On communities of practice – an example

A workplace initiative at a former workplace that I am really proud of was the introduction of communities of practice (CoP’s) - I named them ”Pubs”. The pubs connected people with a common interest and a common workplace need across three key business units (and some others), and across geographic space in Australia and New Zealand. I have elaborated on this before so I won’t dwell on it here.

Whilst I am not currently working on establishing CoP’s where I work now, I am still interested in hearing about other people’s experiences with these type of knowledge management activities.

I was therefore pleased to read a recent article describing CoP’s within an engineering environment. Allow me to quote at length the relevant example of interest:

“Schlumberger Ltd, a company involved in the gas and energy exploration industry, provides a useful example. A knowledge management system called Eureka links technical experts in its Oilfield Services unit into communities of practice. It is through these communities of practice that relevant tips, tricks, and conceptual understanding are shared. Engineers, regardless of location, can access the collective knowledge of their peers within the company. Each technical expert within Schlumberger has two organizational “homes”—the formal, rational, hierarchically sanctioned home that corresponds to a position on a chart, and the Eureka technical community, the informal, natural, horizontally linked network of peers who share a common interest, goal, or passion regarding what they do to create wealth for the corporation.”

The notion of a formal and informal “system” of knowledge exchange and knowledge distribution is where significant potential exists for organisational knowledge sharing and knowledge rearticulation. I also like the notion of “home” – a safe place in which to have open and frank discussions. I hope that is the case at Schlumberger.

I believe that CoP’s still have a part to play in good knowledge management activities, despite the popularity of blogs and wikis. I am pleased to read that other organisations are finding value in CoP’s as well.

And, talking about value, Patrick Lambe recently blogged about CoP value as an extension of a discussion on the act-km listserv – a discussion in which I also participated. Ascribing value is always important - how the people at Schlumberger do it would be of interest. The challenge is in presenting CoP ”value” to management in a way that delivers meaningful and relevant quantitative AND qualitative information in a form that management is happy to accept and understand.

And the more CoP success stories I hear about, then all the better!

On blog action day 2008 poverty

The 15th October was blog action day for poverty. I was away in Canberra yesterday on more mundane things like knowledge management and the act-km conference (more details in a later post). However, I still wish to highlight the awareness raising hopes of blog action day for poverty with this post.

The UN reports that “the World Bank has revised upward its estimates of the number of the world’s poor from nearly 1 billion to 1.4 billion, drawing on new data that indicates that poverty is more widespread across the developing world than previously thought”. You can also check out the Human Development Report for more facts and figures.

The facts and figures reveal the magnitude of the poverty crisis in the developing world. But of course, here in Australia, we have poverty as well.  Poverty affects Indigenous communities and is largely responsible for the gap in life expectancy between white Australians and Indigenous people.

Since I work for an international development agency in Australia, The Fred Hollows Foundation, I can say with certainty that every contribution makes a significant difference to people whose lives are deeply affected by blindness and vision impairment in developing countries.

Take Simila in Kenya for example. Her mother had to stay at home and couldn’t work or do many of the households tasks for her family. Her daughter, Simila, often had to stay at home and help her mother instead of going to school. By missing out on school, Simila’s level of education is affected that can limit her working opportunities in the future. Children having to stay at home to look after family members because of blindness is a real problem in many developing countries.

Often, with a simple sight-restoring operation, people like Simila’s mother can obtain new-found independence that not only makes a difference to the individual, but to the rest of her family and often the community at large as well. Simila can return to school and look forward to an education, something she is keen to pursue if her dream of becoming a doctor is to be realised.

And vision impairment in developing countries affects a whole range of factors that can contribute to poverty and the poverty cycle. Blind people in developing countries find it extremely difficult to find work and get a regular income. Even working in the fields or with livestock is difficult. No income makes it difficult for families to buy the food they need, pay for school education and materials, and get proper health care. Poverty can exacerbate blindness because health care and preventable treatments can’t be accessed. Poverty can lead to blindness through disease, poor nutrition and poor sanitation.

The recently concluded Cataract Impact Study makes the following observation about the link between vision impairment and poverty and the difference cataract surgery alone can make:

“The results, which were remarkably consistent across countries, showed a marked increase in quality of life after surgery, an increase in activities both in and outside the home, better relationships and an increase in household expenditure. This study strongly suggests that the downward spiral of poverty experienced by people who are blind can be halted or even reversed by modern high quality cataract surgery”.

Poverty is indeed a huge issue. We can make a difference ourselves. We can help by donating to international development agencies, like The Fred Hollows Foundation, lobbying governments to support the UN Millennium Development Goals, and through raising awareness and commitment from people in Australia and all around the world. Blog action day – poverty is part of that crusade.

And as part of The Foundation’s comitment to raising awareness, have a look at the Anti-Poverty Week activities as part of our schools-based community education services from our getfcused web site. We will continue this education campaign with primary schools until 14th November.

On back into the swing of things

I am back to the blogosphere from the two week distraction of the Olympic Games and a week sick with the ‘flu. The paraolympics are coming up next and I shall be watching them keenly. But I can safely say that I will also find the time to give some attention to this blog.

Quite a few interesting things to report on in the next couple of days….

On the value of online communities and social networking

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.

On possibly an announcement from WordPress

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.

On my new job

I start my new full-time job at the Fred Hollows Foundation tomorrow. I will be in charge of the information, knowledge management and education unit of the organisation. I am really looking forward to working back in the NGO sector and in international development. It will also make my involvement in KM4dev and Society for International Development more relevant.

It’s sort of a full circle for me since my first full-time job was working for an international development NGO, Australian Freedom From Hunger Campaign (AFFHC). That was quite some ago, but it feels like yesterday!

There will be some differences for me though, having worked in the Sydney CBD for most of my working life, and now working out in the suburbs. The organisation will also be different to me, having working in the banking and finance industry for almost twenty years.

The new position combines my personal interests and professional skills very well and this match really appealed to me when considering my working options. I look forward to the new challenges with the Fred Hollows Foundation and helping to make a real difference beyond just the organisational borders.

I hope to relate some of my experiences and observations in this new workplace context through more regular blog postings – so stay tuned!

On blogging until you drop

According to this newspaper report, blogging professionally is dangerous to your health. As a non-paid blogger who blogs out of interest (and not as frequently as I would like), I don’t seem to have that kind of health issue.

On blogs and CoP’s

Joitske Hulsebosch blogged about the potential of using blogs with communities of practices (Cop’s). Joitske gives four very useful ways in which blogs can support CoP’s but I just want to focus on one of them. Quoting Joitske:

“A weblog with summaries of discussions can be a repository for the community. An example is the weblog Everything you always wanted to know about capacity development . It is a weblog from ICCOcapacity building advisor”.

Using a blog as a repository for summaries of debate and rich content is a great idea. Some threads in a vigorous discussion in a CoP can be lost in the rumble-tumble of debate. Sometimes the debate is at such an intellectual depth that a summary of the salient points would be a nice feature to have to bring the level of discussion into a broader realm of understanding. This latter point was highlighted for me with a sterling debate among three key protagonists on actkm recently – a debate I really enjoyed but at times found difficult to follow (not helped by my part-time tracking of this exchange at one of my contract jobs).

I liked the thinking behind Joitske’s use of blogs to support CoP’s. As a result, I am doing some thinking of my own as to how weaving narrative into the blog summary may be used to create another dimension to understanding rich content.

On tagging, the grey side

My last two posts have been about tagging based on my presentation last week at the conference in Sydney, ”Enhancing search and retrieval capabilities and performance”.

I want to look at some of the perceived disadvantages of tagging that I briefly mentioned in my presentation:

1. Lack of specificity – refers to the fact that an item can have innumerable headings (tags) and there is no fixed agreement as to the most suitable term. A formal taxonomy and classification system have been the traditional ways of asserting specific terms to items.
2. Ambiguity and inconsistency – because anyone can apply a tag to an item, there will be a multitude of tags that do not clearly and consistently apply to a specific item. Some people may tag something as “locomotive” and another “train”. The same person may use “locomotive” now but three weeks previously used the term “train”. And train may in fact not refer to a locomotive at all (with or without carriages or wagons) but to a wedding dress, a series of thoughts, or to an adult education class.
3. Lack of structure – The traditional relationship between broad and specific terms (the parent-child tree structure that historically organised information into “like things”) is not there in a tagging system. Weinberger refers to a tagging system as one that looks at the leaves on a tree rather than just the branches.
4. Problems with stemming or truncation – words like plurals, or words with a s or z in them.
5. Ceding control of search terminology to the “inexperienced” – using the correct terms is an important exercise not to be trifled with by amateurs and the inexperienced professional.

It is true that there will be imprecision in tag terms and inconsistency in the application of tags to items that look to be the same things. It is also true that the same individual may use different tags over time to describe essentially the same thing. And tagging might thus be perceived as a mess, needing an experienced taxonomist and library professional to make sense for us. People in the information business who like order and structure have a long historical paradigm to work from.

Yet all is not lost. Tagging will become self-refining, gradually highlighting preferred terms (perhaps through a tag cloud) or via suggested or similar headings. Collaborative tagging and folksonomies will help shape a form of group consensus leading to a meaningful sense of order. And technologies will improve to cater for some of the weaknesses of current tagging systems. One example is Raw Sugar.

Overall, tagging will continue to grow simply because digital information will grow at time-warp-like speed. The sheer scale of the digital world, and the cost of ordering that digital information, will not easily permit formal and timely classification. Just imagine trying to keep up with all the blogs in the world, let alone the individual blog posts from each of them. 

Tagging will become more important and self-fulfilling due to both the technology and the demographic changes in society, responsive to the digital world and the need to make sense in it for individuals and their peers. The changing nature of information, and the new consumers and producers of that information, means that change is inevitable.

Interestingly, a recent article highlighted the changing nature of reading – the development of an information browsing culture among the digital natives. The impact of the digital world should not be underestimated.

In looking at tagging so far, perhaps one could say we are in a period of transition from the structure and hierarchy of giving order to physical information (like books, journal articles and celluloid film) to one where digital information allows for innumerable access points, innumerable tags and descriptors, and seemingly available from anywhere.

[Of interest, check out this podcast from Beth Jefferson on transforming public libraries' online catalogues into environments for social discovery of resources that are catalogued not only by librarians, but also by patrons. A salient quote on social cataloguing - collaborative tagging if you like: "the metadata people create by cataloguing content is what enables social search and discovery". Beth Jefferson wants to enhance social search and discovery across North American public libraries through collaborative cataloguing, whether by evaluative comment or by description. Tagging and thesauri may indeed coexist.]

So the question remains – is the traditional way of ordering information and establishing a single authority for fixed terms appropriate in the modern digital world? And practically speaking, what is the right balance between order and miscellany in any given context?

I will feature one more blog post on the tagging issue looking at how the enterprise (the firm, not the fictional space ship), might take to the tagging phenomenon. Stay tuned…

On the positive side of tagging

In the light of what I discussed yesterday with respect to my conference presentation on Tuesday, I want to move on to tagging. Tagging is essentially unstructured metadata that is assigned by the content creator and the readers/users of the content, the latter called collaborative tagging. The user-generated classification that emerges is called a folksonomy.

Examples of digital content using tags include de.licio.us, Flickr, LibraryThing, Technorati, and Youtube. Even the web-based news services are using tags, like the ABC in Australia.

In addition to the tags themselves and the act of tagging content, a collection of tags into a group showing relative emphasis or popularity is called a tag cloud.

There are a number of benefits from using tagging and they can be broadly summarised as the following:

1. terms meaningful to the content creator and/or readers (and not just those terms allowed by a single classification authority)
2. establishes relationships between content and the people connected to the content (both content creators and readers)
3. is inexpensive to undertake, especially in relation to traditional cataloguing and thesauris construction
4. scales exceptionally well, thereby suiting the miscellany of digital space
5. aggregates especially well, thereby harnessing the so-called wisdom of crowds
6. permits multiple access points to information instead of just bibliographic data
7. permits discovery of a range of other items tagged by other content creators and readers
8. overcomes the lack of currency when using traditional fixed forms of metadata (like the established classification systems)
9. is highly participatory in that people freely choose the relevant tags they regard as appropriate to their own content and to the content of others
10. as more applications make tagging available, and as the new digital generations increasingly enter the workforce, tagging will become the established norm in the digital information environment (we can see how blogs may offer such an opportunity)

Point 10 is especially important. There is already some evidence of tagging popularity from a Pew Internet Report showing that nearly one-third of US internet users tagged content. As tagging becomes more familiar and mainstream, new opportunities will open up to enhance the popularity of tagging – what I have called “the tagging locomotive”.

I’ll stop here (but with another post to come) with some recommended readings:

Everything is miscellaneous by David Weinberger

Ontology is overrated by Clay Shirky

Folksonomies: power to the people by Emanuele Quintarelli

Blog inside the enterprise

I have come across reluctance by senior management in the past to consider blogs as a suitable communication medium for engaging readers and encouraging dialogue. I have also heard that “it’s all too hard”.

Check out Naomi Wolf’s Amazon.com blog. This is as simple as it gets and all focused around a single theme. And that theme supports Wolf’s recently published book, The end of America: letter of warning to a young patriot. The blog could be improved, of course, with better content and more linkages. However, the gist of it demonstrates simplicity itself.

Could this be done in a similar fashion in the enterprise? You bet – with the right attitude and some well founded enthusiasm.

Imagine a company that publishes research reports on different industry topics for staff, and external clients and prospects. Imagine putting up a very simple blog to support the research report and any discussions around it. Imagine starting a conversation, creating a dialogue with clients, and working through further discussion and analysis from the original report. Imagine that both the author and readers are better informed and more engaged with each other. Imagine how much more impact that research report would have with readers – the clients and prospects you want to impress.

Imagine…

On Jeremiah’s weekly digest on social networking

Today I want to highlight Jeremiah’s weekly digest on social networking. I find it a valuable and quick read about the social networking space. Jeremiah Owyang is on my blog roll but his weekly digest is too good to hide behind that!

