At a project kick-off for an enterprise information architecture project I started this summer for the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) I used a useful technique to determine enterprise priorities for taxonomy projects, called “Metadata Dot-Mocracy.”
The purpose of the exercise was to determine priorities for developing taxonomy facets across the organization. I combined a list of existing metadata elements with suggested new ones, and presented them in lists of administrative, descriptive and structural metadata elements.
Participants had been selected from across the entire organization, and I gave each one 10 bright orange dots. Each dot was a vote, and each participant could vote across the three lists of metadata elements as they saw fit. The could put all 10 votes on a single element, all 10 votes on 10 different elements, or any other combination that would be best for them.
The result was a set of votes representative of the organization that demonstrated the priorities for the developments of facets, created in a collaborative, transparent and engaging process. Having the participants vote with each other developed an common understanding of the project and gained stakeholder buy-in for the results.
The exercise, when complimented with other work including card sorting, standards research, search analysis and user research gave me an excellent foundation to build a new taxonomy across a large, dynamic international organization.
“Metadata Dot-Mocracy” was an exercise that was easy to implement, and it gave me good results. I’d recommend it to other taxonomy and enterprise IA professionals working on