Overview:

When I joined school, I bought a few notebooks to pen down notes during the class.  It didn’t take me long to realize that the quantity and diversity of information from lectures was so vast that managing it with physical notebooks was very challenging.  Besides, I felt I needed a more powerful personal note taking software that let me search my notes quickly with keywords, sort notes chronologically, categorize notes related to a certain topic, include links/photos/files/web references within the notes, replicate notes easily and share notes with others, create reminders and to-do lists; things that physical notebooks aren’t very efficient at doing. In the following sections, I will talk about my instance of “Evernote” software as a personal note-taking tool, which I use to create, organize and retrieve notes and is an elegant solution to all my needs mentioned above.

What resources are being used?

The primary resource that my note-taking software would organize is a note. Each note can be composed of text, images, links, documents, drawings, audio and video files. The first design decision involved taking scope and scale of the software into consideration. I make notes for ten classes/week and ~4 months every semester for 2 years. Each course needs one notebook each. My notes mostly contain text that I create during my classes, with occasional links, drawings, photos, videos and other file attachments. Sometimes when I quickly need to refer to a note and cant recall where it is, I need to be able to retrieve the note based on a keyword or non-textual content like images, attachments and audio present inside it. Sometimes, I need to be able to reference one lecture’s notes to another lecture’s notes if they are similar. With my instance of Evernote, low data volume such as mine is efficiently handled in terms of memory and processing capabilities of my laptop. (As opposed to Corporates having high volumes with 100s of documents being generated and stored every day). I can create virtual notebooks for each course and can keep adding notes under them for every lecture. I use tags to categorize notes related to the same topic so that I can cross-reference them at a later point. The advanced search field fulfills my above mentioned search need by allowing search all notebooks or one particular notebook for textual, non-textual information and tags. Allowing me to safely backup my notes in html/Evernote xml formats is another feature that my note-taking software gives me. This will also allow interoperability with other software systems that support these formats in case I want to port my notes to a different note-taking ecosystem.

Why are the resources organized? 

My note-taking software allows additional interactions besides note creation and archiving. It gives me flexibility to delete notebooks and notes, make copies of notes and enable others to access them. Alternately I would want to sort notes chronologically, size-wize or alphabetically. For the above interactions it’s important for the software to store resource description like the author, date of creation and last update, notebook name, size, associated tags, reminders, attachments, and geo information and revision history. The decision regarding what resource description is useful and what is not is guided by what interactions the software supports. Decision about what interactions are to be supported is determined by the scope of the software which in-turn is guided by decisions regarding storage size, number of users, number of resources the system can hold, how many attachments can each note hold and their size, whether notes can be shared with public or private individuals, whether geo-tagging is allowed, how many tags can be created per note, whether notes can be converted to other formats for interoperability and portability, what granularity of resource description is used most often to search for notes. (Eg. The decision to provide search feature by keywords/title/tags/attachments/creation date is more sensible than having to search by note size or number of attachments in a note.)

How much are the resources organized?

My system supports categorization for enable better browsing and searching with the help of “notebooks” and “tags”. It is important to use controlled vocabulary while tagging especially while sharing notes with a lot of people with write-access to the notes. By setting boundaries on who is allowed to tag the shared notes and whether they can create their own tags or forced to use existing tags is a tradeoff for the designers of this system.

Also, decision regarding what file format can you export Evernote resources (notebooks and notes) determines the extent of interoperability of notes created my Evernote system. Exporting resources as simple text/xml/html makes them more interoperable with other systems but might result in information loss (attachments images, drawings, reminders etc). Exporting as Evernote xml format (.enex) might keep all notes intact. However that might make it less interoperable with other systems. Supporting multiple export formats might be a good way to satisfy varied requirements.

When are the resources organized?

Notebooks have been created at the beginning of the semester and notes are added it to during each class. Typically, tags are created after notes are created depending on the topic the note refers to. Also, the resource description is automatically created computationally by the software as and when resources are created, updated or deleted. Additionally, copies of resources created offline exist on the local hard disk and are organized on the server cloud space once online.

Who does the organizing?

As an end-user I’m responsible for creation and physical organization of resources in my note-taking software. Taking into considerations the flexibility and limitation of the software, I decide whether to create different notes for different lectures or one note with multiple lecture’s notes. Also, depending on the cloud space available I can decide whether to attach external resources like pdfs into the system or store them as hyperlinks. Resource description activities like tagging, adding geo-location, and adding author is manually done by me. Rest of the metadata like creation and updation date, calculation of size etc is done computationally. The interaction of saving resources is done automatically by the system within the first few seconds of creation of resources. This prevents loss of information when I forget to save them explicitly.

