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At work our communities are taking off, but not without their hiccups.

I’m part of a team that is resurrecting a previous “build it and they will come” approach.

We have a great team, and our leaders are eager users of the community, which is an essential.

At the moment, we keep getting lots of new community requests, the viral approach is really happening. There has been no rollout, only word of mouth, actually the team has done no promotion at all, if anything we are still quiet as we are trying to write up all the How-To Guides.

This has been a small issue, as it’s time consuming helping out Facilitators of existing communities and creating new communties. It’s a bit of a catch22, because if they had the guides they would need less help from me.

So what’s happening, in the interim, is I’m emailing back and forth with so many communities, and having the exact same conversation.

As Community Coordinator, being a community inclined person, I decided to create a Facilitators Community.

Firstly in each community I created a forum called “CoP - Suggestions and Feedback”, this is for community members to discuss setting up, roles, maintaining, growth, etc…I am not subscribed to these forums.

These forums are a good start to get new communities using the very tools to build their communities, it just makes sense.

If a Facilitator does not have the know-how to answer a question raised in their forums, then they can raise it in the forums in the Facilitators community. My hope is that other Facilitators will have an answer before I do, so I plan to wait just a little before answering myself.

I forgot to mention, after I approve a new community request I set up a private forum between me and the new Facilitator in the Facilitator CoP. We have some dialogue before and after setting up their community, this makes sure that the Facilitator is familiar with the tools even before they have their own community. It’s also a way to have ongoing conversations of a more specific matter rather than using email. If the question is general, then it’s to be in the general forums as other Facilitators may learn and share their insight.
Prior to these private forums I was having back and forth email communication with about 10 community facilitators at a time. It was stressing me keeping track of the chain of all these various conversations. On top of that I was involved in conversations that the soon to be community members were having…it was like I was on 10 email lists and more.

I allievated this frustration by asking a soon to be Facilitator to not include me in their conversations, and rather represent their teams views in a private forum with me.

Now I have lots of private forums (one for each community), and the thread is all in one place for each. My next job is to go to the 30 or so existing communities and open a private forum for each.

Another benefit here is that once someone finds out what it means to be a Facilitator, they usually pass it on to one of their key team players, someone who has more time to run a community. I then add that person to the forum and they can see the discussion so far I’ve had with the previous Facilitator.

Not to mention, if I move on one day, my replacement will have an equivalent of what would be my email archive, but it will be super neat.

The Facilitators community is a place for Facilitators to come together, share and learn.

NOTE: This post is a bit pre-mature in a way, but I thought I’d dump my experience before it’s no longer fresh.

Today, in the Facilitators Community I set up a:

Community news blog (only I write to this)
- keep facilitators abreast with the latest releases and features

Community Tips (Group blog)
- everyone can share there know-how, experiences and success stories
- I plan to post tips like use a “subscribe to this blog” in your blog post signature, how to post by email (I’ll be like the Pro-Blogger blog)

Learning Communities (My Personal blog)
- these are more theory and methods type posts

I already have one Facilitator who has created his own blog, to blog about his experience in creating his community…I was impressed.

We also have forums where Facilitators can come together and ask questions to other Facilitators. We hope that this self organising technique will enable Facilitators to feed off each other, and discover a way to run their communities better. I guess it’s a type of learning university, where the students or practioners are teaching and learning off each other.

The key to the success of our communities is in the Facilitators and their key members, it’s my job to train up these guys to know just as much about communities as I do. They don’t need to go do a course, and they wouldn’t anyway as they are engineers, marketers, web designers, etc
The reason for this is they know their communities best, I can’t possibly oversee and make sure they are all thriving, I don’t have time to garden them all, etc…

So by training the trainer I hope that the expertise spreads, but I know this wouldn’t be enough. The Facilitators community is going to be the best way to learn, and the best way to share contexts and stories, each participant enrichens each others experience…a kind of self organising intelligence.

I just came across a perfect quote in Ken Thompson’s Bioteams blog that suits this scenario perfectly:

“1) Each role in a social network should be defined not in terms of its outputs or objectives but instead in terms of the transformations (and instantiations) it makes to the other roles in the system.”

“2) Collectively the role interactions should create a positive feedback loop in the sense that each role is fully defined in terms of its interactions with other roles.”

Some brief Lessons Learned

BE PREPARED

I’ve already mentioned this one
- don’t underestimate the viral approach
- make sure you can handle the demand otherwise you get bad user experiences (that’s the absolute last thing you want)
- so make sure you have learning guides

IN VOGUE

Don’t be seduced by the viral approach in another way
- people like the idea of communities, something new and social
- this can be very novel
- that’s why we have a request form
- we don’t want to scare them, but we want to stress it’s a living thing you will have (it can be like that dog you get for christmas and then neglect due to lack of interest, it’s health and wellbeing suffers)

SOLUTION

People want a solution
- they are keen to try…that’s why we need to hook them in with design and training up Facilitators
- I tell them it’s like the document repository but with conversations
- now alot of the talent and know-how in your email that’s currently distributed can be retained in one spot
- cross community people can visit and share insights

PILOT

So a new Facilitator doesn’t freak-out when 50 people start asking them how do you do this and that
- the idea is to get the Facilitator and a handful of key members to really get to know the tool, and what their role really is, so they are prepared for the onslaugh of member demands
- otherwise they will be asking me, which is not an empowering enough a model

Besides the design, the Facilitator and champions are the most key components for success

