Had a pleasure to talk with Nancy on her work on technologies for communities. Some things are still hanging out in my head, so I guess I just write them here to move on.

Open issues for research/thinking on communities (communities of practice; KM perspective).

Definitions. Ton cites Marc Smith:

… let’s shelve the word ‘community’ and use and study the term collective action instead. There are over 150 definitions of community by social scientists. If we (the social scientists) are not able to decide what it is, maybe everybody else should not be using the word either…

I agree with both that there are no good definitions and I like ‘collective action’ as a term, but I think it doesn’t work if you want to talk about specifics. It could include anything between a loosely coupled network, a community with shared language and practice or a project group with tight deliverables and deadlines. The boundaries between those are fluid, but they (at least in the extremes) are different in many respects (e.g. relational density, levels of trust, shared understanding, goal-orientedness, etc.)

Bottom-up evolution vs. top-down control in supporting communities. See the discussion at Dave Snowden’s blog.

Personal vs. social in community tools. Most of the community tools are group-focused (although Nancy is right, it’s getting more and more blurred). However, many of us are members of multiple communities and have to deal with different group tool configurations for all of them. Technology-wise I’d love to see more work on something like personal learnining environments (slides with more) for networking and collaboration: a toolset that would allow me to participate in different social spaces without learning yet another interface.

Aggregation of digital traces and social effects of those. Digital traces we leave eventually get aggregated and fed back to the social spaces we participate in or to some members of those (think of a community moderator who has access to stats on your activity in a community). They change knowledge we have about each other and eventually change the dynamics of our relationships and interactions (think of gaming the ratings or effects of metrics to measure community things in a corporate context). This is going to be bigger and scarier (at least for those people like me :), so we need to know more about it.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/22.html#a1857; comments are here.

• IPKM: Inter-Personal Knowledge Management
• Weblogs: conversations with self and conversations with others
• Private, public and selective sharing

We are going through rounds of discussions with colleagues on information overload, which is going to be one of our research topics for 2005. Those discussions provoke some associative thinking – on conversation overload (I’d define conversation overload as a stress of not being able to participate in conversations one wants to participate).

Another trigger for this thinking is a discussion at AOK mailing list on online communities. It’s very timely (re: paper on weblog communities), very interesting and very frustrating at the same time.

The frustration comes from the fact that I’m not able to participate in the discussion… I guess there are several reasons for that. First, there is a usual bad luck – all interesting AOK discussions happen when I’m heavily offline. But there are other reasons as well:

• It’s “high traffic” + “deep thought” discussion, so you need to spend a good effort to get into it, to follow different turns and arguments before you can jump in and comment.
• The discussion is organised in a way that’s difficult to digest with tools I have at my disposal:
  • there is no threading as all posts are moderated, so I can’t use Gmail’s great thread display to focus on most interesting threads
  • there is no RSS feed (at least I couldn’t find it), so I can’t use news aggregator to treat messages as posts
  • it’s not public, so I can’t bookmark interesting messages to come back to them later

It’s may be my personal problem (am I so addicted to blogging that I’m not able to follow mailing lists anymore? :), but it makes me wondering why I’m less stressed in a case of weblog conversations.

This is what I suspect:

Weblog conversations are easier to “jump into” in a middle – as each weblog post have to be meaningful on itself (see also Jill on good hypertext), bloggers make more effort summarising earlier arguments or at least linking to them. In case of a mailing list without threading you have to read all messages to get into the context of conversation).

Weblog conversations are “relaxed”: of course, timely response may be important, but you know that nothing awful happens if you react a couple of months later. In a case of a mailing list reacting in a couple of months can easily turn your message into “off topic”, as conversation moves to new areas and context is lost.

