Library clips

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.

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.

| View | Upload your own

[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