Like now. Finishing my PhD is the worst ever experience of unbalancing work-life balance. As I wrote before, I don’t mind and even appreciate professional thinking and activities outside of work hours, and think of holidays and weekends as a time when I don’t have to work, but may very well do it if I feel like it.

Well, at the current stage my PhD is mainly what I have to do: I focus on finishing it, cutting off most of the fun (well, I do a few fun things like going to IR9 and Berlin6 recently, or occasionally reading a few blog posts or papers that have nothing to do with what I have to write). The worst thing is that PhD I-have-to-work spills off to evenings and weekends. Not that I work all my free time, I make sure I do things with family and friends, but it feels that I work all the time when I’m not busy with something necessary or social (I read a paper a while ago discussing a nice concept of pottering - this is exactly what I miss right now).

And then comes a day like yesterday. I went swimming with Alexander and admired how good he was (usually he goes with Robert, so I only get to hear the stories), sleept when he did, recovering from travel and writing induced sleep deprivation, was outside feeding animals, playing with sand, collecting acorns, getting warm in a shopping centre and then cycling to another park when it was already dark to wake up sleeping sheep to give them acorns and to look at Luna (one of a few Russian words he says) between the trees… We made pancakes together and played with the Lego train (again!), read books from my own childhood, called papa to say good night and looked at the moon once again before going to bed…

The whole day I kept feeling how precious and important it was to be like that, grounded in everyday details, feeling life as an experience, and not as the time ticking towards the moment the next chapter is due. When I wanted to work less to spend time with hypothetical kids I didn’t even come close realising how important that would be for staying sane.

• Combining PhD writing and caring for a sick baby OR New take on flexible working hours
• Invisible work
• Mama’s day: Legitimate peripheral participation

The first phase is awareness and articulation. This is the moment when a certain idea (or an aspect of it) first comes to my radar, either being brought by others or articulated as a result of reflecting on my own experiences or choices. I join those two together as they are often interrelated. Personal experiences shape what I pay attention to in interactions with other people, while articulation of my own thoughts is often prompted by events or conversations that involve others.

Once ideas appear on my mental radar they go through a sense-making phase: discovering different aspects of an idea, the meaning of it to me and its connections with other ideas.

Finally, there is a moment when ideas are ripe and the process of turning them into specific products is started. In my case it is doing research and reporting about it, usually in a form of an academic publication.

These phases do not have clear boundaries between them. While being engaged in a sense-making process around an idea I may become aware of or articulate new aspects of it; working on making an idea part of a product often prompts additional rounds of sense-making. Also, there are many ideas that grow at the same time, so multiple processes like the one described above go in parallel.

• PhD blogging and paper writing
• On blogging and book writing
• Bloggers as public intellectuals and writing about them in a research report

[I think videos should be online somewhere next week, will add a link here]

In the talk I decided to talk about my experiences of blogging research to make it as relevant as possible to other researchers, so I focused primarily on connections between it and the process of growing ideas and turning them into a publication. It doesn’t give a good overview of blogging in respect to research methods and methodologies (some readable insight on it is here).

Links for more background on parts of the talk:

• Process of growing ideas: from fuzzy feelings to finished results
• Fuzzy ideas: awareness and articulation
  • Things that don’t fit
  • Blogging as creating space for important
  • Reasons for using weblog to keep information bits
• Sense-making
  • Mangrove effect: the value of making things explicit
  • PhD: experiential research and everyday grounded theory
  • Weblog and the mess of papers on my desk play similar roles in supporting my work
• Turning into an outcome
  • If most of the things I want to say in my PhD are already in my weblog, what’s the added value of the dissertation?
• Issues related to doing networked research
  • Blogging research: attribution and ownership of ideas
  • Bloggers as public intellectuals and writing about them in a research report
  • Paper: Blending blogging into an academic text (it discusses blogging from a methodological perspective; relevant in this case for the discussion about research quality issues and ethical challenges of studying bloggers)

I know it bugs for being turned into a readable paper. Will work on that after finishing the dissertation (soon, submitting first draft as a whole in three weeks!), but any comments on where it makes sense to publish is are very welcome.

• Changing shapes
• Weblogs in business: why not
• Methodology chapter: Quality verification strategies

I can imagine that for others the picture would be different, but I guess that for many of us two thing are true: weblog is only one of many tools to connect with other bloggers and with each new technology the exact niche of blogging becomes smaller and better defined.

