Author: Jim

Weblogs and knowledge management . Don’t forget to KISS

Web logs as KM (Con’t). I’ve been struggling with this whole “what is going to make Web logs use successful” question for a while as the idea is getting more an more interest here. The bottom line, I believe is acceptance by classroom teachers as a useful technology. To me, it all starts from there. I think potential users need to know the technology is easy to use, works as advertised, and enhances the educational experience of their students. Absent widespread adoption, it’s a tough sell to try something new on a district level for “managing our knowledge.” But I think there are enough models out there to at least whet their appetites and pilot some uses. From a KM standpoint, Jim McGee finishes off a nice wrapup of Web logs as KM with this:

Weblogs are interesting in organizational KM settings because weblogs are technologically simple and socially complex, which makes them a much better match to the KM problems that matter. One thing that we need to do next is to work backwards from the answer – weblogs – to the problem – what do organizations need to do effective knowledge management. We need to avoid the mistakes of other KM software vendors and not assume that the connection is self-evident.

As usual, this has me thinking. I’ve just been appointed to “champion” the KM/Internal Communications topic at our annual “Critical Issues” gathering next month. That’s when the administrative team sits down to talk about the solutions to the issues that we feel are most important (and this came in at the top of the list.) As such, I need to develop a problem statement, so Jim’s observations are once again distinctly relevant. What exactly are our needs in KM?

  • We have two dozen committees that never “speak” to one another.
  • We have parents interested in our work that can’t access it.
  • We have teachers who could use materials and ideas and opportunities for collaboration.
  • We have students creating a whole heckuva lot of knowledge that gets lost when the day ends.
  • We have data.
  • We have results.
  • We have a lot more situations like this throughout our organization. [emphasis added]

And right now, it’s so hard to get to any of that “knowledge” that it is resulting in a real lack of communication and growing frustration with that fact. I think here it’s almost a question of communicating knowledge more than managing it (although I realize they are the same thing on some levels.) Web logs allow for inexpensive, easy creation and storage or publication of information (or knowledge) that is accessible, archivable, and searchable. Also, Web logs are flexible in terms of access and security. They are at first (and second) blush a viable solution to what is a growing problem. But only, and this is the big one, only if people use them. What I need to keep in mind is to grow into the solution instead of implementing it. I can see the end result in my brain, but I need the patience to nurture it into fruition. [weblogged News]

A nice list of examples of the kinds of simple things that weblogs enable that matter.

The simplicity of weblogs is the central reason for their success and their promise as a tool for making knowledge work easier. That same simplicity also makes weblogs (and wikis for that matter) a hard sell into organizational settings.

Technology vendors do not make money by demonstrating easy solutions to problems. Managerial wisdom in organizations is about learning to apply the 80/20 rule ruthlessly. Technology developers love to solve the tricky problems and handle the edge cases. Technology vendors have all learned to sell against one another through feature wars. No one wants to invest the time to learn how to use the tools at hand to solve the problems at hand.

knowledge workers have limited capacity to absorb new ideas and practices into their already overfull lives. You can suck up that limited capacity in learning the ins and outs of some fancy new knowledge management tool or you can use that capacity for examining individual and group work practices and adapting them. Weblogs and wikis let you dial in that  balance in a different, and potentially better, place than more complex tools.

Here’s a bit of design wisdom that is particularly important now as we seriously begin to think about how to blend technology and organizational practice to get to better knowledge work:

  In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.
  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

If information foraging is the metaphor, are weblogs the ur-farms of the knowledge economy?

Information Foraging.

Information Foraging: “Information foraging is the most important concept to emerge from Human-Computer Interaction research since 1993. Developed at Xerox PARC by Stuart Card, Peter Pirolli, and colleagues, information foraging uses the analogy of wild animals gathering food to analyze how humans collect information online.”

[elearnspace blog]

I think you could make a pretty easy argument linking the upsurge in weblog popularity to how well tuned they are to supporting effective information foraging. Add in good aggregators and perhaps we have the first hints of the knowledge economy equivalent of the transition from hunter-gatherer cultures to agriculture.

I’ll respect it when it ships

Smug Canadian, long rant about Dave and RSS: “This is the path to failure.”

[The Scobleizer Weblog]

Scoble finds a wonderful piece that offers new insight into what’s been going on in the recent RSS debate and in Dave Winer’s decision today to pull Scripting News offline (hopefully not for long – it’s now back).

One insight from Smug Canadian’s post:

Every debate about software always comes down to the same thing, and I find it fascinating that it mimics every fight I’ve ever seen in a meeting room between two or more programmers over a piece of software. You have programmers who have been around a while, who created something that works, who have seen users use software and who have seen failures. And you have the programmer across the table who has no “baggage” from having created that success and who thinks they can instantly improve on the whole deal, nearly always by starting over, and nearly always in a way they suggest.

