fall is coming, work is interesting.

Ah, gorgeous days, cool and cold nights. In the Berkshires last weekend, I noticed the leaves were starting to change, but it might not be obvious to the casual observer or to those in denial about the end of summer. Last night, when I got up to -er- facilitate, I noticed that my feet were cold, and that was after several hours of snuggling under the down comforter and wool blanket with a cat wrapped around my head. Air's crisp, we're all more comfortable, and I'm back down to one shower a day.

I've been at my job for nearly a year now, a year of this part-time experiment. I'm working on my third boss, and have gone from being a department of less than one to being part of a department of two (spread across three people), with two contractors and a possible new hire in the next few months. It's been a fun ride so far.

Right now, I'm working on infrastructure, in an area that's interested me for years -- information architecture. My former boss encouraged me to go to conferences and learn as much as I could, and now I'm trying to put all that knowledge to use. (A special hiya to KAH.)

My current project goes something like this. Right now, we have developed all sorts of deliverables (in lots of different formats, I might add) -- user manuals, online help, white papers, training materials, and so on. You can imagine that our directory structures are organized by each deliverable, with subdirectories and files underneath. You might also imagine that if we're writing about the same subject over and over again, there might be a fair amount of overlap. Right now, because of different formats and organization, there's no way to reuse the overlapping material.

Well, wouldn't it be cool if we took all the little subjects we talk about and put them into one common directory structure so that when we want to include information about that subject into another deliverable, we could either plagiarize or at least have a darned good starting point?

That's the point of my project -- to figure out how to organize all our topics so that people can find the information in the directory soup.

I started out on my own, and immediately ran into problems -- do you organize by the people doing the work? By area of the product? By subject? There are so many interconnections -- of course there's no one obvious solution.

But there is an obvious path to the solution -- ask other people to help. I wrote down about 100 subjects that we document, each one on its own little card. And I've been asking people to sort them into groups and subgroups. The results have been interesting and are almost all in. I'm hoping to have some preliminary recommendations next week.

At the same time, I've taken a subject (called "locales") and found all extended discussions of it in all our documentation -- about 25 pages worth. I've done an analysis of the types of information, and am now trying to write a set of draft topics related to this one subject. For example, I found nine places where we define "locale". That's a lot of overlap. Of course, some of the descriptions aren't very accurate or are obsolete. I've written a draft of the definitive definition for locales, suitable for inclusion in all nine of these places. Once our structure is in place, when the central definition changes, the text in each deliverable will be automatically updated, too. Next, I'll be working on "how to create a locale," and then "deleting" and "modifying." Pretty straightforward stuff, but an incredibly complicated web to unravel.

Imagine doing that for all 100 or so subjects. The good news is that I've figured out a way to move over to this centralized system in an evolutionary way. This strategy will allow us to continue to write new documentation even as we're switching over to our new centralized system -- we won't have to stop all work, convert, and then resume work.

I of course worry about the responsibility -- once the new structure is in place, it will be hard to change, though not impossible. So it's important to get it right, or "good enough," as we like to say, the first time. I dream about sorting cards, though not obsessively. And in waking life, after each person goes through the card set, I shuffle the cards to get them ready for the next person, and now my colleagues accuse me of playing card games.

This is interesting work, though, and I never dreamed I'd get to work on this kind of project at this company. I'm crossing my fingers that all these good ideas end up in a workable implementation.

P.S. After posting this, I checked work email to find a note sent to the entire company saying that an employee's email is down; to reach him, call his mobile phone, and he'll send email to all employees when he is once again reachable via email. At a larger company, this type of message would be (select one) inappropriate, annoying, worthy of sending a reply asking for more caution when using the email system. At this company, the message is useful to at least half the employees, maybe more. I love working in a small company.