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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ken Case View Post
I'm not sure I understand. If the action is to send one email to 7 people, then the context for the action is simply "Email" and the task title or notes would presumably list those 7 people.

I don't see how multiple contexts would help here.
I understand and agree that the data can be classified under "Email" just as I agree that organisms can be phenotypically classified or classified by genetic proximity; any organization is possible. I'm merely saying that contextual richness is lost and can't be rederived easily ACROSS potential organizations if only a single context is allowed.

I'm not arguing that you can't make it work with a single context, that would be equivalent to arguing that hierarchies can't be used to organize data, but I am saying that, and I think that other proponents of the multi context notion will agree, it is useful to add richness to actionable items, within reasonable limits, for search/filtering purposes and to be more in line with the way humans recall/think about information.

In other words, the non-selected contexts are obfuscated by the chosen one (other contexts which, from a human standpoint, provide useful information to recall and think about related contexts).

Another way to think about this:

Carving a statue out of a marble block robs the artist of other potential statues he could have carved with the same marble block. I contend that my artist would like to be able to overlap carved statues he likes to see in the same marble block so that he doesn't feel robbed too much of the marble block's potential.

Regards
omniinmo

Last edited by omniinmo; 2009-07-31 at 06:10 PM..