An ecosystem of knowledge

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Jon Husband dragged up an older post about blogging, that concludes:

Finally, an ecosystem of knowledge can develop that consists of the aggregated sets of links and content the participants in a blogalogue create. And this “body of knowledge” and understanding remains online, available to anyone who cares to become involved.

Advocates of blogging know how valuable our blog knowledge base is for our work and learning. I have over a thousand posts, several thousand comments and connections with hundreds of other blogs on a wide variety of subjects of professional interest ranging from schooling to the semantic web. The value of having a blog, reading other blogs, using a feed aggregator and making my bookmarks social and searchable has very tangible benefits. I’m actually more productive.

In spite of the obvious benefits, it’s still a challenge to get adoption of these tools and techniques with non-blogging professionals. Unfortunately, it takes more than a few blog posts to see how these can become a knowledge base or how they enable you to connect with others. The benefits take a while before they’re “obvious”.

After my first workshops on Personal Knowledge Management (using social bookmarks, aggregators, blogs etc., to make sense of digital information flows) I saw about 1% of participants actually try to adopt some of these tools. Perhaps three or four tools are too much at once, and any move to co-creating knowledge should start with the basics and only proceed to the next tool once there is a level of comfort. Here’s an idea/suggestion:

  1. Move your Bookmarks online using Social Bookmarks and some common tags for your group/team (1 – 3 months).
  2. Set up an aggregator for each worker, with a few pre-selected sites and have people Tag any posts of interest, using the Social Bookmarks that they now use (3 – 6 months).
  3. Create company or team multi-user blog focused on one area of interest or practice. Something like external training activities may be a safe place to start, with comments on how pertinent these were for those who attended (give it a year).

Your valued opinion on work and life in the 21st Century

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Nine Shift

One of my favourite blogs is Nine Shift and the book of the same title is still worth reading, even after being in publication since 2003. Bill & Julie have recently been asking several questions that warrant comments, so I’m linking to them here:

What you are doing in response to expensive gas.

If you have a feature special to you in your home office.

Whether students should be penalized for late work.

Whether you think the web will help close the gender pay gap.

Here’s a snippet from the book:

As we will see, the Internet is behaving exactly in the same way as the automobile did 100 years ago in its impact on society. The auto is not used here as an “analogy”, which is defined as something “somewhat similar”. Instead the influence of the Internet on our lives is exactly a replay, a mirror, of the influence of the auto on society 100 years ago. The outcomes will be different of course, but the forces and how these forces interact and change our lives, are the same.

This book is not really about the Internet. It is more about the consequences and changes of the Internet, about how the Internet is changing how we work, live and learn in this century.

NRC IRAP Workshop Follow-up Links

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Here are the follow up notes from the session in Halifax this afternoon on Open Source and Web 2.0.

The Open Source Initiative

Social Bookmarks, that are searchable and shareable, on the topics of Open Source and Web 2.0

Videos:

Web 2.0

Open Source by Greg Papadopoulos

Yochai Benkler (author of The Wealth of Networks) at TED 2005

Cathedral & Bazaar story

Tools & Applications:

If this is your first time to this blog, check out the Key Posts or look into the major threads here, such as OpenSource.

PS: For those who attended, and got a free book, I’m looking forward to the book reviews ;-)

Karyn asks, How did you get started in social media?

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This is in partial answer to Karyn’s question. My first foray into using the Web for more than just gathering information was in asking questions to those who were publishing. Kieren Egan, author of The Educated Mind, posted e-mail comments on his web site, and my post from 1997 is the earliest I can find online. For the next several years, I read a lot online and made some comments. Jay Cross‘ earlier websites were a common spot for me to make comments. During this time, I used online discussion boards and many closed platforms, but not much on the open Web, as there weren’t many options.

My first step toward almost blogging was with QuickTopic in 2003, discussing topics like elearning R&D and Open Source for learning. I still find QT an excellent discussion board. I later moved to Blogger, which I found to be a more flexible platform for the expression of my opinions, such as this from October 2003:

I believe the next great business model for an elearning entrepreneur is to provide high quality installation and support services for a select group of open source learning systems. Your customers will soon realize that you are not trying to sell them the next upgrade to get more cash, because the software is free. You will be selling your knowledge, experience, and customer service. Many IT departments would be more apt to use open source if they knew that it was strongly supported. Also, there is a lot less conflict of interest when you remove the vendor from the ongoing support.

Maybe I should have invested in Blackboard stock instead ;-)

For me, social media have been closely linked with my becoming a free-agent (June 2003). Blogs were becoming easier to use, and by early 2004 I had this one up and running on Drupal. Since then, it has been a fast trip testing out so many different platforms and applications that I cannot remember them any more. Thankfully my blog has become a knowledge-base so that I can find out what I was doing and writing about four years ago.

Social media – first blogs, then wikis, bookmarks, SNS, micro-blogging, etc – have provided a richer way to engage people whom I would not have met other than online. It has allowed me to engage many communities, such as edubloggers and open source advocates. To say that social media have made a difference to my professional practice would be an understatement. Much of my current practice has become focused around social media. Five years ago I would have said that I was a training and performance improvement consultant. Today, I would say that I specialize in social media for learning and working.