On knowledge management’s crisis of confidence

I read a lot of blogs on knowledge management. I also read articles and I try to read books (although I am doing so at a much slower rate these days). I attend knowledge management conferences and discuss issues with attendees. I talk knowledge management at forums and with friends and colleagues.

What I find is that there is a seeming lack of confidence about “knowledge management” and why it is important. It seems to me that there is much to discuss, plenty of good KM work being done, numerous relevant multidisciplinary approaches, and plenty of opportunities for KM initiatives across organisational boundaries to enhance personal and organisational effectiveness. Yet it is all undone because we can’t define KM in a single sentence, and knowledge management is not “recognised” as a “discipline” unto itself.

In other words, knowledge management is complex and multidimensional, and there is no “authority” to give knowledge management the seriousness it deserves. 

So it is interesting to read yet again – actKM has had a long discussion about what constitutes KM – that there is still conjecture as to what knowledge management is, whether it can become a “discipline”, and whether knowledge management is really something separate from everyday work practices within an organisation.

Some relevant blog posts on the topic have come from Annette and Matt, James Dellow, Gladur, David Gurteen, Lucas McDonnell, Dave Snowden, and Jack Vinson. There are many, many more out there in blogland.

I almost forgot to add the notorious (?) Tom Wilson article: The nonsense of knowledge management in which knowledge management is derided as being just a mere fad – a fad that shows no sign of abating despite it’s lack of clarity.

My definition of knowledge management from my 2003 journal article said this:

“Knowledge management is a collective term for the facilitation of improvements to an organisation’s capabilities, efficiencies and competitive advantage through the better use of its individual and collective knowledge and information resources”.

I still think of knowledge management the same way today in terms of facilitation. And facilitation can be technical by providing tools and it can be behavioural, in terms of embedding work processes that enhance positive knowledge and organisational outcomes.

In fact, knowledge management is likely to continue its amorphous definitional context for the very reason that more and more knowledge management practices are becoming embedded within ordinary day-to-day work.

And this is a good thing…….

On actKM Conference 2007

Yesterday I attended day two of the actKM conference in Canberra. The day was full of thoughtful speakers and enjoyable conversation. The venue was in an unpretentious room located in the lovely grounds of University House at the Australian National University.

David Gurteen opened the morning session with an overview of a range of social networking tools and technologies. David emphasised the practical and the simplicity of these tools in his usual conversational way. His enthusiasm and commitment are infectious! It was good to catch up with him after having met him over a few beers in Fleet a couple of years ago.

Patrick Lambe followed with a workshop using workplace personality archetypes as points of discussion for the active participation of attendees. I have heard Patrick speak about archetypes before. The archetypes reinforce to me how important communication style and personality preferences can be in communicating with people, let alone communicating for influence [it was also good to catch up with Arthur Shelley and finally get a copy of his book on workplace behaviour, called The organizational zoo].

After lunch, Matt Moore facilitated a great participatory workshop on improvisational approaches to brainstorming. Matt used a three stage approach to get people thinking about a particular issue, KM or otherwise. We moved from thinking through standard solutions within our established confines to opening our minds to some outrageous possibilities from where we could refine and develop really useful and practical ideas.

I love hearing Matt talk (and see him facilitate) as he truly loves to think about things and explore possibilities across a range of subjects - always a thought-provoking experience!

Deborah Blackman from the University of Canberra spoke next with a presentation (with Monica Kennedy) about “knowledge management and governance in higher education”. The key thinking point for me was in Deborah’s challenge to use governance as a knowledge generating activity, not solely as a documented record. She made the point that tracking back over governance records yielded little in understanding the thinking and discussion on how decisions were actually made. As part of the analytical framework, Deborah briefly discussed Cook and Brown’s four forms of knowledge – something for me to look into further at a later stage. One of the key questions that Deborah and Monica wanted to address in terms of knowledge and governance was: “how do we really report something” based on who needs to know and why, and how it will be transformed to those who need to know.

After the mid-afternoon break (at which I unfortunately had to go back to the office), Colette Raison from AdeptKM was scheduled to talk on “managing to measure or measuring to manage”. The concluding paper was from the effusive Nerida Hart, “Knowledge for regional natural resource management”. Nerida’s group at Land and Water Australia are doing some really wonderful KM work with remote communities so it was a shame for me to miss her presentation. I’ll catch up with Nerida in due course.

I understand that the presentations will be posted on the actKM website in due course. Congratulations to the actKM conference committee and the speakers for a really great day.

On information research

The latest issue of the e-journal, Information Research, is now available.

There are some really interesting papers, especially the paper by Marcia Bates on browsing behaviour and the paper by Judit Bar-Ilan on librarian blogs.

There are several book reviews too, including this one on David Weinberger’s book, Everything is miscellaneous (a book I am currently reading).

 All in all, a range of articles and reviews well worth a look!