Friday, August 27, 2010

Information Classification Like Creative Commons [Part 2]

[Part 2 - A picture is worth a thousand words]


Following on from my last post on Information Classification - I think that this concept would be better shown by using examples. I guess that the irony of the last Blog is that I was trying to say "Using pretty pictures is better than using text" but I tried to do that in a Blog post which lacked pictures totally. Still, I did get some good feedback on the post even though my coments don't work. 


I have done a little bit more research and tried to find some pictures to show what I am aiming toward. 


These pictures are all from an icon pack I found here but I'm not sure what pack I would use when it is finished or even if I should make my own. These are just for demonstration purposes. Please don't steal these graphics (they are free so just follow the link). 


*deep breath* Here goes:


If a document contains anything to do with someone's medical condition or some such - it gets labled "Medical" and has the following graphic printed on it: 

If a document is confidential - it gets labeled "Confidential" and has the following graphic:


Then what you can do with the document is listed - so you can copy it to CD, email it, move it on the network and take it home:




If you are not allowed to do any of these things then a little circle with a cross through it will be added to the image. 

Putting it all together again - you have a piece in the footer of the document that says:


This document is classified as "Medical-Confidential". You may do the following: burn to cd, transmit internally, email outside of the network, take the document home. 
Then under that, you have the images to re-enforce. The important thing is that the images must be a standard set so that users across companies, regions, businesses, etc all can look at them and at a glance know what is expected from them regarding the document. 


For bonus marks it would be nice to have a tool that can automate this process.