And a bit further on,

It seems to me that if you want to be a success with XML, and more importantly with one of the few established XML standards in RSS, you need to ignore these people that keep trying to kneecap XML and RSS. The whole point of a “lingua franca” is not what that lingua looks like, it’s whether it works at all and whether anyone has used it. You gain advantage in an open webserver world by building on top of what is established, not by showing up a few years late and saying “it’s nice, but we can make it better.” You can’t, just like you can’t go back to 1992 and make HTML better.

“Lingua franca” triggerred it for me. Courtesy of GuruNet I grabbed the following definition:

lingua franca (l ng‘gw fr ng‘k ) , an auxiliary language, generally of a hybrid and partially developed nature, that is employed over an extensive area by people speaking different and mutually unintelligible tongues in order to communicate with one another. Such a language frequently is used primarily for commercial purposes.

In other words, a language focused on the need to get stuff done now. A language that gets learned in the streets not in the classroom or the academy.

I studied Latin, Greek, and French for years. Sadly, I studied them all inside classrooms. Not a big deal for Latin and Greek, but a truly missed opportunity with French. The few times I tried to use my schoolboy French in the real world, I was absolutely crippled by the notion that I needed to say everything perfectly. One reason that kids learn languages so readily is that they really, really want that cookie up on the counter and they have yet to learn the strange idea that mistakes are bad. Success or failure is about whether they manage to get the cookie.

The tools I use all have warts. I don’t have the time or talent to build them myself. I’m old enough now that I no longer believe in the perfect tool, especially one that is coming Real Soon Now. But I will invest time in learning how to use tools that do exist. And I am willing to cope with the inevitable breakage. RSS and the blogging tools built over the last few years lowered barriers for me to the point where I could get useful stuff done with them, partly because I abandoned the myths perpetuated by software marketers about intuitive interfaces and other fairy tales.

I would hate to lose that and I am anxious. I fear that while engineers debate “edge cases” and argue over whose ego or IQ is bigger than another’s, I will see a hugely powerful set of ideas embodied in tools that work get gobbled up, watered down, and built into the products marketed by the BigCos. For an example of that process, compare the power of outlining tools such as ThinkTank and Grandview with what Microsoft calls an outliner as built into Microsoft Word. For an economy that depends on the quality of its thinking, that’s a dumbing down of ideas we can’t afford no matter how appealing it might appear from a marketing perspective.

The most pernicious thing about this process is how easy it is to suck engineers into this debate trap. FUD is a term that long predates the birth of Microsoft. It’s a strategy that’s been perfected by those with market leads to defend. Their interests are rarely my interests.

Navigating among all the conflicting demands of getting a design that works, converting it to code that ships, and having the patience to bootstrap a user base is hard. It deserves respect.

More gifts; if you share, you learn

Dropping Names, or, Who said that?.

Lilia Efimova picks up on something I too had read over at David Buchan‘s Thought?Horizon referring to a wonderful metafor Jim McGee used:


There’s an old story that I’ve heard described as a Russion proverb. It says that if each one of us takes care of sweeping the sidewalk in front of our own home, we won’t need streetsweepers. It’s worth thinking about how that might apply to the world of knowledge work, both on the level of being an individual knowledge worker yourself and on the level of helping make the other knowledge workers that surround you more effective.

As Lilia is Russian, and the mention of a Russian proverb triggers her curiousity, she starts a search for the story and comes up with Tolstoy as a source. (An act Jim McGee appreciates as a gift, which is a beautiful posting in itself)

In the comment section Jay Cross offers that he’s pretty sure it’s something Goethe wrote.

My first thought on reading the story was “that could be something written by Vondel“, one of the icons of Dutch literature. Sweeping the sidewalk in front of your house is a picture that reminds of the Golden Era which Simon Schama has written so eloquently and amusingly about in his “Embarassment of Riches“. It sounds so cliche-fittingly Dutch, you know, it just has to be by Vondel.

Now how come we try and attribute things that apparently have a familiar ring to it to icons of our cultural background or context? Is it to reinforce the importance of what we’re saying with names that carry authority? Or is it laziness, “let’s attribute it to someone who might have written anything, saves me the time to look it up”. Or even to get away with talking in clichés?

And do we bloggers do the same? If there is anything that pops up in your mind on the way we experience internet, do you think “ah, I probably read that over at David Weinberger‘s”? Are the A-listers our icons of blogospheric culture, whom we can attribute the stuff to we don’t want to fact-check too closely ourselves, but do want people to listen to? Are we building up the reputation of A-listers, to be able to off-load all that general stuff, so we can forget about it ourselves, as Gary L. Murphy suggested recently (and which is backed I think by how Daniel C. Dennett views the evolution of our minds)?