FULL-TIME

Don’t be fooled, this requires a full-time team for it to work
- and it’s not only about technical stuff and processes, it’s about teaching Facilitators to be community leaders, it’s about learning, there is a real element of humanistic studies

PUBLIC/PRIVATE

We encourage public communities as part of organisational communication bottlenecks is that you aren’t in the loop across business units
- if we don’t give some teams private spaces then they will use email (they may have stuff to discuss that is not for all eyes, and figure forums and blogs are easier than email in the long run)
- these teams can have an additonal public facing community that’s a communications and repository space more than anything…they can post the relevant stuff from the private community to their public blog, and also have a public forum for discussion

FEATURE CREEP

We have blogs, forums, mail archives and Q&A.
This is way too much, so in the new template I’m suggesting to go just with blogs and forums
- if people have to think to long about what the right tool is for their content, they will just use email…blog or forum is an easy choice

BLOG vs FORUM

This is a big one.

Just off the top of my head…

Blogs can replace broadcast emails (news, announcements), but they can also be to share work in progress, status, ideas, reviews, etc…you can have blogs by region, topic, personal…blog can also be multi-authored
- people can leave comments, but a blog post doesn’t always have to be discussed, just as journal/new articles or diaries are not always discussed
- some people can become known as guru’s or subject matter experts, they become known for their blog

Forums are places for discussion, and it’s a group ownership
- a forum topic is not for musing or news like a blog post, it’s made for the intention to get back some discussion and answers
- think of a forums as pubs in a city, and forum topics/replies as groups of people in the pub

Next time, don’t use email lists:
- if you feel an email chain discussion coming on (use FORUMS)
- if you need to broadcast an announcement, or keep a log of your experience (use BLOGS)

TASK ROOMS

At the moment each community has a folder for forums, documents, and blogs
But some people want to make rooms where they can have a combination of tools
- at the homepage level they have made a folder called “Task Rooms”
- in that folder can be a folder called “Task A”
- in this folder is a blog, forum and document folder
- sometimes they are making these rooms private so the homepage isn’t polluted with content that just 2 people are working on
- problem is a task room is a folder with objects in it, there isn’t a mini homepage
- we are envious of Google Sites that enables you to create dashboards from various community objects
- maybe wikis can help in the future

RSS

We have RSS for blogs, but it’s just summary feeds
I can’t see people using IE7, they want one dashboard, and that’s Outlook
- for starters they have to go to the actual sites to leave a reply
- lucky for us we can post content and replies via Outlook

To conclude…

My hope is that our communities become infectious…if a commuity member joins a team that still works using just email, I hope for that person to not put up with that as it’s going backwards and enlighten new people to social productivity.
I agree with Stewart Mader that the dynamics of an organisation will different to the web, where there will be more contributors, as you will have people telling others to re-purpose that email, as we don’t work like that anymore. This social influence and discipline will change the 90-9-1 participation ratio.

Tinypaste - type in some text and it gives you a URL to host that text…handy for sites like Twitter when you need more than 140 characters…also see ChangeToLink, and ShortText.
Similar are edge feeds like, publi.sh, my.notify, FeedMarklet, ControlC…Texty is similar, but as a widget.

GeoGraffiti - like tagging or blogging physical objects, but this time with the use of audio. Also see Whereboutz, MyTago, Placeblogger, outside.in, Socialight, Rrove, and Flagr.

identi.ca - an OpenSource micro-blogging service built on Laconica, see more services.

12seconds.TV - a video based microblogging service…see more.

ScribbleLive - text or blog streaming service similar to CoveritLive (now with Qik)

Kevin Jones from Engaged Learning has a bunch of posts about objections to social learning, basically objections to web 2.0 behind the firewall.

I really like these posts because they are a quick answer kit for when people doubt social tools at work.

Here are a few that really grabbed me.

Objection #2: What Does This Have To Do With Training?

This one is what web 2.0 is all about and what KM has strived for all along, knowledge transfer.

“Too often we, in the training field, get stuck on how to ‘train’ rather than on how to help our ‘customers’ learn which in turn drives results, which is the real goal. Our focus should be on LEARNING, not training.”

“…social learning compliments training and covers knowledge formal training was never able to reach. It is in addition to, without having huge amounts of formal resources needed to deliver.

In another post Kevin relates this to the long tail, which is, “…products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers”

“Let me put that in Learning terms, “That information which needs to be learned and which is in low demand or has low visibility can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current learning initiatives, if the distribution mechanism is large enough.””

“If we can make the tools that capture the knowledge lightweight and simple, we can harness the collective knowledge and use it to our advantage. The sharing then becomes a natural part of how an employee does their job.”

It really is viral, as he says social learning becomes the dominant learning process, “…superseded in size the traditional, formal learning in business”

He draws the big picture that I’ve heard David Weinberger say before, in that it’s a change from the economics of scarcity to the economics of abundance.

Objection #3: Control of Information

This is similar to the one above, people working it out among themselves (self-organising)

“For the most part, anyone can post anything. Be it right or wrong…And, as counterintuitive as this may seem at first, it is not all bad.”‘

“Number one, the training department didn’t need to ‘write’ it. Instead the employees taught each other. How great is that? Ya, it is not as pretty as a powerpoint presentation you may have given, nor quite as polished, but it was good information everyone needs to know and now anyone can find it!”

He then alludes to self-organisation and sitting on the fence to steer what manifests, sounds like cognitive edge thinking.

“By implementing a social learning solution you sit on the control fence. Control to much and it won’t be used. But not controlling it at all is unwise. There needs to be a balance - enough structure and processes to give guidance yet enough freedom to allow the users to do what they want.”

Objection #5: How Do You Know it’s Accurate?

What if someone posts inaccurate information (unlike email it’s visible to a lot of people), and someone acts on it?

I actually mentioned this in a previous post as the garderns job, to go back to old posts and re-edit them or use comments to correct situations. But this is self-organised as well, the ecosystem may correct itself to an extent, people are quick to catch people out and correct things. The blogosphere is self-regulating in this way, you say something that is bad practice, and you are knocked down…in the enterprise I would hope that you don’t lose your credibillty (once bitten twice shy).

Actually, these occurrences are lessons learned we all witness in the open blogs, so we all learn from it as it happens, we experience it together…it sticks in our minds.

I almost like the idea that the openess and informalness of blogs can reveal bad practice. If you want to stamp out bad practices start some internal blogs, people’s inaccuracies will come to light, we can all evolve and correct behaviour. It’s like the wound healing itself.

Kevin shares a story where a manager didn’t like the idea of non-authoritative people posting for all to see for fear of inaccuracy and the consequences that may follow.

“Leaving the meeting she walked by some cubes where she overheard one person describing an HR policy to the other person that was completely incorrect. And the second person took it as gospel.”

She suddenly realized, 1) How many times does this happen and I don’t know about it? 2) If they asked this question using the tools we were talking about, more people would be able to respond and the right answer would surface

What a great story!

Objection #10: Wasting Time

Kevin shares a classic success story at Intel, involving finding a person with the right skill to help you with your task, simply because they participate, their on the map, they are visible and findable in their blog posts. Further to this they are now a new contact in your network.

“There was a person who needed to accomplish a task. To do so, that person needed to use a piece of software they had never heard of, let alone knew enough about to functionally use it. It would take months to learn it and complete the task.

Instead of forging on, they searched the blogs and found someone who mentioned that they did another project using the software. This second person was contacted and asked to help. Within a matter of a few weeks the project was done.

Now, tell me, how many blog posts was the efficiency gain worth? Add up not only the time saved by one individual, but the advantages for a quicker ‘time to market’ for this project.”

When I was thinking up the title for this post I was loving all the fabulous C words:
Conversations, Connections, Context, Communication, Collaboration, Community, Complexity, Collective

This post like others is focused on the first three, and mostly on conversations and context…but without connections and participation (visibility), none of these can eventuate, along with ultimately collaboration or even forming communities. I guess this post is also about communication, not directly, but more on the assumption that a message is understood once it’s transmitted.

Abstraction

Having a high abstraction with the author of a blog post or codified document for that matter enables me to have more of a chance to derive the intended understanding or signal from the author.

NOTE: High abstraction refers to knowing that person well enough, having a shared background, having things in common, in-jokes, etc…

The stronger the relationship and commonalities you have with a bunch of people, the more you understand each others writings, the more chance their knowledge comes to be your knowledge.

So right off the bat, it’s essential we have this kind of ecosystem where people are connecting to each other and sharing nuggets of what they know as it happens, exactly like we do in the offline world.

Codification and Context

The whole idea here is to capture what we know so others can use it, captialising on the talent that sits in an organisation.

But since we can’t know everyone, it is no surprise that the intention of codification is an attempt to have a universally applicable object (re-use recipe) that will work in every context of the person that encounters it, or rather, that the person can use the document and mould it to their context.

Codification is OK for procedures, etc..and even for things like an IT support solutions database.
But the problem here even is that a codified solution is usually formal (stripped of context)
eg.when this happens this is the fix

This doesn’t contain the situational context of the occurrence.

What happens when that fix doesn’t solve the exact same error you are dealing with. Reasons for this may be your clients PC may be using a different version of Excel or they may be remotely logged in, etc…
Because a codified document is sanitised and generic it removes all the idiosyncrasies of the context of the situation, so this doesn’t really help your situation even though it’s the exact same error.

So rather than a sanitised solutions database, why not have support people blogging their experience, this way they are sharing the solution in the context of their experience and surroundings. And they can also tag (index) this solution with keywords. Now there can be various versions of this same solution, each caters for a context.

This solution has not been stripped of any context, it’s informal and casual, it has the personality of the author, and you don’t have to spend extra time remembering to add your solution to the database as the blog is the database.

Two extra things happen:
- people can subscribe to each other, and be aware of solutions as they happen, even though they do not have a need for the solution at this time, they are learning and aware of what others are experiencing.
- if you can’t find a solution to your problem you may know another support person to contact as some other solutions they have blogged may be similar.

We are aware of what’s happening through a filter of people we trust, we are able to tune into what matters to us, and our network brings quality information to our attention so we don’t always have to go looking for it (we just can’t read everything).

So…

Rather than having to write a formal and standardised solution after the fact, we can instead have a database (blog) of raw data (indexed by tags). Blog content is more colourful and establishes the situation (background and any other peripheral stuff that happened). This more humanistic (personal, informal) story-like and emotional type of language, is easier for the brain to absorb and remember (it contains triggers for recall).

A wiki could also be used. The original solution page could be edited to add other contexts that people experience with the same error. Or maybe you could edit the wiki by entering URL’s of blog posts that talk about this same error in other contexts.

To find a solution
- you may already know which support blogger to ask
- search the blogs and browse the tags

But is this enough, is it too messy, and not quick and handy?

