Care & Information Architecture in Drupal 7 and h2cm

At Drupalcon Paris this morning webchick provided an overview of Drupal 7. Amongst the feature laden slides was the way an information architecture emerged and was used to review the usability of version 6 and the soon to be released 7th version of Drupal. The list - comprising several contexts:

• appearance
• configuration
• content
• people
• structure

- had me reaching for Hodges' model and the care (knowledge) domains. This is a very informal rendering of an information architecture and yet very useful. As explained elsewhere h2cm is a very high level tool and resource and I have often viewed Hodges' model as a care architecture. Placing the above list on to the model then -

content	appearance structure
people	configuration

The rationale for this is fairly straight forward:

CONTENT: in creating content we are - as Dries stressed with Drupal - reaching out to a global audience, but content needs to fire in the mind of individual users. The site must have meaning for that person.

APPEARANCE: Style and design are physical in the sense that properties abound, even though appearance is subjective at the end of the day. Despite this there are guide lines and rules that help us avoid "what sucks".

STRUCTURE: Again even if conceptual on paper, in menus, or database tables; our models and frameworks span the divide between physical and abstract or virtual as representations. They enable communication and interaction.

CONFIGURATION: Well here the decisions are political. They may vary in the degree of left - right and centre, but they are nonetheless political.

PEOPLE: Last, but not least is people - COMMUNITIES! Built around users and the practical implementation of things they want to do - their purposes.

When we think of people it reminds me of the way people sometimes confuse social inclusion and exclusion and in placing 'people' here we cannot ignore the constant interplay between the interpersonal and political domains with roles, permissions, policy, security and other related issues.

Hearing about Drupal 7 on the first full day of Drupalcon means that the winter and indeed 2010. ... sounds a busy and lucky time here! The plans for code freeze and move towards the final release were also outlined this morning. With the announcment of Drupalcon 2010 in San Francisco more to follow: including three days in Paris....

Acknowledgments: Dries, Webchick and the Drupal 7 team.

My image source (and great opening line)