Editorial: Long Live The Web

The launch of Perspectives creates a place for our team to explore the ideas, concepts, and trends we regularly find ourselves discussing with our customers and with each other. Drawing from a range of expertise and interests – policy, history, technology, sociology, art, and design – this is our creative outlet for exploring how to improve communications, enable dynamic organization, and embrace institutional diversity all while cutting through noise and buzz words that have taken over what the Web has to offer.  While the challenges of our customers are unique, we hope to highlight similarities and confidently say: "This is how we'd do it!"

For this issue, we've put together a number of essays, reviews, and visuals around the theme of knowledge and knowledge management. We've taken our cues from the Web and open source technology, from elegant design aesthetics and complex problems, and from attempts to challenge the paradigms of a waning era. As we explore and begin to understand the implications of digital information when "everything is miscellaneous," as David Weinberger would say. We will see just how far traditional approaches can take us and at which point new ways of communicating will prevail.  Quite simply, what can we DO to prepare organizations for new interactions and make the most use of social connections across enterprises?

We've tried to take an accessible tone in Perspectives. Yet, the challenges for organizing and coordinating efforts that require the most attention often come to the surface in the wake of extreme tragedy, such as earthquakes and tsunamis. Once circumstance shatters our best models,  priorities, relevance, and trust take on a more social role than we otherwise allow for.  It is in front of this backdrop that we turn to the Web as a reference for communicating, building trust, and making sense of information.

While the themes addressed in this journal relate to popular Web trends as well as enterprise-level solutions, the motivations are utterly serious.  We've seen that organizational infrastructures often hinder the very tasks they are intended to enable, resulting in more confusion, less "signal-to-noise," and unnecessary duplication of effort. The themes we cover in Perspectives have significant implications for improving communications and the construction of knowledge across distributed and decentralized endeavors.

Combining analysis, advocacy, and a bit of humor, we hope that Perspectives will deliver worthwhile food for thought to help make sense of the jargon spinning around the Web and encourage information strategies appropriate for these digital times.