• How Bob manages his conversations
• Preaching to the converted: PKM is not about methods and tools, but about attitude change
• How ‘individualistic’ weblogs support community

I started my PhD research with an idealistic target to create something that people would read and find useful. As I worked on it the “people” turned into bloggers, my peers on the quest of figuring out where weblogs fit in knowledge-intensive environments. They were the audience that I wanted to reach with my work.

I didn’t realise that doing PhD research is extremely slow comparing to the fun of playing with new ideas in my professional community. As I moved beyond the early studies into doing research and writing about it, I felt more and more being behind. There were a few “objective” reasons to stop reading other blogs, but also  an emotional one next to them: reading about new ideas people in my network were playing with made me feel working on “yesterday’s news”. It also made clear that my work wasn’t that interesting for my imagined audience, so I was losing my main motivation to do it.

I struggled with it for a while. As I eventually figured out the problem was in my own expectations and I had the answers in the first paper I wrote on weblogs that I mechanically copy-pasted into the introduction chapter of my dissertation. I wanted to study blogging to get an understanding of where it fits for the “pragmatists” who come after “enthusiastic early adopters”, yet it’s early adopters I imagined as my audience.

That changed everything. As I realised that I’m not writing for my “early adopter” peers, but for people who were only getting into blogging, it suddently made more sense.

• Open and free global registry of doctoral dissertations in progress
• How blogging makes my life difficult
• Why PhDs should start blogging

And then I keep wondering if those corporate templates actually do anything - when I hear a good talk I remember the speaker, not the company. May be it’s one more illusion of corporate communication departments…

• No related posts.

My original intentions are outlined in the study description I used to invite bloggers to participate,  Networking practices of KM bloggers:

In general I prefer using real names of the participants and links to their weblogs to give credits similar to how it’s done in the blogging world. [...]

I would like to post summary of the interview on my weblog (after all interviews are done). I will email it to you before posting, so you can correct anything wrong or decide if it should not be published.

There is a chance that I will blog about work-in-progress while analysing the interview data or working on a publication. In this case I will only quote from publicly available sources (e.g. from your weblog or summary of the interview after you give permission to publish it online).

The main motivation behind this approach was to give credits to the participants and create a possibility of a dialogue around their contributions. I also didn’t expect that the things I wanted to ask would be extremely sensitive, so thought that bloggers wouldn’t mind (or even would appreciate) sharing them in public (in fact, a couple of people I interviewed said that I could just post interview summaries without checking with them first). An additional motivation for doing so was “methodological”: adding transparency to the research process as a way to improve the research quality.

Now what’s happened:

I’ve got stuck with writing interview summaries as those had to satisfy both, putting them online and analysing them for my research. For the analysis the ideal way would be to have “extended summaries”, those with as many direct transcripts of actual interviews as possible, however those would be too long and too fragmented to post in public. I could also make shorter summaries to post online, but this would limit what I could use while discussing the results since I promised to “only quote from publicly available sources”.

So I thought of analysing the data, deciding what had to be quoted and revising the summaries accordingly. But then I’ve got stuck with the analysis. For me discussing emergent interpretation with others is the best way to get “unstuck” and for this study doing that in the weblog would be really the best option. However, I couldn’t blog about anything untill posting the interview summaries online. And I couldn’t write those summaries either…

I eventually got “unstuck” with finding a way to discuss the interviews before making public summaries of them. I made anonymous summaries and used them to have a discussion on emergent themes with two colleagues who are far from blogging. With that input I could get a better picture of how to discuss the study results and which parts of the interviews are really important to include. I’m currently making blog-friendly versions of the anonymous summaries, so I can finally email those to the participants to be checked, post them online and get into blogging the results.

In the process I also figured out a few other issues with making the research data publicly available and attributed to the participants: it made more challenging including background data on the participants (e.g. age) or discussing “difficult” issues around their practices. So, my idealistic attempt for an “extreme” transparency didn’t really work - I guess I’ll be more moderate next times :)

• Weblog research ethics (3)
• Methodology chapter: posting parts online
• What happens once you see patterns in the mess of traces you and others leave?

