I am forced to use the word document more liberally than many people would like - as a media object that performs the function of documentation and not simply as something that resembles a paper document.
In my art practice we were encouraged to document our work, while I would never do this, the meaning and importance of the concept stuck, and as a family resemblance I have little association of the term with the type of paper documents you would use at work - after all for me I never documented anything in a paper document since I started to program Hypertext systems in 1983.
However document as poetry is a more radical and newer formulation, that has emerged from my exploration of legal practice (law as code), and the philosophy of meaning as it relates to collective intelligence and hypertext (wiki). Let's start with ambiguity in law.
Once this has been understood, we should not forget that there is a great deal to gain from immutablity, provable argumentation and robust engineering apraoches to the law (as in code). These techniques are sorely missed, and the lack of these capabilities in our legal and governance systems goes a long way to exlpining the ossification, corruption and malfunctioning of those systems in a modern context.
However, this engineering approach - however essential - must not be done at the expense of poetry - in the original sense of that term (it means Making with Words. Most of my work in software and in governance this century has been focussed on trying to udnerstand this balance, and how robust technical systems can serve the human centred ambiguity required by a system that must evolve in time with the technology being developed in society, yet in tune with our human ability to understand these technologies.
The form of interface that I believe is required for this takes the soul of wiki, built on top of the poetry of association that this enables, and the dance of individuality and social practice that is federated wiki, while combining it with modern appraoches that can carve out and protect viable spaces for human centred creativity. See: