Month: April 2005

Virtual Work

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Over lunch today, we discussed the trials and tribulations of work and the different challenges faced by salaried employees and independent virtual workers. Being a virtual worker or virtual student can be quite lonely whereas the opposite may be true as a face-to-face, salaried worker. The latter has no choice in who he or she may have to face with day-to-day regularity. Good bosses are wonderful, but their opposite can lead you down a slow path to depression.

All of this talk reminded me of the joys of working for yourself, much of which is as part of a virtual team. I had recently come across these rules for virtual web design work from The Useful Arts which I’ve summarized:

Stick to small groups, and
if you’re the leader, give up control, because
there is no leader, so
have complete trust, and
allow for total transparency, but
provide clear & achievable goals, while also having
an open ended final goal.

These are good rules, because virtual work requires a lot of trust, intuition and initiative. I disagree with the last part, because I think that there should be a final goal, so that at some point the project can be considered over and everyone can get paid. This way, everyone will want to work together again.

Putting your body and soul into your work

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Here’s a slightly changed excerpt from a book that I think many working folks could relate to:

Of course, everyone spoke ill of his profession, but, basically, it was all a question of selling his time, like everyone else. Doing things he didn’t want to do, like everyone else. Putting up with horrible people, like everyone else. Handing over his precious body and his precious soul in the name of a future that never arrived, like everyone else. Saying that he still didn’t have enough, like everyone else. Waiting just a bit longer, like everyone else. Waiting so that he cold earn just a little bit more, postponing the realization of his dreams; he was too busy right now, he had great opportunities ahead of him, loyal clients who were waiting for him. . ."

Before you check out the link, ask yourself this question, "What is the profession of the subject of this story?" Make a note of it, and then go to Anita Sharpe’s post at Worthwhile.

Learning through Blogging

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When you write a blog, your thoughts and comments, right or wrong, stay online for a long time. In reviewing what I have been jabbing about for the past year, I’ve pieced together some of my previous conclusions – warts & all:

Starting with learning in general:

It seems pretty clear; the basic unit of learning is the person. This person is indivisible. All learning activities, products and strategies must be centered around the person. We can then go on to develop environments for many people, but the individual is the building block – not the learning object, the course, the programme, or the institution. All of these are temporary organisations that the individual may use, or be part of.

And moving on to learning at work:

My conclusion for a while has been that knowledge cannot be managed, and neither can knowledge workers. It will take a new social contract between workers and organisations in order to create an optimally functioning enterprise. Adding management and technology won’t help either. This is the crux of everything in the new "right-sized, lean, innovative, creative" economy – getting the right balance between the organisational structure and the knowledge workers.

However:

Training without clear performance objectives, that are relevant to each learner, is useless.

And on the positive side:

What’s exciting about workflow learning is that the technology has caught up to some of the theory, and the globalized economy is making workflow learning (or something resembling it) a necessity.

Not only possible, but cheap:

An organisation’s entire KM effort could start with simple technologies. It could provide a blog to everyone, letting workers blog as they wanted. RSS aggregators could keep an eye on blogs of interest, and maybe even a blog rating system could be included in the performance management system. Yes, the better writers would get better rankings, but so would those who solve problems. A bottom-up approach to KM, at a minimal cost, makes a lot more sense than betting that some centralized system, with a huge training bill, will solve all of our problems.

Because:

What I like best about open source is that the development process is a real meritocracy, much like being an entrepreneur. In small business, if you don’t deliver, you can’t make an honest living.

And finally:

Informal learning, facilitated by the likes of blogs & wikis, works well for general education, and for continued learning outside of the "classroom". Informal learning (education in the broadest sense) is messy by its very nature. Training, such as how to drive a car, can use a more scientific method to
optimize training time, achieve the desired performance and reduce the risk of accidents. Training and education can even use the same tools, like simulations, but not the same approach. Education and training are complementary, but distinct.

Still a work in progress ;-)

Conference on Engaging in Open Source

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The ACM Chapter at Dalhousie University in Halifax is hosting the Conference on Engaging in OS on 12/13 May. Invited speakers include folks from Sun and the Department of National Defence. Exploring the Business of Open Source by Brian Barry looks interesting. The organisers are still calling for papers, but I cannot find any information on how to register or the cost of admission. Anyone else know more about this?

I’d be willing to carpool if any New Brunswickers or PE Islanders want to head down for one or both days. Also would be interested if anyone knows the presenters, or has heard them before. For those outside of the area, you might want to attend this conference in Halifax on the Thursday/Friday and then head to Fredericton for the Monday/Tuesday Learning Innovations Symposium – a double header! Any comments from the Moncton LUG members or other groups?

Update: Registration info is now available, with fees listed as $75 + HST (On or Before April 28, 2005) or $100 + HST after the 28th.

