Devil’s Dictionary on Copyright. The new edition of The Devil’s Dictionary has many swell corkers, but I’m quite partial to this one:
copyright, noun
The notion that you can protect from the future what you stole from the past.
Link (Thanks, Jason!) [Boing Boing Blog]
That sums it up pretty nicely.
Where are the KM discussions?. There seems to have been a dramatic drop in the level of on-line KM discussion across all the key forums since the end of the first quarter '03. Let's take a tour: The EU Knowledge board has closed its forms… [Knowledge-at-work]
Denham Gray starts a blog, Knowledge at Work, in addition to his KMWiki and his frequent thoughtful comments on existing blogs. I've certainly benefitted from his generous contributions to my thinking. I've subscribed to his feed and am looking forward to being able to follow his contributions more easily.
Denham is focused on the interactions between knowledge workers level of knowledge management, so it's intriguing that he's picked up on a drop in activity in discussion forums and email channels devoted to KM. Certainly, in my own case, I've found a blog to be a better forum for striking a balance between developing my ideas about knowledge management and knowledge work and sharing those ideas with the broader community of interest/practice around the topic. I find the signal to noise ratio of blogs much higher and much more susceptible to management than in threaded discussions or mailing lists.
For those of you who are interested in the case method as a tool for teaching and learning, David Garvin of the Harvard Business School has an excellent article in the September-October issue of Harvard Magazine. Better yet, it is available online:
All professional schools face the same difficult challenge: how to prepare students for the world of practice. Time in the classroom must somehow translate directly into real-world activity: how to diagnose, decide, and act. A surprisingly wide range of professional schools, including Harvard’s law, business, and medical schools, have concluded that the best way to teach these skills is by the case method. [Making the Case: Professional education for the world of practice]
Garvin’s research and writing have focused on organizational learning long before it was a popular buzzword. This article offers extensive background on the origins and history of case method teaching as well as insights into how it is evolving.
Power to the Edge: A new book by Dave Alberts and Richard Hayes – open sourced in its entirety by CCRP.
This book is truly a must-read for anyone interested in decentralization and the social and organizational relevance of shifting power to the edge, whether in a commercial or a defense context. As you read about the technology enablers of the edge, it'll become clear why products such as Groove – as COTS enablers of the fully-networked collaborative environment – have such immediate relevance to the defense community.
A debt of gratitude goes to John Stenbit and Lin Wells for catalyzing the creation of this tremendously timely, useful and relevant piece of work. [Ray Ozzie's Weblog]
Something to add to my high-priority reading list (as opposed to my much longer “get to it someday” readling list). There's certainly major new possibilities in organizational design that make it feasible to distribute decision making more widely and the competitive environment makes that distribution much more strategically relevant.
Classic Video Games And Computers. While looking up music lyrics i found myself clicking on one 1980s site's link to classic video games. They turned out to be implemented in Flash — yuck, but in the usual Net way it lead to me reading up on early VideoGameHistory. The real gem on that front is Stewart Brand's 1972 article from Rolling Stone, on Spacewar and computing in general:
I asked Alan Kay if Spacewar had been played over the Net.
Since I was looking for emulators anyway, I also dug up the most recent version of VICE, which among other things emulates the CommodorePet, my first computer. [AbbeNormal – Abbe Normal]
Another example of all the good stuff you can find on the web. Brand's Rolling Stone article is one of those classics that I've been wanting to lay my hands on for a while.
Of course, this is available as a labor of love. While you're at the site, check out the rest of the coverage about the original Spacewar.
Dan Bricklin has finally attached an RSS feed to his blog. Thanks, Dan. Over the past year, the number of Web and eMail holdouts has been steadily (and thankfully) decreasing. A few remaining that I'd love to see embracing RSS in their subscriber notification & distribution models: Mark Anderson's SNS, Esther Dyson's Release 1.0, Dave Farber's IP. C'mon, Mark, Esther & Dave … it's truly a “reader-friendly” approach. [Ray Ozzie's Weblog]
I've been reading all my news exclusively via my Radio aggregator for sometime now. One site I really miss – is “Good Morning Silicon Valley“. I really wish they had an RSS feed.
Another blogger sees the light.
As Ozzie says, RSS is “truly a 'reader-friendly' approach.” If making it easier for your readers is one of your priorities, there's no excuse for making them come to your site if they want to focus on your words and ideas in an aggregator.
Semantic Web. Semantic Web, proper noun: An attempt to apply the Dewey Decimal system to an orgy. [The Devil s Dictionary (2.0)] [Seb’s Open Research]
Finally, something that captures why I can’t get terribly interested or excited about discussions of the semantic web. It’s fundamentally a recapitulation of the neats v. scruffies arguments from the early days of AI research. I am firmly in the scruffy camp despite my deep respect for librarians.
Apropos of the gift economy of weblogs, here’s a great little story courtesy of David Gurteen on courtesy among scholars.
The scholar’s courtesy. A few weeks back I met with a very interesting woman called [Shane Godbolt] who works for the National Heatth Service (NHS) in the UK.
As she valued my website and newsletter – she brought me several ‘knowledge gifts’ in return as a ‘thank you’. This is just what I love about Knowledge Sharing – you get back as mcuh as you give – if not more [
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Amongst these gifts was a beautiful little story about the importance of acknowledging the sources of your ideas – regardless of whether they are in ‘print’ or not.
I received an early lesson about acknowledging others from my mentor George Spindler. The Spindlers were houseguests visiting me after I took a full-time academic appointment upon completion of doctoral studies. I eagerly shared an early draft of a chapter I had been invited to write, tentatively entitled “Concomitant Learning”.
