On experiencing context

I want to talk about experiencing context.  I want to investigate what it means to experience something that is really going on rather than what is supposed to be going on.  I want to see what happens in practice as distinct to what the theory might suppose.

I am reading the classic book on urban planning by Jane Jacobs, called The death and life of great American cities.  As a lapsed economic geographer, I am always drawn to the intersection between economics and space and how in practice these two dimensions work.   The first observation, certainly if you are from Sydney as I am originally, is that there is a dark nexus between property developers and urban development.  Much has been made about the power of developer influence on government planning, for instance.

In fact, I recall one big developer wanting to concrete over the beautiful Kuring-gai Chase National Park in the north of Sydney to build more multi-dwelling housing!  The worst part, of course, is that besides giving the developer more profit and more power, the architecture of said multidwelling housing leaves a lot to be desired with their prefab look and feel.

In the introduction to Jane Jacob’s book, she cites an example of a so-called slum in Boston (in the 1950s) called the North End.  To much of Boston, and certainly the city planners, North End was a major slum.  Yet when Jane Jacobs visited the place before a future-planned “redevelopment”, she was amazed by the life and vitality of the place.  She rang a planning friend who confirmed he thought it was a slum, albeit a slum with pretty good health and socioeconomic statistics behind it.  Moreover, her planner friend actually visited North End and found it to have a “wonderful, cheerful street life”, even better in summer.

Jacobs says: “Here  was a curious thing. My friend’s instincts told him North End was a good place, and his social statistics confirmed it. But everything he had learned as a physical planner about what is good for people and good for the city neighbourhoods, everything that made him an expert, told him that the North End had to be a bad place” (page 15).

The story certainly tells me how important it is to experience the context.  I doubt whether it will always be good enough to just look at the theory, or the statistics, or the expert opinion, without experiencing the context for oneself.  More importantly, however, is the finding out about the experience from the people active within it.

It therefore comes as no surprise that in many areas of our professional lives where we have to make decisions, we often rely solely on past experience, our previous training, and the thinking that pervades ourselves and like-minded colleagues.  This is quite insufficient.  We need to explore other ideas and other people’s views, especially the views of the people involved – the real stakeholders.  And if we can break these patterns, either through our own determination or allowing some disruptive thinking to break through from elsewhere, then we can at least look at the world in a different way.

If we can experience context, and include the contextual experiences of those involved, we can make more informed choices and decisions that reflect the real context as distinct from our personal-world-view context.

Knowledge management and the world financial crisis

Since my last blog post, the world financial market has really taken a battering as large finanical institutions in the US, Britain and in Europe collapse under the weight of poor lending practices and even poorer management and control structures. The financial impact alone is enormous.

What has this to do with knowledge management, I hear you ask?

Well, knowledge management is about enabling informed decision-making and taking action. Knowledge management facilitates the information and knowledge assets of a business to drive operational efficiencies, create opportunities for growth and innovation, and establish sound information management practices and systems for preparedness and risk mitigation.

Knowledge management is therefore about establishing the internal operational conditions for making effective and knowledgeable choices and decisions across the business domains of a firm – and those business domains are where profits and losses are created.

An organisation’s codified knowledge and information (explicit knowledge), capacity for research and analysis, and capabilitiy to locate and disseminate this information will inform a workplace and the people within it; for decision-makers and for taking action.

At the same time, knowledge management involves people - the information and knowledge exchanged, re-articulated and reformulated by humans within particular contexts. The knowledge and experiences of people are unique, co-evolving, and able to be shared to develop or create new knowledge. This is what is commonly referred to in the knowledge management literature as tacit knowledge.

Knowledge management facilitates this interplay between explicit and tacit knowledge out of which organisations make decsions and take action. Knowledge management is therefore ongoing, cumulative and regenerating.

Knowledge management also works to reduce costs through improving workflow, facilitating efficient and effective information capture, access, and dissemination, facilitates conversation and human networks, and enhances collaboration and connectivity between individuals for common purpose.

Knowledge management is therefore about providing the infrastructure and capability for organisations to make informed decisions. As knowledge managers, we like to think that the outcome of knowledge management is Innovation and competitive advantage – and sometimes it is. But just as importantly is the strategic importance of using knowledge and information assets wisely to improve operational effectiveness, decision-making and governance issues – profit making and risk mitigation.

