The Information Space, or I-Space was developed by Max Boisot

Max Boisot

Max Henri Boisot was Professor of Strategic Management at the ESADE business school in Barcelona, Associate Fellow at Templeton College, University of Oxford, and Senior Associate at the Judge Institute of Management Studies at the University of Cambridge.He was also a research fellow at the Sol...

 as a conceptual framework relating the degree of structure of knowledge (i.e. its level of codification and abstraction) to its diffusibility as that knowledge develops.

This results in four different types of knowledge.

• Public knowledge, such as textbooks and newspapers, which is codified and diffused.
• Proprietary knowledge, such as patents and official secrets, which is codified but not diffused. Here barriers to diffusion have to be set up.
• Personal knowledge, such as biographical knowledge, which is neither codified nor diffused.
• Common sense – i.e. what ‘everybody knows’, which is not codified but widely diffused.

The I-Space model is commonly shown as a cube with three axes: abstraction, codification and diffusion. A social learning cycle is drawn, showing how as knowledge is increasingly moved from concrete experiential Zen type knowledge to codified highly abstract (expert language etc), where it is increasingly easy for it to defuse independently of the knowledge holder. Once internalised it moves back to the concrete.
The I-Space framework is an acknowledged early influence on the development of the Cynefin

Cynefin

The Cynefin framework is a model used to describe problems, situations and systems. The model provides a typology of contexts that guides what sort of explanations and/or solutions may apply. Cynefin is a Welsh word, which is commonly translated into English as 'habitat' or 'place', although...

framework.