Gardener/Facilitator

We need a gardener to make some rules on some tags to use, and naming conventions, I’m not talking about a taxonomy, I’m refering to ambiguous tags, etc…
eg. I see you tagged this post “check in/out” can use please tag it “edit” instead
eg. I see you tagged this post “MSoffice”, but “Excel” should also be another tag
eg. Can you also include the tag “Perth”, in this post because the error only happens on PC’s in the Perth office

The gardener could also create some lists from this raw content, and compile conversations.
The gardener could make some review pages of this content to tie in different blog posts that deal with specific issues part are part of a bigger issue.
eg. These 10 blogs posts refer to various issues, and these 2 blog posts refer to a bigger issue that is the cause of all these other issues experienced in the 10 blog posts.
Then they can go back to each blog post or wiki page and cross reference this review blog post (or perhaps it’s a review wiki page).
The gardener will also have to go back to the database to re-edit posts that are no longer current or relevant solutions. Remember this is a solutions database so we can’t have people acting on the wrong information. The gardener can re-edit these posts pointing to a newer post.

Maybe creating the conditions for this ecosystem, other social activities, and specifically the facilitating and gardening is what managing knowledge is all about…if this phrase makes sense.

Mathemagenic has a great post on not so much gardening, but on her thoughts on writing her dissertation when it’s all there in her blog.
If we one day read her dissertation, and then read her blog posts, which do you think we would be able to get more know-how from. I think the blog posts, as they are more initimate like conversations, but the corollary is that perhaps her dissertation would give us an overiew to be able to tie all these blog posts and see the big picture.

More from the post:

“While weblog provides a space to grow ideas, it’s also a mess of fragments. They are connected through links and tags, but in many cases the higher level reasons of why certain bits appear and how are the relevant to a bigger whole remain unarticulated. Mainly because at the moment of writing it’s not clear how the fragments connect.”

“It also takes extra work (e.g. a systematic data collection and analysis) to connect fragments in a story that provides stronger evidence than a collection of anecdotes.”

“Working on a dissertation provides a structure to address those issues: the need to connect fragments, push and discipline to collect evidence, time to work on converting all that into a bigger whole and a space to do it.”

Connections and Conversations

OK, back to our problem…earlier I said:

“The whole idea here is to capture what we know so others can use it, captialising on the talent that sits in an organisation.’

“But since we can’t know everyone, it is no surprise that the intention of codification is an attempt to have a universally applicable object (re-use recipe) that will work in every context of the person that encounters it, or rather, that the person can use the document and mould it to their context.”

So we understand this situation, but from my explanation above codification isn’t effective and practical.

By non-practical, I mean people don’t see the returns or worthwhileness in the effort of remembering and sharing a formal document into the database…it feels like extra work.

Using newtorked tools, this is no longer the case, as while we do our work (blogging and conversations) the sharing has happened by default. The gardner makes sure the web doesn’t get tangled.

By non-effective, I mean people have to cognitively write the document in a formal way, which will strip it of situational detail, and index it into a pre-set topic structure.
And people find these formal and static documents unusable most of the time, plus people like going to people, rather than searching databases.

Using networked tools, this is no longer the case, you don’t mind searching a blog database, because it’s like searching past and present discussions (this is similar to the offline way of doing work), tapping into a pool of raw conversations like radio waves out in space.
These are more informal fragments of contextual information, and when we are networked with people, and know the people behind the information, there is more chance we will actually understand the intended meaning in the information.

The value is in conversations, rather than secondhand degenerated information.

A downplay is that an addiction to a codified database creates a situation where we think we have all the answers to apply to any situation, but we don’t so we then find it hard to adapt. When in the first place rather than codifying we should just keep learning, publishing and subscribing to fragments as they happen, giving us more on the spot sensemaking abilities.

So it’s about bouncing, managing and arranging the fragments, rather than codifying.

More on context

Dave Snowden says in relation to past KM tools:

“They assume a common or constant context. So knowledge captured in one specific context can be generalised to apply in all contexts.”

Then he says:

“…blogs and the links between them are much better at passing on context than traditional KM tools. Mainly I think because they are fragmented, real time and emergent in their connectivity.”

So as we have covered, codification tries to be as objective and perhaps context free as possible, or put another way a “constant context” (oddly assuming every situation is the same).

So no wonder it doesn’t pass on context.

This is not the intention of a blog post, they are musings and publishings with no other motive than stream of consciousness (sorry I’m getting carried away), I mean more informal and as it happens.
They are rich, and more descriptive (like a story, you feel like you were there), and also more localised where we can assimilate with the context of the situation.

This means a blog post will have more of a defined context, it will be more personable.

Further to this, all this peripheral information may give clues or triggers to apply to other unrelated solutions, whereas a codified solution is so narrow that you won’t get anything else out of it.

This is great if the context of the blog post suits the need of your situation, but what if it doesn’t?

Is the arguement that blogs are not trying to be what they can’t be vs codified documents that have an intention they cannot meet (they are not achieving what they are intending to achieve)?

So, nothing can have a constant context, blog post or not.

But what we can do is to be able to have more of a chance to at least understand the context of something (a blog post) we are reading as it’s not trying to be generic, it’s only useful if it has context…maybe not to my specific situation or need, but at least it’s rich and deep (like an impact a story has), and I can learn from their experience. Because blog fragments and stories are not trying to achieve an outcome, except just tell a story or expression, they are rich with lots of meaning, whereas a deliverable is trying to push a meaning to you. You can get so many different colours and feelings from a story, everyone can get different meanings from the same story, whereas in a deliverable everyone is just meant to see the one meaning.

