Coffee table in Enschede (Office) in a tired mood by Johan Koolwaaij

For a long time I’ve been interested in the fuzzy, informal, accidental and non-goal oriented parts of knowledge work – things that we often do implicitly, but that are actually essential to create a foundation to get things done later on. Normally a lot of those activities are happening in and around of the the physical space. For example, think of a coffee corner and it’s role at work:

• At the basic level a coffee corner provides a coffee (or other nourishments :) and a break from what one is doing.
• Often the conversations about on-going work continue at a coffee-corner (especially if you go there in a meeting break), but more informally, providing opportunities to deviate from what have to be done and to explore crazy alternatives.
• It also provides a space for accidental help and knowledge sharing, when colleagues from different groups/projects talk about something interesting they do/read/think about.
• It’s a great space for relationship building – sharing personal stories, food and drink helps to get to know people and to build trust.
• It’s a great place to pick up bits a pieces of information (rumours :) that help to build a bigger picture of an organisation, group or project – what’s going on and why, who is busy with it, what are the powers at play.

In the office life there are many other opportunities for similar things: sharing rooms, bumping into colleagues in the corridor, social events or meetings (even most of ‘lets get things done’ meetings have moments – waiting for others to arrive, endings, breaks and other detours from dealing with the agenda points). When we are together in one space, it creates an opportunity and an excuse to talk about things that are rarely worth to focus on intentionally (e.g. plan a meeting for), but are important for creating social and intellectual fabric behind the work.

One of the things I’ve been struggling with is the name for those things – those that provide us with time, space, opportunities and excuses to engage into informal and non-goal oriented interactions. Are they spaces? activities? contexts? structures?

There should be some research on it and I’m slowly digging into it, but so far have only the ingredients, but not the answers I want to have. So far the most inspiring insights come from the work of Jan Gehl on emergence of social activities in urban public spaces (see bits and pieces tagged as life between buildings), but I’d love to hear about other works in that direction.

My bigger interest behind all of it is simple – I want to understand how those things work when we move from a physical space into a digital one. It comes from two sides. First is about understanding what is missing when the work becomes distributed (expect more on it – I’m working on a case :). The second one is about emergent solutions – articulating how exactly tools facilitate things ‘around work’ that enable it.

The insights from my PhD research on how blogging supports the ‘fuzzy’ end of the knowledge work feed directly into that. This is what I say on it in my dissertation when discussing further research needs (p.226 of my dissertation; some context is in Blog as an edge zone):

…the effects of blogging are often accidental and emergent, rather than intentional. Bloggers and their weblogs might connect different social worlds not because they intend to do so, but by writing about eclectic topics that interest them and by making what they write accessible to various audiences. Relations between bloggers and more complex community structures might emerge as a result of individuals serving their own interests in a publicly visible way. Capturing and understanding those effects requires theories that account for practices that might seem to have lack of purpose. In relation to knowledge work that would mean theories that look at knowledge worker activities that go beyond performing specific tasks, or at interactions that look aimless (e.g. as some of those discussed by Nardi, 2005). Using the terminology of Jan Gehl, “excursions” that might have nothing to do with knowledge work on a surface (like drinking coffee together) might be a pretext or an occasion for something that is essential to enable it.

• Weblog as a networking instrument
• Writing as a method of data analysis
• Learning from Jill’s PhD journey

Collecting relevant links for my talk on blogging research yesterday I realised that a piece explaining my current view of the process is missing. So, a little story is below. It’s an edited piece from the dissertation chapter on blogging PhD ideas, There I reconstruct my own process of growing ideas from the moment they appear as fuzzy unarticulated feelings to turning them into some tangible outcome as part of my work. I distinguish three phases in this process: awareness and articulation, sense-making and turning ideas into a product.

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
• On book writing

Blogging PhD research and what happens next – presentation (an attempt of zen :) for the panel “New modes of scholarly communication: blogs, wikis, and web2.0 in academia” at Berlin 6 Open Access conference, November 11-13 2008, Dusseldorf, Germany.

[Video of the presentation]

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.

• On passion, imperfections, confessional writing and fears (re: dissertation goes to a printer)
• When they read what we write: respondent identification
• Paper: Blending blogging into an academic text

Ages ago I blogged about adopting a wifi bunny – Nabaztag. Since then I has been planning to write more on peripheral awareness, ambient knowledge and simple devices to support it, but somehow never did.

