Dan Brown is a brilliant information architect and content management strategist with a forthcoming book called Communicating Design, about producing IA deliverables for websites.
On his blog, Green Onions, he posted a few months ago about an emerging design pattern he’s identified related to managing incoming information.
He describes the object model thusly:
- The People
- Sender
- Recipient
- Administrator
- Stakeholders
- The Objects
- The Item
- The Inbox
- The Archive
- The Lifecycle
- Create
- Submit
- Receive
- Act
- Dispose
- The Interactions
- Assigning items to people
- Disposing an item
- Archiving an item
- Distinguishing content
That’s just the bare bones, though. Read his whole entry to get the details.