Tales from the history of documentation, chapter one

One of the main battles I have been fighting during the years, is the fight against inefficient documentation. Inspired by these challenges I would like to tell a tale of the epic documentation struggle through the ages.

Once upon a time important information was stored by carving runes it into huge stones. This way of maintaining information was thought to work very well by the elders. It had worked for many generations, the documents would last for many, many years, the rune stones never moved, so the information should be easy to find and it was ensured that only the wise elders was allowed to contribute to the documentation.

But for some reason the writing on the stones weren't used that much by the common people, they mostly preferred to talk to other people with the relevant knowledge or just write notes in the dirt. When the common people were asked why they didn't use the stones, they answered, that it took too long to go to the stones and read the information and the information written there was out-of-date and wasn't really relevant for the common people.

The elders response to this was that the common people needed more teaching on how to use the rune stones and more rules regarding rune usage should be developed (and of course written on other rune stones). Another improvement would be the manufacture of even more stones to close the holes in the existing information and more effort should be put into updating the rune stones.

People were sent on rune stone courses, massive amounts of rune stones were produced, but the usage of the rune stones didn't improve much.

Then one day a young enthusiastic fellow approached the community with a new media for maintaining documentation. It just consisted of thin sheets of wood (he called it paper) and you could just write on it with small pieces of charcoal. He said that the paper was a major improvement to the rune stones, the paper was much 'easier' to used than the rune stones, everybody could contribute to the documentation, you could easily update the writing on the paper and you could bring the relevant documentation with you to use it where you needed it.

The elders listen to the young man and told him this paper thing looked very nifty and he was very welcome to use it, but it could of course not be used for the more important information. After all, it wasn't as safe as rune stone, it could burn, rot, bleach or blow away. Anybody could write on paper, which would be dangerous, who would control the changes. It would also be impossible to maintain the archives the rune stones provided, when everybody could just pick up a document and take it with him.

The young man was pretty disillusioned by this lack of vision from the elders, but agreed to follow the elders decision to only use the paper for things considered less important by the elders.

The years passed, and surprisingly enough paper gradually started to replace the rune stones. Apparently the intangible concept of 'easy to use' and the possibility of everybody to contribute was found to be 'better' by the common people. Soon all documentation was stored on paper and the rune stones retired to museums and parks.

End of chapter one