So who did write that story about sweeping the sidewalk in front of your house?

tolstoy.jpg vondel.gif naamloos.bmp
Tolstoy? Vondel? Goethe?

Will the real author please stand up? I bet it is indeed Tolstoy, I trust Lilia on her word. Or is that just my way of escaping fact-checking it myself?

[Ton’s Interdependent Thoughts]

A continuation of a little snowball I started rolling a few weeks back. Courtesy of Ton I learn still more new and interesting things about the little proverb I had picked up along the way.

This little blog-thread illustrates a couple of important points. First it’s a prime counter-example to offer to those who say knowledge management can’t work because people won’t share. Ton. David, Lilia, and I have never met face to face but they’ve become new colleagues in my worldwide network of people I trust. Sharing begets sharing. It only takes a few seeds planted to start the sharing. If you happen to be in an organization that has no one willing to take this kind of small risk, you’ve got deeper problems than I want to deal with.

I suspect that the real reason behind people raising the sharing myth is not organizational resistance. It’s fear of looking stupid; not in front of your peers, but in front of whoever taught your English class back in primary school. That gets to the second point this exchange illustrates. I didn’t worry about whether I had everything right when I posted the story that got this all started. I made the point I wanted to make and I fessed up to my ignorance at the same time. What I got in return for that tiny bit of risk was the opportunity to learn some neat new stuff and a couple of more strands linking me into the web that links people together. Seems like an awful big return for a tiny little risk.

A user tries to follow the Echos of the RSS debate

Echo: Stop the madness!.

Log Format Roadmap. There seems to be quite some excitement around Ram Ruby’s Roadmap. At first I was a little skeptical on the project (why not calling it YASF as in Yet Another Syndication Format?). After reading Tim Bray’s why we need a new format at all I think that it’s worth a try. Recent history tells us that the main divide was between people saying “It has to be powerful and thus not necessarily easy to understand, we will build tools to manage the complexity” and others saying “It has to be simple so that anybody will be able to hack new solutions using it without being an expert”. Both positions make sense. You don’t really need to understand how the jpeg format works to create cool images, but at the same time all of us learned html looking at other people’s pages, because it was relatively easy to understand. Ultimately it’s only a matter of a very little number of tools vendors, most of them small companies, agreeing on a new standard and changing the world. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo’s Weblog]

My first thoughts were “don’t we have enough format arguments as it is?”  I guess I am less skeptical now.  Maybe this is a chance to end the madness and get our collective shit together.

I like the sound of Echo as a name for the new format (much more than PIE).  I think a new name is essential to avoid getting into squabbles about RSS 1.5, 3.0, whatever…

I would prefer that it not use RDF unless that is absolutely necessary.  If there are advantages to having RDF available then Danny Ayers has already shown how this can be achieved.  On the other hand I would like to see some advantage taken of the work that has been done on topic maps, like XTM, XFML and ENT.

I’m also hopeful that Dave’s comment (I was a little suprised not to find a permalink) indicates that he will support the new format although I notice he has not added his name to the list of supporters.

[Curiouser and curiouser!]

Matt pulls together a good collection of posts on what’s been going on in trying to specify a format for weblog posts. The place I found the most usefuf starting point was Tim Bray’s explanation of why we need a new format at all. I found it nicely user oriented.

I depend on other people’s efforts to build the tools I use to do my work. When the engineering debates spill over into incompatibilties and inconsisentcies among the tools my life is harder. As one current example, I would like to subscribe to the RSS feed from the blog thought?horizon. I used to subscribe but it got upgraded to something that my current aggregator tool chokes on. I could send David Buchan an email and point out the problem. Or not.

As a user I don’t really care about the pissing contests that developers like to play. I don’t have the time or the patience to deal with them. I’ve been an early adopter of technology since before I knew what that was. I’m willing to tinker and I like to understand how things work. But I don’t like getting whipsawed. If Bill Gates and Microsoft do something annoying it’s usually time to BOGU. When it’s one of the little guys I’ll place one or two bets and then I get annoyed and then I go somewhere else. 

I want to find ways to support and encourage the innovations like weblogs and wikis that get built because some smart programmer has an itch they need to scratch. I think I get an edge from finding tools before the rest of the pack. And I like to help bring those tools to others who trust me. One way that I control my risk is to make sure that I can get my data in and out of formats that I have some reason to believe are reasonably standard and wide spread. Right now I mostly watch these arguments, worry a lot, and hope they’ll get resolved so I can get on with managing my information environment.