Mathemagenic

The slides from my talk at Online Information today - Getting value from employee weblogs: A knowledge management approach

Related:

• Microsoft study
• Lilia Efimova & Jonathan Grudin (2007). Crossing Boundaries: A Case Study of Employee Blogging. Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'07)
• Links to papers, presentations and blogposts, related to the study
• Blog post on all kinds of things I talked about
• Blogging as breathing or how to find time for blogging?
• Blogging as creating space for important
• Legitimised theft: distributed apprenticeship in weblog networks
• Public weblogs as a tool for (internal) knowledge management
• Employee blogging: Making most from what is already there

Something that has been in my "to blog" list for a while - the current reincarnation of my personal KM models, turned into a knowledge work framework.   

The left part of the framework represents personal knowledge management activities that inform and support performing specific (content-related) tasks, which in turn provide direction and focus for PKM. The distinction between tasks and PKM could be clarified using one-person enterprise metaphor: tasks would represent its core business, while PKM - its overhead activities.

New ideas and insights are often developed in the social context, hence conversations are in the middle of the framework. This sector incorporates a spectrum between passively followed conversations to collaboration with others focused on performing specific tasks.

The lower sector represents the domain of relations, since effective knowledge development is enabled by trust and shared understanding between the people involved. For an individual, this means a need to establish and maintain a personal network, to keep track of contacts and conversations, and to make choices about which communities to join and which to ignore.

The top sector represents the domain of developing ideas that requires filtering vast amounts of information, making sense of it, and connecting different bits and pieces to come up with new ideas. In this process physical and digital artefacts play an important role, so knowledge workers are faced with a need for personal information management  to organise their paper and digital archives, e-mails, and bookmark collections.

The scale from left to right represents a continuum between non-active awareness of a specific domain, its players and social norms and active, usually purpose-focused, tasks. As the focus increases from left to right, the number of specific ideas one can actively pursue, conversations to participate and close relations decreases. The scale reflects the process of legitimate peripheral participation, moving from being an outsider in a specific knowledge community to a more active position. Awareness, as a starting point of this process, comes through exposure to the ideas of others and lurking at the periphery (observing without active participation) in order to learn about professional language and social norms.

A bit of a follow-up on the microactions aggregate point from my post on 'Beyond blogging' lessons learnt, where I wrote:

Blogging is about microcontent - publishing small pieces of thought and commentary, anchored with permalinks and carried away by feeds. However, the real value is not at the post level - ecosystems between blog posts are more interesting and more important. Think of the fuzzy feeling of knowing someone from reading a weblog over time, implicit understanding of a new issue that emerges while following a conversation between bloggers or sense of belonging to a network of others - in all cases posts and links are only a tip of the iceberg.

Developing "fuzzy feeling", "implicit understanding" and "sense of belonging" takes time and effort. For those writing and reading weblogs in a real time that's an integral part of the process, but what about others - newcomers, who need to navigate implicitly constructed knowledge and relations, or those of a periphery of the particular topical community, who don't have lots of time to invest, but still want to know, or those searching for an answer to a specific question?

In this respect I would distinguish between the first degree and second degree of blogging effects:

• First degree effects - those that "happen" as part of the natural processes in a blogging ecosystem - conversations, networking, reputation building.
• Second degree effects - those possible since weblogs provide rich traces to learn from for non-participants.

For a non-participant the microcontent nature of blogging creates two problems (actually, those are also problems for the participants, but to a much lesser degree):

• There are a lot of weblog posts, that are difficult to navigate if you are not part of the ecosystem
• Posts are fragmented, so often to gain real insight on the issue or to judge the expertise of a blogger one have to follow multiple posts

Now think of a company where many employees blog about their work internally or externally. Next to creating conditions for blogging (and the first degree effects of it), ideally it would be also also interested in maximising the second degree effects - making most from what is already there.

So, what are the ways to make most from the weblog traces that are already there?

One thing to do is improving discoverability of interesting blog posts, blogs and bloggers with smart search, aggregation and providing pointers to good content (exteded discussion and specific "to do" ideas). However, those things do not help much with improving access to expertise fragmented in a number of posts that not only take time to read, but also require some "integration" effort. Similar problem exists, for example, with forum-based Q&A discussions, where one often have to read through the whole thread to get an idea of proposed solution(s).

