(2023-03-21) Taylor Confluence

Dorian Taylor: Confluence. I will be speaking at the Information Architecture Conference in New Orleans which runs from the 28th of March to April Fool’s. This year I will be expounding upon The Specificity Gradient, a conceptual framework I came up with some time ago (I want to say 2009 or 2010) (2022-09-10 Taylor The Specificity Gradient)

The idea behind the Specificity Gradient - patterned after the Pace Layers framework popularized✱ by Stewart Brand - is that different categories of concerns within a domain of inquiry change at different rates. For Brand, it ultimately was a model for civilizational change. For me, my focus, as usual, is the process of creating software.

My contribution with the Specificity Gradient, is to emphasize that the decreasing durability (and increasing perishability) of concerns goes hand in hand with increasing detail.

The argument underpinning The Specificity Gradient is that in the race to get to running code (and therefore a product we can sell), we skip over representations of processes and conceptual structures at lower levels of detail. These representations are much more durable than any piece of code is apt to be. The programming process itself is ironically frustrated due to skipping these intermediate steps, because everything has to be worked out at the highest possible level of detail. Because of this, the knowledge gained is encoded in the program itself, legible only to programmers—​the smallest subset of stakeholders—​if it is even meaningfully captured at all.

it’s the document that reaches out and gets the freshest content.

This is something you unfortunately can’t pull off in a document-centric regime. Conventional documents have to be demoted in favour of structured hypermedia.

The real goal, though, is that the durable material sticks around in such a way that it actually gets reused, and companies start to accumulate it as an asset

arrows representing hyperlinks between the strata

Business goals → user goals,

user goals → user tasks,

user tasks → system tasks,

system tasks → system behaviours,

system behaviours → executable code.

Contributions from information architecture and content strategy, usually of a more declarative modality, likewise lie at different points on the gradient. Taxonomies and audience models, for instance, will far outlast any individual navigation bar or content audit.

My final remark on this topic is that at least as important as the durability—​and therefore reusability—​of any of these assets, is the level of detail. Specifically, don’t trouble important decision-makers with too much of it

Chapter 6 of The Nature of Software, Good Shape, is away

The other bit of news about this is that to be consistent with my commitment to “hypermedia-first”, I set up a mirror of the archive on https://the.natureof.software/. At the moment it’s the same as what’s on Buttondown (the newsletter provider) save for a little nicer typesetting. The plan, though, is to create a place for subscribers to annotate and discuss the work, as well as provide structured data that can be reused in other applications

From breadboard to prototyping platform

If I’m going to make an online community, I’m going to need something to power it. Starting sometime in 2018, I began putting together a “content management meta-system”

At the top of the list was a durable addressing mechanism, with the ultimate goal of eliminating the 404

I use the Swiss Army Knife—​what I call it—​to generate my (static) website, which has maintained every single URL it has ever exposed since I set that incarnation of the website up in 2008.

Also of great importance is the ability to represent structured data in a number of useful ways

Lastly, I’ll need something to get data into the website, using the website.

This bill of changes entails graduating the Swiss Army Knife from something I alone run in a development console to an actual open-source product, with a user interface, tests, and documentation

not quite a framework or CMS, but what I’ll call for now a “prototyping platform”.