This is why I think we are moving from knowledge management, and more into a learning organisation. There is no aim (to manage knowledge besides gardening), it just spreads by being (in a learning enviroment).

What I mean is I’m not avert to mixing and matching, and making lists, of self-organising and emergent data, in order to correlate and see it in other ways…or even to dampen the self-organised data as it’s heading in the wrong direction. Read Dave Snowden’s blog on complexity (boundaries, attractors, amplifying and dampening).

So all along KM has been about:
- content, when it should have been about context
- storing, rather than flowing
- static, rather than dynamic
- imposed, rather than emergent (self-organised within boundaries and manipulation)
- lacked all together connecting people (other than expert locators), but I mean relationships and networking

Summary

In the days before databases, like now, we used the phone and offline conversations to do our work, then these conversations were conducted in email. In these interactions is where people communicate and exchange their know-how, and it was thought how do we leverage this so people outside of the conversation can benefit from the talent pool…how do we capture this.

Not all were privy to these exchanges, so the idea was to conscript people to codify their talent, this is very confronting, not practical, and not effective when trying to remember what you know…hmmm, let’s see what I know…ummm…hmmm…this feels stupid…if you’re gonna be that way why don’t you hire me as a consultant instead so I can get a reward. It really has a big brother, police state feel to it, the extreme is to connect your brain to a computer so it can drain your know-how.
And when you go to seek answers it’s hard to find something that relates to your context, you perhaps find it hard to understand because it lacks back story, and you may not identify with the calibre of writing.

The interactions between people is where the know-how and the spreading of it lies, the new era is mimicing this experience in an online global village, so the richness is documented as it happens. The beauty of this is using platforms rather than closed channels opens up the conversation to a greater number of minds, to evolve know-how and connect with others you normally wouldn’t know, exchanging ideas. It’s self-rewarding in an ecosystem where you participate, people riff on your ideas, and you come to a better place using the wisdom of crowds.
And it’s people friendly as we socialise (social connectedness), get our work done, and learn (become smarter).

I think we have a sharing nature if the right conditions are there for it to happen, once we find like people we understand and trust, interdependencies build where sharing becomes a natural thing…from this comes communities, collaboration, emergence, and autonomomy…I call it the k-flow model.

Now we can achieve spreading know-how, at no extra effort, and it has changed the concept of work for the better as it’s more socially engaging. It’s a learning organisation concept where the individual is learning in a reciprocated environment, and the organisation as a whole learns and adapts…being able to respond to changes conditions.

What’s special about all this is it’s happening from the inside out, we want to work this way, even if some of us don’t know it yet.

This has come at the right time in the face of fast paced industries, and distributed teams, and it’s going to change the dynamics of the scientific management model to a more accomodating networked model (tribal).

Let’s finish off with a video clip by David Gurteen on conversations (referencing David Weinberger and Theodore Zeldin).

Here’s a great quote on learning via stimulation, rather than a bank of information:

“What is lacking now, I believe, is something which we cannot find anywhere, somewhere where you can reach, and get that stimulation - not information, but stimulation - where you can meet just that person, or find just that situation, which will give you the idea of invention, of carrying out some project which interests you, and show how it can become a project which is of interest to other people. “

Some great quotes from the video:

“conversation being a creative process”

“conversation doesn’t just shuffle the cards, it creates new cards”

“conversation where we emerge a slightly different person”

Twadl - An alternative place to post to Twitter…preview your tweets, track links (see how many people clicked on the link you posted), attach files (see others)

AnswerMe - ask a question and manage your answers
eg. @answerme Am I missing out on life because I’ve got my head constantly buried in a mobile phone as I walk?
- someone can anwser
eg. @answerme @johnt Just don’t walk into polls?

Follow @answerme to get direct messages of your answers

Tweenky - probably what the Twitter interface will eventually look similar to. You get live refresh like Twitter Spy, you get Twitter Search, and best of all you get folders to organise your Twitter friends. That’s more like it, how often have you wanted to see a stream from just a particular grouping of friends. Reminds me of what MioNews does for FriendFeed.

TweetMyPage - bookmarklet to tweet the page you are on…also see TwitThis.

TweetParty - group friends and blast a direct message…also see GroupTweet and Twitter groups.

BONUS LINK
TweetCrunch

Some villages in Mexico have found that what their children learn at school is not beneficial (does not prepare them for life) for their community and well being. They don’t find the teacher and student model effective, ie. learn now, and apply later.

So they dropped out of school and created their own apprenticeship university, where you learn as you do. As mentioned before in this blog post, the best transfer of know-how happens when learning and work is happening at the same time.

The article is also honing on learning stuff that is relevant to the well being of your community.

From the article:

“As soon as the young people arrive at Unitierra, they start to work as apprentices. They discover that they need specific skills to do what they want to do. Most of the time, they get those skills by practicing the trade, with or without their mentors. They may choose to attend specific workshops, to shorten the time needed to get those skills.

One of the most important conclusions of our conversation was the explicit recognition that we learn better when nobody is teaching us. We can observe this in every baby and in our own experience. Our vital competence comes from learning by doing, without any kind of teaching.

The most dramatic lesson we derived from the exercise was to discover what we were really missing in the urban setting: conditions for apprenticeship. When we all request education and institutions where our children and young people can stay and learn, we close our eyes to the tragic social desert in which we live. They have no access to real opportunities to learn in freedom. In many cases, they can no longer learn with parents, uncles, grandparents—just talking to them, listening to their stories or observing them in their daily trade. Everybody is busy, going from one place to another. No one seems to have the patience any more to share with the new generation the wisdom accumulated in a culture. Instead of education, what we really need is conditions for decent living, a community.”

