Curiouser and Curiouser!

Good conference call today between Ross and Adina of SocialText and Paolo and I.  We all shared of our vision and our plans for the future which seem to be quite complementary.  It's good to talk to other people doing interesting things in this space and I hope that we get an opportunity to work together.  Certainly we both believe in the importance of supporting standards which, for us, means a big focus on RSS2.0 and XTM.

At a time when the US government seems to be acting not entirely with the backing of it's citizens or necessarily in their long-term best interests I found the following article: "Lincoln's spectacular lie" quite interesting.

Bill Bryson's book Made In America speaks very eloquently about the war of independence and many of the myths that have grown up surrounding both it and the formation of the union.  I find the whole subject fascinating.

Staff Directories.

Column Two has posted a "list of what you might consider including in your staff directory." A few extras we are considering for our staff directory, in addition to those on James' list, include:

• regular work hours
  
• telecommuting days with contact info
  
• teams you are a member of (we are a team-based staff)
  
• teams you are interested in
  
• self-selected subject areas of expertise (drawn from our thesaurus)
  
• self-selected subject areas of interest (also drawn from our thesaurus)
  

[High Context]

On the original post, Phil Wolff comments:

Check out http://tacit.com. They mine worker emails, blogs, and documents to extract full-text profiles. It's almost impossible to anticpate every need, and always impossible to get everyone to fill out such comprehensive self descriptions. Tacit presents their mining results to you, letting choose what to share with your colleagues and whether to share it anonymously. On the search side, you find three French speakers with an HR background, two with public contact info and one anonymously that tacits contacts on your behalf.

That's why klogging becomes so important. Lots more description of things that interest and matter to each person.

I've been spending some time thinking about how to employ k-logs in a business and, in particular, in a business which does not primarily see itself as a "knowledge business" but as a production business.  I'm thinking about the challenges of getting people who don't routinely use computers as part of their work to not only become part of a KM project but to thrive in it.

It's probably no surprise that I think k-logs are a good idea but, in the 6 months or so since I took up this sword I haven't really seen the practical evidence of this.  Where are the big deployments?  Where are the articles and papers?

I think k-logs struggle when it comes to practical implementation because, good idea or not, they do not stand on their own.  They struggle without a wider context in which they can make sense.  This leads me back to a question I have mulled before which is about the boundary between k-logs and the legacy intranet.

k-logs, to me, should be the living, beating heart of an organisation.  The posts racing from aggregator to aggregator are like the blood pumping around the organism, connecting parts together and ensuring they are healthy.  But if these posts are not to be ephemera then they have to go somewhere, they have to gain a context within the wider organisation and it's memory systems.

I predict that successful k-logging will require an interface between k-logs themselves and more established systems & groups.  At the moment I think the 3 most likely candidates are:

• Communities of Practice
• Best Practice Programs
• After-Action-Reviews

Each of these has a review element and a sense of producing something in aggregate from what they review.  I think it will be these groups who will mine an organisations k-logs and make best use of them.  And it will be participation in such groups that will create loops back into the heart of the organisation, keep it connected, keep it alive.

Matt Mower asks:

"How do you bring knowledge management to people who do not see knowledge as part of their job?

For example the workers in a process plant. There is knowledge all around them and embedded in the work that they do. How, in practical terms, to do you make them knowledge workers?"

One of the companies in the UK who have embedded KM into a nuts and bolts business is Unipart, which operates in the automotive components and logistics industry. At their head office in Oxford, you're confronted by the Unipart U and various learning facilities before you even get to reception. They also take the Unipart U and put it onto the shop floor where it is immediately available to production workers who need training for the task they're doing right now, who want to learn or share best practices, or who want to discuss issues with colleagues via the web and videoconferencing. Their approach is about "learning at 10:00am and doing at 11:00am". They call this the Faculty on the Floor.

Take a look at their introduction to what they're doing. If you want more information, try contacting Unipart Advanced Learning Systems and talk to some people who enthuse about knowledge workers within production processes with real passion and understanding.

[Making Connections]

I was asking yesterday about how to make KM work with people who do not see themselves as knowledge workers.

My thanks to Simon for providing a spot on example of a production business who seem to be doing something about making KM work.  I especially loved the "learning at 10:00am and doing at 11:00am" idea.

Mugabe: US must disarm. The United States should lead by example and destroy its weapons of mass destruction, says Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe. [BBC News | World | UK Edition]

Sometimes, young Indy, you go too far!!

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!

Smart Mobs picks up on a report by the ACLU which argues that surveillance is increasing, civil liberty guarantees are shrinking, and the combined impact of surveillance data from multiple sources is far greater than the sum of its parts.

Although I only follow the issues from the sidelines, I have growing concerns about corporate and governmental prying. The more my life is easily traced by following electronic trails, the more I worry about who is sniffing those trails out. Whether or not my career as a criminal mastermind is tediously pedestrian is beside the point - the fact that I have nothing to hide makes me more concerned about my actions being watched, logged, collated, catgeorised and cross-referenced.

Sometimes I take comfort in the thought that the more data the government has, the less it will know what to do with it. Trying to integrate it meaningfully will be way too complicated - trying to see and understand patterns across all the disparate data streams is just a cyber-spook's wet-dream.

But then I get back to cold reality. Just because they can't do it, won't stop them trying. The integration may not be meaningful - the patterns may not be understood - but patterns there will be. And in the paranoid world of the cyber-spook, an excess of false positives will be a fair price to pay for tracking down the bad guys.

So my real concern is not that they're sniffing my electronic trail. Sure, it's an invasion of my privacy but it's rather an abstract invasion. My real concern is what cock-eyed conclusions someone will draw from matching this parameter with that pattern and what real-life, concrete actions they will take against me (or you, or any of the other millions of people whose profile just doesn't smell right).

Paranoid? Maybe. Except, they are watching us...

[Making Connections]

Simon neatly identifies the conumdrum facing most of us in relation to privacy issues.  We see our rights being eroded on the back of claims of this or that (today it's terrorism) but we have no trust in the custodians that they will not betray us.

That the government cannot possibly assimilate all the information it eventually hopes to hold does not, however, make me feel any happier.  This is, I think, for two reasons:

1. We have seen many times how a single idea (or cluster of related ideas) can revolutionise an industry completely.  Today they may not be able to use the data in aggregate, but they will keep it and, who knows what they will be able to do tomorrow?
2. The data may not be useful in aggregate but it will be open to targetted abuse.  That is, if my data is separable somehow from everyone elses then what is to stop corrupt officials from selling it to those who, for their own reasons, would wish to use it against me.

Even if these massive TIA style super-databases are a boon in the fight against crime (and I have yet to see the cogent and persuasive arguments for this) I would, I think, still be find the countervailing arguments for liberty more compelling.

Total Information Awareness and it's ilk are sledgehammer solution to the wrong problem.  We should not be asking how to catch more terrorists but how to avoid situations in which terrorists want to kill us.

This Modern World. Call us crazy, but we've begun to suspect racism didn't disappear with Trent. [Salon.com]

Colour coded alerts all round.