Other considerations

Evernote is a good attempt at providing collaboration, availability, consistency, information hierarchy, it still falls short when it comes to computing ability in terms of memory and processing power and information formatting capabilities. Dropbox, Google drive, MS Skydrive, MS Office Suite, and Blogs are some of the other alternatives.

One interesting consideration here is the philosophy of centralization vs. diversification. Let me elaborate this with an example. Instagram for example accomplishes a single objective, i.e sharing of enhanced photos, and has captured the imagination of 1billion+ users. The popularity is surprising because more powerful applications like facebook and twitter can also do the same, which suggests that people applications solving specialized needs, over integrated products. To overcome this challenge, Evernote will have to think of ways and means to minimize the learning curve for users. And, product simplicity and design elegance should be its top priorities.

Overview. A weekly neighborhood newspaper in New York City has expanded over the years such that it now covers the entire borough of Queens. Rather than publish a single weekly edition for this highly diverse area of more than 2 million people, its owners have opted to produce 14 separate editions, each centered on a different neighborhood. All editions share a deadline, delivery schedule, and staff pool, but each has unique content tailored to its target readers.

What resources are being used? The newspaper’s resources — its content — consist mainly of articles and photos generated by staff and freelance contributors throughout the week. Often newspapers will assign their reporters to beats based on subject matter (politics, education, “cops and courts,” etc.), making them domain experts who cover stories on that beat throughout a wide geographical area. However, because of this paper’s historical orientation toward “hyper-local” neighborhood news, it has given each of its seven full-time reporters a more granular geographical beat that corresponds to two of the 14 editions’ coverage areas, within which they are responsible for “general assignment” reporting.  Most reporters also have a specialty for covering news that is of more general interest throughout the borough, such as citywide government or transportation issues, and they will include coverage of these domains in their story budgets for the week as well. The staff maintains a centralized “story list” that includes a handful of resource descriptions for each story: its “slug” (an abbreviated, descriptive name, including tags for its relevant neighborhoods), its length, and whether it has “art.”

Why are the resources organized? The media market in New York is crowded and extremely competitive, and this newspaper believes its competitive edge lies in its laser-focus on individual neighborhoods. Furthermore, most of its readers are subscribers who receive the paper in the mail, not newsstand buyers. As a result, the paper generally eschews the familiar tabloid approach of splashing the most salacious story of the week across the front page and usually fronts two stories that are “small-bore” but extremely relevant to the neighborhood, such as the doings of local school or government officials, notable crimes, or human-interest features on neighborhood residents. The deeper into the paper one goes, the less “local” its content will become, and stories often appear in more than one edition, in different locations and even with different headlines, to tailor them to an appropriate level of localization.

On a more general level, of course, the paper must support the conventional interactions all readers expect from newspapers. Readers are rarely expected to progress through the paper from front to back, so it supports a wide variety of reading styles; large headlines and photos and concise, compelling story “ledes” (opening paragraphs) facilitate skimming and scanning interactions, and dividing the paper into sections, such as “Opinion,” “Sports,” and “Arts & Entertainment,” lets readers skip directly to their areas of interest after turning past Page One.

How much are the resources organized? The level of organization behind the scenes at this small, local newspaper is surprisingly complex. The primary organizing principle that determines a story’s placement is its relevance, which is a function of location granularity (does it directly affect the people of this neighborhood? Did it happen here?), significance (will readers find it important?), and time (is it old news? Has anyone else reported it yet?). Counterbalancing that is the economic reality of the struggling newspaper industry, which results in often severely limited space for the news (because paper and press time are costly physical constraints) and manpower with which to produce all 14 editions before deadline. The result is a hierarchical system in which the 14 editions are categorized into three “zones”; in each zone, about two-thirds of the pages are common to all editions, and the remaining third (including, most crucially, pages one through three) are unique to each single edition. Thus, for instance, a general-interest story about transportation need not be laid out 14 separate times, but one about a fatal car accident can appear on Page One for the neighborhoods where it occurred and where the victims were from, and further back (or not at all) for other neighborhoods.

When are the resources organized? In a weekly news cycle, selection, creation and organizing of editorial resources is largely concurrent. The story list is updated on a rolling basis throughout the week, and an article or photo’s placement in the paper is often planned based on its intended subject matter well in advance of when the resource is actually created. However, organizing must be completed long before it reaches its intended users, because the final layouts must be printed, collated and mailed to readers, which, due to logistical concerns, takes several days – so the paper is laid out on Tuesday (as late as possible to maximize the window for ad sales), printed on Wednesday and delivered by the Postal Service on Thursday or Friday.

Who does the organizing? Human agents — specifically, editors — are the newspaper’s primary organizers. They rely heavily on the judgment of the reporters, who are most familiar with their beats, to determine a story’s relevance and placement for each edition, as well as their own news judgment, assessment of the story’s quality, and estimation of where the story will physically fit based on ad placements (which are decided first). The implementation of their organizing system is carried out by page layout designers, with some software automation on the part of the paper’s content management system.

Other considerations. Part of the grind of a weekly news cycle is that the effectivity of the paper’s resources is never guaranteed; when the next edition comes out, they all become “yesterday’s news,” and one never knows when new developments will render a story irrelevant or incorrect; in fact, because of the latency between layout and delivery, a story’s effectivity may even expire before its publication.

Overview:

A neuroscience lab is doing Parkinson’s disease research in which they do experiments with rats. They use different types of rats, surgeries, and drugs for experiments and have to keep track of all this information for data analysis, publications, and lab inspectors.

The existing organizing system was developed before personal computers were prevalent and has slowly evolved over time. However, much of the underlying structure of the system still has its roots in pre-computer concepts. In order to update the system to incorporate more modern technologies what are the changes to the resources, their descriptions, and the systems structure that need to be made?

 What Resources are Being Organized:

Resources in the current organizing system include rats, surgeries, experiments, drugs, and data recorded from the experiments. There are some other resources that could be incorporated into the organizing system.

One such new resource is surgery techniques. Surgery techniques have historically been passed down by the master apprentice method and information was largely tacit knowledge that was held by the researchers performing the surgeries and not explicitly in the system. This was done because it is inherently difficult to store the intricacies of surgery in text and even more difficult for a new researcher to learn how to perform the surgery from textual information. The ability to store and annotate multimedia changes this however. It is now possible to make instructional videos for each type of surgery, add resource descriptions to the video file and store it in the organizing system.

There is also a resource that is treated as one resource through its entire lifetime when it may actually be two. When rats are originally brought into the organizing system they are treated as a manifestation of the rat resource type.  Meaning the rats are interchangeable, you can use any rat from that group in your surgery. Once the surgery has been performed the rat is modified into a new resource instance. The specific rat the surgery was performed on now has a new set of resource descriptions.

Why are the Resources Organized:

Is the main purpose of the organization system to make sure the correct rats are used in each different experiment? Or is it to make sure the records are kept up to date for the lab inspectors? It could also be making data analysis and paper writing more efficient. These decisions will affect how many different types of resource descriptions are required and the granularity needed for those descriptions.

This system is just one of many organizing systems within a lab so deciding the scope and interactions it will have with the other organizing systems is very important. One important decision is if the system will support the training of new members of the lab or not. Having resources such as video recording of surgeries and experiments could enable teaching interactions for new researchers.  But there are many other aspects of training a new researcher must go through, should these also be included in the organizing system? If so, it would make the system much more complex and expand the scope of the organizing system outside of surgeries and experiments but would keep all of the teaching resource in one system.

Another option would be to have a separate organizing system that is responsible for training material which is able to interact with the multimedia in the system that are relevant to training. This does not expand the scope of the system but would make the maintenance of it more difficult. Each time a surgery technique or experiment is changed two systems would have to be updated to take the changes into account.

How much are the Resources Organized:

The system is going to be access by many different types of users, each requiring a different type of interaction. The researchers need to search for the correct rat and surgery technique. The lab inspector needs to check for drug logs and make sure all the surgery methods and equipment are up to date. The principle investigator needs to see an overview of progress on projects.

Currently the system is organized in hierarchical categories where the top-level categories are surgery and experiments. This organization makes it easy to retrieve specific resources. However, the interactions normally performed with the system use resources from both sub-trees, which makes the hierarchical approach less than optimal.

A faceted classification approach could work well to enable these interactions.  The facets would incorporate the original categories of surgery and experiments but also add facets for each common type of interaction. In this case different resource descriptions of the same resource will often be classified into different facets. These resource descriptions will often act as resources themselves. For example, a lab inspector is interested in retrieving the expiration date and times a drug was used in surgery, not the drug itself.

When are the Resources Organized:

In a neuroscience lab resource descriptions are often lost if they are not recorded at the time they are measured. For example, if a rat is weighed to calculate the correct dosage of a drug, both the dosage and the weight should be entered into the system. If the weight is not entered at the time or measurement it would be impossible to weigh the rat later and get the same result (as the rat changes weight over time.) This is a common problem, so as a rule all resources and descriptions should be entered into the system at the time they are acquired.

Who does the Organizing:

The researchers working in the lab do all of the organizing. They are the ones creating new resources, descriptions and have the most knowledge about the resources and how they relate to each other.

