As anyone who has followed my blog should have noted, I think that particular conferences are exceptionally fruitful as networking and learning experiences. It should therefore be no surprise that I am eyeing some upcoming conferences.

There are five that I have my eye on at the moment, although I won’t be able to go to RMAA in September unfortunately.

• Oz-IA Conference on the weekend of the 20th and 21st September at Double Bay in Sydney
• Web Directions South on the 25th and 26th September at Darling Harbour in Sydney
• actKM on the 14th and 15th October at beautiful University House, ANU, Canberra
• Online Information 2008 on the 2nd-4th of December in London, UK.
• Records Management Association of Australia Convention (RMAA) on the 7th-10th September in Sydney

Whether I can go to all of them will depend on what leave I have available and how much I can afford in conference fees. However, I will definitely be going to Online Information in London (thanks for the non-profit organisation discount) since that is the key reason for my UK trip, fully paid for by myself I might add. For the other conferences, I will have to see what is possible.

In my current role at The Fred Hollows Foundation I am working with my community education co-ordinator to put together a teacher reference group to provide input and comment on development education materials aimed at school students.

I am exploring Ning at the moment to get a better understanding of its capabilities as a potential tool for use in establishing this educational reference group. One of the benefits of Ning is the ability to have an invitation-only member forum in which to communicate and discuss various educational issues with a reference group who may not otherwise meet together in person.

I’d be interested in hearing about any experiences with Ning, or other systems, that have been used to develop educational initiatives and teaching materials in a professional reference group setting. I would be especially interested in experiences from the international development and NGO educational areas.

I was alerted today to this blog post from ReadWriteWeb on social networking. The blog post cites some media commentary on a study that says that social networking is a waste of money. The report is based on a survey of over 100 US businesses. Despite spending millions of dollars, the companies could see little tangible benefit from their investments. Much of the disappointment reflected the fact that the numbers of community members weren’t into the tens of thousands, a metric I am not really supportive of to define success for online communities.

Without seeing the complete study, I am not aware of the specifics of the report and its conclusions. However, what I can comment on is that social networking is not about technology - it’s about people. If a corporation wants to spend $1 million on social networks without understanding what social networking is about, and how and why people should be engaged, then it will simply fail. It should come as no surprise that developing online communities without focusing on the people is a recipe for disappointment.

I am often perplexed that companies still don’t understand social networks and communities. Is it because company management employ “workers” rather than “human beings”? Does management not see that social interaction happens all around them and that much of what is work today in the West is knowledge work based on working with other people? Is the social connection not clear here?

Companies really need to understand what they are trying to achieve and how social networking will work before embarking on costly high-tech investments. These days you can have a social network pretty much at no cost.  Have a look at what you can do on Facebook or Ning, for example. There are of course more sophisticated solutions if that’s what is required by the people in the online community. I am not convinced such high-tech costly solutions are always necessary.

The ReadWriteWeb blog post also identified that technology was not the answer but added that developing a social network around a product -especially cat litter - might not be the best approach.

In terms of product communities, I am not so dismissive. I believe that it is possible to successfully run online communities around products - perhaps not all products! However, the challenge here is in making engagement with people in the online communities authentic, and not just another vehicle for digital junk advertising and marketing-speak. Phony communities promoting particular products are even worse!

There must be some thinking around why people would want to be involved in your product community and how the company will engage and interact with that community. Above all, what is the purpose of the social networking interaction for the consumer, how will the company respond, and how will the consumers in the online community and the company benefit?

Dell has an online community. IdeaStorm is part of that community. IdeaStorm allows consumers to interact with the Dell company, offer suggestions and feedback, give opinions and value ratings, and generally provide a communication channel into the company. It’s even possible to get real-time interaction these days using Twitter!

Dell has recognised the importance of engaging with people on the web. As Lionel Menchaca from Dell said in a podcast from the SXSW Interactive Conference 2008, conversations about Dell products are happening on the web and in the blogosphere anyway so it is important for companies to be involved in the conversation. Establishing a community forum is a good way of doing that.

Participating and listening to the conversation is where there is enormous value for companies. Social networking plays a positive role in engaging with consumers and using the power of the network to generate and stimulate ideas and discussion.

It really is the people who count.

A couple of months ago WordPress started adding automatically generated links to the bottom of the comments section on WordPress blogs. WordPress calls them “possibly related posts”. The rationalisation was that these automatically generated links gave the commenter or comment viewer the option of seeing similar blogging posts from WordPress bloggers. The idea seems to make sense, based on the options one has on Youtube and Amazon (although I have more faith in Amazon than the others).

However, I have noticed some interesting links popping up at the foot of my comment sections. My post yesterday generated a couple of comments and so the automatically generated links were added by WordPress, one to a site on rude cartoons. Now I am definitely not prudish, but I didn’t really feel that such a site was really appropriate to the kind of stuff I want to talk about and the tone of my own blog.

