You know 2....?

Planet Earth

2008-03-23T21:42:00.005+01:00

Acquired the 5 DVD box. Saw it presented in a shop on a Panasonic 150 inch (!!) plasma TV (80.000 Euro...). On our modest TV at home it is still visually gobsmacking, although admittedly, the storyline is not really educating. Generates lots of discussion in the household nevertheless!

Born on a blue day

2008-03-11T19:10:00.003+01:00

Reading this at the moment: Daniel Tammet's Born on a Blue Day, fascinating, somebody who can actually tell about how he thinks and, indeed what extraordinary ways to reason he has.

Away for the week, again

2008-03-09T19:03:00.004+01:00

Mon March 10: Deventer-Schiphol-Newcastle-Cleator (434.7 miles, as the crow flies, so add another 100+ miles for the distance actually travelled)
Tue/Fri: Cleator-Sellafield v.v.
Fri March 14: Sellafield-Newcastle-Schiphol-Deventer

Skybrary

2008-03-08T14:34:00.003+01:00

At ATC2008 in Amsterdam, www.skybrary.aero will be presented by EUROCONTROL. The result of the effort of many (including a little bit of mine), this wiki-based site promises to provide a significant contribution to the sharing of aviation safety knowledge.

Dyslexia and spelling checkers

2007-05-25T13:54:00.000+02:00

FOUR YORE I's ONLY
I have a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye cannot sea
When eye strike a quay to right a word
I weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait away
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two late
And eye can put the error rite
Its rarely, rarely grate
I've run this poem threw it
I'm shore your pleased two noIts letter perfect in it's weigh
MY CHEQUER TOLLED ME SEW!

(Sauce unknown)

One the family members has been diagnosed with dyslexia. I started to look for some material and found this on several sites dedicated to dyslexia (starting with a site of the West Cumbria Dyslexia Association, a pure coincidence). I certainly do recognise the phonetic approach...

Dyirbal

2007-05-21T23:46:00.000+02:00

George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things booktitle was based on this language. Fascinating. Lakoff's work (including Metaphors We Live By) was pretty cool in my AI days, but there was no Wikipedia article on the Dyirbal language back then!

Wiki

2007-05-16T17:02:00.000+02:00

We're currently involved in setting up a wiki for aviation safety knowledge. We're using the mediawiki platform for this. Look and feel, content structure and content will change over time, but isn't that what it is all about? Thusfar, it has proven to be relatively hassle free. In the meantime, I learn a lot about aviation safety, in particular the Air Traffic Management part of it. Also, I'm really looking forward to seeing this wiki develop a community of contributors around it, resulting in high quality knowledge in this interesting field.

Project Retrospectives

2007-05-15T22:09:00.000+02:00

I was rereading this book on Project Retrospectives on the train today and found it (again) quite useful, despite the software development context that the author puts project retrospectives in. For all knowledge management professionals who seek some alternatives exercises in their lessons learning workshops.

FlightMemory - Where your memories fly!

2007-04-13T21:41:00.000+02:00

Nice one. May be somebody should do a TrafficJamMemory (where did I spend all that time in my car?) or StandinLineMemory (where did I have to wait so long?) or WaitingforaTrainMemory or BadFirstNightinaHotelMemory?

FlightMemory - Where your memories fly!

The map is not the territory

2006-11-24T20:21:00.000+01:00

In a recent discussion about NLP (remember that? wasn't that a thing big back in the nineties, although I've noticed it is still quite something in sales and customer contact ('agent', arghh) training) I had recently, I became aware of the similarities with expertise mapping that was popular in the eighties, but now is back again as one of the solutions to capture knowledge of scarce (and often ageing) experts in organisations. Mapping expertise is basically about trying to understand the models that an expert is using to solve problems. These models may be as varied as for example maps of people that can be contacted to provide help, logical structures such as cause-effect links to help refine the problem or decision trees to actually solve the problem itself.

An expertise mapper is like a neurolinguistic programmer, who stops his work after the 'modelling phase', without the ambition to reprogram...

Of course, the map is never the territory (to quote somebody who is also quoted a lot in the NLP world), but we must assume that experts have developed better maps than us normal earthlings, so the effort may be worthwhile.

Knowledge auditing from a risk perspective

2006-11-20T21:07:00.000+01:00

Many clients ask us to help undertake knowledge audits (with a focus on critical analysis of the organisation's knowledge portfolio) or knowledge management audits, with a focus on analysing knowledge management processes). In any case, I have learned that a risk-based approach helps to better appreciate an organisation's dependencies on its knowledge assets (either human or artefacts). Asking questions such as: 'what will happen to us if we leave things as is in this particular knowledge area?', 'what are the costs if our experts in this knowledge area leave our organisation?'

You might think that such a risk-based approach results in overly 'protective' knowledge management strategies and implementations, focusing on more capture and securing of knowledge assets.

However, processes of knowledge generation and renewal to create new business opportunities could be seen as equally important from a risk perspective: not paying attention to opportunities is a risk as well!

Therefore, auditing activities should preferably analyse risks and opportunities relating to current levels of knowledge quality, knowledge capture and knowledge sharing in key knowledge areas.

Risks may vary as much as opportunities may differ: on the negative side you may find that your main experts become overburdened, that the speed of acquiring new competences is too slow, that lessons learned are not captured so that costly mistakes are repeated. On the positive side, you may discover that you hold some important IP that could be exploited in a new context and you may conclude that if you would link up some teams in your organisation, time-to-delivery could improve substantially.

Once you get a handle on risks and opportunities such as these, your knowledge management action plan has found its foundation and you can start to set goals for each of your key knowledge areas.

Big red thing

2006-11-18T21:13:00.000+01:00

Flying back from Zagreb via Munich on wednesday evening last week, I was looking out of the window of the aircraft and noticed a big red object shining in the dark. It took me some time to realise it was the Allianz Arena, radiating that there was a Bayern Munchen home game going on while we passed it in the sky. Beautiful sight and amazing architecture!

Why Zagreb? I was addressing an audience there in friendly Croatia....this time I delivered a talk on implementing learning cycles in business processes.

Back on the blog, addressing the world ;-)

2006-11-05T16:57:00.000+01:00

After a long period of absence, a sign of life. After a month's holiday in France in August, returned to business and immediately got flooded in all sorts of projects (as usual). Work took me as far as Bangkok, where I worked with a group of very friendly and hospitable Thai, delivering a course in knowledge auditing and knowledge mapping. Some action pics were taken during a public seminar over there on Oct 20, small me on stage in the distance..:

New to the game

2006-07-02T22:05:00.000+02:00

Just created a quick collage with some pictures I took yesterday in Amsterdam. As you can see, I'm new to the game of digital photography (I have had a digital camera for years, but didn't really use it that much). Now we have four in the house, causing a ripple effect: we need new computers, new screens, photo editing software, battery chargers, more disk storage and possibly a new TV....

Categories: photos

Flickr as a content migration tool?

2006-06-29T19:05:00.000+02:00

Hmmm, I was wondering whether you could use Flickr to temporarily store a photo set (with tags per photo) and then later download the entire set with the metadata still intact and linked to the photos. I initially thought that was impossible.....

It would be good to have the easy tagging facilities of Flickr to process a set of photos by tagging them and then download them with the new metadata attached to each photo and then migrate the content to a content management system.

Apparently tools such as FlickrDown or FlickrExplorer should give you the missing link: download the photos and get the Flickr tags linked to the photos stored in e.g. iptc/exif fields, but I haven't tried that yet. So, no verdict yet.

Categories: photos, categorisation

QQUIP visualiser now live

2006-06-29T08:28:00.000+02:00

A nice project I helped materialise has now resulted in a website with a fine visualiser front-end. Interested? Check the QQUIP Website.

Categories: visualisation, KM, categorisation

Back to the future

2006-06-29T08:06:00.000+02:00

My colleague (to the far left here) undug this little picture of our visit to XEROX Parc (now simply PARC) in Palo Alto, probably 8 years ago.

I'm to the right, still very young...

What hasn't changed though, is our common interest in fun projects and extraordinary concepts and technologies.

Categories: AI, photos

ZOOMMMMM

2006-05-24T19:23:00.000+02:00

Cool zooming in on this face!

Categories: Photos, Visualisation

Thames Path Run

2006-05-21T21:13:00.000+02:00

In London, for business. Near London Bridge. Running gear in the bag, allowing me to finally run part of the southern Thames Path. Starting at London Bridge up to Greenland Pier and back, a really interesting route. First past London City Hall:

then passing Tower Bridge through Butler's Wharf:

and on to Rotherhithe, passing the Engine House of the Brunels (father and son), serving during the construction of the first Thames tunnel (a fantastic story by itself):

Continuing along the Thames, on a path that has multiple sections like this:

You'll pass nice pubs like this (the Angel in Rotherhithe):

You'll progress in the direction of Greenland Pier and you'll have a nice view across the river overlooking Canary Wharf:

On the way back a glorious view of Tower Bridge in the evening sunshine....

(I didn't make the pics, I just ran....)

Categories: Running, London

It could get worse

2006-04-23T21:57:00.000+02:00

Extreme driving lessons in Saigon. Great spotter's place for Honda Club affectionados, though.

Categories: distributed, intelligence, traffic

A pledge for distributed intelligence

2006-04-21T22:08:00.000+02:00

If you watch this episode of India Driving then you'll be certainly convinced that distributed intelligence is a good way to solve a complex problem!

Categories: AI, intelligence, distributed, control

Repertory grid

2006-04-14T17:24:00.000+02:00

The Centre for Person-Computer Studies provides a free copy of a basic repgrid tool that you can use to elicit expert classification knowledge. Download the tool and use the 'elicit grid' script to guide you through a typical bottom-up knowledge acquisition session.

Categories: KM, knowledge-acquisition

Big, bigger, biggest?

2006-04-02T18:13:00.000+02:00

I was wondering: what is the biggest online community in the world, let's say defined as having the largest number of registered users on a given day in a year? Big Boards gives some insight, but having read an article about Bebo, the numbers given by Big Boards are dwindled by the membership numbers of these social networking places: Bebo should have around 22 million registered users, MyPlaces.com is said to have 50 million user names on record. South Koreans flock together in CyWorld in their millions. Couldn't find a definite answer though. Another question would be: who has the largest number of person data on (electronic?) record? The Chinese post office?

Any 'official' rankings out there?

Categories: km, communities

Knowledge recycling

2006-03-29T19:28:00.000+02:00

This week is becoming a somewhat melancholic trip down competency lane, as I'm reminded, triggered by several client requests, to work I undertook 8 to 12 years ago. I rediscovered (trawling server archives and even floppy disks) my own work in teaching interaction design, knowledge modelling (working with sound engineers and speech therapists as case material, quite eclectic) and group facilitation. One of my favourite subjects in the course I taught on interaction design were the Gestalt principles, well explained by this text (the picture in this post is a teaser).

Seeing all my slides and other teaching material, there's lots that can easily be reused, and I'm sure it will be! More later.

Categories: education, KM

Scenario thinking for schools

2006-03-26T21:28:00.000+02:00

ISP Wijzer, a Dutch advisory service for schools seeking support for their internet provision recently organised a scenario thinking session, to which yours truly contributed. Report found here, including a podcast (all in Dutch).

Categories: Scenariothinking, Education