Other Considerations:

Changing the system and entering all of the data at the time of measurement will initially cause more work for the researchers but will result in more accuracy for the interactions supported by the system and less retrieval work during data analysis and paper writing.

OVERVIEW

Dance teams are an exciting organizing system – they offer a fascinating form of entertainment that provides both the dancers and audience with a fun, uplifting experience. This case study will observe a specific dance that I had the privilege to be the male lead in this semester. Our dance set is called “Bring Me The Night”; we are part of the Dancewrx team, and we performed this dance in the Dancewrx Showcase in Berkeley this fall.

As a dancer, I had the opportunity to observe the entire Dancewrx team on different levels. On one level, I saw how all of the different dances (or sets) come together to form a showcase for the audience. I also observed on a much closer and detailed level how a specific dance, like “Bring Me The Night”, prepared for a showcase. As an organizing system, I discovered that the richest organizing principles and the interactions that they support are found at this lower level of abstraction.

WHAT RESOURCES ARE BEING USED?

There are three physical resources that can be found in this organizing system: dancers, props, and location. The dancers are the primary resources. They are by far the most important elements of a dance set for obvious reasons (without dancers, there would be no set), but also because the dancers contain resource descriptions (as will be mentioned later) that drive the organizing principles.

Props are also sometimes used in order to enhance or add an exciting element to the set. For example, in another set that I participated in, the men wore pre-ripped tank tops and at one point stripped them off and threw it into the crowd, much to the thrill and delight of the audience. For “Bring Me The Night”, however, there were no props used. Note that there is an important distinction between costumes and props: costumes are required and are part of the dancer, whereas props are optional and largely detachable materials.

Location or environment is a resource used for marking the placement of dancers. Different parts of the environment that surround the dancers can be used as points of references. For “Bring Me The Night”, we held practices on campus at Upper Sproul and used its various reference marks to remember where our placements should be.

Note the exclusion of one important individual: the choreographer. When discussing a single dance set, the choreographer is not a resource; he/she is actually the user, as the choreographer is the one who does the organizing.

WHY ARE THE RESOURCES ORGANIZED?

The high level goal for this organizing system is to produce a dance that is pleasing and enjoyable for the audience and that satisfies the vision of the choreographer. However, on a more specific level, one will discover that there are 4 main goals that a choreographer hopes to achieve in a set: 1) fairness for all dancers, 2) conveying the theme of the dance, 3) proper execution of moves, and 4) cleanliness of the set. The interactions that occur in the set are motivated by and carried out with these 4 goals in mind, and “Bring Me The Night” is no exception. Choreographers may interact with individual dancers (to assess their execution and cleaniness), collections of dancers, and props (to demonstrate a move to the dancers).

It is important to note that these 4 goals often occur in separate stages, so that even though the interaction may involve the same agents, the purpose for each of these interactions is different. For example, a choreographer may interact with the same group of dancers in both the execution and cleanliness phases, but the purpose of the interaction for the former is to improve technical ability while the latter is to spruce up the overall piece in order to look good cohesively.

HOW MUCH ARE THE RESOURCES ORGANIZED?

The intrinsic static and dynamic properties of the dancers allow the choreographer to apply different organizing principles in his/her set. These properties – which are also resource descriptions of dancers – include size and sex (intrinsic static), and skills and experience (intrinsic dynamic). In “Bring Me The Night”, the most prominent organizing principle was sex – there were parts of the piece devoted to just women, in which the choreographer loosely referred to as “the girls part”. The choreographer also used size as an organizing principle – it was apparent that the taller dancers were placed in the back. Note that in the domain of dance teams, being “placed in the back” for a set usually has a negative connotation. So this presents an issue for the choreographer: should a tall dancer always be placed in the back – even when he/she is relatively skilled – for the sake of making the set look good? If not, then at what point of the dance would it be appropriate to have taller dancers in the front? The choreographer on our team attempted to solve this problem by placing the taller dancers more towards the center at all times.

WHEN ARE THE RESOURCES ORGANIZED?

The organization of the resources occurs during a phase of dance preparation called “blocking”. “Blocking” is when the choreographer places the dancers in specific positions. The dancers will invariably move around throughout the piece, but their physical locations and where they are supposed to be at any point in time remains constant.

However, when the interactions occur is largely dependant upon the choreographer. For example, the time in which a choreographer wants to interact with a single dancer versus a collection of dancers is never pre-planned; it is all determined on the fly. As the lead in “Bring Me The Night”, the choreographer often interacts on a one-to-one basis with me more than any other dancer, and often interacts in collections with the others.

WHO DOES THE ORGANIZING?

It is easy to assume that all elements involved in a dance set are resources – after all, from an outside perspective, it appears that all that is going on is a bunch of individuals lined up in formation and doing a set of relatively similar moves. However, this level of thinking is superficial and erroneous. As a dancer, I saw firsthand how all of the organization and interactions were driven through the choreographer. As mentioned early, the choreographer is also the user of the organizing system. In many ways, the choreographer is also the visionary; all of the organizing and interactions are meant to fulfill his/her vision of what the dance is to look like.

OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

Many elements of the organizing system here will not be carried over to a more collective level, such as studying the showcase as a whole. The most noticeable difference is that the user will no longer be the choreographer; it actually becomes the audience. In fact, the choreographer may himself/herself be part of the dance. At this level, the organizing system becomes very much like that of a museum or zoo, where the primary interaction becomes just observing the resources. According to the TDO, people often visit institutions with physical resources because “they value the direct, perceptual, or otherwise unmediated interaction that these organizing systems support”. This may not apply to the domain of dance performances, because although the resources are physical, there is no way for the audience to have any direct perceptual interaction with them other than simply observing with their eyes.

Overview
Zappos.com is a large online shoe retailer that sells thousands of types of shoes, as well as bags, clothing, and accessories. Like its parent company, Amazon.com, Zappos has mass consumer appeal, so its website has been designed to serve a broad range of users. This case study reviews Zappos’ website and how it has been designed to support the company’s mission to provide the best customer service possible.

What resources are being organized?
The primary resources on Zappos.com are digital descriptions of the physical products that Zappos sells. Product descriptions include pictures, the price, available sizes, and customer reviews. In terms of granularity, a single product page for a pair of shoes or article of clothing may actually include dozens of variations of that item given the size and color options, with some variations having different prices. Zappos groups these variations together rather than giving each one a separate page.

Shoes can be difficult to buy online because customers cannot try on the product and test the fit before purchase. Zappos uses its customer review feature not only to collect review information, but to administer a “fit survey”. The survey asks a reviewer to rate the shoe’s support and whether the shoe felt true to size and width. This information is aggregated across reviews for each shoe and is prominently featured on the product page. In addition, the customer reviews include other experiences with the products such as whether a shoe is of good quality and construction. The fit information and customer reviews are essential for helping customers understand what it is like to wear the shoes being described.

Why are the resources organized?
The product descriptions on Zappos.com are organized to help customers find and browse shoes and other products for purchase. This search system must be easy to use in order for each unique customer to be able to quickly filter out tens of thousands of products before browsing just a subset they are interested in. A typical customer starts by entering a general search query like “winter boots” into the search bar. Then the customer is presented with a grid of product images. At this point, the customer might filter items by gender (men’s boots), price ($200 and under), and color (black). The results can additionally be filtered by brand, style, and other properties, or sorted by price and customer rating.

Once the customer has reviewed an item’s product page including the other customer reviews, the customer can “add to favorites” to remember the item for later or “add to cart” to save the item for purchase. After purchase, the customer may review the the item, thus contributing additional information to Zappos’ collection of product descriptions.

How much are the resources organized?
Zappos.com employs both a hierarchical classification system and a faceted classification system to organize its product descriptions. From the home page, the classification system appears hierarchical with top-level categories for women’s, men’s, and kids’, which are each subdivided into clothing, shoes, and other product categories. After clicking on a subcategory like “women’s shoes”, the customer is taken to another page that shows that subcategory broken down further (e.g., boots and slippers).

After clicking on another subcategory, or when using the search bar at the top of the website, the faceted classification system is immediately apparent. The left-hand menu becomes a tool for filtering the products shown. Prominent facets like color and type (e.g., for shoes: boots, sandals, athletic, etc.) are based on intrinsic static properties. Other facets like price and average customer rating are based on extrinsic dynamic properties. Curiously, while the fit survey information is prominently displayed on each product page, this information is not accessible for filtering.

When are the resources organized?
Product descriptions are first organized when they are created for a new product. As customers buy and review the products, they provide sales and rating information by which the product descriptions are continually organized. This information is used by later customers to sort by “Best Sellers” and “Customer Rating”. As the physical product inventory is sold, and certain sizes or colors of a product sell out or get discounted, the product description page continues to be updated. This maintenance of the product description continues until the item is eventually removed from the collection of products sold by Zappos.

Who does the organizing?
The product descriptions are organized by both humans and automated processes. The descriptions and product reviews are originally created by people and then made accessible to customers by automated processes. Customers browsing product descriptions can help organize the reviews on any given product page by marking reviews as helpful, where the most helpful reviews will be listed first in the list of reviews. As products are sold, automated processes manage marking items as best sellers and sorting items by average rating.

