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Identify an information environment of your choice and write an essay to address the following questions: (3000 words)

• What should be your role within this environment?
• How can the principles of information organization and representation help you in performing this role?
• What are the challenges facing you in performing the role? How will you address these challenges?

Let’s define first what information environment is.

The information environment is the aggregate of individuals,
Organizations, and systems that collect, process, disseminate, or Act on information.
The information environment is where humans and automated systems observe, orient, decide, and act upon information, and is therefore the principal environment of decision making. Even though the information environment is considered distinct, it resides within each of the four domains. The information environment is made up of
Three interrelated dimensions: physical, informational, and Cognitive.

(1) The Physical Dimension. The physical dimension is composed of the command
and control (C2) systems, and supporting infrastructures that enable individuals and organizations
to conduct operations across the air, land, sea, and space domains. It is also the dimension where
physical platforms and the communications networks that connect them reside. This includes
the means of transmission, infrastructure, technologies, groups, and populations. Comparatively,
the elements of this dimension are the easiest to measure, and consequently, combat power has
traditionally been measured primarily in this dimension.

(2) The Informational Dimension. The informational dimension is where information is
collected, processed, stored, disseminated, displayed, and protected. It is the dimension where the C2
of modern military forces is communicated, and where commander’s intent is conveyed. It consists of
the content and flow of information. Consequently, it is the informational dimension that must be
protected.
(3) The Cognitive Dimension. The cognitive dimension encompasses the mind of
the decision maker and the target audience (TA). This is the dimension in which people think, perceive, visualize, and decide. It is the most important of the three dimensions. This dimension is also affected by a commander’s orders, training, and other personal motivations. Battles and campaigns can be lost in the cognitive dimension. Factors such as leadership, morale, unit cohesion, emotion, state of mind, level of training, experience, situational awareness, as well as public opinion, perceptions, media, public information, and rumors influence this dimension.

The information environment that I chose was the internet.

What is internet?
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standardized Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) to serve billions of users worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private and public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope that are linked by copper wires, fiber-optic cables, wireless connections, and other technologies. The Internet carries a vast array of information resources and services, most notably the inter-linked hypertext documents of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the infrastructure to support electronic mail. In addition it supports popular services such as online chat, file transfer and file sharing, gaming, commerce, social networking, publishing, video on demand, and teleconferencing and telecommunications. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications allows person-to-person communication via voice and video.

The origins of the Internet reach back to the 1960s when the United States funded research projects of its military agencies to build robust, fault-tolerant and distributed computer networks. This research and a period of civilian funding of a new U.S. backbone by the National Science Foundation spawned worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies and led to the commercialization of an international network in the mid 1990s, and resulted in the following popularization of countless applications in virtually every aspect of modern human life. As of 2009, an estimated quarter of Earth's population uses the services of the Internet.
The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used in everyday speech without much distinction. However, the Internet and the World Wide Web are not one and the same. The Internet is a global data communications system. It is a hardware and software infrastructure that provides connectivity between computers. In contrast, the Web is one of the services communicated via the Internet. It is a collection of interconnected documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs.[1] The term the Internet, when referring to the Internet, has traditionally been treated as a proper noun and written with an initial capital letter. There is a trend to regard it as a generic term or common noun and thus write it as "the internet", without the capital.

• What should be your role within this environment?

My role in this information environment, as an IT student, I would rather be in the area that would really suit me and that would execute my skills and abilities. I think, I want to be a WEB DEVELOPER someday.ehehe
A web developer is a software developer or software engineer who is specifically engaged in the development of World Wide Web applications, or distributed network applications that are run over the HTTP protocol from a web server to a web browser.The Web Developer is responsible for developing and maintaining multiple company web sites.

KEY AREAS OF RESPONSIBILITY

• Develop and maintain corporate web sites while working on a timeline.
• Assist with the planning, coordination, and execution of web related projects.
• Support social media, and social media programming.
• Work within a team of developers, graphic designers, copywriters and other creative staff.
• Track and monitor project progress and develop project work plans.
• Integrate multimedia, complex display systems and other hardware.
• Assist with the planning, coordination, and execution of the Global Finals event and other events
• Write reports, conduct research and compile information/data
• Assist IT Manager on Special Projects.
• Other duties as assigned
ESSENTIAL RESPONSIBILITIES
• This position requires a High level understanding of PHP, XHTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, Linux, Apache, and MySQL
• A solid understanding of modern web based template systems including but not limited to Joomla, Drupal, Zen Cart, and Smarty Templates
• Ability to manipulate a web site’s template based on a graphics designers layout.
• Attention to detail, and professional demeanor (often under stressful circumstances)
• Ability to work within a team of programmers
• Bachelor’s Degree Computer Science or equivalent.
• Ability to work at an offsite company event (Tennessee) for a ten day period each May
• Ability to work at other offsite company events as business grows

Nature of employment

Web developers can be found working in all types of organizations, including large corporations and governments, small and medium sized companies, or alone as freelancers. Some web developers work for one organization as a permanent full-time employee, while others may work as independent consultants, or as contractors for an employment agency.

Educational and licensure requirements

There are no formal educational or licensure requirements to become a web developer. However, many colleges and trade schools offer coursework in web development. There are also many tutorials and articles, which teach web development, freely available on the web - for example: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Basic_JavaScript
The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. It is designed for Firefox, Flock and Seamonkey, and will run on any platform that these browsers support including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

• How can the principles of information organization and representation help you in performing this role?

Modern web applications often contain three or more tiers, and depending on the size of the team a developer works on, he or she may specialize in one or more of these tiers - or may take a more interdisciplinary role. For example, in a two person team, one developer may focus on the technologies sent to the client such as HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and on the server-side frameworks (such as Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, .NET) used to deliver content and scripts to the client. Meanwhile the other developer might focus on the interaction between server-side frameworks, the web server, and a database system. Further, depending on the size of their organization, the aforementioned developers might work closely with a web designer, web producer, project manager, software architect, or database administrator - or they may be responsible for such tasks as web design, project management, and database administration themselves.


• What are the challenges facing you in performing the role? How will you address these challenges?

When you are designing social media you are not building and designing a product in the typical sense of that word. You are really designing an infrastructure upon which social interaction, and eventually a community, can build. The affordances needed to "direct" and "control" the development of a community are very different from and much more subtle than typical single-user systems that (as designers, developers) know. Usually compare it metaphorically to a soap bubble: you can gently try to push it in a certain direction, but if if you push too hard, it'll burst. User-centered design takes on a whole new meaning when you are building social media and communities.

Designing for when there is "no there there." The users supply the content. However, the site needs to make sense and be compelling to those initial users who arrive when things are a bit sparse (otherwise you have no chance of it growing of course). In addition, a new user who joins the site (at any stage of that site's growth) should be able to understand how it works and see the site's value. They have to be motivated to do that initial work to become a part of the site before they've made a number of connections (or contributed content). Frequently Those two types of experiences are overlooked in favor of imagining every user experience being that of a long-time user on a mature site. But if those initial experiences aren't pleasant, the site won't ever reach that stage.





References:
http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/jp3_13.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_developer
http://www.ask.com/bar?q=challenges+in+web+development&page=1&qsrc=0&ab=3&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.linkedin.com%2Fanswers%2Ftechnology%2Fweb-development%2FTCH_WDD%2F103757-93094