That’s said, I’m extremely happy writing a paper and going to Internet Research 9.0: Rethinking Communities, Rethinking Place in Copenhagen. It was intense (especially given that I didn’t finish a PhD chapter before leaving) and insightful - it feels that I had all the conversations put on hold over last year in four days… And, the best thing of that came out of it is - somehow having all those conversations really helped me to feel that “I’m there” PhD-wise. Of course, there is still lots of writing to be done, but that feels more like working out all the loose ends and making threads that go through different pieces more visible and more strong. The conference was also good to start thinking about the post-PhD life - reflecting on what topics and people I was drawn to helps to get a feeling of where I’ll be heading next.

I hope to be able to write on some of the themes in more detail, so just the highlights to remember what to write about (I may also come back and edit this post with more ideas and links):

• a distinction between friendship-based and interest-based participation and learning in a keynote by Mimi Ito (notes by Axel Bruns), loosely corresponding to maintaining existing connections and creating new ones
• thinking about online places - their differences from physical places and co-presence as a way of constructing them - and ways of studying (in) them
  • communities, online places and participation; multiple places + multi-membership
  • experienced as an individual and implications for research and practice
• learning: community-based, (duad) relation-based, artefact-based?
• different ways to look at privacy: episodes, aggregations over time, patterns, lifestreaming triangulations
• blogs
  • blogs as transitional objects (find the paper!)
  • exploring identity and constructing identity in one space; changes over time
  • crafts online and research on mommy-blogging (loved to see research done on things I am exposed to via non-work blog reading)
• researching fast changing fields - audiences and expectations (later:
  Research results as yesterday’s news, audiences and expectations)

Twitter notes from two ‘communities’ session on the last day are here.

• Personal effectiveness in a knowledge intensive environment
• Weblog networks as social ecosystems
• KMSS02: Day 2. Communities of practice

In the evening I found that my uncle died yesterday. They didn’t want to tell me, but as soon as I heard my mom’s voice I knew something was wrong. Being sad, being happy that last time in Russia we spent a good time together, being angry that I couldn’t be there with my family, smiling at the little guy who wants to play, trying not to be afraid thinking of my family being so far away…

But behind all that being grateful for how much I have - including this day, full of emotions… Realising that whatever happens, the best thing I can do is to be here, to be present, to live fully now, to be with those I love, to do things I enjoy doing…

• The wedding dress and other cases of revisiting the past

Jack Vinson [bold is mine]:

…what I take from this is the larger picture of how people work together to develop new and interesting ideas.  Academics, the focus of Lilia’s discussion, naturally talk to one another and hammer out ideas.  It’s hard enough to see where an idea truly originates even amongst a few people.

But when the conversation crosses tens or hundreds of people AND locations AND sources AND time, then the genesis of ideas is up in the clouds.  We know this - at least this seems like something I learned through my education.  But we still insist in our society on finding THE person who came up with some invention and pouring the credit upon her.

I guess those things happened before, but with current interconnectivity the process of “cloud idea generation” becomes wider and faster. It also becomes more visible - with so much of interactions being technology-mediated it’s now more easy to see how bits of ideas travel and change.

“Pouring the credit” is an interesting issue. As a person, I’m happy inventing ideas and even more happier to see them travel and being used: knowing that a bit of my thinking was useful for someone else is rewarding by itself. In this respect I don’t really need credits, but I definitely appreciate having “trackbacks” - some way of knowing where my ideas travel and what happened to them.

For me as a professional things are much more difficult: I still get hired and get paid as an individual, not as part of the cloud. The current rules that govern my work are pretty much based on the number and quality of the ideas that could be traced to me as a contributor. In this sense, credits are essential.

While I love doing research, one of the reasons I’m not planning to stay in the academic world is the system that ties formal professional growth (which is about the scale of challenges to deal with and available resources next to the salary scale) to channelling ideas into forms and spaces (e.g. A-list journals) that might work better for credits, but do not necessarily for helping ideas to travel wider and faster.

Interestingly enough, this is also the issue that makes me thinking of getting back to my HR(D) roots after I’m done with the PhD research. I believe that many new ways of working are not getting where they could be in organisations because they do not fit with the ways the work is evaluated and rewarded.

• Learning and knowledge sharing (2)
• Why people do not ask questions?
• Knowledge flows are powered by questions