Comment by jen729w

Sorry if the comment came off as critical to what you've done; it was not meant to be. I just find the ability to tag data to be useful for organization and discoverability and I find it interesting that in 2020 there's no widely used file systems that have it out of the box.

I'm not GP, but I would love to have everything organised with tags, and my tags themselves would use your system (or something very similar).

Some observations, and thanks: -

"What is the tag?" is a category error. It's "what are the tags?" Tags are not paths.

Is it Payroll? Yes. Is it Finance? Yes, if that's how your org does things. Is it other things besides? Yes. A "superseded" tag would likely be useful to many organisations.

The idea of tags as opposed to paths is that a leaf object can have lots of them.

Of course tags are not free. The question is, does the value they bring outweigh their costs? Like you, I think the answer is usually "no". People suck at tagging.

If tags are to be used, "who manages the tags" is a key question that needs to be explicitly asked and answered at the same time as, or before, deciding your categories.

However the same applies to managing the "chart of accounts" that Johnny Decimal requires. The structure that is best for the organisation almost certainly won't be optimal for any given staff member. So management is required.

These are both stewardship problems.

The Johnny Decimal website is silent on the subject of stewardship. Here I want to focus on two aspects: keeping things working, and managing succession.

Keeping things working: using a gardening metaphor, is planting and weeding, re-potting, trimming and pruning and harvesting, turning over the garden beds, and so on. Like gardening, this part of records stewardship is best carried out regularly and frequently.

Obsoleting things is a key part of this. Contra the poster above who says "just delete it"[1], often you have to keep no-longer-current versions of filed objects around for a long time, for some combination of reasons: the maintenance and repair manual for a machine tool model we stopped selling 20 years ago, minutes of board meetings from an equivalent time ago, commemorative photos, old logo artwork, client records (if, say, you're a dentist) for the life of the client, even if you haven't seen them for a decade, ...

Succession is about ensuring groups have the right access, new people belong to the right groups and are properly indoctrinated, and things are handed over when staff leave or change roles, and ex-staff have their access removed; and about revising the structure, ontology, and access rights so that they stay relevant as the organisation they serve changes.

Records management is somewhat like plumbing--good drains, no-one notices; with bad ones, everyone is miserable. And keeping the drains "good" requires work.

The problems that are now universal ("Acme Corp Contract", "Acme Corp Contract - final version", "Acme Corp Contract - final with client revisions", "Acme Corp Contract - senior management approval", "Acme Corp Contract Brian", etc.) have indeed come about because computer-illiterate and filing-illiterate office workers thought the FAT file system (and then NTFS and/or Sharepoint) was a magic, zero-effort substitute for having a system both for keeping records and for training/indoctrinating new staff to keep records properly.

We have had two generations of office workers who have never experienced properly functioning filing systems (except possibly at a university library). Just like people who browse the web without an ad blocker, they don't know any different, so this is an invisible problem to them.

Johnny Decimal is a step towards opening people's eyes (or noses). Thanks for publishing your website!

1. Deleting things that should be deleted is an important skill, but another one is knowing what should not be deleted, but instead moved out of the main stream.