Harold Jarche

Small Towns & Free Agents

by

Sackville, New Brunswick, where I live, is a small town of 5,000 people, which increases every Fall by the 2,500 students at Mount Allison University. I think that it is the perfect small town for free agents who run virtual offices. I’ve discussed this with some of the town councillors, but I don’t have any convincing market analyses to show that we could attract some more small businesses to set up shop here. Here are some of the attritubes of this community that I think would be appealing.

We have high speed Internet access, both DSL in the town core, and cable access in the outlying community. My web site is hosted locally. The town is located on the Trans-Canada Highway with Moncton Airport 20 minutes away and Halifax Airport 90 minutes away. There is a hospital in town, and larger hospitals in Moncton (50 km) and Amherst (20 km). We have a number of physicians in town; more than most small towns. Sackville is centrally located in the maritimes, with Fredericton, Charlottetown and Halifax within 2 hours driving distance. We also have a local, live theatre company.

Sackville is a great town to raise a family, as it is safe and hospitable. Many of us were not born and raised here, so the town is open to newcomers. A good house will cost in the vicinity of $(CAD)150,000, but you can even find them cheaper. For families looking to get out of the big city rat race, this may be the place. The school system offers French immersion starting in Grade 1. French schools are available in the neighbouring community of Memramcook, about 20 km away. There a few companies in town, and some free agents as well. We tried to start a loose association, The Sackville SOHO Society, to discuss non-retail business issues, but we never got the necessary critical mass.

So what would it take to interest a free agent to move to Sackville? Do we have what it takes? Are there essential infrastructure requirements, or cultural issues? I’d appreciate your comments.

Update: My neighbour has just put her house on the market, through Property Guys. Search for Listing #2370.

Blogs & Information Literacy

by

Will Richardson has a good post on how many of the competencies required for information literacy can be addressed through blogging. Will’s quote from the American Library Association:

The information literate student validates understanding and interpretation of the information through discourse with other individuals, subject-area experts, and/or practitioners.

This is the kind of educational outcome, based on a process, that makes more sense than mastery of subject-based content. The content discussed in blogs is not as important as the skills developed through the process of blogging. The content is just grist for the cognitive mill.


Do It Yourself (DIY)

by

After to listening to an interview with Doc Searls, Jay Cross expands on the analogy of open source software as the material for DIY’ers of information technology.


The DIY crowd just want to build things. The closest analogy is to the construction industry. They share a common language ("builds,""tools,""builders"). Linux is the DIYers’ lumber, a raw material for virtually any job. Neither software construction nor building houses locks you in to a particular supplier. The housebuilder doesn’t say, "We’re building this house on a Weyerhauser platform…."
…
The fact that Open Source code is free delegates decision-making lower in the organization. You don’t need a purchase order — or official approval — to use it.

As IT becomes ubiquitous, many of us just want to build things that will address our issues, and open source gives us the material to start with. No, open source is not perfect, but without it we couldn’t afford to test out many of our ideas. Open source lowers the barriers to innovation, because you have free building material, and only have to supply the labour.

From Classroom to Boardroom

by

Jay Bahlis, President of BNH Expert Software in Montreal, has produced a free, online booklet, From Classroom to Boardroom, that will be a good job aid for performance improvement professionals. It covers step-by-step actions and six strategies for aligning training with business goals. Though not new in its concepts, this booklet is an additional resource that may be helpful, especially for internal initiatives. Some of Jay’s cited references may be of use as well:

  • Ford and Weissbein estimated that less than 10% of training expenditures actually result in transfer
    to the job. By focusing on the most important initiatives, you can reduce waste and maximize the
    impact of training.
  • Broad and Newstrom observed that most of the knowledge and skills gained in training (well over
    80% by some estimates) is not fully applied by employees on the job. And more recently, Robinson
    reported that on average, less than 30% of what people learn (in training) actually gets used on the
    job. By focusing on solutions that resolve clearly identified performance deficiencies you can
    minimize waste and maximize performance.
  • Lance Dublin observed that over 90% of training is conducted through informal means such as web
    searches, chats, reference materials and mentoring. Providing the right information to the right
    individuals at the right time “learning at the speed of work” can significantly increase the competitive
    advantage of the organization – allowing individuals to do things they have not been able to before.

Many thanks to Jay for making this available to the community.

ChangeThis

by

ChangeThis has been created as a distribution medium of rational, logical "manifestos" that encourage thought and debate. The ChangeThis Manifesto is in the same vein as The Cluetrain Manifesto, but the former reads less like a rant.

We?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re betting that a significant portion of the population wants to hear thoughtful, rational, constructive
arguments about important issues. We?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re certain that the best of these manifestos will
spread, hand to hand, person to person, until these manifestos have reached a critical mass and
actually changed the tone and substance of our debate.

The site includes a blog and there are a number of manifestos in the mill from authors like Malcolm Gladwell, Tom Peters and Seth Godin. It seems that the new medium is "retrieving" the pamphleteer of old, and I look forward to reading, and commenting on, future manifestos.

Cycling and KM

by

Denham Grey has the perfect presentation for my tastes, but I won’t be able to get to Cincinnati to see it. Denham is using cycling as the metaphor for knowledge management (The only sport I love more than cycling is cross-country skiing) .

Having cycled across France & Belgium, as well as climbing three passes in the Alps in the same day, I must admit that cycling is a passion, and Denham is going to link it to my business – great!

Ever had that sinking feeling you are being dropped from the peleton as new technology decends?, looking for new ways to collaborate on a strategy or coordinating to chase down a break-away?, is your team self-organizing or do you rely on command and control?, do you have the agility and the shared mindset to react to a sudden event?

I hope he posts his notes. Allez-y!

Networks Replace Hierarchies

by

Jay Cross has synthesized many of the same themes discussed in my previous post on the The Dummies Guide to Change. There are also some good links on his post, which covers some previous material because Jay has been having problems with comment Spammers.

I am certain that we are about to experience a tipping point in business organisations as well as organisational learning. Observations made in The Cluetrain Manifesto are becoming obvious to the Early Majority. Informal learning is the huge growth area (not online courses), and will prove John Chambers (who said that e-learning will make e-mail look like a rounding error) correct. We are also seeing the rise of connected natural enterprises, as Jay says:

Networks are the next step in computing, business organizations, and more. As internodal communication costs drop, networks replace hierarchies.

The world is a different place because [almost] everyone can talk to everyone else. That changes business as well as learning.

 

Sakai 1.0 to be Released Today

by

The Sakai Project will be releasing the first version of its open source learning management system today:

The University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, Stanford, and the uPortal consortium are joining forces to integrate and synchronize their considerable educational software into a pre-integrated collection of open source tools. This will yield three big wins for sustainable economics and innovation in higher education:


* A framework that builds on the recently ratified JSR 168 portlet standard and the OKI open service interface definitions to create a services-based, enterprise portal for tool delivery

* A re-factored set of educational software tools that blends the best of features from the participants?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ disparate software (e.g., course management systems, assessment tools, workflow, etc.)

* A synchronization of the institutional clocks of these schools in developing, adopting and using a common set of open source software.

It will be interesting to see if this changes the balance in the higher education marketplace.

Update: More information and related links are available at ICTlogy.

Furl helps to create the personal web

by

Via Weblogg-ed is a good overview of Furl, and how it differs from the usual bookmark managers. Greg Ritter goes into detail on how you can use Furl. It seems especially useful for students and researchers. I use Furl (see Home Page) when I’m too lazy to blog or if a want to share a series of web pages on a single topic. It’s a great tool for collaborative web research. I think that the use of tools like Furl may surpass blogs in the near future – they’re too easy.