Other Considerations
Zappos.com’s faceted organizing system can be used to help with the vocabulary problem of describing shoe styles. For example, what some people call “sneakers”, others call “tennis shoes” or “athletic shoes”. Zappos’ classification system allows the same product to be classified with all three facets. In addition, this system has been designed for thousands of new products to be added each year. As shoe styles change over time, the faceted classification scheme will allow Zappos to create and add new descriptive facets for filtering products in a way that is understandable to customers of the time.

Overview

An amendment to limit voting rights was proposed to the Minnesota constitution in 2012. With many similar proposed laws popping up across the US and heavy support in Minnesota, a coalition of Minnesota organizations set out to convince voters to defeat the amendment. Concurrently, an effort to defeat an anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment was underway, and swallowed resources and attention that the voter ID amendment may have otherwise gotten. In May 2012, a poll showed 80% of Minnesota voters in support of the amendment.

What are the resources?

The main thrust of this organizing campaign was how to strategically organize volunteers, voters, and money to produce a simple majority against the amendment.

The campaign carefully chose voters to persuade and aggressively recruited volunteers to reach more voters. Initially, the campaign used the public voter file and roughly categorized voters based on their voting history. Factors like party registration and likelihood to go to the polls played into decisions about resource selection, usually called list segmentation in this context.

Volunteers were tasked with moving voters who were pro-amendment but likely to jump categories, and to then document whether the interaction yielded movement on the 1-5 scale.

Why are the resources being organized?

The voter-volunteer interaction is designed to produce data about voters to be folded into algorithms that produce subsequent call lists.

The persuasion interactions turned the voter file into increasingly meaningful data with growing granularity. The voters that could initially be thrown into only 5 categories could be segmented much further: towards the end of the campaign, we could create a list of all registered Democrat veterans living in zip 55407 with valid phone numbers with whom we’d had at least two conversations. Conversations with voters enriched allowed for a sharpening of volunteer efforts towards more strategic persuasion.

How much are the resources organized?

Voter data was organized iteratively throughout the campaign as more and more data came in.

Volunteers noted additional descriptions such as veteran, having tribal ID, disabled, or unable to renew driver’s license, or otherwise personally affected by the amendment. Sometimes this identity “tagging” was used to match volunteers of a particular identity to similar voters for more effective conversations.

During the campaign, all volunteer-voter interactions were designed to describe voters in greater detail, which helped automatically filter out voters not receptive to conversations about voter identification. Based on certain behaviors and outcomes during volunteer-voter interactions, some voters were labeled Do Not Call, Wrong Number, or Deceased, handily eliminating them from future lists.

After the election, the campaign data could be used again, but the archived data was all that remained. The volunteers and voters don’t persist as campaign resources once votes are cast.

When are the resources organized?

Volunteers were trained in rapid voter classification before door-knocking or calling. Based on responses to the script, volunteers categorized voters with whom they interacted with a ranked resource description. Voters were given a number between 1-5 depending on whether they were likely to vote for or against the amendment, or somewhere in the middle. Their rankings were kept on file and those ranked anywhere from 2-4 received repeat calls during the course of the campaign to gauge the effectiveness of the persuasion tactics. The campaign decided to save resources by deeming anyone who was strongly in favor of the amendment as “immovable”.

Removing the extreme voters made sense at the beginning when the odds of beating the amendment were low and limited resources had to be used extremely frugally. The cost-benefit analysis changed once the campaign garnered more attention, and the campaign shifted to spend resources to reach these extreme voters: the supportive ones to ensure that they hadn’t been swayed by the opposition, and the opposing ones to begin the hard task of swaying them.

Who does the organizing?

The coalition of organizations behind the vote no efforts orchestrated the campaign’s organizing system.

The slate of volunteers working on the campaign grew in granularity as the campaign moved forward. Volunteers specialized by taking on particular roles within the campaign and called or visited voters within their district of Minnesota. Some climbed the hierarchy of leadership. As the campaign progressed, more categories of leaders were added to the leadership structure.

Other considerations

Because this organizing system is all about people organizing people, resource description is particularly difficult and subject to bias. All the “data” that results from persuasion interactions is necessarily fuzzy and one 4 is not necessarily equal to another 4 in likelihood to vote a particular way. However, a no vote from one person is interchangeable with a no vote from another. Conducting effective conversations with the right individuals has the potential to yield scores or hundreds of no votes because of the social capital and persuasive power of some individuals.

Interestingly, if a volunteer reached a wrong number with a receptive human at the end of it, they were advised not to spend time persuading them. Because the lists are produced ahead of time and individual volunteers didn’t have access to the voter file, they couldn’t match a receptive ear on the other end to a particular voter. The campaign couldn’t rely on conversations that weren’t documented.

