For 2,500 years, knowledge was shaped like a tree. It had a root, branches and leaves. Now that we're digitizing all the information we can lay our mitts on, it's becoming clear that trees make sense within the constraints of the real world but are far too limited when it comes to organizing information in the digital world: Trees assume a leaf really should be on only one branch, favor neatness over mess, are owned by the people who own the knowledge, and assume the universe can be known ahead of time. We are instead rapidly inventing new principles oforganization, from faceted classification to bottom-up folksonomies. If we change the most basic principles of organization, what will happen to knowledge and to the institutions that take their shape from knowledge?
In a change of pace, David Weinberger will do a rough run-through of a talk he's giving in a couple of weeks, asking for advice about its contents: