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

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

He points to one of his previous posts and also Kevin Mullens’s blog post that makes the point of “solutions”:

“Enterprise 2.0 is about the Business and is about providing solutions for Business. When I think of Enterprise 2.0 solutions now, I think of tools and solutions usually delivered via Web Services, with much more collaboration built into the tools and solutions.”

Isn’t it all about social productivity and emergence, and what ever comes from that…maybe this is what solutions means.

If we go to an Anecdote paper on community, collaboration and networks, we see three different dynamics at play.

1. Communities of Interest - people coming together to share and learn
2. Teams/WorkGroups - people coming together to achieve a goal, this includes a lot of collaboration (working together on a task or paper)
3. Networks - individual centric (self interest), connecting profiles, and in aggregate we are able to get valuable data.

UPATE: I guess there is a 4th type, and that’s social tools mashed into existing applications.

All these 3 types can exist on the open web and in the enterprise.
A community leader or facilitator may moderate, garden, etc…and in a workgroup they may give directions.
Whereas with social networks/sites like Facebook, del.icious, Flickr, Slideshare, YouTube, Twitter there is no leader, it’s individual centric. But if you put up a “bad” clip in YouTube, you will be dealt with (these are the rare occasions we hear from the overall owner), and the same in an enterprise social network.

I don’t see anything different here in dynamics, one difference is that in the enterprise the content must be about learning or work, not goofing off, and that there are policies to adhere to the usual expected conduct from employees (don’t talk about confidential stuff and, don’t jeopardize people).

Accountability

Bill Ives points out a difference within the enterprise and that’s “accountability” to a groups aims:

“In the consumer web you are only accountable to yourself. In enterprise 2.0 you are accountable to the group success of your team, your company.”

This is referring to group work where you may have a project space with blogs and wikis, etc… But what about an internal blogosphere like IBM or a shared interest CoP, this is more about general sharing, learning, and experience (not really accountability). This participation platform is emergent (we don’t know what we are gonna get, we just take part and see what happens). We become more capable and skilled as we are educating each other, and then we can bring that know-how back to our tasks.

So I do think there is a difference between using social tools for project work, and for purposed based sharing and learning. Again the Anecdote paper pointed to above explains the different dynamics between share interest groups, team/project groups, and networks.
At this stage there is no difference between enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0 in regards to communities (learning) and networks/blogospheres (self interest), but there is when it comes to work spaces set-up to actually do work.
You can have Workgroups on the open web, but you are still volunteering your time to take direction from the leader, if you don’t you may get kicked out of the group…in the enterprise you may lose your job.

One

So the first difference is content in the enterprise must be about work or learning.

Two

The second difference, as just mentioned, is being accountable, or else.

The third difference is that in web 2.0 I choose to participate, and no-one tries to get me to go to training or promote social tools. This may be the same in the enterprise eg. CoP or internal blogosphere or bookmarks, but when it comes to Workgroups then I have to use whatever work style or tools that have been set-up.
In relation to communities and networks/blogospheres, if you are not that passionate about your job or work related topics, you are not gonna blog about work things.

But not all participation is about volunteering know-how, as mentioned above using social tools in team spaces is about social productivity, so it may be mandated that we use blogs for broadcast announcements, news, task status, etc rather than email.
This is directed contributions, it is content you are already producing, only you are mandated to deliver it in blogs rather than email…and have conversations in forums rather than email…and collaborate in wikis rather than email/attachments. See more in Mike Gotta’s post with a great comments discussion (incl. me). I couldn’t believe some people think mandating their know-how (stuff you know that you never really write down) was OK…I bet David Vaine couldn’t believe his luck when he found the opportunity to spread the word about corporate flogging in this post.

Three

So to re-iterate the third difference is mandated to use certain tools over others for directed type of content.

Transparency, Network Effect, Facilitation and Egalitarianism

Bill Ives goes on to say that in social team spaces (Workgroups), managers need to act as coaches to help and sustain the participation and team work, capitialising the transparency to make correlations, connections, and evolve the input, and welcome their POV rather than being watchdogs.

This is about the need for facilitation, and the realisation of emergence rather than imposing or controlling. People in the enterprise need to learn and be encouraged and guided, using informal learning practices, as this may be new to some people. You just don’t need this on the web, as there is no agenda, if someone can’t get the hang of web 2.0, it just doesn’t matter or have impact on the residents of the webosphere, as there are so many people that do get it.

Recently on our internal communities someone left a comment on one of my blog posts about communities of interest. He said; the new technology, this way of coming together, having discourse and learning is something new, he felt like it was migrating to a new country. The dynamic and technology was foreign, and the current participants seemed intimidating (well not really, but the initial fear of wanting his content to be of the right calibre). But he went ahead and made that comment because he said the community participants were hospitable and welcoming, and it was this factor that gave him the confidence to participate.

Another example was a demo I was doing for a new internal community, the managers were excited (the possibilities), and at the same time it was very foreign to them (platform vs channels), they seem intimidated.
At this point I realised even though they see the benefits, they really have to experience them, and when this happens, they need to be guided. So I decided to make a Facilitators community (Train the trainers), I want each community facilitator to know as muchas they can about social technology, community dynamics and facilitation itself.

I made a comment in the post about some additional things I’ve posted about in the past, I’ll re-post it here. It’s mostly about a harder time generating a network effect in an enterprise 2.0 environment due to a smaller amount of participants.

It also harps back to transparency and the fact that the enterprise is not an egalitarian culture like the open web, instead we have managers and hierarchies.
The question is will transparency be accepted, as Bill alludes to in his post, the transparency of participation eventually leads to collaboration (KM 2.0 model).

These higher positioned people may not like the concept that the ideas of lesser positioned people are in a visible arena and may be seen by all to contribute or have an impact on decision making. They may feel this transparency lessens their role, or replaces their impact or exclusivity on what’s best for the company, as it may now be more openly influenced by the people…they might feel less in charge, and that all this transparency undermines their role.

When you think about it, it’s giving more power and autonomy to the people, where social productivity and connection brings the best minds together, in a more networked self organised kind of way that hierarchy just can’t do. Senior staff also have to accept that this greater organisational performance won’t happen unless participation and transparency is welcomed. Once you start censoring this type of ecosystem, it might just revolt on you. In the end they are still making ultimate decisions, but these are based on the conversations and content of the social enterprise, rather than just an exclusive meeting.

This is the real difference between enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0, it’s about acceptance and a new model of management.
What was initially about sharing know-how and collaboration has turned into a new style of de-management, and decision making, where the networked enterprise approach is heading into a more adaptive, self-organising, and autonomous learning organisation.

This to me is a milestone in time, a change from scientific management and the industrial age to the networked knowledge age. Perhaps the more pressing topic is management 2.0.

Here’s my comment on Bill’s post:

“Bill,

In comparison to the enterprise, web 2.0 and the blogosphere is an egalitarian environment, there is no org chart, even if there was, no one cares, all people are treated equal.””

Four, Five, and Six

This makes facilitation, the critical mass of the network effect, and transparency the fourth, fifth, and sixth differences.

Social Productivity and ROI

The seventh difference is measuring social productivity, ie. how much you help others, and how you source the right connections to help you. Personally I thinking knowing the right person to help you out can make a massive impact on a project, compared to getting a lesser proficient person…”who you know” should be valued.

Another impact on whether people want to spend time in the social enterprise is whether they will be measured by their social productivity, that is, helping and spending time beyond their tasks for the greater good.

Gia Lyons was contemplating whether to go the social route on a task or to keep it to herself, as she isn’t measured on how well she uses her network, she says, “…there is a direct correlation between the number of assets I create in a quarter, and my quarterly bonus…”.

Seven

Gia sums up the seventh difference by saying, “…we are asking people to spend precious time to do something for which they are not measured.”

All this is highly related to Boyds Law:

“Connected people will naturally gravitate toward an ethic where they will trade personal productivity for connectedness: they will interrupt their own work to help a contact make progress. Ultimately, in a bottom-up fashion, this leads to the network as a whole making more progress than if each individual tries to optimize personal productivity…

Perhaps more importantly, the willingness to assist others leads to closer social connections, and increases the likelihood of reciprocal behavior, where an obsession with personal productivity does not.”

Read more on the myth of interrupting, especially related to IM…Luis Suarez in his email detox diet often refers to the speed of IM in getting something done, and the visibility of social tools to help out future similar requests.

Conclusion

Enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0 environments may have their differences, but trying to veil transparency isn’t going to do any good. We also have to work at generating network effects, we need to encourage and facilitate participation, and lastly we need a way to measure or value an individuals social productivity. This can all be helped by reviewing job descriptions, corporate strategies, and job evaluations to include or encourage social participation.

Let’s finish with a quote by Larry Prusak:

“The modern organisation evolved in the 19th century to deal with land, labour and capital, not with knowledge, which was assumed to reside only in the heads of the owners and managers,” he says. “This led us to the modern organisation built on command and control mechanisms, run as hierarchical bureaucracies. This won’t do when knowledge is the major source of value, as it is for most large organisations today.”

TweetPaste - get some embed code for a tweet, so you can paste it in your blog post…I find this the easiest so far.

Matt (Multiple Account Twitter Tweeter) - post to multiple Twitter accounts

Chirrup - if you re-syndicate your blog posts to Twitter, any replies made to those tweets can be channeled back to your blog via a widget…people can even tweet directly in the widget. [via RWW]

Twebinar - Twitter mashup with the conference video display…enables tweets before, during, and after a webinar by following twebinar [via /message]

BONUS LINK
Twitter updates from Mars

Documents that are open and dynamic allow people to evolve the documents by direct editing or leaving comments…ie. people are sharing their experience and what they know can add to the richness of the document.

Right away I thought of the How-To Guides I’m writing for our Communities of Practice (CoP) at work.

If my guides are on a wiki rather than PDF, people who use the guides can leave comments, or people with permissions can edit the page itself or a new page to add what they know.

This way they can help me evolve the document, even though it’s finished. Well, that’s the idea, it’s never finished…I may miss a feature, and I can’t experience every context, so there’s stuff that happens when people use Communities that I may not know up front. eg. a new way to use blogs, a workaround (exception to procedure) page for Document Control as each client has different needs.

They may leave a comment about a feature of our CoPs where they have a workaround, or a use case.
eg. someone might say everyone in our team has a status blog, so when we go to a meeting we already know what everyone has been up to, our meetings are more about action.
Another person visiting the guide may see this and use this idea.
A simple comment box on a wiki has enabled the sharing and receiving of know-how by two people that don’t even know each other, plus this is perpetual as another person may come along and get value or an idea from reading the same comment. In fact another person may leave a comment back and say that they found it more manageable having one group blog for status. The original person my see this and comment back saying, that is a great idea, I didn’t know that was possible. Oops, that’s because I may have not put that fact in the guide, lucky that comments allow for others to help where the guide fails.
And as Stewart mentions I can go and refine the guide and leave a comment saying thanks.

In the end we have this explicit type deliverable that has to be formal and succinct as it has to cater to many audiences, and can’t be too explanatory (long), and try to cover every context possible, as people won’t bother reading it. But on top of this we have a layer of collective know-how and feedback via the comments which inturn we feed back into the document (via edit) some tacit know-how.

The point is having perpetually live documents (editing and comments) harnesses the collective wisdom, where people can share their know-how, and benefit the user experience as a whole. It’s a win win situation.

- just say my blog feed posts my latest item to Friendfeed (it’s a post about something I have on Slideshare)
- my latest Slideshare activity will post an item to Friendfeed as well
- and someone bookmarks that blog post or slidedeck URL on del.icio.us which then shows up on Friendfeed
- someone tweets about it, and that shows up on Friendfeed
- someone may even post directly into Friendfeed about the slidedeck

As you can see above there are 5 opportunities to initiate the same conversation about the same thing within Friendfeed, and the most thriving conversation may be around someone’s bookmarked item of your post, rather than around the feed item of your own post.

As Read Write Web point out, at the moment your re-syndicated blog post may not have any discussion in Friendfeed, but an A-lister who bookmarks your blog post will have lots of discussion around that item in Friendfeed.
This is a new dynamic as now people are becoming a hot spot, a community onto themselves, for not only their own content, but content of others.

Moopz plans to prevent this fragmentation from happening.

For starters it only displays content that has links, so you won’t see tweets saying “Good morning Twitter!”

If a new link that appears is already linked to in another Friendfeed item, then they will be merged (clustered together) preventing fragmented conversation from even happening.

Another good thing about this is that we don’t have to see duplicate items.

And each item is auto-tagged meaning you can browse conversations on a topic

I guess this is a memetracker of sorts based on clusterings, and what gets on the frontpage is decided as a result of people using the system. This makes it a more self organising version of Techmeme and Megite…and a more limited version as it’s only based on content that comes from the aggregate of user profiles.

Megite allows you to enter your OPML, and displays most popular and recommended posts from people you care about (rather than all items ranked), but it’s not a conversation platform. It also displays memes by topic.

At the moment Moopz only has a public timeline, hopefully soon it can be personalised to have a friends timeline.

Like Megite and Techmeme, Moopz will display popular memes based on links, but it doesn’t scour the web for these links and cluster them, instead it scours content people have re-syndicate into it’s own system…the former Memetrackers also use other methods like concept analysis (as two items may be about the same exact thing yet they both don’t point to a common link).
Moopz also has another aspect to popular memes, and that’s based on the amount of conversation that happens within Moopz (Friendfeed) itself.

More

Also checkout how Read Write Web and Louis Gray are incorporating Friendfeed comments back to their blog (the original source)…Read Write Web also allow posting to Friendfeed from within their blog.

Louis Gray has some great Friendfeed tips every Friday, the first one on the hide funtion is a great way to reduce the noise, and same with advanced search.

NoiseRiver (via LG)

Another way to filter the flow by a feature called “My Interests”, enabling you to use a drop down menu to filter in or out items containing a certain keyword, the filter choices are:
I love it so much!, I love it, I like it, This is nice, It’s OK, I don’t care, It stinks, This is bad, I don’t like it, I hate it, I hate it so much
There’s also a feature called “My Neighbourhood” to filter items from people on a similar filtering menu.
I also noticed:
- you can re-share an item (this posts it as a FF post)
- there is a reply icon next to each item and comment so your comment is pre-pended with that person name eg. @louis
- each item has auto-keywords (not sure why you can add/delete them, you can also filter rate these keywords as explained above)
- “hide all entries with this URL” is a manual way of doing what Moopz already does.

FeedMachine (via LG)

This brings an element of an RSS reader because you can mark read/unread

Friends view - contact list where you can choose a contact and click on a source icon and a box displays latest content from that source…it lacks latest content from all a person’s sources

Good Friends View - When you click on a profile it allows you to tick that person as a good friend, this will add them to your Good Friends section

Stream View - latest items from all friends
When you click on the info icon it loads the original item on the right and the FF comments on the left, where you can post a comment
- sort by: newsest, oldest, unread, user, service, item text, comments, most liked, least liked
- hide duplicates

Just like NoiseRiver and Moopz you filter out entries by keyword, as well as user, service, hide read items, and hide “@” items

Mio News (via LG)

This turns Friendfeed into an RSS Reader, kind of reminds me of Spokeo.

On your subscription pane you have an icon to see your FF stream (mark as read).
You also have an icon for each friend, clicking this will stream the latest from a friend (mark as read).
You can group friends into folders, click on a folder will show you the latest from just those friends in that folder (mark as read).

But, you can’t filter your whole stream, a folder stream, or one friend by service.

This has an MS Outlook feel, as when you click on an item you see the full-text on the 3rd pane, from here you can:
- mark as read, share on FF (also share to your blog, twitter, and email), comment, like, hate, goto native item

There also a bookmarklet and blog and Twitter integration.

Lastly there is a “Topics” feature where you list keywords (also organise in folders)
- clicking on a keyword will display all items from your friends about that keyword (not sure if it’s “about” or just the appearance of the keyword)

At the moment you can’t view rooms, or share an item to a room.

This could be a replacement for Google Reader, it would be good if you could manually adds feeds from non-FF people so I don’t need two RSS Readers.

Related:
FriendFeed Rooms : Interactive topic streams
Friendfeed : social filter conversations

Organisations that run on predictability encourage supply side KM, ie. KM practice that is focused on explicit knowledge (information) like best practices, lessons learnt, etc…personally I think this is information management. The idea is that capturing and documenting this information can be used for similar situations that arise in the future.

Raj mentions that this concept is focused on learning from the past, he says, “Demand, it’s assumed, is automatically created.”

He alludes to this being more a process of content management or information management, rather than KM.

This article isn’t focused on whether people actually visit these databases, but his tone assumes that people rather be connected to other people, having information coming to them, rather than search a database…shared context, peripheral knowledge, high abstraction, trust all come into that equation.

The focus of the article is on how we learn and innovate by generating a culture of knowledge creation.

An organisation run on predictability already has all the answers from the past, which is OK in a predictable and static market, and you are happy to not keep up with the cutting edge. But, he says:

“We may get so focused on analyzing the past and documenting every possible learning or best practice, that we may not foster creative design and focus on the future.”

The more likely scenario is that we live in a fast paced world, where we have to adapt with new and changing demands, and this requires a need to continually create new knowledge to add to the supply.

Common sense

This is common sense:

1. keep your solutions in a database that you can dip into in the future

2. we need to be agile and adapt to the market and respond by creating new solutions and capabilities which are in turn added to the database (responding to the market may involve using past information as well as creating new information).

The reason I say this is common sense is that we don’t live in a static world, no matter how much we try to control circumstances, life has plans of her own for us. So we need to adapt to this realisation, and respond.

Personally I don’t think the supply side view is seen as or considered to be a one-time program, but rather an ongoing process, so there is nothing really new here.
I mean there is no stage where you stop learning lessons, or refine your best practices (keep current and new contexts), so it seems normal you would collect this information and keep creating it, and keep collecting it.
Basically all the answers are not in our best practices database, we need to create new knowledge/information just as much as we store it.

But isn’t this natural, if you don’t have a stored answer, you have to create one…usually the problem is in knowing you already have an answer to prevent re-inventing the wheel.

The question is how do you make sure new knowledge is always being created?

How do you make sure you have an adaptive environment where you swim and don’t sink?

Not only that, but how well you swim?

That is, how do you go about effectively creating new knowledge?

Where do you focus your energy?

OK so now I get it.

The article is about how much time and energy we devote to:

Capturing and storing vs Knowledge flow

Hoping people will refer to it for future use vs Adapting, being aware and in the loop, and learning off each other (participation)

I think there is room for both.

I don’t really think this is Supply side store approach vs Demand side creation approach

I think the learning approach is balanced in itself, for example, a blogosphere, community of practice, social network are all examples of learning off each other and being aware, and creating knowledge, but at the same time you are sharing knowledge.

Perhaps we might say, is there a need to store and capture as much, as this happens by default anyway when you take a creative learning approach.

Even better, in a learning organisation you are aware of solutions as they happen, even if you have no use for them at the time. You can connect to people involved in the solutions, and you are connected to people in general. The act of participating gives more chance of solutions coming to you more easily…and as we mentioned earlier you have more of a chance of shared context and the peripheral information around a solution.

We don’t need to mention that by participating we have conversations and create and evolve ideas, become aware of ideas.

We can be pro-active and innovative.

I think this is what the article is all about; as well as adapting and storing information, we need a practice or ecosystem, like a university, where we perpetually learn and develop capabilities that can help us be more prepared when a problem arises. The more aware we are, and the more we know, the more chance we will have the skill or know-how in dealing with a situation or issue that comes to our plate.

Raj says:

“Companies that are able to foster knowledge creation, alongside the more traditional view of KM, are able to strike a balance between effectiveness and efficiency and between innovation and productivity. This is a necessary condition for longevity in a global knowledge economy.” This can all happen with participation enabling tools.

It is mentioned that a good indicator for focus on innovation is to see how ideas generate, evolve and eventuate in an organisation…R&D shouldn’t be the only department that is innovative.

Twannabe - find out who someone is following and you are not…similar is Does Follow, and others.

Tweet Thread - from the makers of Tweet Boards, an on-the-fly Twitter stream…enter user names and get a stream of the latest 20 tweets from each user (even filter by keyword or hashtag). Also see Twitter Digest.

TwitterBash - enter a tweet URL and it will display in the stream, people vote on their favourite tweets…the best thing about this is you can get an embed code for a tweet

TweetMarks - a link bookmark tool for Twitter, once you join you can follow @tweetmarks and direct message this user with a link in your tweet that you want to bookmark…view all your links at TweetMarks.

But that’s just that least of it, you can get this to automatically happen. In the settings check a box and then all your tweets that have a link will appear in your TweetMarks stream.
If you don’t want all tweets with links to appear you can filter this to tweets with a #hashtag, or filter by your retweets from someone else’s tweets.

You can also check a box so all your tweets that appear in TweetMarks are auto-bookmarked in del.icio.us.

You can also search your TweetMarks.

I’d like to be able to filter out keywords.

I’d like to be able to have a similar service where it stores your tweets where you use a #hashtag. Then you can filter your stream via a #hashtag cloud…as I can’t remember all the hashtags I have used in the past.

Maybe this is something for Twemes, I’d like:
- show me tweets from all the people I follow with this #hashtag
- show me a #hashtag cloud of all the people I follow
- show me my #hashtag cloud (and I can click a tag to see all my tweets with that tag)

BONUS
Twittering Teddy
- follow @teddy2pointhome, it will follow you back and it will speak your tweets on Ustream

In that post I riffed off some bloggers on the concept of Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom (D-I-K-W) not being of a hierarchial nature, and rather a loop, where knowledge is required to turn data into information, and the sensemaking process turning information into knowledge…and if that knowledge created were to be exchanged (written down/conversation), it would be back to data or information, depending on who was looking at it.

I also prefered the verbs in the diagram, Analysing - Sensemaking - Pathfinding - Executing (ASPE).

NOTE: I just had a flash of physics then with my phrase, “…depending on who was looking at it”. In physics sometimes things exist only if you look at them, the same goes with information, where information only exists if the receiver has the current knowledge to see data as information.
In physics, if you don’t look at the thing it doesn’t exist…if you don’t have the knowledge to see the data as information, then the information doesn’t exist to you. Someone help me here…

Knowledge Management is an oxymoron?

An oxymoron is a phrase combining opposing or contradictory terms

I’m not going to define KM, but here are 43 knowledge management definitions - and counting… I like the idea that it’s not about a means to an end.

For me it’s a way to augment the way you work, which is in a more open networked environment, where your information is visible, creating more chance for connections (conversations), awareness, relationship and trust building, in turn creating more opportunity to develop shared context with others (which increases the chances of successful knowledge transfers, ie. the meaning in the message is transferred).
This way of working (leveraging the social capital), creates interdependencies between people which solidifies the success to keep working in this style.

Oops, did I just try to define it…perhaps describe it…

This is really information openess and connection, perhaps this practice is “knowledge sharing.”
I don’t say information sharing, as the intention is for your knowledge to be received as knowledge to someone else, rather than just information. So knowledge sharing is the intention, but sometimes information sharing may only occur, or worse.

Is someone who is in charge of this way of working, a Knowledge Manager or more a steward or facilitator who instills a culture of Knowledge sharing practices or style of working, where the aim is to create shared context?

If knowledge is not an object, and is more personal know-how and is used to make sense of signals we receive, then how is it possible to capture knowledge, or for that matter transfer knowledge?

Further to this, then there is no such thing as managing knowledge.

We can only manage information, whether you get intended or unintended meaning out of this information is up to the receiver.

If you get someone to store and tag a report into the repository, this is the role of information management.
If you get someone to write down their know-how and store and tag it into the repository, this is still information management.

Anecdote realise this and rather use the term “Better Information Managment”, and “Improved collaboration and learning”.

We have to admit we are stuck with the term “Knowledge Management”, and it will continue to be used even though it’s not exactly what happens…what’s in a name.

Information has no meaning

An Anecdote paper, Our take on how to talk about knowledge management, tells us:

“Knowledge is the stuff in people’s heads which enables them to do things.”, and:

“Information is certainly valuable, but it is inert; it does not cause things to happen.
As described by Polanyi and Prosch,[1] information (suchas a map), no matter how elaborate it is, cannot read itself; it requires the judgement of a skilled reader who will relate the map to the world through both cognitive and sensory means. Debra Amidon, in 1991,[2] asserted that information, in and of itself, is not useful until it is embodied in a person’s awareness and related to business imperatives.”

Oscar Berg has being talking about the nature of information, and how the value derived depends on who uses it.

This is the very message of the late Frank Miller’s seminal paper, I = 0 (Information has no intrinsic meaning), which I re-read lately.

Miller says:

“…we’ve been led to believe that information contains meaning - rather than just standing for, provoking or evoking meaning in others.”

“…knowledge is the uniquely human capability of making meaning from information…”

“…information is intrinsically meaningless on its own and remains so unless - and until - it is interpreted by human beings, within some context.”

“…information become knowledge? The answer: at the moment of its human interpretation (and not an instant before!)”

One of the best quotes is:

“But if we then take the step of ascribing intrinsic meaning to the information itself, we cross the boundary of rationality and enter a bizarre world where we assume that impersonal stimuli have minds of their own and can have their own meaning!”

He gets more esoteric by saying that if we didn’t have information, ie. no sensory input, then there is no knowledge to be created…without information (therefore no sensory input) how to we know we even exist. Let’s not get into this here, as we could discuss non-materials planes.

Re-reading this paper was a very different experience from when I first read it a couple of years ago. Since then I have read and experienced more of life, especially in KM and related fields, and with all this knowledge I have amassed I got 10 times more meaning (and ideas) out of this paper.
There must be a term for this, my different experience in reading this paper demonstrated what the content of the paper is about.

The nonsense of ‘knowledge management’ is a paper, by T D Wilson, that is along this same line of thought:

“…’knowledge’ (what I know) and ‘information’ (what I am able to convey about what I know)”

You can’t capture knowledge, and there is no such thing as explicit knowledge

Miller says:

“…knowledge was only ever tacit. Once we attempt to make knowledge (i.e., what we ‘know’) explicit, it reverts immediately to an ‘information’ state again and requires human intervention anew for sense to be made of it.”

“Knowledge is, after all, what we know. And what we know cannot be commodified.”

“Knowledge (ie ‘what we know’) is only ever ‘tacit’ and can never be ‘explicit’. It must never be thought of as a commodity to be captured, processed, stored, transmitted, managed etc.”

Wilson says:

“‘Explicit knowledge’, of course, is simply a synonym for ‘information’.”

“…’tacit knowledge’ involves the process of comprehension, a process which is, itself, little understood. Consequently, tacit knowledge is an inexpressible process that enables an assessment of phenomena in the course of becoming knowledgeable about the world. In what sense, then, can it be captured? The answer, of course, is that it cannot be ‘captured’ - it can only be demonstrated through our expressible knowledge and through our acts.”

This nullifies the concept that you can capture knowledge, as it’s not possible to capture meaning, the meaning is derived by the person encountering it, all the capturing we do is simply information management.

This makes Nonaka’s SECI model (turning tacit into explicit then back again) a bad model of KM, which is a pity because it was “the” model that has defined KM for a decade.

Dave Snowden has more on KM sins, which includes, knowledge as more a flow, rather than an explicit asset:

“…put all their effort into knowledge as a thing; making tacit knowledge explicit…”, instead:

“…focus on creating connectivity between people to allow knowledge to flow, rather than worrying about the knowledge itself. Get the channels right and that is most of the battle. Generally if people have a working relationship, ideally a trusted one then in the context of need they will help each other without the need for direction, structure or technology.”

This leads to Dave Snowden’s three heuristics. Wilson seems to be in the same school of thought:

“The fact is that we often do not know what we know: that we know something may only emerge when we need to employ the knowledge to accomplish something. Much of what we have learnt is apparently forgotten, but can emerge unexpectedly when needed, or even when not needed. In other words we seem to have very little control over ‘what we know’.”

Shared Context creates more chance of the intended message being understood

As I mentioned earlier I think Shared Context is at the heart of KM, when you are in a conversation you hope what you are saying is understood, ie. the receiver has understood your intended meaning.

Frank Miller explains that the reality of information not possessing an intact meaning, can be felt in mis-communications or mis-interpretations.

Why do some people understand one thing, and others another, or nothing at all?

It’s because we use our current knowledge to derive the meaning, the information itself can’t do it for us.

He says:

“…although information certainly stands for meaning, it is never meaning itself. Meaning is a mental thing and is only ever tacit, that is to say, ‘in us’. Identical information almost invariably provokes (or evokes) different meanings in each of us.”

“…it is not what the message does to the audience but what the audience does with the message that really matters.”

This reminds me of a paper by Nancy Dixon, on the onus role of the knowledge receiver to tease out the desired exchange…I’ll get round to posting about this later on (it’s such as great paper).

Wilson has a similar thing to say:

“‘Knowledge’ is defined as what we know: knowledge involves the mental processes of comprehension, understanding and learning that go on in the mind and only in the mind, however much they involve interaction with the world outside the mind, and interaction with others. Whenever we wish to express what we know, we can only do so by uttering messages of one kind or another - oral, written, graphic, gestural or even through ‘body language’. Such messages do not carry ‘knowledge’, they constitute ‘information’, which a knowing mind may assimilate, understand, comprehend and incorporate into its own knowledge structures.”

Web 2.0 helps build abstraction with people in far places

Apart from information having no intrinsic meaning, Frank Miller goes on to talk about a very important point, in that the web has enabled people to get a message to a global audience.

These days you don’t really know much about the people you are working with or communicating.
This becomes a problem, because there already is the potential problem with people you know well mis-interpreting your message (information), when you work with people you don’t really know this is going to increase the chances.

Miller says:

“Our knowledge - that is to say what we knew from our direct experiences - was closely akin to the knowledge of others with whom we necessarily lived our lives in close proximity.”

“The “information age” changed all that.”

“We can send information and provoke a response in almost anyone we wish anywhere on the planet, but we can never be sure - unless we know these people personally - how they are likely to interpret (ie what meaning they are likely to make of) the information they receive from us.”

“Successful communications depends on knowing others well enough or caring about others deeply enough (the tacit dimension) to imagine how they are likely to interpret the (explicit) messages we exchange with them.”