Weblogs are a bit better than forums in respect to summaries (since bloggers could not rely on having previous messages visible in a thread they tend to summarise some of it, see paper on weblog conversations for more), but they are still far from providing densely packed information in a way a good article would do.

Weblogs are good for drafting and discussing ideas in progress, but it also makes a lot of sense to find ways to do more with those drafts. Some ideas:

• Making a list of "best of my posts" is a good practice anyway, but as a company you can provide an additional incentive by asking bloggers who work for you to make those lists. For example, to be promoted in a newsletter on a topic of their blog or as an input for their evaluation if they want to bring their work-related blogging as an extra point.
• Checking if weblog content could be reused as an input for web-pages, white papers, help files, training courses, books, etc. and asking bloggers to work on those. I guess many would be happy with an opportunity to rework bits and pieces of ideas into something more coherent and potentially more visible (and I think that asking "more professional" writers to rework someone else's weblog content only makes sense if bloggers themselves don't feel like doing it).
• Automatic summaries and visualisations. Those do not replace human summarisation, but could be useful to get an idea of interesting trends and to locate specific weblog posts and conversations.

While trying to find things related to my previous post I came across a few posts I forgot I wrote. While reading this one I became mesmerized by "madly letting go" in the quote from Donella Meadows:

I don't think there are cheap tickets to system change. You have to work at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off paradigms. In the end, it seems that leverage has less to do with pushing levers than it does with disciplined thinking combined with strategically, profoundly, madly letting go.

I'm getting more and more convinced that letting go is one of the key skills in whatever 2.0 - web, business, science, life...

While working on my methodology chapter I realised that my interest in using alternative writing styles (e.g. authoethnography) in reporting research is also supported by knowing that storytelling is an effective way to share knowledge from my KM work. Now the problem is that I was never seriousely into storytelling research, so I don't have any research-based arguments for that. Any pointers are very welcome!

From what I can recall it was something about the power of contextual cues in the story that trigger all kinds of connections in our brain.

Some randomly related things that I thought about:

• The effectiveness of online communities vs. databases of best practices (personal context, specifics, interactivity).
• Engagement as on of the Relational qualities that promote effective knowledge sharing
• "The interspersed questions prompt learners to process the material in a manner that is more likely to give birth to learning" (mathemagenic processing).

See also: a collection on how storytelling communicates complex ideas by Steve Denning

Thanks to Euan Semple, a pointer to Bringing Social Media To Work by Jeremy Burton, with the quote:

For most people, the human drive to connect and share is stronger than the duty to spend every possible moment "being productive". No matter what, people will  find ways to socialize and share during work hours. It might be best to treat this like sex education: If your employees are going to "do it" anyway, why not encourage them to channel their social-media impulses in smart, safe ways that can potentially help your business?

Puting it next to David Gurteen's blogging as loving sexual relationship :)

I has been struggling for a while to figure out how comes that 'individualistic' weblogs support community formation. Paul Hodkinson provides an elegant answer to my question in his chapter on LJ goths in Uses of blogs:

Wellman and Gulia have distinguished between superficial "weak ties," which are confined to a narrow shared interest and take place within a single domain, and "strong ties," which involve extensive familiarity and are played out in a variety of domains. Through enabling individual goths to read about and comment upon a variety of aspects of one another's individual, everyday lives, rather than just those aspects directly related to the goth scene, online journals played an important part in the development of strong, intimate relationships between them, which nearly always extended to other forms of interpersonal communication, whether email, online chat, mobile phone, or, most importantly, face-to-face interaction. In turn, the development and/or reinforcement of such strong, multiplex ties between goths served to reinforce participants' general sense of investment in and attachment to the goth scene as a community. (pp.191-192)

Other interesting things in the chapter: moving from group spaces to weblogs, descriptions of online/offline dynamic around goth events, blogs as a way to reinforce culture. It's about goths, but lots of things apply to other blogging subcultures (KM blogging, for example :)

References:

Hodkinson, P. (2006). Subcultural Blogging? Online Journals and Group Involvement among UK Goths, in A.Bruns & J. Jacobs (Eds.), Uses of blogs, pp. 187-197. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Wellman, B. and M. Gulia (1999) `Virtual Communities as Communities: Net Surfers Don't Ride Alone', in M. Smith and P. Kollock (Eds.), Communities in Cyberspace, pp. 163—90. London: Routledge.