On the cost side, knowledge management drives down the cost of doing business through more efficient and productive operations (saving time is one of the obvious manifestations). Being able to find the right information at the right time is critical, as is preparedness through awareness. Being aware and having quick access to information and the right people allows for organisational agility and responsiveness that impacts on how opportunities are found and change is managed.

A strategic knowledge management approach to organisational perfomance is an excellent way for companies to make improved decisions for profit generation and risk mitigation while also saving costs and speeding up interaction within people networks for collective thinking and collaborative advantage.

Knowledge management offers a foundation, many paths and a network. Yet it’s true that senior management and executives choose which way to jump – and the frying pan at 700 or 870 degrees is one route. Wall Street, if it’s not to late, take heed!

On imagination

I was reading this article about an address to Harvard University students by the author of the Harry Potter books, J. K. Rowling. Rowling is quoted as saying:

“We do not need magic to transform our world,” she said. “We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already; we have the power to imagine better”.

Rowling addressed the fundamental importance of imagination – that anything is possible, and that imagination gives one the power to feel empathy.

On anything is possible, imagination truly is a wondrous gift. Yet I fear that it’s a gift that our social and political systems try to beat out of us (metaphorically) to conform to the “real world”.

Children have boundless imagaination. I well remember a science lesson in junior primary school in which we discussed the possibility of life on other planets in our solar system (back when Pluto was in the team). One of my classmates, Ian Ball, said that life could be on any of the planets, to which he was roundly shouted down – how could there be life on Jupiter or Pluto – ha, ha, ha! Ian replied that there could indeed be icicle men on Pluto! And of course, why not? Just because our human concept of life requires a certain environment does not preclude a system of life existing beyong our present knowledge. Afterall, look at what Star Trek and Alien and Farscape imagine is possible!

You can see how what happens with children who have tremendous imagination but have it gradually worn away by “growing up” – what we know in the present rather than what is possible beyond us.

The capacity for imagination in the board rooms of corporations, in the offices of politicians, proprietors, and principals, are sadly lacking today. Let’s deal with the present, they say, and hope that we may straighten out the future with the tools and thinking that have got us to where we are today. Yet the future is craving to be discovered through imagination.

And empathy? How can humans respond to people if they cannot share their experiences? They can share or approximate the experience by imagining what it must be like to be in the shoes of the other person. That is empathy. That is how we can feel connected, no matter who we are or where we live. It is why we need to think of the big picture as well as our own small worlds.

People like J. K. Rowling (perhaps a Jules Verne from another time) challenge the way we see the world. They challenge our thinking to see what is possible even if we can’t understand how to get there now. We must nurture imagination and we must learn how to use imagination to solve the present real-world problems and take on new opportunities.

Imagination is an asset that needs greater attention in our dealings with others and in looking beyond what we see and accept now. Let’s start using it!

On participation

I was listening to the radio this week when I heard an interview with a film producer on triple j. Of special note was the comment by the female dj that perhaps casting for movies should be done the same way as decisions are made in those reality tv shows. Just sms your vote! The film producer was aghast at such a thought! In contrast, the dj’s suggestion was just an obvious manifestation of what is already happening within her demographic’s frame of reference.

And this is where the demographic fundamentals will be working in businesses today. Participation isn’t something the management requests when it suits them, oh no! In a culture where participatory decision-making and social networking are becoming second nature, the workplace will need to adapt as well.

At the same time, the very same set of younger generations have not only been brought up with a hefty dose of reality tv but they have also been participants in the internet revolution. To them, the web and all it can do is as normal as a mobile phone.

Enter web 2.0 (the term web 2.0 was actually born in 2004) and add gen x, y and z.

The web-savvy generations with their penchant for personal networks and participatory decision-making are gradually working their way now (and in the future) into the very dna of organisations across the globe. The norms of organisational decision-making in those post-Fordist managerial hierarchies are looking a tad less secure in the 21st century.

For managers, we need to foster this connectedness and participatory zeal in our workplaces. We can assist with a suite of web 2.0 applications (RSS, blogs, wikis, social computing) that enhance the level of participation and communication among our people and our people-networks. And we can allow and actively encourage the participation, the networks and the conversations to take place inside our businesses because it is through these interactions and participation that we generate real organisational value competitive advantage.

Participation and web 2.0 are a great combination so let’s use them to the best of our advantage. [Check out this Ross Gitten's article for some more reasons to treat your employees well].

On information research

The latest issue of Information Research is online. A couple of the articles of particular interest to me were on household information practices and Flickr: a first look at user behaviour in the context of photography as serious leisure. The sample sizes used in both research articles were quite small but the articles did prompt my thinking in a number of areas.