Stock & Flow

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Lee Lefever at CommonCraft has re-linked to a series of three posts that he made last year on stock and flow in online communication. There’s a neat graphic at the main link, summarized as:

Flows = Timely & Engaging (e.g. radio, speeches, e-mail, blogs)
Stocks = Archived, Organized for Reference (e.g. web site, database, book, voice mail)

Lee discusses the changes that are happening within television, as TiVo (TV on demand) changes the medium from one of flow (and therefore engaging) to one of stock (and therefore of less value). He also says that blogs are so engaging because they allow flow.

This got me to thinking about the whole notion of digital content in education. Fewer people are willing to pay for content which is just stock, such as self-paced online courses. Stock is like product – over time, price tends to zero. You need flow to provide value (context), enabled through social interaction. For instance, MIT’s open courseware initiative makes the stock available for free, but you have to pay to participate in the flow (class membership). On the other hand, flow without any stock could become noise; everyone talking but no one taking notes or referring to previous knowledge. I think that you need both stock and flow, especially in education. It’s just becoming harder to offer one of these alone for a fee.

On this blog, it’s the flow that keeps the conversation fresh, and the stock that gradually builds in value over time. To keep this valuable, you need to have steady flow and an easy way to access the stock that you may need. I’m going to work on a site redesign in the near future and see how I can improve both stock and flow.

Small Business Leads the Way

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Rafe Needleman writes in ZD Net how big businesses have a lot to learn from small businesses. His interview with the Chief Technology Strategist from Accenture resulted in the realisation that small businesses set the example in efficiency and optimal technology use. For instance, it was the home office that pioneered the Palm Pilot, avoids technology infrastructure investments (can’t afford them) and is already using blogs for knowledge transfer.

In fact, I think these giant firms, with their one-letter stock ticker symbols, have a lot to learn from small businesses — the millions of companies that constantly do more with less, live by their wits and not their inertia, and actually make up the backbone of the US economy.

Many of my clients are interested in the tools that I’m using (Skype, Open Office, blogs, wikis, open source), or some innovative knowledge-sharing processes, but usually come up against a brick wall with HR, IT, Purchasing, etc. Memo to decision-makers in large firms: look to small businesses to see what "really" works in the networked office.

Via eBiz Blog

The Tantramar Commons …

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I had some great conversations over the weekend, mostly around the
ideas of The Commons Network, first posted by Rob
Paterson, and now being implemented with the Queen
Street Commons. This has given me the impetus
to resurrect the idea
of the Sackville
SOHO Society, though I think I’ll change it to
the Tantramar
Commons.

I’m going to start by getting a small group of people
involved in the design of our own Commons. We originally started in
2003 by meeting at the Bridge Street Cafe in downtown Sackville. The
cafe now offers free WiFi service, so it might be even more
attractive as a meeting place. Take a note of this if you’re driving
past Sackville on the
Trans-Canada Highway and want to go online.

Anyway, I’m planning on
heading to Charlottetown in the next few weeks and see how the Queen
Street Commons is progressing and find out what lessons they’ve
learned so far. As we progress (once again), I’ll post my thoughts,
and would appreciate any input or advice. Hope springs eternal!

Giving it away

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In the April edition of Business 2.0 (requires paid subscription) there is an interesting article, "The Great Giveaway", about Amazon, Google and eBay, as they open up their data for others to create innovative web applications and services. The basic realization is that one company alone cannot follow all of the innovation possibilities, so let’s open it up for other developers to expand the potential of our platform. Though not for all kinds of business, opening up some of the data is a growing phenomenon:

Eric von Hippel, a business professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, explains those old rules: "We come from a culture where if you invested in it, you kept it. That was your competitive advantage." The rise of open-source software certainly challenged that notion. The rise of open data and Web services goes even further, holding out the promise of automating the links between online businesses. In geek-speak, such links are known as application programming interfaces, or APIs, through which more and more companies are revealing their vital data. As Vermeulen says, "Those that succeed have to think about removing walls instead of putting them up."

Opening up the data has spawned new companies, such as ScoutPal, which lets you check the price of Amazon’s merchandise, via your cellphone, as you shop for bargains off the Net. The service is particularly aimed at used book buyers who need to know the current market value of the books they wish to buy.

Update: If you would like to dig deeper into API’s and how they are the HTML of Web 2.0 (lots of acronyms there), then go to Seth Goldstein’s post:

As of 2005, the Internet has replaced the desktop PC as the primary platform for APIs. Unlike Microsoft and the desktop, however, nobody controls the web as a platform; although certain companies do oversee enormous pools of user data and have the opportunity to direct such traffic as they see fit. The talk of Google and Yahoo! (and now IAC) as web platforms center around their ability to recycle users through complex interconnecting networks of search, email, dating, travel, shopping, local services and more. This is the web version of the gated AOL community circa 1996. Ironically, AOL is now desperately racing to open their proprietary (Rainman) environment to a public web site (AOL.com) before Yahoo! fully eclipses its relevancy.

Google ups the ante

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I just noticed that my free Gmail account now gives me 1223 MB of space – and it’s increasing every second – I now have 1224 MB. I guess that I really don’t have to worry about running out of space. So why does Aliant only provide me with 10 MB for my $40 per month?