Library clips

James Dellow (ChiefTech) is interviewed by Matt Moore (Engineers without Fears) on a podcast all about Enterprise RSS…good listening.

One thing I disagree with is the terminology, an email broadcast was referred to as “pull”, and RSS as “push”.

To me email is “push”, as I can push (send) you an email and you have no choice, it just ends up in your inbox.

Whereas RSS is “pull”, as I publish and people can subscribe to it and “pull” it down to read.
Technically once you are subscribed new posts are, I suppose, pushed to you…it’s not like I have to pull each post everytime. But at least you have control, you can decide to disable the subscription.

The podcast wasn’t just about RSS, there was a lot to take away in relation to enterprise 2.0 in general.

One quote I liked was something like…social software doesn’t have to be used socially.

This really hones into a post I published on knowledge visibility, and how collaboration is different than emergence.

Blogs and wikis can substitute email and Document Management Systems for certain types of processes and communications.

A blog can be used to broadcast news, announcements, project status…
A wiki can be used to collaborate on a document

These scenarios are not anything unusual, you still are doing the same things and tasks you normally do, only using more appropriate tools for particular types of tasks (In-the-Flow).

Using tools this way makes things easier, centralised and more visible, and comments offer people to participate for all to see…and the fact that it’s visible allows more eyes to come upon this content and perhaps add value.

So far this is not km 2.0, it’s just using social tools to replace ways of getting our tasks done.

What KM 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 is mostly about is emergence, ie. people participate and contribute their know-how, whether it’s blog fragments, presence status, research bookmarks. This content may also be tagged, and from a tag cloud we can see emerging patterns.
This participation is also about transparency, allowing anyone in the enterprise to be heard, as value and innovation is not just generated by supposed experts.

The most valuable part to knowledge workers is that publishings and conversations are taking place online, and you can tune into the flow.

Knowledge Management is about flow, maybe we could call it K-flow.

It’s no longer about capture and store it, and if you have a task go search the knowledgebase.

It’s about publishing fragments, and conversations, we are educated everyday with what people are saying in the Enterprise Conversation Market.

We can tap into this k-flow whenever we want to be informed, and we can also tap into it to ask questions…it’s all about people and conversations.
Sure this stuff is also archived by default for later searches, but the point is that it has flowed around the place, maybe evolved, and may come to rest, only to be resurrected and evolved again perhaps later on.

Twitter is the perfect example of flow. I subscribe to people I trust, and watch the tacit flow, I tune into what I like, I converse, stuff evolves. I can also ask questions to the sources of my flow (subscriptions/contacts) and get answers or have discussion, others, perhaps weak ties can add value or perhaps eaves drop and learn.

Twitter is about people, stuff I’m interested in comes to me, and stuff I want to know will be returned to me…you are no longer on your own, people are the filter to finding stuff and discovery.

Ross Dawson refers to research that identifies this is how people work anyway, so social tools are just encouraging and harnessing the way humans work:

“The research showed that in an organization, people were five times more likely to go to people than to databases to get answers to their questions. So knowledge workers’ productivity is strongly related to their social networks, in terms of who they know who can help them, and whether there is sufficient trust and reciprocal value in the relationship that they get a response.”

Two quotes I have posted before have to be mentioned again:

O’Reilly - “…it’s more important to have a shared memory than a shared workspace.”

McAfee - “…focus not on capturing knowledge itself, but rather on the practices and output of knowledge workers.”

McAfee’s SLATES model is also mentioned in the podcast:

Search
Links
Authoring
Tags
Extensions
Signals

James Dellow uses the term “Awareness” in reference to RSS picking up signals, and I think this is what k-flow is about, we are participating, we are each others daily news…forget about knowledge management, this is a learning organisation.

A couple of weeks ago I was writing a wikipage primer on blogs for my work, and when tryng to describe that you can get email updates to new blog posts, I used the traditional subscription model as a metaphor.
James mentioned a newspaper subscription sent to your house, I used a similar description explaining email updates to new blog posts is like a magazine or journal subscription.

This is what I said:

“Blogs are different than email as you are not pushing a message to a set of people, instead you are publishing an item, making it visible to all. People may visit your blog, or decide to pull content by taking out an email subscription.
This is similar to physical magazines or journals, people publish these, and you may browse them in a shop, or you may decide to take out a subscription.”

James has taken this more granular and has mentioned that it’s a little different as you can use an RSS Reader to create your own personalised newspaper. A daily newspaper has many articles by many contributors, similarly everyday your RSS Reader can have many blog posts by many people.
The great thing is you have decided on all these sources, or you have decided on the topic content (search feeds) you want in your daily newspaper.

My post on, Web 2.0 : assemble and tune in goes further on about the new many-to-many model and the new authority model.

Lee Bryant calls this Actionable Collective Intelligence:

“From my 300+ sources, I may skim read 1000+ items every day, of which I might bookmark 10; if something really newsworthy is going on then I might write one blog post or internal analysis based on one or more of these signals. That means that as an individual, I am rigorously filtering my information inputs by amplifying the signals of 10 stories and perhaps adding my own insight and analysis to one key development in any given day. Imagine for a moment that a significant proportion of 5000 person knowledge organisation do this every day. The resulting social signals about what is important would be incredibly useful to the organisation as a whole, and would provide a far greater return for the overall investment of time and attention than unconnected reading and research. Creating this kind of flow for signals, information and insight is one of the key objectives of a social knowledge sharing strategy. KM people used to talk about the knowledge pyramid where a wide base of information is filtered to a middle tier of knowledge and then further refined into the ‘point’ of insight. Social tools give us the potential to do this in a networked environment.”