A while ago I came across by Patti Anklam‘s 3 KMs, which I found very useful to think about my own experiences in the knowledge management field:

• Big KM (strategic, enterprise-wide)
• Little KM (“stealth” KM: specific KM practices applied where needed, often without the KM label on it)
• Personal KM

My dive into KM started from the Big one: I started to explore the field with studies of integration between KM and HR(D) in organisations and the role of CKO (Chief Knowledge Officers) in “managing KM”. That served as a useful high-level introduction to the field, but I guess my heart wasn’t really at that level – most of the KM-related things I did afterwards were about two other KMs and interactions between those.

Now, Patti is sharing another series – this time it’s about social media. I kind of have a reputation as an “expert on blogging”, but quite often I have to explain to others that it’s not any type of blogging that I can easily talk about. The distinction about 4 SMs helps to pinpoint more precisely where my interests are (only two are blogged so far, but you can also check this presentation for an overview):

• Media SM
• Customer SM
• Enterprise SM
• Personal SM

My interest in social media spans across Customer-Enterprise-Personal SM, but most of my work has been about the Personal one and its connections with Customer SM and, especially, Enterprise SM (so I’m eagerly waiting to the remaining two posts :)

That’s said, I’m also wondering if there should be other SMs in the list – from my angle of this world, I’m thinking in particularly about areas like politics and activism, that seem to be different enough from what is there in the list…

[Update: Patti made it into 5SMs :) - see Emergent SM and an updated presentation The 5 social medias (5 SMs)]

And, once you are at Patti’s blog, check her Socializing post that provides a good overview of definitions and perspectives on a variety of “social something” concepts that are used when talking about social media related topics.

• Evolution of thinking
• Leadership as releasing the energy of others
• eLearning’s Next Chapter

I has been unsure about the title from the start – I didn’t have enough context to place it (of course, my own fault, the whole thing was just googling away). I went to Blogwalk with Ton‘s redefinition of it:

Digital Bohemiens are (relatively) young people, fully adapted to the digital lifestyle. They see a city as their home, and are connected in European and global networks. They flock to conferences as their meeting places.

However, at the meeting Sebastian brought in the context – the term came from the book, which had much more emphasis on being lack of full-time employment than I expected

Gabriela writes pretty much on how I feel about it:

We had a sort of identity problem: we couldn’t figure out if we, as a group, belonged to that Digital Bohemians category. In the original book that inspired this title, digital bohemians are living in a metropolis(Berlin) and are freelancers. Part of us have permanent jobs (actually most of us!) – don’t we qualify?! I guess this bohemianship is more a state of mind than anything else: flocking together at such unconferences on our own expense seems to be one of the features; having a digital lifestyle, trying to keep in touch with what’s going on, being open to try new things are some of the others.

I guess most of us agree that “there is something in the air” – the nature of work is changing, boundaries (work-life, geography, etc.) are getting blurred, authorities are challenged and technology has something to do with it. Talking about “digital bohemians” is one way to address it, but I could also think of calling them mobile professionals, knowledge networkers or neo-Bedouin.

I don’t know what would be a good term (I’m not comfortable with digital bohemians since there is non-employment connotation from the book and a general feeling of alternativeness and counter-culture). I can talk about my own perspective on the ingredients of it:

• Passion-driven and values-driven work that becomes part of life rather than separate “I work to earn money to have a roof over my head and something to eat”.
• Flexibility in respect to work focus, time, space, tools and people to collaborate.
• Personal responsibility. Distributed authority and decision-making.

Technology is secondary – it’s just enables more flexible and distributed way of working, but as always – it’s only what you make out of it.

Full-time employment? I’ll write another post on why I think it shouldn’t be part of the equation.

Technorati: blogwalk blogwalkeleven blogwalkamsterdam

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/05/19.html#a1895; comments are here.

• Knowledge networker skills: ‘getting more’ and ‘giving up’
• Recently online on knowledge workers
• Weblog as knowledge networker instrument: questions

One of the things I try to grasp in my conceptual struggles in weblog research is about relationships between blogging activities at different levels and co-dependencies between them.

A good starting point is comes from framework of blogging practices by Jan Schmidt (earlier comments on it). He distinguishes between: (1) blogging episodes that serve specific goals and (2) rules, relations and code that frame blogging episodes from one side and get redefined by them from another. Following this logic (in a heavily simplified way) one can talk about blogging practices as a whole and/or specific blogging episodes, taking into account the relations between those two.