Spindler was up early the next morning, but to my disappointment I found him looking through materials he had written (my library contained many of them) rather than reading my new draft. He had already read and enjoyed my article, he explained, but he expressed disappointment at my failure to credit him as a source of inspiration for the concept that provided my title and rationale. He had been searching for the citation I should have made. “But you’ve never written about it ,” I explained, reaffirming what I already knew and he was beginning to suspect. “I got the idea from you, but you only suggested it in a seminar. There was no publication to cite.”
Technically (and luckily ) I was correct, as his search revealed. That wasn’t the entire lesson however. “No matter where or how you encounter them,” he counseled, “always give credit for the sources of your ideas. It’s so easy to do so : so appropriate to good scholarship … and so appreciated.”
Never again have I limited my acknowledgements only to people whose ideas are in print. And I, too, have “so appreciated” that courtesy when extended to me!
Harry F. Wolcott, Writing up qualitative research, 1990, pp.72-73). Quoted in Blaise Cronin, The scholars courtesy, the role of acknowledgement in the primary communication process. Taylor Graham 1995, p122. [Gurteen Knowledge-Log]
Na ve though it may be, I continue to believe that knowledge hoarding and information hoarding are fundamentally pathological behaviors that have little chance of surviving in the face of healthy organizations. People who really know stuff are always willing and eager to share their interests and knowledge with others. Those who feel compelled to hoard their knowledge do so because of the meagerness of their holdings not because of their riches. Dolly Levi is the patron saint of the knowledge economy not Ebenezer Scrooge.
One of the fundamental pleasures of blogging and of having an eclectic subscriptions list is that someone out there is going to point you toward something you would never find on your own that you enjoy immensely. The following comes from Richard Gayle’s weblog and fits that aspect of blogging perfectly.
My mother sent me a link to some interesting essays by author Jane Haddam. One has a great title Why I Don’t Vote Republican which is actually a more mild and well thought-out essay than the title would suggest. Be sure and check out the sidebars: The God Thing, The Money Thing and The Stupid Thing. Her other recent essay, Jane’s Rules of the Road, offers some very good points about online discussions. I enjoyed reading all of them. [A Man with a Ph.D. – Richard Gayle’s Weblog]
We live in a world that denigrates thinking. With blogs you can surround yourself with those who revel in it. It’s a gift economy where the gifts are thoughts, ideas, and perspectives that can widen your horizons if you’re willing to accept the gifts as they appear on the threshold of your aggregator.
Hylton Jolliffe of Corante pointed me to this great post on one of Corante’s weblogs that I don’t frequent. Very helpful in understanding issues I encounter every day.
‘Tis Folly To Be Wise
I came across an article in my files today that I thought I’d share. It’s by the late Calvin Mooers, an information scientist. He addressed his colleagues on the question of why some information systems got so much more use than others – often with no correlation between the amount of use and how useful the tools actually were.
“It is my considered opinion, from long experience, that our customers will continue to be reluctant to use information systems – however well designed – so long as one feature of our present intellectual and engineering climate prevails. This feature – and its relevance is all to commonplace in many companies, laboratories, and agencies – is that for many people it is more painful and troublesome to have information than for them not to have it.”
When I first read this, I experienced that quick shock of encountering something that you feel as if you’d known all along, without realizing that you knew it. Of course. It’s not a new idea, but we keep having to learn it over and over. Mooers again:
“Thus not having and not using information can often lead to less trouble and pain than having and using it. Let me explain this further. In many work environments, the penalties for not being diligent in the finding and use of information are minor, if they exist at all. In fact, such lack of diligence tens often to be rewarded. The man who does not fuss with information is seen at his bench, plainly at work, getting the job done. Approval goes to projects where things are happening. One must be courageous or imprudent, or both, to point out from the literature that a current laboratory project which has had an extensive history and full backing of the management was futile from the outset.”
Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. I’ve seen these examples made real right in front of my eyes, and more than once. Have I mentioned that Mooers wrote all this in 1959? The problem has not lessened one bit since then. If anything, our vast information resources and the powerful tools we have to dig for it have made things worse. Just try being the person who finds a patent claim that stops a project in its tracks, one that was missed while the work went on for months. Or find out that a close analog of the lead compound was found to be toxic twenty years ago.
We’re supposed to be able to find these sorts of things. But everyone assumes that because it’s possible to do it, that it’s been done. Taken care of: “Didn’t we see that paper before? I thought we’d already evaluated that patent – isn’t that one one that so-and-so found? It can’t be right, anyway. We wouldn’t have gone this far if there were a problem like that out there, clearly.”
My rule, which I learned in graduate school and have had to relearn a few times since, is to never take anything on faith when you join a new project. Go back and read the papers. Root through the primary literature. Look at the data and see if you believe it. If you let other people tell you what you should believe, then you deserve what you get when it comes down around your ears.
I don’t think we can afford this kind of behavior any longer either as organizations or as individual knowledge workers, although there’s no question we continue to reward it. Two things have changed.
One is that the excuse that it is too difficult or expensive to track down and check relevant information is no longer tenable. The problem has changed. The risk today is that the potentially relevant information is too vast and easily obtained and threatens to overwhelm you. This can be managed with modest investment in learning how to search.
The second thing that has changed is a requirement to understand what kinds of information pose the greatest risks to an initiative. You may be reluctant to go searching for the “ugly fact” but your competitors may not be so hesitant.
What’s tricky is that you still operate in an environment of imperfect information. One of the entries in my personal collection of quotes worth thinking about comes from Samual Butler; “Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.” More information may be available but you still have to make a decision and there’s always a timetable. But you now have to think explicitly about what information to seek out within the limits of the time available. The old excuses are gone.