My 1994 spark!

Over the last ten years, my friends and colleagues have asked me what was the spark that led me to structure collaboration and social network information. Here it is. I found the bar napkin!

Just before being acquired by Lotus in 1994, I was hired to help solve the problem of the collaboration breakdown emerging from too many Lotus Notes applications at Lotus, each with a different design and team practices confusing the users that belonged to many teams. Then, I discussed the issue with Peter Rothstein at a well-known bar by Lotus employees and wrote this model on the bar napkin.

My idea was simple; if the information is the unpredictable variable, can the context that wraps it be structured? I then proposed that information in the context needed to be associated with four vectors that will be the foundation for organization, reporting, and access. 

The vector analogy was particularly enlightening when one or more vectors were left undefined, thus causing the information to be out of context. With this model in mind, I created TeamRoom, a standard template for collaboration where each team would define their terminology in these four dimensions (what we could describe today as organized tagging). I later used the same inspiration to create a Contextual Navigator in InterCommunity in 1996. The object tags were used to assemble a portal to support collaboration and communication for communities of interest. The model was then recycled in IBM's Websphere in 1998.

Today I am still inspired by this initial model and continue to build solutions that leverage tag clouds with multiple dimensions. But the inspiration for the napkin came from my understanding of a brilliant product that was retired by 1990; Lotus Agenda was simply brilliant, and my thanks to Mitch Kapor for its creation.