Another distinction that could be made is between goals (why?), activities (what/how?) and effects (what happens as a result?) of blogging. Those are not always explicit (lots of writing happens without setting specific targets) and logical (goals, activities and effects are not necessarily correspond to each other).

Also it could make sense to talk about goals, activities and effects at both levels: those of a specific blogging episode and those “aggregated” over time into a personal blogging practice.

This is exactly where I have a problem, since once you interview people about their blogging experiences they do not make clear-cut distinction between all those things. They could tell you about their personal reasons to start blogging, give examples of specific blogging episodes, or talk about blogging effects discovered over time that eventually become part of explaining why and how a weblog is used in a particular way.

I thought of using Jan’t framework, but it seems to exclude the level of personal blogging practices (from what I get his blogging practices are social constructs). So far I tend to us general category weblog uses, but this doesn’t make my life easier, since this one needs definition as well (I some hopes for more clarity to come from Uses of blogs, but although it’s a great collection I couldn’t find any explicit definitions so far).

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/28.html#a1862; comments are here.

• How using (or not) a particular technology influences content of a weblog and social dynamics around it
• Nancy White on blog communities and more questions
• Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, community and culture of weblogs

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.

• Relations <-> networks <-> communities ???
• BlogHer aftermath
• Growing pains of virtual communities

My PhD is a constant struggle with definitions and terms. This time it’s about personal perspective at work.

For me (knowledge) work practices are shaped by at least three different contexts: personal (me as a human being), social (my networks and communities) and organisational (a company I work for).

However, when I start talking about personal there are all kinds of misunderstandings, since it could mean both individual and private and I don’t like both terms in relation to my research:

• Individual means ‘not social’, while I’d like to focus on ‘me’ which has both sides.
• Private (when you talk about it in a work context) is usually perceived as ‘not work-related’, while I’m interested in ‘me’ as a whole (the one who goes to work and then goes home :).

I have stressed many times that I’m interested in knowledge work from personal, actor-centric perspective (it’s just a matter of focus), however this doesn’t mean that I want to exclude social and organizational sides of it. Even more, I’m interested how things in the middle are shaped by the interactions between two (or all three) perspectives.

Of course, the area in the middle is full of problems as well. For example, I was asked recently to separate in my analysis of work practices organizational and personal concerns. With some things it could be done easily: there are things that are imposed on you by the organization (e.g. working hours) and those that come from your being a person with specific preferences (e.g. preferred modes of communication).

However, the most interesting things at work can’t be separated so easily:

• If you do your work faster or better – is it for yourself or for your company?
• If you come up with a good idea – is it to make more money for the business or because it makes you feeling empowered or just fun?
• If you manage to sustain a good relationship with a customer after your product breaks – is it in order not to lose the contract or because you actually like the challenge and can’t stand making people unhappy?

I think in those cases it’s a sliding scale between ‘me’ and ‘my company’, where the specific ratio between those two is defined by many factors (e.g. situational choices or longer-term work-life balance practices of an employee). I don’t see an easy way to describe all instances of balance of organizational vs. personal interests in relation to that scale and, to be fair, given my focus I don’t believe it adds much value. What I’m trying to do instead is to describe the extremes and types of decisions that are made in the middle zone.

But all this thinking doesn’t make my PhD life much easier: I’m still trying to figure out how to talk about personal perspective without getting into ‘individual’ and ‘private’ and how to talk about all those sliding scales between three perspectives that define how work is actually getting done.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/06.html#a1851; comments are here.

• Personal <i>something</i> management
• Soul searching
• Defining weblogs

Last Friday Stephanie emailed a simple question, asking for my own definition of what a weblog is. I was too busy then, finishing things before a weekend offline (end-of-the-season windy North Sea coast, if you are curious ;), so I had to leave it till now. Of course, the purity of the experiment has been already spoiled since I have read about the first results, but I’ll give it a try.

So, what is my definition of a weblog? I couldn’t answer it easily because “it depends” – I could identify at least three clarifying questions that would probably result in different definitions (as I write this I don’t know yet ;).

What is my weblog for me?

On my About page I say that it’s my learning diary and it’s “a reverse-order posting of insights, commentaries, links and a few longer stories”. It’s definitely more than that:

• it’s an edge between personal and social, between implicit and explicit, between themes, topics and people that otherwise would exist in parallel universes
• it’s an incubator – where ideas and relationships grow
• it’s my personal space online – pretty much like my home – where it’s up to me to choose style and focus (or no style and focus); as with my home, I’m aware of others – they could peak through the windows or share a food and a conversation – so their (possible) presence definitely shapes what and how I write, but I still feel pretty much “owning” the place to cater for the guests only when I feel like doing it
• it’s a place for serendipitious conversations with myself and others – not expected, planned or counted on, but ever present as an opportunity

How do I know that it’s a weblog when I see one?

First I react to the format (something I would probably recognise even if it’s written in Chineese) – dated entries, reverse-chronological order, often a calendar and a way to peak into the archives (= bits of micropieces unfolding in time). However, this is not enought: one can well use a weblog software to update news pages of a website.

Second reaction is to the content and style: it should have some kind of “personal touch” to qualify as a weblog. Most likely it’s writing from a first position (I, not academic we), personal stories, opinions – something subjective that shows the personality behind the text (as the opposite “trying to stay objective” of academic or journalistic writing). To be percieved as a weblog it needs some degree of “this is how I see the world” perspective in it.

Third thing is more complicated – I’d call it “a possibility for an interaction“. To be a weblog it has to be not private, not “intended for myself only” – those I would percieve as personal diaries or private communication that in a strange way ended up in public. It also has to avoid another extreme – being written for an audience in a way that expects interaction and doens’t make any sense without it (those give me suspicious feeling of “something else pretending to be a weblog”). For me a weblog needs some degree of ambiguity (“not entirely for myself, not entirely for my readers”) – something that gives an excuse to the author to actually write in public and to a reader to read it and an opportunity for both of them to interact without feeling an obligation to do so.

How do I define weblogs for my research?

This is totally different discussion, since my personal definitions above are a bit fuzzy to serve as a good criteria for deciding if something published online with a weblog software is actually a weblog. In my publications so far I usually refer to Jill’s definition as a starting point and a self-definition (“if an author considers it a blog”) in a process of data-collection. Since I’m into heavily qualitative sub-culture specific studies this works, but I definitely would be very cautious in using it with respects to “blogs in general”.

I’m not happy with that: I’m pretty much sure that implicitly my research is shaped by my personal definition of what a weblog is, but I don’t have (so far) a good way to articulate the criteria that would turn it into a some kind of “objective” researcher-independent definition.

And, Stephanie, a word of caution – “blogging” as an activity might be defined quite different from “writing a weblog” (for me it would be something like “doing things around my weblog” that would involve, for example, talking about my weblog with blogger friends when we meet).

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/09/04.html#a1826; comments are here.

• Weblog research
• Networking: YASNs vs. blogs
• Blog research addict

From Taking Responsibility by David Gurteen in Inside Knowledge (via Luis Suarez at ITtoolbox):

The point here is the line, “the ability to act on knowledge is power”. So many of us, even when we have the knowledge, fail to act for a whole range of different reasons: it’s not our job; we lack the confidence; we don’t have the resource; we are tied to old habits or we don’t want to stick our necks out and so forth.

This leads me on to my own definition of a knowledge worker: “Knowledge workers are those people who have taken responsibility for their work lives. They continually strive to understand the world about them and modify their work practices and behaviours to better meet their personal and organisational objectives. No one tells them what to do. They do not take ‘no’ for an answer. They are self motivated.”

The key here is about taking responsibility. To my mind knowledge workers cannot be coerced, bribed, manipulated or rewarded and no amount of money or fancy technology will ‘incentivise’ them to do a better job. Knowledge workers see the benefits of working differently for themselves. They are not ‘wage slaves’ – they take responsibility for their work and drive improvement.

David formulates in a very nice way the essence of why I’m studying knowledge workers in my PhD. If knowledge workers “cannot be coerced, bribed, manipulated or rewarded” than how do you manage them? Command-and-control methods wouldn’t work, “doing a better job” is not easily specified in a job description – so what then?

For me it has been a long way from my initial questions of supporting informal learning to current focus on blogging practices of knowledge workers, but the underlying quest stays the same – how do you “manage” (support, facilitate, steer a bit ;) knowledge worker activities that couldn’t be controlled?

