stories connect knowledge

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“Perhaps the most central thrust in KM [knowledge management] is to capture and make available, so it can be used by others in the organization, the information and knowledge that is in people’s heads as it were, and that has never been explicitly set down.” —KM World

Knowledge management is a mixture of explicit and implicit knowledge sharing. It can be as explicit as an organizational knowledge base, or as implicit as the work culture. A lot depends on what the organization wants to preserve. Is it how-to knowledge, like a trade secret formula, or is it certain practices and norms that define the culture? Or is it both? Every organization has to define this for itself.

To be effective, knowledge management has to be part of the workflow. The people doing the work and making decisions how to do it must be involved. This starts with the discipline of personal knowledge mastery (PKM): a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world and work more effectively. PKM is an ongoing process of filtering information from our networks, creating knowledge individually and with our teams, and then discerning with whom and when to share the artifacts of our knowledge. PKM helps to put our personal knowledge maps out there for others to see.

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tetrads for sense-making

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first we shape our tools and then they shape us

I use Marshall and Eric McLuhan’s laws of media to ask better questions about how technology affects those who use it. In the following presentation I have put together a number of tetrads, or hypotheses on the possible impact of social media, the internet, and other technologies. In summary, the laws of media state that every medium (technology) extends a human property, obsolesces the previous medium (& makes it a luxury good), retrieves a much older medium & reverses its properties when pushed to its limits.

every medium extends a human property, obsolesces the previous medium, retrieves a much older medium, & reverses its properties when pushed to its limits McLuhan's Laws of Media tetrad of gpt-3 social media tetrad McLuhans laws of media McLuhans tetrad for print

online privacy and security

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As the internet becomes an essential part of lives — enabling us to access government services, connect with friends, and earn a living — there are frustratingly few ways to maintain privacy or security online. Companies that control a large part of the web traffic — Google, Facebook, Amazon — can pretty much do whatever they want with our data. And now American internet service provides can sell customer information to the highest bidder. Since most internet traffic flows through the USA, this affects the rest of the world as well.

I am not a programmer but I try to stay informed about information technology through my professional social networks. Here are a few things I do to thwart government and corporate interests that may not have my privacy foremost in mind.

I use a password manager, Canadian-made 1Password. It creates a unique, long, password for every site I use. Each one is different so that when the site inevitably gets hacked, I only have to change one password, and the hackers do not get access to my other sites.

I use three different browsers. One is used to access Google services and LinkedIn only. I know that these sites track me so I don’t do anything else on this browser. I have another browser kept clean and seldom used, as a backup or if I need to access something that is blocked by my main browser, Firefox. On Firefox I have installed HTTPS Everywhere, Ghostery, Privacy Badger, CanvasBlocker, and uBlock Origin. I have also uninstalled Adobe Flash, a known point of vulnerability on any computer. I realize that this is probably not enough but it gives me some defence against prying eyes.

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TGIF

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“The given is not given unless it is taken, and taking is an act of interpretation. Always.” —@dweinberger

“The most important skill to learn is how to distinguish between confident people, and people who actually know what they are taking about.” —@existentialcoms

“History is not another name for the past, as many people imply. It is the name for stories about the past.” —A. J. P. Taylor via @RayBoomhower

Conway’s Law: “Any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.”

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the geography of genius

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“Creativity is a relationship, one that unfolds at the intersection of person and place.” Thus concludes Eric Weiner in The Geography of the Genius, an enjoyable historic and modern romp through Athens, Hangzhou, Florence, Edinburgh, Calcutta, Vienna, and finally Silicon Valley. This book provides no easy answers or simple recipes but gives much insight told as a personal journey. It was a joy to read. The closest Weiner comes to providing a pat answer as to what makes for genius or geographical golden ages is at the end, as a counterpoint to Richard Florida’s 3 T’s (talent, technology, and tolerance).

A better set of attributes, I think, are —and I’ll jump on the alliteration bandwagon here—the Three D’s: disorder, diversity, and discernment. Disorder, as we’ve seen is necessary to shake up the status quo, to create a break in the air. Diversity, of both people and viewpoints, is needed to produce not only more dots, but different kinds of dots. Discernment is perhaps the most important, and overlooked, ingredient. Linus Pauling, the renowned chemist and two-time Nobel prize winner, was once asked by a student how to come up with good ideas. It’s easy, replied Pauling, “You have lots of ideas and throw away the bad ones.”

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TGIM #1

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Thank Goodness It’s Monday. Now that’s something we freelancers appreciate :) As part of the wonder of Monday, I am starting a series of posts, similar to Friday’s Finds, but posted on the best day of the week: Monday. I have no intention of making this a regular feature but from time to time on Monday, I will share something I think may be useful. This week I am sharing some of my social bookmarks that relate to personal knowledge mastery. Just look below the cartoon …

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digital literacy for the arts

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Last week I attended the Arts in a Digital World Summit in Montréal. The event launched the four-year funding program of $88.5 million aimed at amplifying “the quality, scale and sharing of Canadian art through digital technology”. One aspect of this fund that gives me confidence is the desire to fund many small projects of around $10,000 and also the willingness to invest in risky projects. Given the complexity of the challenge, using a probe-sense-respond approach only makes sense.

The presentation by Astra Taylor, author of The People’s Platform, was a highlight for me. Astra stated that the digital advertising model, which is the force behind platform capitalism, only reinforces economic inequity. She urged the audience to ‘occupy the internet’ especially since artists are those with the power to change society.

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networked knowledge creates value

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As we enter the network era, the dominant technology is the internet and working knowledge is distributed through professional communities, many of which are hosted online. Compare this to the last 75 years where the company was connected to a factory and knowledge was delivered from business schools. Tangible goods, best practices, and standardization are being replaced by intangible assets, emergent practices, and transparency. In the network era, business is changing.

In the networked knowledge triad, I tried to show how real value creation today happens outside the organization. Therefore professionals should develop value creation networks that connect to the world, beyond the current workplace. These networks are the modern equivalents of degrees and certificates. They are the value we bring to our work teams and organizations. As the life expectancy of organizations decreases, we can no longer depend on employers to provide stability for our working lives. That stability now comes from our networks.

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power, control, literacy

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@Kasparov63: “To play the victim despite holding power, one needs dangerous enemies. If they don’t exist, they must be created or their threat inflated.”

@kevin2kelly: “Humans are experts at inefficiency. All art, discovery, innovation, creation, are inherently inefficient. Efficiency is for robots, not us.”

We didn’t lose control – it was stolen, HT @josemurilo

“Let me state it plainly: Google and Facebook are not allies in our fight for an equitable future – they are the enemy.

These platform monopolies are factory farms for human beings; farming us for every gram of insight they can extract.

If, as Tim [Berners-Lee] states, the core challenge for the Web today is combating people farming, and if we know who the people farmers are, shouldn’t we be strongly regulating them to curb their abuses?”

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