Also check out Kevin Jones’s presentation on training vs informal learning.

[via Nancy White]

Patrick Lambe has reacted to my post on where would we be today if we had no KM movement, would it be any different, would of social networking happened?

I agree with the concept Patrick puts forth of , “I’m not sure we would have found our way into the social computing groove if we hadn’t made the mistakes of indiscriminate structure and control, and big planned systems that didn’t fit local working needs.”

But I’m not so sure this applies in this case, I’m not sure Knowledge Management even had to exist for social computing to occur…maybe I’m wrong, I wasn’t on the beat in the earlier days.

Would of Facebook still happened if KM didn’t happen?

Would of YouTube still happened if KM didn’t happen?

Would of del.icio.us still happened if KM didn’t happen?

Would of Blogger still happened if KM didn’t happen?

You get the picture…

I’m not dissing KM, I’m just inquring, and investigating.

As far as I know, KM used information management principles to tease out (conscript) and organise people’s know-how, ie. stuff you hear in conversation…casual fragments.

So the idea was to get people to “share” what they know…and of course all in the aim of supporting and formulating decisions and actions.

But at the time you couldn’t do that unless you were having those conversations in an environment that could capture what you said as you said it.
We can’t have a video on all the time, there would be too much garbage, but now with social computing you can have conversations online, which become digital artefacts as a result.

But as a result, and I do agree with Patrick, in the other extreme of a fragmentation frenzy, where everything is informal and nothing is distilled or preserved. It’s all messy and is intact by hyperlinks.

I like the idea of a deliverable that has some metadata listing the URL’s to all the blog and forum fragments that beget the deliverable…all the workings out.
Usually this is email, but that doesn’t have a URL (and who wants to upload stuff in the repository), and you don’t usual muse in email…whereas a blog is your thinking out loud place.

A real important aspect is a local embedded champion in each team who is a gardener, weeder, distiller, facilitator, guide, plumber, curator…

This person is to take those fragments that stick or resonate and house them in a location.

But to me, doesn’t this flow anyway, if someone says something profound in a blog or forum, it makes the rounds. Still there’s no reason why these nuggests can’t sit in a wiki via the flow and stock approach…everyone loves making lists.

This person could also run techniques like World Cafe’s, Most Significant Change, After Action review, anecdote circles, CoP, SNA, etc…

What do we call this person? It has an aspect of a librarian (curator).
Is it a coach? No a coach sounds like a leader.

The word co-ordinator and practioner is better.

This is about performance and learning, this person makes sure they patch up mis-communcations (or that they don’t happen often), that everyone is in the loop…they tie everything together, and massage the team.

Anyway I think a person who curates and facilitates is needed in every team…a collaboration coordinator is too narrow a term.

They are certainly there to optimise all the know-how and talent of the team and how they cooperate and are aware of other teams.

So this is about knowledge and performance, but more about coordinating it, so it flows itself, and what we drink from the flow helps us to adapt to our changing environment.

Perhaps a Knowledge co-ordinator.

Perhaps a Performance co-ordinator.
But then does this mean about performing to a decided outcome. If so, then it lacks the learning and adapting part.

This person observes how the team operates, and gets it to be more fluid, rich and responsive…almost sculpturing.

How do you mesh all these words into a coordinating role
- communication, information, knowledge, learning, collaboration, performance, adapting

The utopia is once the team has been guided and optimised in its behaviour or way of being, then perhaps they will become adaptive and self organising…and it sure helps to have intuitive technology.

I’m not sure about this, groupings of people have different dynamics, so you always need a facilitator to guide people, show them the boundaries, the group norms, the style of working…

Patrick’s tells us why we need a person like this:

“The reason why KM happened was that the problem of how organisations can operate coherently and swiftly on large scale became critical to survival. The more connected, competitive, uncertain and fast moving our environment is, the more this problem rears its head. This includes being able to sustain our slow, deep knowledge structures and memory, not just our fast moving current awareness.”

Tom Davenport talks about managing the balance of messiness and structure:

“Let’s talk about the more limited issue of defending knowledge management. As I said, I don’t really care what you call it, but if your organization really cares about creating, distributing (I’m sorry—“sharing”), and applying knowledge, you need to manage it. The last time I checked, “management” of knowledge could include some relatively structured, “here’s the knowledge we really need to do our jobs right” approaches, as well as some more emergent, Enterprise 2.0-oriented ones. If you only do the former, your knowledge workers will probably feel a bit stifled; if you only do the latter, things will probably feel a bit chaotic. If I’m a NASA astronaut, for example, and I’m sitting on the launch pad when something goes wrong, I’d rather have people looking for a solution in structured knowledge bases than mucking around in blogs and wikis.”

Andrew Gent has this to say about codification:

“The next layer up represents “knowledge capture”. Here the knowledge is instantiated in documents of some kind: sample documents, lesson learned, case studies, white papers. These all represent mechanisms used to selectively capture and sort knowledge in such a way that it can be reused by people who may never come in contact with the original author. The obvious limitation is that only a small portion of what any individual knows about their profession is captured in any of these documents. This is offset by trying to capture the most important or influential pieces of wisdom.”

“…the process of codifying or standardizing knowledge into actionable procedures and practices actually changes the knowledge. It cleanses, sanitizes, and simplifies the knowledge — removing the stray tidbits, the ugly but necessary workarounds, the secret tricks of the trade… all of the untidy clutter that make up true expertise in a field — all of this is stripped off to achieve a linear, documentable, process.”

