Do “living documents” really exist?
Interesting post from Mark McDonald, at Gartner, about the (mis)use of the term ”living document”: Why most ‘living documents’ are dead on arrival”.
He makes very interesting (and true) points about the fact that “living documents”, or what we call as such today - often excuses for unfinished work. “living documents” rarely live on, and are – at best – updated on a best effort mode – “zombie” documents. They require human efforts to keep them alive, and that is the weak link.
But there are technologies on the horizon that should bring the “living document” closer to reality. Future electronic documents will not be self-contained documents anymore, but instead smaller document elements collected here and there and pulled at the time of need - evergreen mash-ups of atomic information content pulled as required, and integrated into a unified, customized view.
Cloud Computing will be a great enabler for “living documents”. See Zoho docs for example – each document can integrate bits and pieces from other documents (e.g. a spreadsheet, a slide, etc…) and if the original source document is updated, your “living document” gets updated. When there is no connectivity to the cloud, a “local” version of the document will still be available, with whatever latest sync was retrieved, as in Sliderocket. And, when the electronic documents really starts to live, the paper document will remain ”dead” for a while. But it might contain additional information, such as a machine-readable hyperlink to provide easy access to the latest version of the documents, with highlights showing the recent updates?
So technology can help bring documents to life. The real question is, will human accept that, if that removes “living document” excuse for not finishing their work?. 
Francois, an interesting question is: Is an automatic generated document, using mashups to retrieve the lastest actual data, still a document? Or is it a new presentation of an application GUI? Or do both worlds come together?
Some definitions from the web:
“In the PC world, the term was originally used for a file created with a word processor. In addition to text, documents can contain graphics, charts, and other objects”
“a piece of paper that provides an official record of something”
“A document is a bounded physical representation of body of information designed with the capacity (and usually intent) to communicate. A document may manifest symbolic, diagrammatic or sensory-representational information. To document is to produce a document artifact by collecting and representing information. In prototypical usage, a document is understood as a paper artifact, containing information in the form of ink marks. Increasingly documents are also understood as digital artifacts. WIKIPEDIA”
Common: Documents use a formatting structure to combine selected data into information to communicate or to record, e.g. freeze information, so it can be used for evidence.
Do living documents freeze the information, e.g. can be track back all the versions?
Hmm, not answer to Johan’s question… The funny thing is that I triggered on ‘living documents’ from a whole different perspective. I was thinking about ‘living documents’ in the sense that documents classify themselves, ‘know’ which workflow they should be in, etc. Living documents in the context of live systems, complex systems.