AINTscience - Online User Guide
Francis_Bacon
Everybody likes rules. They make us feel safe, they make life easier, and it is so much fun to break them. The children's game "Simon says" is fun because of the psychology of rules, commands and perception.
The first rule of AINTscience is the Ain't Simon rule,
| Ain't Simon | "AINTscience says: Do everything AINTscience says." |
The point of "Simon says" is to trip people up by making them react instinctively instead of consciously applying a rule. The AINTscience system of rules has the opposite goal, namely to avoid tripping people up by facilitating smooth transitions between conscious decisions and instinct.
Therefore, learning AINTscience is a two step process of 1) learning the rules and 2) getting so used to the rules that they become automatic responses a.k.a reflexes, intuition or instinct.
In short, Ain't Simon means: Follow the rules, and the less you need to think about it, the better, because they ain't made to trip you up. Consider the following examples:
Say you have a file named ”Guns_R_Us_license_agreement.pdf”.
Where do you place it?
Customers/Guns_R_Us/Agreement/ or
Signed_agreements/ or
Legal/Agreements/Guns_R_Us/License/ or
Legal/Agreements/License/Guns_R_Us/ ?
Where is the latest version of the offer to Guns_R_Us?
Sales/Offers/Guns_R_Us/2008/ or
Customers/Guns_R_Us/Offers/ ?
These examples may seem trivial, but without rules and conventions, there is no way that everybody will make the same choices and create the same directories, or even look in the same places.
Then some people will either waste time, or not find the files they need.
To most people, not finding a file, or not knowing where to put one is perhaps not very dramatic, but to a business it does make a difference.
Francis Bacon said "Knowledge itself is power". Knowledge feeds off information, and file system organization is therefore part of knowledge management.
In business in the 21st century, the power of knowledge is what it's all about.
So forget Simon, remember Francis, and let's make everyone do what AINTscience says.
To save small businesses from becoming roadkill on the information highway, there are two AINTscience super-heroes coming to the rescue: "Tina" and "Belle"
To the right is the nasty widow "Tina", "Latrodectus mactans" - a venomous black widow spider with characteristic red hourglass markings.
"Belle", who was a particularly nasty specimen of a human widow will be introduced later.
Make them your best friends, and you won't regret it. The whole point is their abstract qualities, though. Their perceivable manifestations are only memory aids when searching for and finding the holy grail of AINTscience: The sequence.
| 1 | Identity | Name | Who |
| 2 | Function | Action | Did |
| 3 | Form | Shape | What |
| 4 | Chronology | Time | When |
| The AINTscience sequence | |||
The sequence is nirvana, salvation and fifteen minutes of fame all rolled up in an environment-friendly, recyclable package that has caused pain to no animal, except this author. In short, the sequence is useful.
In highway terms, the sequence is like a GPS. It tells the driver where to go at all times, and it is easy to learn. It's just four short steps, like
The sequence steps are used to determine where a file can be found, or should be placed, and the steps are:
| 1 | Determine the Identity or Name of Who the file belongs to |
| 2 | Determine the Function or Action that Did or does something the file is for or about |
| 3 | Determine the Shape or What Form of document it is |
| 4 | Determine the Chronology or Time When the file originated or is about |
The following examples indicate how the sequence steps are used to build a sequence of directories. First, the AINTscience sequence again, this time shown from left to right instead of top to bottom. This is because directory paths are usually shown this way, even though the starting directory on the left is normally referred to as the top.
Assume a bar or pub gives some regularly thirsty customers credit and writes their tabs to files. We are looking for such a customer tab from last year, or we have just created one, and are looking for where to put it. Step 1 is to determine which identity the file belongs to.
Obviously, if there is a top level directory labeled with the customer's name, e.g. Jack_Nielson/, that is a reasonable place to look. It is an identity, and it fits the description. Clicking on it, we open it and see the directories below.
The second step is what function or action is involved. Under Jack_Nielson/ is the directory Account/ representing the business function of keeping track of the customer's account. This fits, so we click a second time to open up Account/.
Step 3 is form or shape and in Account/ is a directory called Tabs/, which again fits perfectly, and clicking again,
for step 4 we find the directory Last_year/, which is where the file is if we are looking, or goes if we are placing an old one.