David Gurteen left a quick comment on my previous post about his take on the evolution of KM, check out his brief story, podcast, and slidedeck below.

[UPDATE: CONFESSIONS OF A CKO: WHAT I SHOULD HAVE DONE]

[UPDATE: What is the job description for a knowledge manager?]

[UPDATE: KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND KNOWLEDGE SHARING
JOB DESCRIPTION]

[ADDED 24/07/08: Contribution and Discovery]

Just watched a video called Is KM Dead? by Patrick Lambe with Dave Snowden and Larry Prusak.

This was alluded to back in 2005 by Martin Dugage, who said businesses were looking at KM as, “processes, engineering and mechanics”, rather they should be looking at it as, “practices, creativity, and social networks.”

Steve Denning relates to not the death of KM, but it’s approach. He alludes to the need for KM to be adaptive, that is to support tomorrow’s strategy. I don’t think KM should be the servant of any strategy, instead your strategies come from KM…KM is the “think tank” embedded in every team.

Dave Snowden likes to refer to social computing and Sensemaking more than KM these days, he mentions the objectives of KM theory are still the same, it’s just how it’s practiced that is changing, with less of an emphasise on management and more on adaptability (decision making) a changing environment.

In the video they talk about the 3 generations of KM, the 1st generation simply being just information management, then to collaboration spaces, and now to a more organic ecosystem (networks, emergence, and complex adaptive systems).

There’s a bit about the history of management and it’s origins in the term “manege” (to handle and train horses…the ability to ride a horse in dressage), Snowden says “you can’t issue a memo to the horse to instruct it to execute against targets, you have to develop a relationship between rider and horse over time.”

To me, practising in this relationship is how we learn know-how off each other, it’s about people connecting to people. This is what makes blogs so special, as you can do this online and geographically apart. In contrast we don’t learn or always absorb knowledge from a database, there is no conversation and relationship building.

Dave Snowden talks about the blogosphere as a university common room, and that rings so true for me. I don’t need to go back to university and study knowledge management from textbooks when I learn about it everyday in the blogosphere. In fact I bet I would be frustrated and want to take the class, sure the teacher may know the history of management, but I live social networking, there’s nothing like it, you are are hooked in to the “come to me web.”
I read consultant blogs who share their day, I interact with them, I blog my notes, and that’s how it works in this conversation market. I’m learning and doing at the same time (these guys get me thinking), and it’s all casual, stream of consciousness, fragments of life…plus I make friendships and connections.

They also talked about the organisation treating KM as a separate thing, rather than being a skill, capability, or a smart and social way of working. They think KM personnel will be a thing of the past, and hope to see it absorbed into how people work, with the help of a local co-ordinator in each team, to garden, facilitate, connect, guide, nuture…sounds like an information counsellor to me.

They also mention that librarians would be good as this role, and this just may be the case, because a lot like me have moved into the KM space. I’ve mentioned before, the librarian knows the interests of each person more than any other person, they are a hub. And naturally the librarian connects people, and naturally you think if only everyone could be connected like the librarian. This is why I think, as a former librarian, I took to social networking, because it amplified exactly what I was doing.

The video touched on codification, which I believe refers to making tacit knowledge into a explicit tangible information object…and shelve it in a best practices database.

Larry Prusak prefers the term knowledge making practices (or something like that), and the only sophisticated name for information he will accept is “knowledge representation”. Whereas Dave Snowden alludes to explicit knowledge (but he doesn’t expand on it), that is, knowledge disembodied from the holder. As much as he thinks codification is useless, he still thinks the output is a knowledge object (only how usable is this object to who encounters it).

When you blog isn’t that codification, making what you know into information for consumption?

The difference here is you are not writing it to a spec or formalised structure, trying to encapsulate all that happened, and categorising it in a taxonomy.

Instead a blog post is has it happens, unstructured, casual and informal, and self tagged.

The blog post lives in your space and people dip into it, it flows around…they are moving, not shelved like a document database.

A blog has ownership (it’s your place), rather then donating to a machine.

You want to write blog posts as a log of your thoughts and representation…your writings are for a different purpose (self interest, connection, passion and learning)….whereas you don’t want to codify a document into a database.

Writing blog posts becomes part of your daily routine, not extra effort.

You are rewarded with people reading and learning from your blog post, which motivates you…this doesn’t happen in a document database.

Your blog posts are dynamic, people leave comments, the content mutally evolves…there’s is no conversation in a static document database.

You connect to a blogger and clarify information (share the context), get a level of undertanding, get what’s behind the document…whereas you can’t talk to a document.

You build a relationship with the blogger (author’s house), they become your contact for other needs…a document database is owned by the taxonomer, no-one has their own place…whereas a blogosphere is everyone’s places meshed into one space.

If I like a blogger I will subscribe to them, and learn from them everyday…this just doesn’t happen in a document database.

What I like about the blogosphere is that it’s a work in progress/thinking out loud/as it happens culture (steam).
It’s funny, when you read a bloggers whitepaper, you are already intimate with its contents because the author has blogged their learnings and musing on the journey to this whitepaper. But the level of writing has to suit a common audience (or sometimes a narrow audience), so sometimes you miss the intimacy and informalness of a blog.
This is what makes a blogs special, it’s not just about content, it’s about the author, and your connection to evolve content together, and the context and commonality you have with the writer…this is a much more dynamic environment. Same goes with wikis, these are moving and changing things, rather than a static, non interactive, shelved document.