Parts of weblog conversations are easier to “wave” into your own thinking. It could be a “personal KM researcher” bias, but I could hardly do without connecting discussions I have with others with my own thinking (re: conversations with others vs. conversations with self). I participate in a discussion not only for an altruistic reason of helping others and not only for the fun of “creative abrasion”, but also to learn myself and to develop my own ideas further. This could often mean that I also need a way to organise messages in a discussion (“collective” artefacts) in my own way to make them my personal as well (e.g. by selecting and reorganising them in my own way with as bookmarks).

I guess I’d go and post these ideas to AOK mailing list – may be my life will become easier :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/11/23.html#a1441; comments are here.

• For me blogging is about conversations
• Weblog conversations revisited: conversations with self
• KM: what’s in it for me?

Just thought I would share a piece from the previous post paper (p.9):

In a simplest case, a weblog post is embedded into “a conversation with self”, a personal narrative used to articulate and to organise his own thinking. A single blogger could have several of such conversations simultaneously, returning to ideas over time. In a weblog this is usually visible as linking to one’s earlier posts, use of related titles, or organising ideas using different categories or topics. At the same time a weblog post can trigger (or be a response to) a conversation with others, sometimes leading to several independent conversations happen simultaneously.

The interplay between personal and public, individual and community, is something that makes weblogs interesting to study… In the same line of thinking (Learning webs, p.4):

Synergies of self-organised and community learning. A weblog provides its author with personal space for learning that does not impose a communal learning agenda and learning style. At the same time learners are not alienated and can benefit from a community feedback, validation and further development of ideas.

This post also appears on channel weblog research

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/03/22.html#a1137; comments are here.

• Personal ways of doing things in public
• Nominated for Edublog Awards :)
• WBC04: selected

One problem in on-line communities is getting newcomers up to speed: it’s not easy to catch up in a middle of a conversation of a group that has history of developing shared understanding and common language. A colleague asked if weblogs have the same problem.

I would say yes, but I believe that “getting into” a weblog is easier than joining a community conversation.

Compared to a forum posts weblog posts are more “self-standing” pieces. I would say that weblog post is more like one of many TV series and forum post is like a movie scene.

• Weblogging discussions are distributed and bloggers have to take into account that the rest of a discussion is not visible on the same page, so they provide explicit links and often some kind of summary of other posts.
• Bloggers also know that a specific post can not be easily connected to previous posts in the same weblog (because most of the archives will separate them into different pages), so they also provide linking and summary to their own posts.

In a forum you have to read most of the posts to get to the point, but weblogs provide multiple coherent “views” on a distributed discussion simply because each author tries to make his weblog meaningful. This provides a reader with choice of “entry points”: I can always select weblogs fitting my level of understanding and preferred reading style and use them as “lenses” to grasp what’s going on.

There is still a problem of developed shared language and understanding that can be difficult for newcomers to get through, but I believe that openness and multisubjectivity of blogging ecosystem provide more space for accommodating emergent interpretations of newcomers. [Of course, multisubjectivity may lead to lack of shared language that makes dialogue more difficult, but this is another topic]

These are my ideas and personally I find “jumping into new weblog” easy, but I wonder if there are other experiences.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/10/01.html#a774; comments are here.

• RSS Winterfest (2)
• Macromedia blogging
• de Moor, A. & Efimova, L. (2004). An argumentation analysis of weblog conversations

Jack Vinson points to Knowledge Flows: Mainstream or Myths? by David Skyrme. As Jack says, it’s good to read again. This time I picked up the following quote about communities of practice:

With rare exceptions it is individuals who practice, not communities.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/09/26.html#a768; comments are here.

• KM: what’s in it for me?
• Weblogs: conversations with self and conversations with others
• Learning: community vs. individual perspective

Denham commenting to my community vs. individual perspective for learning post:

To change entreched mental mosels you need the energy supplied in deep dialog, the explication and defense of alternative points of view, you really need ‘community’ help to discover, surface, articulate & examine your personal assumptions. To get to those burried models you have to have external support – they just cannot be reached via personal introspection.