Going Solo

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I would have loved to attend the Going Solo conference in Switzerland last week, but alas I had neither the time nor the budget to fly across the Atlantic. I’m starting to see more interest in the option of freelancing and I think that some of this has to do with demographics (aging boomers looking for something to do) as well as economics (globalisation, outsourcing and downsizing). For instance, I was a bit surprised at the high level of interest in my presentation on Marketing Yourself as a Free-agent on the Internet.

I also see the free agent route as one of the only practical ways of currently implementing wirearchy, “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, with a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology“.

The only situations where I have witnessed a real “two-way flow of power and authority” is when I work with other free-agents. All of these relationships have been built on trust and in most cases there is not even a contract. I think that free-agents, working together, will eventually come up with the new organisational and management models required for a wired future. I don’t see how we can make incremental changes to industrial organisations and expect them to change their DNA.

If you want to see the future of business, take a look at how interconnected free-agents do business today and find out what they still need to do better.

Queen Street Studios

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A theme on this blog is that of a Commons, or third-space that connects people in their work and living. The Queen Street Commons on PEI was one of the first in Atlantic Canada and a slightly different model is offered by Queen Street Studios in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia:

Fondly known as QSS, its genesis emerged from the personal and professional background of its creative director Julia Rivard. Her vision was to create a place for creatives to meet, work and share ideas. Together with her husband Trevor, Julia purchased the historic Union Protection Company property, built in1895 at 50 Queen Street in Dartmouth. In the summer of 2006, the interior of the building was transformed into a unique space and Julia’s dream became a reality. Today it is a vibrant space nurturing the creative energies of its members, and reaching out to the HRM community and beyond, to further the growth of the profession.

QSS offers various levels of membership services, ranging from $150 to $675 per year. It also houses the for-profit QSS company, which provides the nucleus of the business energy that seems to result in many opportunities for its members. Students are welcome and QSS will be offering an incubation program soon.

This looks like a focused and pragmatic business model that is growing a local ecosystem of independent companies. It is the kind of business development that our governments should be supporting, instead of creating jobs (a.k.a. indentured servitude) by luring multinational corporations to set up temporary shop in the Deep East.

Bridging with Conversations

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I’m currently working with several communities of practice and helping to find appropriate web tools and techniques to foster their goals. I was going over some previous documents that I’d developed and found a diagram that may be helpful. It shows how you need to move into a space of shared conversations before you can work on sustaining a community of practice (CoP).

Many organisations are cut off from their clients/customers and the Internal staff are often focused on the inside of the company when they should know much more about the customers they serve [no customers, no job]. Shared conversations start the process of creating shared knowledge, but first a level of trust must be developed. This happens over time, and is supported by the creation of tools to support the work. Over time, these conversations are supported with the right tools and this can create an environment for a performing business network. It takes time and commitment, not just words, but in the end there is a dynamic and resilient network of trust, based on work that is meaningful to each individual.

A Partnership Economy

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Jon Husband, whom I finally had the chance to meet in person this week, sent me a link to a 1999 article by management guru Peter Drucker. Jon tells me that this article helped spark his concept of wirearchy. In Beyond the Information Revolution, Drucker explains the similarities between the printing; industrial and information revolutions. He concludes that we are definitely in a knowledge economy and that knowledge workers, as the only means of economic production, can no longer be treated as employees.

Bribing the knowledge workers on whom these industries [the new ones created in the 21st C] depend will therefore simply not work. The key knowledge workers in these businesses will surely continue to expect to share financially in the fruits of their labor. But the financial fruits are likely to take much longer to ripen, if they ripen at all. And then, probably within ten years or so, running a business with (short-term) “shareholder value” as its first — if not its only — goal and justification will have become counterproductive. Increasingly, performance in these new knowledge-based industries will come to depend on running the institution so as to attract, hold, and motivate knowledge workers. When this can no longer be done by satisfying knowledge workers’ greed, as we are now trying to do, it will have to be done by satisfying their values, and by giving them social recognition and social power. It will have to be done by turning them from subordinates into fellow executives, and from employees, however well paid, into partners.

If you agree with Drucker’s reasoning, which I do, then there is little doubt that industrial management and all that it has created (chain of command, human resources, line & staff, production, etc.) are the wrong models for the emerging workplace. We are seeing some signs of innovation in companies like Google, that give 20% independent research time to their engineers, but there is much more work to do.

The companies and societies that create and master the new models for wirearchy will be the leaders for the next century. However, there is no guarantee that this will happen here in Canada, the US, or Europe. In fact, it probably won’t happen where industrial models and values are the strongest. Look at the working definition of wirearchy and see if your organisation even remotely practices anything like this:

a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, and a focus on results enabled by interconnected people and technology

FrenchPod Launches

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As New Brunswick continues on its self-destructive path of eliminating early French immersion without a viable alternative, we now have FrenchPod, a [subversive] learning option that bypasses the politicized education system:

FrenchPod is a language training service designed around your needs, rather than the traditional constraints of language schools and publishers. Technology solves these problems and can make the learning of a new language easier.

We take the best pedagogical approaches of the classroom, layer in the community features of the social web and tailor a customized learning pathway for each student.

Note that networks route around obstructions with ease, and we now live in a networked world.