Nakedize founder, Simon Hertnon, introduces a new information production framework that boldly expands on the practice of plain language to make information quality everyone’s business.
Note: This page is the temporary home of the fledgling Helpful Information Network (helpfulinformation.net).
Unhelpful information is blocking global sustainability
I’m proud to reveal that Nakedize is evolving into a sustainability practice focused on information.
This repositioning is because of a crucial and urgent societal need for what I’m calling ‘helpful information’.
Global society is suffering from an ever-increasing flood of low-or-no-value information that buries, obscures, and dilutes the relatively small amount of helpful and essential information humans need to live sustainably. It also consumes most of our finite attention and memory.
This 24/7 deluge is today exponentially inflated by AI misuse and overuse. Most of us are highly occupied interacting with information but, due to our finite attention and memory, we can consume only disjointed fragments of what we see and can usefully retain even less. Pouring water into a full glass is not progress, its wastefulness.
Information should enable us to live better lives but, instead, it is directly leading to us being increasingly distracted, divided, and overwhelmed.
For a society to survive and thrive, its citizens must know how to live well, and then direct their energy and effort to collaboratively putting that knowledge into practice. We know lots of things and have access to extreme amounts of information, but we clearly don’t know how to live well in a way that (to quote the UN) meets ‘the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.
Instead, our global society suffers from a ‘polycrisis’ that includes climate change, ecological degradation, social and political instability, and extreme inequality.
So, here is a first glimpse at my response – along with a very warm invitation to mull on it and contact me with feedback and suggestions.
Helpful Information Framework
I have designed the Helpful Information Framework for absolutely every one of us, hence my intention to seed a Helpful Information Network that enhances and expands the global plain language community.
If you’re working as a writer, you will find affirmation that none of us can efficiently create really good information without managerial support. And managers will find affirmation that they need the support of the leaders who set their organisation’s information culture.
The production of helpful information is a team activity and an organisational task, opportunity, and responsibility.
9 June 2026: Gamma version. (Note: A 16-quality Delta version will be released on 25 August 2026.)
Below is a very basic accessible version of the table pictured above. Note, only 7 of the 20 qualities are common plain language qualities as defined by the 2023 ISO Plain Language Standard (ISO 24495-1) and New Zealand’s Plain Language Act 2022.
| Commissioned to deliver societal value | Produced to conserve resources | Designed to be consumed | Crafted to be understood |
|---|---|---|---|
| relevant | co-designed | findable | understandable, clear* fourth of five essential qualities |
| usable | costed | sufficient | concise |
| explicitly-needed first of five essential qualities | affordable* fifth of five essential qualities | accessible | well organised |
| ethical* second of five essential qualities | efficiently-produced | timely | tailored |
| accurate* third of five essential qualities | reusable | engaging and friendly | memorable |
* Essential qualities
Copyright © Simon Hertnon 2026
This framework is intended to go beyond plain language and can be used as a:
- de facto writing standard
- commissioning checklist
- document production checklist
- conversation starter about societal and organisational information culture
Rationale and provenance
For more than 20 years, I have been teaching knowledge workers how to think more and write less – and better – so they can deliver more value to their organisations and, through them, to society.
For around 15 years, I have developed my reputation as a plain language professional, because plain language practice is all about creating information that is clear to the audience who needs the information.
But I have always felt that plain language doesn’t go far enough because, for example, clear information (crafted in plain language) can also be unneeded, unethical, inaccurate, and so on.
This is why I have always specialised in one-pagers specifically, and concise information generally. Concise information leaves out the fluff that wastes time, puts off readers, and reduces comprehensibility and transparency. In both the private and public sectors, concise writing is generally more attractive, engaging, helpful, and cost-effective.
And while I don’t know of a single plain language practitioner who uses their skills to deliberately create unhelpful information, the holes in plain language definitions remain.
Every day, advertisers, marketers, journalists, politicians, corporations, influencers, and others create clear information that could be categorised as plain language, even though the information is unneeded, or unethical, or inaccurate, or a combination of those negative qualities.
Meanwhile, given that the human brain has a limited capacity for processing information, it must also be true that if global society is producing ever-increasing quantities of unhelpful information, then there must be an ever-decreasing availability of attention for us to consume and make use of the helpful information we really need.
An intervention is needed, and this framework is the simplest intervention I could think of. It gets the unnamed, unmeasured and, thus, unsought qualities out in the open. It makes information quality and utility everyone’s business, prompting discussion between writers, managers, and leaders so, together, we efficiently create the information society really needs.
Next steps
For us
Collaboration! I am already collaborating with several organisations, led by the exemplary Victorian Public Service Plain Language Community of Practice, which has more than 2000 members. On 24 August, I will release the next version of the framework in a professional development webinar for this vibrant community.
Tuning, experimenting, proposing, prototyping, and piloting are all in play.
Again, please contact me if you’re interested in developing the framework and its practical implementation.
For me
I am working on a suite of rating and measurement tools to enable an organisation to track progress on the helpfulness of:
- its overarching information culture
- its information production and management systems
- its overall information stock
- individual information items
I am also:
- editing this web site so it meets the framework’s de facto standard!
- adjusting and re-marketing the Nakedize courses and consultancy to embed and make full use of the framework
- working on creating an overarching Same Page ecosystem of which the Helpful Information Framework is a central enabler
When time and funding allows, I will also build a dedicated website (informed, I hope, by many organic collaborations) for the Helpful Information Network I have envisaged.