How does this relate to OrganizationalParadigms

The situation we find ourselves in...

Given real people and the nature of their real data...
...there's a lot of it, mostly unstructured, constantly growing and wildly unpredictable...
Given the way in which real people interact with, process, manage, organize and structure their real data...
Given the limited, but powerful ways in which people are capable of understanding data...

When people are putting stuff into the data system

• They often find themselves with too much information, much of it unwanted or irrelevant to them personally. As a result, the low signal to noise ratio means that important information often gets drowned out clamor of SPAM, mailing lists and FYI notices.
• Organization is ad-hoc and consequently yields inconsistent ontologies, if you can even call the trees of folders we create ontologies

When people are getting stuff out of the data system

• ie. To get the short view of data: Targeted search and retrieval of individual items: They have fickle structural needs.
• ie. To get the long view of data: Seeing the forest for the trees: Need stable, consistent, structure capable of providing a narrative of the data.
• The silver lining is that inspite of our bad habits, we're pretty good at parsing large, messy piles of data, so long as the way the data is presented caters to our natural pattern recognition abilities.