The article on household information practices looked at an area of everyday information collection and use that has had little attention given to it in the past. As a microcosm of society, I found the focus on the household for information use and decision-making a very thought-provoking piece.

The Flickr article looked at what impact an online social-based sharing site for digital photos has on amateur photography as a hobby. The relationship between the hobby and the social technology is a field of information research that again focuses on the common experience that has largely been overlooked as a domain for research and study in the past.

Whilst I will get to the other articles later, the two articles featured here demonstrated how information research can be applied to everyday areas of experience that we often take for granted – well worth a read!

On being in touch

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has just released a report based on a survey, How Australians spend their time. The section I want to comment on says this (from the media release):

“Time spent on recreation and leisure activities has decreased by 1 hour 45 minutes per week since 1997 (to 29 hours 31 minutes a week). We’re spending on average an extra hour a week on activities such as watching television and using the Internet than we did in 1997 (16 hours 20 minutes a week spent on audio/visual activities). However, time spent on sport and outdoor activity has decreased by nearly an hour compared to an average week in 1997 (to an average 2 hours 13 minutes a week in 2006)”.

The survey results tend toward an increase in communication via third party channels and a reduction in time spent physically socialising with actual people. Now I admit that my preference is for face-to-face communication, both in my social space and work space, but this is not always possible. To me, my digital communication channels are secondary. But to others, more younger than me I’ll admit, digital communication channels are more, or just as, important as face-to-face communication.

But I want to link this notion of reduced sociability to knowledge management and to a  blog post on touch written by Patrick Lambe. Patrick makes the valid point that face-to-face interaction and socialising are good things – human things. He goes on to suggest that “touch” is something that we ignore, especially working in a field like knowledge management that relies so heavily on human connectivity and trust. Patrick says:

 ”And we treat everything as if it’s something that happens in the head, or between heads and heads (involving soundwaves) or heads and text in various forms. Specifically, I don’t see us anywhere talking about the importance of touch“.

Touch is a sensitive issue, in a very real sense of the word. Individuals and cultures have a high range of sensitivities to touch (chase up the iconic research by Sidney Jourard thirty-odd years ago, and quoted in the book, Manwatching).

Touch is also a sensitive issue in professional spheres, where much of the knowledge management we do and encourage takes place. There are often professional sanctions with regard to touch, no matter how innocent or human that may be in the circumstances. Is touch appropriate and allowable in the context at the time?

Now it’s all very well to say that it’s a crying shame that professionally and otherwise touch has been ignored for too long. It is indeed a shame when professional restrictions and legalities intrude into the human dimension but this, my friends, is a fact of contemporary life. So let us not dwell too much in “wouldn’t it be nice land” on the specifics of “touch” in our knowledge management work, but focus more on what being human within our work contexts actually allows us to do with people and how we do it. We can be more human by simply going to the trouble of being with people and not hiding behind a desk and shooting off e-mails to the person across the room, just for starters!

I agree wholeheartedly with Patrick’s sentiments for increasing social interaction and face-to-face contact. Patrick cites a great example where Paolo Coelho sends out ten  party invitation to virtual friends and contacts to meet up face-to-face. Such an approach to get “in touch” in such a way like that is a definite improvement for enhancing “being in touch” with our people network.

So, I am definitely in favour of “being in touch” and “getting in touch” through socialising and face-to-face contact, but I am hesitant in escalating touch beyond that given the cultural, social, and professional barriers (good or otherwise) that exist in our professional world.

And as an addendum, I had a quick look to see if I had any notes on tactile communication from my days sitting in on social psychology lectures all those years ago – I didn’t (which may be a good or bad thing) but I do have a couple of references:

The transparent self by Sidney Jourard

Successful nonverbal communication (4th edition) by Leathers and Eaves

The psychology of interpersonal behaviour by Michael Argyle

On real work

A couple of weeks ago Euan Semple wrote a blog comment about real work. I made a hastily scribbled note to come back to the sentiment at a later date.

The prompt for me was the notion held by some people that social computing activities (blogs, wikis, virtual communities, social networks) are not of value for real work. And this negative opinion hasn’t gone unnoticed, as Stephen Collins rightly fulminates over in a post last year in response to more negative press about social computing.

Yet the features of social computing are not so unusual. A blog is another communication tool akin to the newsletter. A wiki and a virtual community are places in which collaboration and knowledge sharing occur, enhancing the scale and scope of meetings and workshops (and telephone conference calls). Facebook is an elaborate and more readily connected personal network tool that works like a personal address book, diary, photo album, and multiperson conversation piece.

The commonality of these new social computing tools with tools and work practices readily accepted from the past (and continuing still in many organisations) is clear.

What has changed, however, is in the scale, immediacy, and speed at which these new activities can now occur. Moreover, the distinct line (if there ever was a clear divide) between work and the social domain has blurred so that social connections have become part of the connectivity for the workplace. And as the world has become more complex, global and fast-paced, there is a growing need to rely more on trusted people networks and their connections.

Sure, social computing activities can be “abused” in the workplace in much the same way as other workplace activities. Who can forget those famous long lunches and hearing long and arduous private land-line telephone calls pre-world-wide web?

Social computing need not be a threat to the modern workplace after all.

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

On search and tagging

Yesterday I gave a presentation at the Ark Group conference, “Enhancing search and retrieval capabilities and performance”, in Sydney. The presentation, called “Tagging and the enterprise”,  is available to conference attendees and I am rejigging some of the slides to load up onto Slideshare.

There were two key points I tried to emphasise yesterday in a conference context that discussed taxonomies and search in great detail.

The first was this: that having been brought up in a world of library-based classification schemes at school and university (Dewey decimal classification scheme), of thesauri and controlled vocabularies, of ordering and searching  for information using the structure of tree hierarchies, I was a typical information-order kind of person in my profession. Working with these established and authoritative structures was in fact the norm.

Yet I wasn’t completely satisfied that this structure always helped – sometimes I couldn’t find the information I wanted and nor could the people I was supposed to help. In fact, sometimes other people (not the authority) had better ways of describing and classifying an item, to which a cataloguer associate of mine would scream, “if it’s not in the book (subject headings), it’s not the correct term and I won’t be using it!”.

In fact when one thinks about, the photo below of steam locomotive 3801 charging through a train station means different things to different people: a Japanese tourist might (incorrectly) classify it under bullet train, while a railway historian might prefer the term ARHS enthusiast special, or the stock photographer might use 3/4 view as a suitable classification term. The point is that we could search using terms like these that make sense to us individually but get nowhere because Dewey or Library of Congress says so.

 

Moreover, the history of my everyday experience has been one where I ascribe my own, personal, and context-driven classification schemes. They have been informal and functional for my needs. I make up my own mind how I sort the dishes, how I arrange my digital photos (well, trying to make up my mind), and how the groceries in the pantry are arranged (even making sense of putting the jar of Vegemite on a small shelf in the kitchen with the cough medicines and cat worming tablets, instead of with the jams and condiments, to ensure that I find it). We try to make order out of complexity that gives us – the individual - meaning. Yet the world is a complex place.

The second point was that the demographic and technological changes in recent times have ensured a generation (or two) of tech-savvy people whose norms are those of identity, connection, collaboration, and peer relationships managed and articulated through digital space. This has a major impact on how information and knowledge is used and sourced. The implication of this demographic trajectory suggests an acceleration into the workforce of people whose norms are couched in the digital space.

The digital space changes our traditional way of looking at information since information is essentially everywhere and not bounded by the physicality of the book or the library. The incoming, tech-savvy generation of digitally connected workers will continue to be part of that change and will (more than) likely increase their participation in it since that is essentially becoming the norm.

Tagging will be one manifestation of this.

I will elaborate on the tagging issue tomorrow.

On the wisdom of crowds and volunteering

My latest Knowledge@Wharton newsletter has this article about a new book called: We Are Smarter Than Me: How the Wisdom of Crowds Can Help Businesses Succeed by Barry Libert and Jon Spector. It’s a timely reminder that networked knowledge has a significant place in the competitive world of business. I recommend the article and the book to you.

The article is also very timely for me. Yesterday I sat in on a debrief given by Dave Snowden about narrative and the wisdom of crowds in relation to a major project on volunteering that is currently under way. The project is being funded by the NSW Department of Disability Ageing and Home Care. My colleague, Chris Fletcher, has been involved with the project and blogged with some detail about it in August. It is still possible to contribute to the project via the survey.

My next blog post will look at yesterday’s debrief and how the project is developing.

On what’s all this fuss about?

