Just found this image whilst going through some old notes. I initially saw it and was reading about the Dewey Decimal just before I found JD.
Pretty cool! I hope to one day have a JDS full of information like the DDS!
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One of the reasons I’m excited for the new small business pack is that it will bring cohesion to a very common field.
Millions of people run a small business. And, really, there’s no shared schema. We all know what the things we need to do are – tax, staff, legal, compliance, sales – but there’s no way to say to someone else, I have a problem with this specific thing and for them to share your frame of reference.
That’s what a JD ID does. So we’ll all be able to say that I have a problem with 13.32 Quarterly tax filing[1] and we’ll all know exactly what you’re talking about, and have the same history, and shared resources, and when good knowledge comes about as a result of that conversation, we’ll codify it in the system so that future people don’t have to ask again.
Made-up example. ↩︎
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This is a surprising new direction for JD - a shared coordinate space instead of an idiosyncratic one. I have a feeling this is indeed possible.
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Interested in thoughts, I certainly see potential and I’ll be pushing it.
With the new tools I’m building, updating your system will be much simpler. A utility will dynamically create your folder structure vs. you downloading a static .zip file.
So if the community spots a gap in our logic, we patch it, and everyone is encouraged to update. And I should think about encouraging people, if they really do insist on ‘freestyling’ their own IDs, to perhaps use a certain non-conflicting range… hmm yep.
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I know it’s not the aim of this thread, but my modern mind isn’t happy with the heavy emphasis on Man in that poster. It was a different time back then.
And these days we’ve veered too far in the other direction, at least in the countries where words are gendered, like host/hostess—in German-speaking countries, it has become politically incorrect to speak of e.g. pupils (Schüler) and all official material is almost unreadable how (Schüler:innen). Having that stumbling notation several times per sentence makes one lose sight of what it’s actually trying to convey.
Yeah, funny to see that sort of thing from the past. I hadn’t considered gendered languages … what a nightmare. So you’re saying that Schüler, being a ‘male’ word, is politically verboten? What does the :innen convey?
Ugh. A mess indeed.
That’s me. Based on the thoughts carried within the Life Admin pack, I have adapted my pre-existing JDex into a shape that is similar to, but different from, the canonical index.
My reason is that I don’t want to cram everything into area 1_ and not use all the others. Especially cramming my entire work into just one node 11.72 and all of my hobbies into 11.82 seemed extremely restricting.
I elevated the categories to areas, which gave me a lot more wiggle room inside each node. And I created an * entirely separate JDex for work*. This works well for me.
Related: English sorely lacks a female/neutral equivalent of ‘dude’.
I can call almost any age man a ‘dude’ and it works. As in, ‘what’s that dude up to?’, or ‘hey dudes’ to a bunch of strangers.
It works for young and old. Although past a certain age you’d go something more formal.
But there’s no equivalent for women.
- ‘Girl’: great if you’re talking to a young girl. Offensive for anyone about 16+.
- ‘Lady’: what is it, 1850?
- ‘Woman’: just a heavy word that doesn’t work.
- ‘Chick’ is the dude equivalent but it feels way more slangy and loose than ‘dude’. And you’d never walk up to a group of women and be like, ‘chicks! what’s up!’
A gap to be filled.
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And by the way you absolutely should not do this! The JDex says:
If any of these things become a major part of your life, you’ll need to give them more room.
We designed the single ID because we can’t possibly know what all of your hobbies might be, so we just wanted to give people somewhere to put stuff.
The ending :innen is like the ess after host to make the female hostess.
Try and rephrase all your communication toward your users and user:innen and your clients and client:innen, it’s horrible.
Any public writing, and any business writing, and just about everything that isn’t just regular folks writing to each other, has now been abused into that style, for fear of upsetting some Karen or being accused of a faux pas by competitors.
By the way, I’ve seen dude used in gender-neutral ways, to apply to the entire crowd. Or dudes and dudettes, if you prefer, so there’s that. Or just go with a neutral word like folks, that also works in a mixed age group.
This is where the Life Admin pack is a great tool for starters and newbies. KISS applies!
Once people build up more content, and it grows into more complex structures, that’s when we need to think outside the box (outside the pack, as it were). Some day you might want to publish a Pro version of the pack, to establish a canonical framework for these uses, too. Until then, I’ll be this guy 
Well for the small business pack we have the same problem – I can’t know your business, I can only give you a structure that covers the overheads that we all have.
But over time, together, we can build up a library of niche-specific templates. Maybe we should be thinking about that in LA world as well?
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Folks isn’t bad. Problem is it’s a bit folks-y! As in old-timey.
The American y’all is good. I enjoy throwing round a y’all.
I’m a sucker for old books. Just went through this to see if it had anything interesting:
And found this:
“The Numeric system is indirect necessitating a card index for filing and reference. For this reason its use for name filing has been discontinued to a great extent…”
Uh oh.
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I have this on loan from the National Library.
The card index system : its principles, uses, operation, and component parts
https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/2020037
It’s a reference library, so you can’t remove books. And last time I was there I didn’t have a USB stick so I couldn’t scan anything. Next time I’m there I’m going to digitise it. It’s ~100 years old and there’s a lot of stuff that still feels fresh.
Which really drives home how bonkers it is that we haven’t solved our computer filing issue. We’ve understood this problem and its solution for a century.
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Nice. And thanks to the people over at the Internet Archive, I’m going to read it this weekend: https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.10935/page/n9/mode/2up
Oh amazing! Now I don’t need to bother scanning it. Thanks! 
Those images that aren’t rendering are just line-drawings of filing cabinets. You’re not missing anything.
book club? 
Highly recommended: The Filing Cabinet
So.
Hot.
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