Robert makes my life easier writing about his experiments with Nabaztag’s Second Life. He programmed a Second Life version of the bunny that connects to the one in real life, notifies it about people in proximity and articulates things said to the SL bunny:

The resulting mesh-up is an example of how virtual worlds and the real world can be interconnected. Anyway, I like the idea of using the Nabaztag as an ambient display for information that you do not need on your screen, but still like to be aware of. Just having the bunny wiggle its ears when you have visitors in your Second Life store, for instance, can keep you aware without requiring you to be logged in to Second Life all the time.

The SL bunny is called SecondNabaz and available for download at SL Exchange.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/03/25.html#a1884; comments are here.

• Note to myself: think in terms of innovation acceptance stages for every new project
• Blogging PhD research and what happens next
• Process of growing ideas: from fuzzy feelings to finished results

It could be amasing how easily you can get drawn into mistakes you made before while having necessary knowledge to avoid them…

Let me first tell you about one of the things I has been doing while not blogging :)

I’m coordinating a European project focused on supporting collaboration of innovative small and medium enterprises (iSMEs) in Russia (official title is RUSMECO – Enhancing Russian SME collaboration and business development through COmmunities of practice). It’s two year project with business/academic partners in four EU countries and three Russian regions.

The first phase of the project is focused on understanding specific problems Russian innovative SMEs have and then figuring out which of them could be addressed in via “communities” (which is a way to address solutions on information sharing/ learning/ networking/ collaboration spectrum). The original plan was pretty straightforward – start from the literature and doing in-depth interviews with selected iSMEs, use insights to develop and run survey to reach a bigger group and then invite participants for the workshops that provide feedback on the results and discussion on solutions that could work (and then work on developing them).

It didn’t work that way – we found out that it was very difficult to motivate iSME representatives to spend their time on interviews and questionnaires. Not only because they are busy anyway, manoeuvring in transitioning economy and changing regulations, but because it was very difficult to explain to them what the project is about because the whole idea of communities was new to them.

Necessary detour. Many KM concepts and practices still have not reached Russian business world (and academia as well) – apart from a few exceptions most of the KM talk there is still about why it could be useful to invest in something like that, rather then deciding what and how to do. Communities of practice, while there as a reality, is not part of conceptual thinking about management and not a format that organisations would deliberately support with some business gains in mind. [more on this]

While dealing with the problem I realised there is something we overlooked during the planning stage: the relation between the degree of understanding the value of communities in business settings and project planning we had laid out. At that moment I thought of a similar mistake I did 6 years ago while planning for e-learning introduction in a university. Similar to 6 years ago I thought of an instrument that could help to prevent it – stages of innovation acceptance by Diane Dormant.

The framework is simple and it’s one of the most useful leadership instruments for me (I blogged it three years ago ;). It suggests that in their acceptance of an innovation people move through several stages and that if you want to promote new practices you need a strategy that corresponds to the stage where people are (check the original post for more details on stages and strategies):

In our project most of the planned efforts were focused on demonstrating-training-supporting communities for innovative SMEs while people in our target group were hardly aware of what a community could be for them. After bumping into a number of problems we had to adjust our strategies to advertising and informing, but it would be much smarter to think about it in advance.

So, given that it’s a repeated mistake I should make a note to myself to think in terms of innovation acceptance stages for every new project I start. Hopefully it will become a routine while working on planning…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/12/16.html#a1714; comments are here.

• MILK: multimedia interactions for learning and knowing
• Single community space: weblogs + forums
• WiFi in St.Petersburg – Cafe Soiree

Before I lose them in e-mail – articles on awareness from Robert.

• The CSCW2000 workshop on awareness
• The SIGGROUP special issue on awareness
• Paul Dourish & Victoria Bellotti Awareness and coordination in shared workspaces

I’m looking for research on awarenss, so please alert me if you know some good articles to read as a starting point…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/09/13.html#a1349; comments are here.

• Blog networking study: establishing and maintaining relations via blogging
• What a coffee corner provides, how to call it and a research agenda
• Formation of norms in a blog community