Some friends of mine have been encouraging me to open up a Facebook account. I understand the mechanics of Facebook, especially it’s college mentality origins. Intellectually I can see why Facebook has become popular, but personally I am not so enamoured. But then again, I don’t watch much televison (especially useful at this time in order to avoid the political commercials – propaganda - for our upcoming federal election) and I don’t play computer games so maybe I’m a little too bookish for Facebook. Mind you, I don’t feel disconnected by not being connected on Facebook either.

However, it’s nice to know that there are other people who are trying to work out what all the fuss is about with social networking sites, like this post about Flickr (thanks Mark for the heads up on this one).

I checked my own contributions to Flickr and see that I have less than a handful. And having promised Matt Moore to load up a plethora of images from my own photographic collection, I am yet to do so. Mind you, I am still to digitise the thousands of slides sitting in their dark, archival quality storage boxes. I need a home-based digitisation project first.

As a photographer though, I do like to look at other people’s photos and I do scan a range of tags of interest on Flickr. Perhaps it’s voyeuristic entertainment much the same way viewers watch other people’s marginally more exciting lives on television, or roast the duds so they don’t feel so completlely hopeless, helpless, and ordinary.

Yet I do use Flickr as a sort of image gallery but only in my spare time (of which I don’t have too much left to spare these days). I have actually been inspired by some of the photos on Flickr so this is a good thing. If only I could feel inspired to get those thousands of slides out of the cupboard and onto the hard drive….or Flickr.

On everything is miscellaneous

I have been discussing podcasts recently. I have also been doing a bit of long-distance driving. One benefit of the driving has been listening to podcasts.

One good podcast I listened to yesterday afternoon on my MP3 player was a recent interview with Dave Weinberger, author of the book, Everything is miscellaneous. Weinberger discusses web 2.o, web-based participation and user ownership, and the miscellaneous nature of knowledge in the rapidly changing digital world. Very interesting and well worth listening to (and reading the book).

On KM Australia 2007 (Part 1)

Wow. Today was the first day of the KM Australia 2007 conference in Sydney. I was very impressed with some of today’s presentations, although I must say it was sometimes difficult to hear the speakers due to the noise coming from the vendor and catering area next to the stage.

Not surprisingly, Dave Snowden was in fine form with his presentation on naturalising sense-making. Dave told me he hopes to have a podcast of the presentation up on his blog when he gets the opportunity to do so. Although I had heard much of what Dave spoke about today at another conference (including seeing the delightful basketball video), it is always refreshing to hear him challenge management orthodoxy in his initimable style.

The highlight of the day, however, was the presentation by Michel Bauwens from the P2P Foundation. Michel is quite the optimistic evangelist for peer to peer innovation creating a new mode of production for post-capitalist society.

I also enjoyed the presentation from James Price and Brian Nielsen from Adelaide-based ”Experience Matters” highlighting some of the learning points from a couple of client work examples.

I am still going through my notes and thinking about many of the key issues raised at the conference today. A full report will appear later in the week – stay tuned.

Also, tomorrow evening is the next meeting of the NSW KM Forum. Our speaker will be Patrick Lambe of Green Chameleon fame. Hopefully, I will have a synopsis of Patrick’s talk when I return home later tomorrow evening.

On the cult of the amateur

I have on my “to read” list the book, The cult of the amateur, by Andrew Keen. I read the review of Keen’s book in the NY Times recently and hastily sent off for a copy of the book [the book has now arrived as at the 23rd July].

The basic premise of the book is that the internet and Web 2.0 have allowed the world to be swallowed up by amateur, superficial drivel. Keen is very dismissive of the value of content generated by amateurs, whether it originates from garage bands or budding political commentators. Keen is of the opinion that real culture is being sidelined by “just cheaper, more accessible versions of vanity presses where the untalented go to purchase the veneer of publication”. I love the imagery. I will need to read the book and follow up with a more detailed analysis in a later post.

Suffice to say, I agree that there is a lot of rubbish on the web (but then again, one person’s garbage is another person’s treasure). There’s also a lot of rubbish in the local library – those dog-eared Mills and Boon novels tell a story in themselves (at a local library I worked part-time in many, many years ago, the deputy librarian refused to purchase Mills and Boon novels based on her belief that just like fairy floss rots the teeth, Mills and Boon novels would rot the minds of the readers). And don’t get me started on the content bombarding the senses from television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and mobile phone ring tones.

On the other hand, I am not totally convinced that just because everyone can now have a say on the web that this automatically delivers value and real democracy either. Let me ruminate on this some more.