Furthermore, it would be a problem of authentication even if they had access: how would they prove the voter’s identity, or resolve the name problem of many potential voters by the same name? Some volunteers flouted this advice and tried to convince the unknown individual to vote against the amendment anyway. Whether these undocumentable conversations resulted in wasted time is unknown, but in the end, voter ID was defeated.

Automatic description at this relatively small scale is impossible due to scarcity of financial resources: it took the massive efforts of many to gauge the political sentiments of others and make predictions about future behavior. At the scales of national elections, mountains of data and data scientists made it possible for the Democratic party to segment the voting public, test message effectiveness, and conduct remarkably successful fundraising, $5 at a time.

Overview
There are a lot of back-stories and alternate versions of characters in the comic book mythology and few people are able to keep track of everything. There is also a growth in the number of movies based on comic books and fans may be interested in learning about their favorite superhero or villain. DC Entertainment decides that they want to create a database that both their creative teams and fans can use to find information on prominent DC characters.

What resources are being used?
The resources being organized are the characters within the DC comic book universe and their descriptions. Other companies and characters from independent are not included because they’re not a part of the DC universe. The size and scope of the organizing system will be limited to only characters that have a lasting or important impact in the DC universe of characters. This will allow DC to focus its efforts on characters that draw more attention from fans. What is considered important or impactful can be ambiguous because many fans have biases about what is important or impactful. The definition used here will be the number of sales and number of years in print. So a character that was a commercial failure and has only been in print within a short time is outside the scope of the organizing system.

A relational standard will also be used to determine who is important and impactful. This means that characters with a significant relationship to these characters will also be included. So even though Damien Wayne is a relatively new character, he is included because he is Bruce Wayne’s son. Characters who have been a part of pivotal plots are also considered, such as Doomsday. Even though Doomsday does not have a long print history, he is included because he is famous for killing Superman. Since the organizing system is not to create an archive but to record prominent characters, there will be a significant number of characters that will be left out. All this information will be stored on DC Entertainment’s web servers and can be accessed online through the DC Entertainment website.

Why are the resources organized?
            The resources are being organized because it is difficult keeping track of all the mythologies. Writers and artists need to remember what was done in the past in order to not repeat certain facts or get them wrong. DC Entertainment is creating the organizing system so that their creative teams can keep track of these facts. It also provides information for curious fans that want to read more about a character, which fosters interests and new customers for DC.

The goal does not include archiving or providing its own critique of characters or even providing the critiques from notable writers and artists. The organizing system is also not meant to sell books either. Doing so would make the organizing system a store rather than a database, and DC has their own online store available.

How much are the resources organized?
A basic biography with background, family names, first appearance, how each person achieved their hero or villain status, or their contribution to the comic book universe. A character’s importance includes the relationship the character has with another prominent character. The varying details between different interpretations are also included, such as changes in super powers, secret identity, or back-story. This will put more constraints in granularity, as many details that appear important to devoted fans will be left out. Some may argue that extensive biographical information is necessary for each character, but the purpose is to help with the basic facts of characters rather than creating extensive biographies. It may also be necessary to create family trees in order to show relationship between characters.

When are the resource organized?
The database would be created long before it is launched but would start as soon as DC Entertainment approves of the project. There would also be scheduled updates and maintenance as new characters and plot developments are made with each new issue. Much of the organizing may already be done as DC Entertainment most likely has its own historical archives. Organizers will also need to filter out information that does not fit the scope of the organizing system.

Who does the organizing?
Employees of DC Entertainment’s historians and web team will be involved in creating the online database. Members from marketing may need to help to distinguish what should be considered a financial success and what titles are have been more consistently popular over the years. If needed, DC Entertainment may also allow fans to help organize the resources. This itself would require much organization to ensure that volunteer contribution fits the scope of the organizing system. This may have some drawbacks, as control over the organizing process would be harder to maintain depending on the number of volunteers involved. But once the database is finished, DC’s web team and historians would be in charge of maintaining it.

Other considerations
The organizing system may grow and DC may change the scope of the database to include unknown characters or more extensive biographies. So the system must be implemented to allow flexibility. DC may also think about adding an API so that fans and its web developers can use the information for other purposes. Other interactions may also be considered such as allowing fans to make specific queries. For instance, a user might be curious about the number of LGBT characters in the DC universe. Doing so will requiring tagging each character to allow easier searches, which allows another interaction for users—tagging. This will also require a controlled tagging vocabulary to ensure that resources are properly tagged. The database might also be so popular that it may merge with its online store in order to sell more comics. Doing so would then change the organizing system from being a database to more of a store.