Stephen Downes commenting on Important Learning Must Occur in Groups by Spike Hall (check 17 September 2003 as there is a problem with direct linking):

That fact that there are some irreducibly social elements to learning does not mean that the whole thing is social. You can learn some things, in some ways, on your own, without a social network. Specifically, you need a social network in order to teach others or to learn from others. But that is not the whole of learning.

I agree with both. “Community” or social context is very important for learning. At least, this is true for myself: I always need a conversation for growing my ideas.

I believe that learning comes from recognising differences. This could be done in several ways: confronting your today’s ideas with yesterday’s, confronting mental models with practices or confronting your views with the views of others. The last way is probably most natural for us as it is part of our social life anyway.

But there is a simple question that makes me looking at the individual differences: why not everyone learns from being a part of social interactions even if “creative abrasion” is there?

I think about very simple example. I studied for my Master’s degree in the Netherlands (here). I was part of an international study group, had international social life and many opportunities to observe people from different cultures. When I look back I say that learning about different cultures and their interplay and learning about my own myths and perceptions about other countries probably gave me more than learning for my studies. But I also observed another extreme of this “cultural” learning: getting closed, staying in one’s “own country” club only and almost visible resistance to look what could be learnt from differences.

So, why same conditions provoke learning and change in some people and resistance in others? I can think of many explanations, like personal need to learn about specific things or personal need to belong to your “tried and tested” communities without being open for new experiences, but all of them have to do with something “personal”.

Summarising I would say: social context is vital for learning, but not enough. I wonder what else do we need and I suspect that this “something else” is hidden at individual level (or, better, in interplay between social and individual).

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/09/21.html#a759; comments are here.

• One does not make a difference unless it is a difference in the lives of people
• True knowledge work cannot be automated
• Bloggers as knowledge animals

A weblog by Olaf Brugman – Knowledge Bridge (many know Olaf well via communicating at the Knowledge Board, where he also supports Special Interest Group on KM in NGOs).

I’d like to pick up a couple of posts by Olaf. First one is on Social Networking: Beyond Communities:

Social networking on the internet is beyond the communities of practice phenomenon, since the former is initiated and driven by the individual, and the opportunities for networking are more flexible, dynamic and fluid than communities of practice.

This somehow brings me to the old conversation with Denham Grey about individual vs. community aspects of knowledge and learning (see also recent post by Dehnam on personal learning). In one of the discussions at KM Summer School 2003 I found some kind of formula to explain my position.

I believe too that learning is social, but I take perspective of an individual while looking at it. I would bring system analysis here and say that I’m more interested in individual as part of a ecosystem of communities than in a that ecosystem (still having the ecosystem in mind).

For me, there are still many secrets in differences between our individual motives and practices regarding “knowledge work”, many uncertainties about knowing how to help people to find What’s in it for me? answers and many open questions about releasing energy of others… The funny thing is that my most difficult “KM discussions” are with “community people”, with whom I share so many beliefs.

…and another post of Olaf on What do I want Knowledge Management to be for me?:

What I want Knowledge Management to be is to make a meaningful difference in someone’s life.

To me, this means:
- I need to find the ‘someone’,
- along the lines of communality of interests, competences and circumstances,
- without wasting my time.

So what do I expect from KM solutions on the internet such as, teamsites, CoPs, blogs, professional networks, web directories:

1. To offer me a “Issue and Interest Finder” navigation to:
. interests (why),
. issues (what), and
. places (where) that
. I relate to.

2. To offer me a “Resource and People Finder” to:
. relevant people and experts
. relevant projects
. relevant competences
. relevant previous experiences
. relevant methods and tools

3. A Workplace:
. to meet
. to exchange/learn/teach
. to coordinate and work together
. to build community, competence, memory, work products

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/09/19.html#a757; comments are here.

• Keeping found things found on the web
• Relational qualities that promote effective knowledge sharing
• 1/2 page description of my PhD research