So in the end you do have a database of codified information, it’s called the blogosphere, so nothings different, it’s just the way it happens. The database happens as a by product, the database is the by product…very zen.

But this is not the aim of blogging, it’s more about conversation, your mouthpiece. This is a more naturalistic or organic way of working, people talking to people, it very much mimics how we act in the offline world…and this is what previous KM efforts didn’t do, it failed to gel with human nature. For more see Dave Snowden’s recent article, Everything is fragmented.

Have you ever talked about what you know to a filing cabinet?

Would I really make the effort to talk to a filing cabinet?

How do I ask the filing cabinet on some clarity on a document?

Am I going to build a relationship with the filing cabinet?

So is KM dead, is it social computing…they have the same aims.

Actually I don’t think social computing has an aim, it just is.

If you told a young person on the web today, the way they network and blog is practising knowledge management…they would say knowledge what, I’m just being, this is what I do, how I act.

I think KM is a bit envious of this as social computing is not separate, it’s just part of your routine.

Is it right to say social computing is the maturation of KM?
I think KM has the same aim but failed, it was just a mixture of information management, collaboration and expert locators.

Social computing came along without wanting to be anything, and perhaps is being hijacked by KM.

Imagine there was no such thing as knowledge management.
And all through the 1990’s there was only information management, and collaboration spaces, and then 10 years later social computing happened.

When you think about it like this, what actually is knowledge management?

Shawn over at Anecdote has shared the link to his Google Reader Shared Items.

This is basically his link blog (similar to del.icio.us) and it’s great that he can also share stuff he finds outside Google Reader into his link blog.

I share mine to, if anyone is interested, it’s very similar to my del.icio.us links.

If I subscribe to Shawn’s link blog it just becomes another feed in my Google Reader, I was hoping it recognised this feed and put it in Friends Shared Items section.

Problem 1

The “Friends Shared Items” section is automatically added if people in your Gmail contacts also use Google Reader. Umm, just because I emailed a person or they emailed me it does not mean they are my friend. Luckily we can manual deactivate any supposed friend.

Anyway I think the “Friends Shared Items” section should allow me to manually add their feed so it appears in this section, rather than in my regular subscriptions section.

Problem 2

We need another section call “Directly Shared Items”, these would be items that one Google Reader person sends to another Google Reader person. At the end of each item allows you to email an item, well rather just allowing to ping that item from Google Reader to email, why can’t it be Google Reader to Google Reader.

Of course this would mean Google Reader would have to be a open social network, where you can add friends. Once you have added a friend this means you would be able to push an item to a contact. Why be limited to email if that friend also uses Google Reader.

The manual way around this is to create a Google Reader tag for your friend, eg. “Abby”, and then make the tag public, this way your friend, can subscribe to the feed in any RSS Reader . Whenever you tag an item, “Abby”, it will appear in that feed, and Abby will see the items you offer her.

Problem 3

Shawn and I have shared our link blogs, but how do we find other Google Reader link blogs.

Maybe there could be a Google Reader Link blog exchange, just like Toluu does for feeds.

Readburner may be our answer, but I think you have to add your link blog feed (ie. your Google Reader Shared Items feed), I’m not sure if it looks for all the public Shared Items feeds that are out there.

But this is geared more towards being a hot news site rather than shopping for people’s link blogs.

For every shared item, it lists who shared the item, and if you click the name it takes you to the Readburner version of their link blog, there’s also a link to the original site of their Shared Items.
I found an item on the Readburner homepage that was shared by Louis Gray, clicking his name took me to his shared items view, then I clicked on the link to go to his actual Google Reader Shared Items page, and there I can subscribe to his link blog.

Idea

The other day I came across Twiffid

This gave me an idea, in our Google Profiles we can list our websites in our profile, here’s mine.

What if you could run your Google Reader OPML (or your Twitter friends list) through a Google Profiles register, and if any of the feeds in your OPML (or Twitter friends list) matches any websites listed in people profiles, it would give you a list. And further to this, from this list it would tell you which people have public Shared Items.

In an instant you could have your hands on the link blogs of your favourite bloggers.

Even better would be if Google Reader became a social network itself…see FeedEachOther, Streamy, Shyftr, and more.

Oops, I’ve already made a post similar to this one.

Summary

1. I want to shop for link blogs from bloggers I subscribe to
2. I want to subscribe to these link blogs, and for them to appear in a special section in Google Reader (ie. the already existing Friends Shared Items section).
3. I want to send items directly to other Google Reader users rather than email them

Twiffid - what an awesome idea…“this site automatically detects the feeds of the websites your Twitter friends have listed in their Twitter profiles and presents them to you in a Twitter-like format”…this could make a great RSS Reader alternative…streams are so in vogue.

TwitterFresh - an alternate website for Twitter, this one auto-refreshes your friends timeline every three minutes

Twitter StreamGraphs - a graph from the latest 200 tweets which contain a search word or user ID, if you hover over parts of the graph it will change colour, if you then click it will generate a new graph for that keyword…also see Tweet Clouds.

Here’s my Twitter StreamGraph.

Easy Tweets - Like Matt you can manage multiple Twitter accounts, and like Tweet Later and others you can schedule Tweets for future posting, and like Twitterfeed you can re-syndicate posts from RSS feeds into your stream.

Replize - a dead easy way to search Twitter @replies, but you can just use the new Twitter search anyway, see here.

BONUS LINK
Twitter Apps