The file path is: Jack_Nielson/Account/Tabs/Last_year/, or in sequence colors:
Here are two more, relatively self-explanatory examples:
AAA_Consulting/Office_lease/Eviction_notices/Old/
My_Own_Business/Things_I_Do/Monthly_Reports/2023/
Reality is usually not as simple as this, so even though AINTscience is simple enough to fit simple examples, it is also complex enough to do much more.
The next four subsections describe each of the four classes. To understand AINTscience, these are essential.
The sequence is simple, but not too simple. There are actually a lot of details to learn in order to master use of the sequence. Not everybody need do that, but getting to know the four classes is a must, and the first is Identity.
Every person has an identity, but that is not the only type of identity recognized by AINTscience. Businesses are also identities, and departments within a business can be identities.
Here are examples of identities.
AINTscience's main example company is ACME Ltd. of London, England, where it was founded in 1882. The list on the left shows some top identities of ACME's AINTscience file system.
ACME Ltd. has many customers, both other businesses and human individuals. Each of ACME's customers is an external identity that ACME relates to, whether they be human or not. The same goes for suppliers, government offices and other identities that are not part of ACME Ltd.
To employees, each department in ACME is an identity. The various directories shown on the left are:
Identity is one of the four AINTscience classes, and the Identity rule is:
| Identity | "Identity is #1." |
The AINTscience identity rule means that the first thing to consider about any file is this:
It's a simple question, and it is always possible to check quickly and accurately which identity in the file system the file belongs to, if any.
If there is no answer, the file doesn't belong in the AINTscience file system at all.
If there is more than one answer, a decision must be made about which identity to choose, because in an AINTscience file system, no file belongs in more than one place.
AINTscience has rules to deal with this.
| I2: Politeness | "Externals rule internals." |
The politeness rule is the first and main special rule concerning identities, and it means that if a file concerns any identity external to the company, that's where it is or where it goes.
Customers are externals. Suppliers are externals. Government offices, NGOs and any identity outside the company is an external.
ACME itself is an internal, as well as all of ACME's departments.
In 1936, ACME had a development project for making a quick assembly machine-gun support that could be carried underneath a jacket. The project's name was "QuickFire", and it was a joint project with the customer Murder_Inc.
If one were to look for the files concerning this project, where should one look?
1) Dev/Murder_Inc/Projects/QuickFire/ or
2) Ext/Customers/Murder_Inc/QuickFire/ ?
The answer is 2), because Ext/ is external, and Dev/ is internal. If a later project had made a general product out of the result, and that product was owned by ACME, files for the development project would be under e.g.
Dev/Projects/Machine_guns/QF_Delta/
where "QF_Delta" is the internal name for the later general product project.
Functions are the actions the company do, did perform or will perform. Function is possibly the most complex class, because it labels (names) everything that goes on in a company for which there are documents in the file system.
ACME Ltd's Accounts department handles invoicing, payments and most transactions, as well as finances, budgeting, and accounting.
This is very simply reflected in the sub-directories of the Accounts department, as shown on the left.
As also shown, the Marketing department has divided its activities into the four processes of advertising, producing brochures, public relations work, and running the company website.
A very clear benefit from having one sub-directory for each main function or process within a company department is that the file system becomes a reflection of what is going on in the company. If something that is done in a department doesn't fit in one of its directories, the activity either shouldn't be in that department, or a new directory is needed.
| Function | "Function is #2." |
Like every document belongs to an identity and usually some function, every document also has some form or shape, and this can be used for classification.
Examples of form are Letter, Picture, Presentation, Long_version, High_definition, GIF and PDF.
Classifying documents by form is very simple, once the classifying criteria for directories are chosen. Form is therefore useful for making it easier to place and find documents when there are many of them that belong to the same identity and function.
| Form | "Form is #3." |
The form rule means that after identity and function, the form of a document is the next class to consider when looking for or placing the document file.
ACME's Accounts department is responsible for budgeting, and this takes the form of spreadsheets. They are placed and found in:
Acc/Budgets/Spreadsheets/
ACME's operations department is in charge of maintenance of the company's "hardware" for various applications. Maintenance operates according to schedules, and reports of what has been done and the state of the items are always logged conscientiously. These documents are found and placed in:
Ops/HW_Maintenance/Schedules/ and
Ops/HW_Maintenance/Logs/
Benjamin Franklin, was a statesman and polymath ('universal genius'), who understood the significance of time better than most people. He said "Time is money" and everyone trying to run a business knows that he hit the nail squarely on the head.
Time can be used for more than hammering away at whatever work you do, though, it is also one of the most used criteria for ordering files.
Chronology or Time as a class is simple to use. Old stuff can be retired to directories named e.g. Old/, History/ or 2007/, and everybody understands what it means. Month by month or week by week also works fine.
Acc/Budgets/Spreadsheets/2007/Q3/Aug/
Mktg/Brochures/Current/
Ops/HW_Maintenance/Logs/2006/Week38/
All files have timestamps, and these are useful for automatic sorting and searching as well as for manual decisions of where to place them or where to look.
Concepts related to time are sequence and order. Many sequences that have bearing on file contents can be mapped on time somehow. Examples are versions of a product that gradually is improved or just updated to fit the requirements of changing time, and activities that have to precede or succeed other activities because of dependencies of results
Dev/Sharp_n_Blunt/AccuAxe/SlimJoe/V2000/
As an ordering criterion, time a.k.a. chronology is at the bottom of AINTscience's sequence:
| Chronology | "Chronology is #4." |
The most important reasons for having time a.k.a. chronology last are that
1. it is so simple that it can to some extent be automated, and therefore doesn't need to take up a more important place,
and
2. it is content neutral, and should not break the flow of content thinking.
The class rule says that the classes rule AINTscience, and the rule is as simple as one, two, three and four. The class rule is the main structural rule of AINTscience. It determines how files are organized in an AINTscience file system more than any of the other rules, and can be thought of as the skeleton of the AINTscience vertebrate, the backbone or the spine of the skeleton.
| Class | "#1 is not below #2 is not below #3 is not below #4, and never forget it." |
The point of the class rule is that it restricts any AINTscience directory hierarchy to having a certain structure, and in that structure, no Identity is ever placed below any other class of directory, no Function is ever placed below Form or Chronology, and no Form is ever placed below Chronology.
The class rule does not imply that any of the classes #2, #3 or #4 has to exist, only that sequence numbers always increase when going from the top of the hierarchy.
Summing up, the 7 most basic rules of AINTscience have been described above, and are:
| AINTscience's 7 most basic rules | |
| Ain't Simon | "AINTscience says: Do everything AINTscience says." |
| Identity | "Identity is #1." |
| Function | "Function is #2." |
| Form | "Form is #3." |
| Chronology | "Chronology is #4." |
| Class | "#1 is not below #2 is not below #3 is not below #4, and never forget it." |
| I2: Politeness | "Externals rule internals." |
That's it for the bare necessities of using an AINTscience file system. Now you know that the NASTy WiDoWW is for Name - Action - Shape - Time, and Who - Did - What - When. All you need to do is use it as a guide to place and find files. If your name is Luke, you should tell yourself "Use the sequence, Luke, use the sequence!". Since your name probably isn't Luke, you may instead ask yourself the following questions when looking for where a file is or should be placed:
| 1 | Who does the file belong to? |
| 2 | Which Function or Action Did or does that which the file is for or about? |
| 3 | What Shape Form of document is it? |
| 4 | When the file originated or what Time is it about? |
Also use the Politeness rule when you seem to have a choice between an external and an internal identity: choose the external.
That sequence again:
| 1 | Identity | Name | Who |
| 2 | Function | Action | Did |
| 3 | Form | Shape | What |
| 4 | Chronology | Time | When |
| The AINTscience sequence | |||
If you have read this far, you can now say that you ain't AINTscience ignorant. However, as indicated by the title of this chapter ("The bare necessities"), we have bared, uncovered and barely covered the necessities of placing files in the right places in an AINTscience filesystem.
The rest of this document is for those who prefer to have a reasonable understanding of what they are doing even if they are not techno-geeks. In terms of a car-driving metaphor, we have covered opening the door, the ignition key, the steering wheel and the accelerator pedal. Upcoming is less important stuff like lights, brakes, mirrors, seat-belts, filling gas, oil, service and other hassles. Sooner or later you will need some of these, so keep reading. Don't worry about running into geek-stuff, that is not here, but in the reference manual.