I just had a meeting with Tom Smith of Other Media has been working with Ultralab to facilitate online collaboration between folks in NZ and in the UK using blogs.
Other Media are website builders who get involved in a variety of projects such as Hyper Island School of New Media Design in Sweden.
Tom has worked on think.com and spinalot and an online living newspaper project.
Blogging in organisations is mainstream now that Microsoft, IBM and Forrester Research are all advocating it, according to USA Today.
Blogs form self-organising online social networks that “[decrease] social space between employees, and [increase] the amount of knowledge shared between people,” (James Spohrer, director of IBM’s Almaden Research Center).
Andy Swarbrick has a comprehensive SNA & KM site (Robotegg). It includes this list of SNA resources classified according to the developmental stage as an SNA practitioner that they are most relevant to.
Also, SNA can scarcely be used in a sentence without mentioning Valid Krebs who “provides Social Network Analysis software and services for organizations and their consultants”.
This looks like a great book on the practicalities of CoPs: Knowledge Networks: Innovation through Communities of Practice.
The invitation to this Virtual Organizational Development 2004 online conference says:
“As more and more organizations embrace distributed work, virtual teams, network organizational structures, and other practices driven by globalization and technology, Organizational Development (OD) practitioners must respond with new approaches and innovative processes that address the opportunities and challenges of the 21 st century. A new breed of OD practitioner is emerging, one that understands how new processes and technologies being used by companies today can enable breakthrough interventions at the individual, team, organization, and trans-organizational levels.”
What is the distinction between OD (now) and KM?
I have been a member of NZKM for over a year now. I attended a worthwhile event they held where Larry Prusak presented.
There is also a small informal chapter forming in Christchurch (catalysed by Julian Carver of Seradigm).
I’ve just signed up on the website of the NZ KM Society, an Auckland-based network of KM practitioners.
The title of this item is from Clay Shirky’s article Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags.
I had real trouble putting this post in a category. I wish I didn’t have them. Action: migrate to blog tool with tags.
Clay’s latest excellent essay provides a detailed analysis of the influence that storage media have had on categorisation. It’s the same problem that kept the long tail invisible from us: what you find out about the world is determined by what will fit on a shelf. Now that we don’t need shelves any more, we can organise stuff in more flexible ways. As Shirky says, “tags enable a huge amount of user-produced organizational value, at vanishingly small cost.”
But that isn’t the only problem. Even the Web has been categorised in hierarchical directories. These have the problems that they are created by a subgroup who have a particular point of view. Worse, they have tended to inherit some of the rules from the physical world like “an item can only be in N categories”.
The central idea in this essay is that “The Only Group That Can Categorize Everything Is Everybody”. After describing some of the limitations of categorisation, it goes on to list some of the enormous strengths of the deceptively simple technology of tagging.
Effectively, it is already easier to find information on the Web than it is on a typical organisational network, or even on most individual computers. The use of user defined tags seems likely to make it an order of magnitude easier again. Apple’s Tiger OS, Google Desktop Search and Microsoft’s plans all go a long way to solving the desktop problem.
>From a KM point of view, the key question that this raises is “how can we allow our members to tag our content?”.
When I met Lee LeFever at Vita (in Capitol Hill, Seattle), we carried on a conversation sparked by Jerry Michalski’s application of Stocks and Flows thinking to communications technology. Lee has written an excellent overview of this.
The basic idea is that some technologies do one or the other better. TV does flow. TiVo does stocks. Email does flow. The Web does stock.
In the KM space, we’ve been thinking about Stocks and Flows in Intellectual Capital Theory since Karl-Erick Sveiby visited in 1998.
I wonder if it is worth pursuing the distinction into the three “types” of intellectual capital: “human”, “structural” and “relational”?
Clearly, the role that technology plays in developing individual human competence is debatable. I for one, however will readily confess that I “know” a lot more when I have access to my PDA (especially now that it can acecss Google).
It’s a no-brainer that the Web, file system, intranet, filed email, wikis and blogs are massive repositories of structural capital.
The interesting question is the use of technology for enhancing relational capital. As ClueTrain becomes a given, we are opening up media that are accessible inside and outside our organisations. Clearly blogs are a prime example, but in the Michalski taxonomy, blogs are “flow” tools.
I am particularly interested in how we can make increased use of “stocks” technologies to provide a navigable interface to the social/semantic networks that they represent.
If you didn’t know about this, give some thought to registering for the Telling tales at work sessions.
Stephen Demming is a world expert in the use of stories to spread insiration and good ideas.
Well, that’s a bit hard to follow but gotta start somewhere.
My friend and colleague Julian Carver has been using coloured stickers to get people to rate ideas or proposals in face to face sessions. I’ve used this too.
He discovered that this is called Dotmocracy. Coop Tools have developed a technique called Advanced Dotmocracy that scales for large groups and have written detailed instructions.
We become so accustomed to being able to rate things easily online. It’s useful to remember that there are good ways to do this offline, too.