Dave Snowden often refers to a level of high abstraction, the level of; intellect, shared experiences, style, character, that is known between a group of people, the more chance they will derive the intended meaning from information exchanges.

Along with this, as mentioned again and again, is a high level of Shared context. This is how much we both know about the context surrounding this information eg. are we familiar with the source, the background it’s based on, the topic, etc…this frame of reference helps in deriving the intended knowledge from the information.

You are having a conversation with a piping engineer:

1. in another company
2. in another office in your company
3. in your office
4. in your office and in your team
5. in your office, in your team, and your close colleague

Obviously number 5 is the person you will have a greater level of trust, inter-dependencies, abstraction and shared context.

These are the the necessary aspects of a relationship for not only successful information transfer, but collaborating, creating, evolving new information and knowledge.

The 5 point list above is based on the offline world, if we include the online world of networks, blogs, communities, etc…then geography really doesn’t make a difference.
In an offline world we can still get to know a colleague in another office using the phone, IM, email, etc…but in a community and network we get to know lots more.

To reprise Frank Miller’s paper I’d say that web 2.0 has evolved to enable us to retain and create close relationships like we have in the physical world…we are still able to know people (geographically distant) well enough that the information signals are no more misinterpreted than they are with people in the same office.

In fact the web now allows us to know a lot about people that we don’t even know, if anything we can connect to more like minds, form new relationships, get to really know other people well.

Social tools like blogs mimic the offline world:

- we can informally and casually talk about stuff
- others can subscribe (these people really get to know your character)
- these people can leave comments and talk about you in their own blog posts
- you subscribe to them
- this all happens on a daily basis

There is no doubt that face to face, audio/visual helps evoke more understanding, but casual and informal blog posts also have this effect, and according to the listed points above, blogs enable people to discover each other and connect into a close relationship where you develop trust, high abstraction and shared context.

So if anything, the Read/Write Web has taken us to the “Knowledge Age”, where we can connect and get to know people, without even having to have a relationship.
This certainly helps in the enterprise as we have to deal with all sorts of people from all sorts of departments. If we can visit their profile, see their network, see the contributions (blog posts, etc…), we can get to know their character, where they fit, etc…we know more about them, which helps a more successful interaction with them.

Miller says:

“Only human beings have the capacity to construct meaning from information and to sense ‘meaning’ evolving in themselves and in others. Only human beings can compare interpretations with a view to achieving a shared purpose.”

“Information, no matter how elegantly processed and presented, is incapable - on its own - of achieving anything!”

We need to increase the chances that when we confront information (read/conversations) we are able to get as much meaning as possible. Both what the sender is intending to transfer, and the stuff the receiver gets out of it, including the stuff that the sender didn’t think of.
This is what participation and collaboration (wisdom of crowds) is all about.

So rather than Knowledge Management (mandating/capturing/storing) we need to be focusing on connecting people, so we can increase the chances of collaboration and sharing what they know, and within this create a culture where this sharing and collaboration is successful in transfering and receiving intended signals, ie. by creating opportunities to create informal communities, networking, develop high trust, inter-dependencies, shared context and high abstraction…most of this is from Dave Snowden.

What is the role of a Knowledge Manager?

For starters, we have discussed that “Knowledge Manager” is an inaccurate job description, and what they currently do is more inline with information management, and people management.

This is a quick list:

NOTE: collaboration tools and the like means not just setting up, but facilitating and coaching…knowing human behaviour

- smooth out bottlenecks in processes
- online storage and search (re-use)
- openness and visibility
- collaboration tools (do work)
- communities (share/learn)
- networks (connect/discover)
- communication and awareness (esp. cooperation across business units)
- autonomy (being able to hook up with the right people and tasks)
- techniques (AAR, Peer Review, Open Space, World Cafe, Narrative, AI, SNA, etc…)

As a result you get more self organisation, learning, innovation, transparency, autonomy and emergence.

There is nothing about managing knowledge in this list, it’s all about connecting people, creating conditions for conversation, enabling more sharing and collaboration to occur, people leveraging each others talent.

The role of a person responsible for all this seems more like a facilitator, coach, and Corporate Anthropologist.

This type of person needs to have a handle on more humanistic fields like: Cognitive science, Learning, Psychology, and social behaviour.

Corporate anthropologist (enabler/facilitator)

- observe the processes and people
- create conditions for smoother processes
- create conditions to be able to find people and content
- create conditions for people to tune into each other
- create conditions for people to have conversations
- create conditions for serendipity
- create conditions for people to successfully understand other people and their content
ie. info