By inference, these links are associated with me and the character and content of my own blog. I have no control over what automatically generated sites WordPress chooses to associate with my blog. I have no say over whether the content is appropriate, according to my standards. WordPress and their monkeys at Sphere determine these links using a “document genome” to do the link matching (sounds exciting, doesn’t it?).

The other issue is that maybe I don’t want my readers traipsing away from my site to explore these automatically generated links. I may want the readers of my comment section to stay on my blog and browse the rest of the site’s content without being drawn away by possibly related posts. And “possibly related” hardly fills me with great confidence that the linked blog posts have any commonality at all.

Furthermore, I can see how this particular automatically generated linking feature could be extended into the realm of advertising, akin to Google ads. How much of any revenue stream will be made by WordPress and how much by the bloggers? I’d be interested in hearing if WordPress is looking at commercialising the automatically generated links to make advertising available in this manner.

Now I want to give WordPress a chance with their automatically generated links to other WordPress blogs. I do believe in serendipity and I do think that cross-linking with other blogs on similar topics is an interesting feature (although doesn’t a blogroll perform the same or similar function?). WordPress said that they are looking at “tweaking” the results to your liking so this is a move in the right direction.

WordPress does allow the automatic linking feature to be switched off all together. I will monitor the automatically generated links more closely in the coming weeks and decide how useful or distracting these links turn out to be. I want to give WordPress a chance but I am annoyed at the lack of control I have as to the relevance and appropriateness of the automatically generated content.

I am playing “wait and see” for the moment.

When I was a kid at primary school, a favourite project of mine was cutting out the word balloons from cartoon strips in newspapers, pasting the cartoon strip down on white paper, then rewording the balloons with a story of my own invention. I remember that the Fred Bassett comic strips were a particular favourite.

One of the initiatives I am looking at in my knowledge management work at The Fred Hollows Foundation is the use of cartoons for knowledge discovery and for use in simple interactive games. It’s not a big focus for me at the moment, but the thinking is working away in the background.

My thoughts were triggered by a discussion last week at the Cognitive Edge course in which we talked about the displacement of personal stories into another character, thereby overcoming the potential reluctance to reveal negative experiences, in a non-threatening way. One of the exercises we did at the course was in developing a set of representational characteristics to develop an archetype. I am not necessarily looking to do the same thing, but I am interested in exploring cartoons (especially the word bubble variety) to generate story fragments for learning and knowledge discovery. 

Whether something comes of this interest in my current role remains to be seen. However, a cartoon character drawing of the iconic Fred Hollowswould be a great start (by the way, there’s a travelling information and photography display on tour through NSW public libraries about Fred - here’s the itinerary). Unfortunately, my artistic skills in caricature drawing are rather poor, to say the least!

My strong interest in the use of cartoons for knowledge discovery has an education side to it too. I remember many years ago when I worked at Australian Freedom From Hunger Campaign, we used a ventriloquist (his name was Kit, if I recall correctly) and his puppet to promote our development education message to primary school kids - a most successful and entertaining project for us. 

From puppets to cartoons and comics, how effective can they be in today’s world? How can I use cartoons in the context of developing more meaningful educational engagement with school kids and the youth market, particularly in the area of international development, blindness prevention, and the work of The Foundation?

I’d be interested in hearing if anyone out there in the big wide world has been actively developing and using comics or cartoons in international development education or youth engagement projects. Please feel free to make comments on my blog (if you’re the first, click on the no comments tag to start the ball rolling).

I have finished tidying up my notes from the Cognitive Edge accreditation course I did in Sydney last week. There was plenty to go through but I feel the notes only just scratched the surface! Dave Snowden certainly covered a lot of territory!

I have listed some key knowledge fragments from the course that I particularly liked:

• correlation is not causality
• a complex system is always different from its parts
• retrospective coherence gives us the benefit of hindsight but not the benefit of future-telling
• with complexity, one can replicate starting conditions but not outcomes
• using safe-fail in the complex domain, “go forward, probe and experiment”, because we don’t know the answer
• amplify “good” weak signals
• we use “ritual” to trigger identity (and we each have multiple identities)
• archetypes are collective representations, not caricatures
• metaphors are good for human understanding
• humans use pattern recognition intelligence; we are not an information processing machine
• any time a measure becomes a target it is no longer a measure
• and my favourite line, “cynics are people who care”, since they are the ones looking for a better way to improve their organisations (hear, hear!).

There was much more from the course, and plenty to reflect upon. I will do some more reading, thinking and writing. For now, I am chasing up some of the author references in my notes (Sutcliffe, Thom, Kaufmann, and Klein, among others).

I have been very busy of late so my blogging has suffered. I start the new financial year here a tad late, but afresh with some key insights from recent educational learnings.

Most recently, I have just completed the Cognitive Edge accreditation course with Dave Snowden in Sydney. The three days were intellectually intense and fascinating. Whilst I have seen Dave perform at a number of conferences before, and read many of Dave’s research papers and Dave’s blog (now added to my blogroll), I have a far better understanding of his work and his personality than I did before.