Overview

From being picked up at a mailbox to being delivered at your door, letters and parcels are processed through a variety of physical and digital systems. Items sent through the United States Postal Service (USPS) coming into or out of the West Coast have a high chance of being processed at the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) International Service Center (ISC).

The LAX ISC follows the organizing principle of maximizing the number of mail pieces processed while minimizing costs to USPS and its partners. The facility is located next to the LAX tarmac, accessible to mail offloaded from airplanes on the tarmac and to interstate highways 405 and 105. It houses millions of dollars of machinery, hundreds of employees and can process hundreds of thousands of items daily. As such, the LAX ISC organizing system seeks to input, process and output resources as quickly as possible: the selection of resources is simple (anything that arrives), maintenance is to be achieved through efficient faceted classification, and the ultimate goal is the removal of the resources from the system.

What resources are being used?

The principle resources in the LAX ISC organizing system are mail pieces. These physical resources also possess associated digital resource descriptions that support the critical interactions available to users. These resources may originate inside the United States and have already been classified and entered into the organizing system at post offices and mail processing centers around the country. Alternatively, they may be inbound from postal operations around the world; the LAX ISC would likely receive digital resource descriptions from foreign postal associations prior to receiving the physical resources themselves.

Why are the resources organized?

Within the LAX ISC, USPS-wide organizing system principles must be maintained to facilitate effective communications between the ISC’s physical organizing systems (such as loading items onto a truck destined for another processing center) and digital organizing systems (integration with enterprise databases for customer tracking). Additionally, the ISC must implement internal organizing principles to manage the physical resources (and their digital resource descriptions) within the facility itself.

How much are the resources organized?

The granularity of resource description varies by resource type. Items arrive with existing physical (written address) and digital (such as mail classification as Express or Priority) resource descriptions keep those classifications. A large package that was sent as “Registered Mail” will have more physical and digital descriptions and supported interactions than a postcard, which may only be classified within a collection of other postcards from that location. These classifications are faceted- an item can be organized based on both being classified as First Class and as having a destination of Seoul, South Korea.

Resources must be entered into the facility based on their origin- inbound items arriving from the airport tarmac or outbound items arriving from trucks off of the highway. This requires an orientation of the mail processing flow that allows for items to be directed from airport to highway and highway to airport with staging and loading areas at both ends. While a different physical layout that allowed truck access to the same side of the building as the tarmac could avoid some of the redundant staging areas, it would also increase the risk of resources being incorrectly classified. The physical layout is heavily structured based on the organizing principles enforced by the enormous mail processing machinery; as new equipment has been developed new classifications have been designed and new interactions have been supported within the ISC (such as the implementation of handheld US Customs scanning of parcels). Through this layout of both physical resources and resource descriptions (paper placards on a trolley containing packages) and purely digital descriptions (the parcel ID numbers) different users can perform two keys sets of interactions:

• Find/Navigate: LAX ISC employees are familiar with not only the institutional categories (express mail is put in this corner, registered mail goes into this room) but also the individual categories their coworkers use (Bob on the night shift tends to forget some bags of letters in this corner)
• Identify/Select: The resource descriptions are updated throughout their time in the LAX ISC via automatic and manual scanning of barcodes and RFID tags, allowing both USPS employees and customers to track their mail pieces

When are the resources organized?

Resources enter the overall USPS organizing system domain when they are inducted at the originating USPS facility (such as giving a package to a teller at a post office).

The scope of the LAX ISC itself includes the latent resource descriptions of any items that physically arrive at the facility, where they are reorganized upon receipt. However, there may be discrepancies between the receipt of a physical resource and the digital resource descriptions associated with it. For instance, a plane may unload parcels to a holding area on the tarmac maintained by USPS; however, the USPS staff may not digitally process the barcodes (and thus update the USPS-wide resource descriptions of these items) until much later. Within the facility, resources are organized continuously- they are classified and reclassified as they move between sorting machines and into different holding areas prior to being removed from the facility en route to their final destination.

Who does the organizing?

As noted, USPS-level organization events occur external to the LAX ISC but are supported by ISC interactions. Within the ISC, a variety of stakeholders impact the organizing of the resources:

• USPS partners such as airlines which update digital resource descriptions and physically deliver mail pieces to the facility
• LAX ISC employees who scan, sort and load onto machines all of the resources entering the facility
• Other government agencies like the US Department of Homeland Security who may wish to inspect the resources.

Other considerations

Mail processing as a domain is a unique organizing system in that it exists to physically move resources between two points. The LAX International Service Center is a large-scale manifestation of the challenges that face these types of organizing systems.