Information just wants to be free.

How do you make an information structure work?

Boy, does that sound pompous. Its a side effect, I think, of the fact that I don't really even understand the question that I'm trying to ask.

Let me put it another way. People have information that must be shared with others. I'm thinking here of something like a cube, with a person at each vertex. Person A wants to know something, and it happens that Person B knows it, but Person A doesn't know that. Person B wants to tell someone something, but doesn't know that Person C is the one to tell. Person C -- you get the idea. Now take that and muddy it up a bit -- Person A doesn't even know that Person B even exists -- and expand it -- there isn't one Person A, there's an Organization A with a lot of Persons inside it. And, oh yeah, the cube isn't just a cube, but a multilevel hypercube.

So how do you make the information flow? How do you even know if its flowing at all?

There are people who are writing and researching this question, and a hundred just like it, coming at it from different points and different attitudes and different goals. I stumbled across just one of them the other day whilst reading through the list of sites at Yahoo that I mentioned in an earlier post. Which one? Um...its in the list of sites that I visited yesterday. Who can remember? But that point was made yesterday. For today, lets just assume that I really do remember the site and say that okay, so I found one person. And I assume there are thousands others. How do I find out what they're saying? I'm not talking about at the deep molecular gotta-know-(fill in the blank) technology down to the twelfth degree before you can even understand the conversation. I'm just saying, how do you find out what's going on, generally, in the world of people who think about stuff like that?

Or is it impossible? Does the information kind of have to resonate and reside solely in that tight universe until it finally gets chewed on enough so that it can be released to the outside world? Because before that point, it just isn't ready for prime time? Just isn't comprehensible to the outside world? Does information have a point before which it can't be released into the wild?

Years ago, I worked in Boston for a computer company, and I thought it would be a novel idea to step across to Cambridge and pick up some computer learning over at MIT. I spoke to a person in their admissions office who was a little unsure of my qualifications to be even thinking about this, and I pointed out that Hey, I did this for a living. They gently pointed out that the things I did every day were things that MIT people had done ten years ago. Day one, I was already ten years too late.

Okay, I know I can't overcome that. But if I want to know more about something -- in this case, how information flows through an organization, how you track it, how you enhance it -- and I'd like to know more about it than Popular Science can tell me, where do I turn? Is it Popular Science, then MIT Tech Review, then straight to the Phd theses?

There's gotta be an intermediate step in there. Doesn't there?