As an aside, whilst I don’t doubt his passion for his beloved Wales rugby side, I do doubt his judgement on their abilities! I guess we will have to wait and see how the Australians go in the rugby Tri-Nations (against New Zealand and Rugby World Cup holders, South Africa) to see if the Wallabies can show some top tier talent.

I have to complete the rewriting of my notes (they are a scrawl!) and chase up some references before making comment here about my Cognitive Edge experience. I expect to make some observations about the learning from the course next week. Suffice to say, the course was well worth the effort and the money!

Jeremiah writes a great blog post about the way in which organisations (employers) will need to deal with the entry of socially-connected Gen Yers into the workforce, and the problem employers face with the loss of corporate knowledge with the exiting of the baby boomers.

There is little doubt in my mind that employers should make use of the networked Gen Yers as much as possible. Networking can provide a pool of intelligence beyond the internal reach of an organisation. At the same time, Gen Yers are adept at using their peer networks for both social and workplace connectivity. Being connected is the norm for Gen Yers, and part of their identity and skill set they bring to a job.

As to the potential loss of corporate knowledge as baby boomers retire, this is a more fundamental problem. It is true that alumnis provide a way of establishing a connection between a former employee and the organisation. The question is: are alumnis effective and do they really make a difference?

I suspect that alumnis have a range of outcomes, from practically zero to the occasional peaks, depending on how the alumni is set up and how members choose to make themselves available.

The key to keeping your exiting baby boomers connected, to my mind, is not just the business connection, but the social connection. The social connection is more likely to keep ex-employees interested, especially in the retirement years when additional time is available. Social relations occur at work all the time, perhaps under-appreciated by employers, but nevertheless important to employees. Tap into these social networks with your alumni or some other social-business model. The chances of keeping the exiting baby boomers connected with the organisation and its people will be all the more likely.

As you can see, the common element that organisations need to embrace is social: both the Gen Yers and the exiting baby boomers can be of most use when they stay socially connected as well as business-connected.

Patrick Lambe’s blog post about getting management read-in is very timely for me.

Patrick discusses how we might tackle an organisational audit across information management, records management, and knowledge management. The usual response is to write a report, perhaps do a presentation to senior management after the report has been read, and then establish the level of buy-in and commitment to the proposed project. Often, these types of projects are couched in terms of managing risk, particularly in document and records management.

I am about to embark on a range of activities at work, and partly for the same reason: the first project is to develop a business case for records and document management (including an assessment of risk). In addition, I will be developing a knowledge management strategy, and my team will be undertaking a content inventory of the intranet site.

Now I happen to think that senior management buy-in actually comes before the “reading-in”, as Patrick calls the report-reading stage. The work leading up to the actual report is just as important as the report itself, and must include conversations and discussions with (and between) senior management and all stakeholders.

Conversation, as highlighted in this book I’ve just read by Patricia Shaw, is critical. Yet conversation is often underrated because somehow everyone thinks that the right conversations happen automatically!

Patrick rightly identifies the difficulty of getting the attention and comprehension from senior management for a project. Senior management often does not understand what the project is actually about. However, it is up to us to start the conversation with these people as early as possible, defining the purpose and using appropriate language to enhance understanding. And sometimes, these senior managers may not even realise that the conversation they are having with you is actually more than just an informal chat.

If you can achieve that, your report will have a much better chance of getting both read-in and buy-in.

I want to emphasise the importance of defining and understanding purpose, as I touched upon in my blog post from yesterday. Defining and understanding purpose is critical for information architecture, communication strategies, knowledge management and communities of practice.

One of the difficulties in looking at purpose - the reason why - is from whose perspective one looks. And here, purpose is what will identify that perspective.

When designing a communication strategy, for example, you need to know your audience. Your audience is who you define to be the people you want to communicate the message to, or interact with. No good trying to communicate to vegetarians that a T-bone steak is a hearty meal! Define your target or market segment.

Sometimes the target market selects itself. When I established communities of practice at Rabobank Australia I recognised the target market very quickly from establishing a good understanding of the business and the people who worked in the business. I could see that there was enormous potential to leverage the intellectual capital of the organisation throughout its disaggregated office network and three internal organisational pillars. But now what?

In establishing communities of practice I needed to define the purpose in terms of my target market. What do they need and what would they get out of a community of practice? From the perspective of the target group (and with whom I actively communicated and participated with), it was clear that there was a need, there was a culture of support and helpfulness, and there was a strong interest in particular subject knowledge corresponding to business and client needs. The purpose was therefore to connect knowledge and knowledge needs within specific business domains through the use of communities of practice.

At the same time, I had to make sure I was using the language of my target market when discussing their knowledge and information practices and needs. The term “communities of practice” was not going to work. Instead, I used a metaphor that was easily understood and represented the social and conversational context that was at the heart of my communities.

By defining purpose and using a language the target groups could understand, the establishment and early adoption of communities of practice by a critical mass of participants meant that we were on track from the start for a successful knowledge management initiative.

Purpose should be at the heart of our knowledge management and information architecture conversations, as it should be in most things.