Guidance 2.0

Imagine what a Guidance 2.0 world might be like ...

  • browse tag clouds of reusable "architecture nuggets"
  • subscribe to "guidance feeds" that give you the latest practices and recommendations
  • share your "guidance" playlists with friends (share your favorite collections of how tos, guidelines, checklists)
  • build guidance mashups from your favorite trusted sources of information
  • rate the guidance and rate the raters (think Amazon or EBay)
  • browse a federation of guidance Wikis in your company and in the community

I think next-gen guidance is about bringing together a lot of key concepts:

  • context-precision (using context to organize information)
  • personalization (create your own views, tailor it for your needs, ... etc.)
  • community type ratings (expose the thinking and rate the raters for the guidance)
  • guidance types (evolvable schemas for guidance types, such as how tos, guidelines, checklists, patterns ...)
  • Folksonomy over taxonomy

A lot of today's guidance lives in blogs.  Part of the problem (and beauty) of blogs is that every end node is a blob of information.  What if there were RSS end nodes that contained "collections" or "lists" of how tos, guidelines, patterns ... etc.?  From a very practical standpoint, I would love to subscribe to the latest MS (or any company) recommendations and view those in a type of my choice (patterns, guidelines, how tos ... etc.)  The mashupability is endless.

Those are the ideas that drove and shaped Guidance Explorer.  Guidance Explorer was just one small step towards a world of more effective and efficient guidance.