Given all that I’m not sure I’d agree with David’s definition of knowledge workers as those who take the responsibility. As David himself says earlier there is a number of reasons why the responsibility can not be taken. Also work (at least for those of us not self-employed ;) is a space for negotiations between a person and an organisation. I may like to think that I’m responsible for my work, but how far I actually can “act on knowledge”? Taking full responsibility for your own work means that the other side gives it to you as well, which is not always the case and which is definitely a matter of power exercises.

As a knowledge worker I fight to my freedom to make decisions and shape my own work, but as far as I’m employed by a company (which, I expect will be the case for many others) there are always degrees of freedom (I have a choice within boundaries; of course, I’m also free to push those boundaries, but they do exist and limit my choices ;) and a “responsibility continuum” where responsibilities for shaping the work are shared between knowledge worker and those who pay him.

So, from my perspective David’s definition needs refinement: I’d talk about “being prepared/expected to take the responsibility” or “striving for taking the responsibility” rather than just “taking it”.

I also wonder if while focusing on the important aspect of the responsibility David lost “knowledge” part of “knowledge workers”. How far does he talk about characteristics that make new generations of “workers” different from whose who were there before, rather then “knowledge workers”? What “knowledge” part of the work has to do with taking the responsibility? The connections are implicitly in there (as far as I know from where David comes), but for a good definition they should be clarified a bit more.

Don’t think I’m ready to come with a good definition myself, but just a try. Some times ago I defined knowledge worker as someone who creates value by being subjective. May be I should redefine it as:

knowledge worker is someone who creates value by acting on knowledge

And then, to make the connections clear I’d talk about:

• the nature of knowledge: invisibility and a personal nature of it (subjectivity, always a degree of implicitness, escaping measurement and all other things are here)
• need for taking personal responsibility for acting on knowledge – since it couldn’t be fully specified from outside
• and how organisations depend on knowledge workers taking the responsibility for acting on knowledge to get the value of knowledge turned into action

Makes a good outline for a section on knowledge workers for my dissertation :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/08/29.html#a1823; comments are here.

• Blog networking study: participants and their networks
• Reference to a wiki page???
• Methodology chapter: posting parts online

This is not fair: David Gurteen is starting a two-week discussion at AOK on Inter-Personal Knowledge Management. And I’m off to Moscow for five days, have to finish a paper within 10 days and on the top of it can’t change my AOK maillist subscription to individual messages or simply read it on-line…

Anyway, I hope I’ll be able to contribute.

So far you can enjoy Three thousand communities of practice by Steve Barth and (usual :) sceptical reaction by Denham Grey.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/02/16.html#a1088; comments are here.

• Uses/benefits of blogging for knowledge workers
• BlogTalk paper: final version and a bit of reflection
• Knowledge worker spaces

What a blog is? discussion at misbehaving turns into actions: Liz Lawley and danah boyd are starting research in order to come up with weblog definition for research purposes. The discussion is worth reading, but I don’t have much time for a summary now.

Would be interesting to know how these ideas could be connected with upcoming paper on framework for analysing weblogs by Kaye Trammell and Urs Gasser.

This post also appears on channel weblog research

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/01/20.html#a916; comments are here.

• BlogTalks book
• Learning webs: Learning in weblog networks
• KM day: my talk on employee blogging and KM

Thinking about terminology for my PhD again. I wonder if I should introduce knowledge networker as a term. I like it because it stresses social side of knowledge work, being a node in a knowledge network, which is often missing in a “mainstream” knowledge worker literature. From another side, it may be perceived as a narrow one, focusing only on the networking side of the knowledge work. May be it should be something like knowledge net worker :)

There is another problem with knowledge networker. Knowledge worker is the one who does knowledge work. Following this logic knowledge networker does knowledge network :) It could be netWORK as used by Nardi, Whittaker & Schwarz, but their meaning is not mainstream too and means “networking part of work”.

Next to the associations that people may have with new term, my problem comes to a usual dilemma about introducing new terminology. For example, many people do not like knowledge management or weblogs for several reasons and introduce new terms to stress specific aspects of the phenomena behind these terms. I understand them and in many cases admire their persistence in introducing terminology that captures their views better than existing one, but I belong to another, more pragmatic, camp. For the sake of common language and being understood I use “mainstream” terminology. For example, I do not believe that knowledge can be managed, but I use knowledge management because it establishes a common ground to start. If we go in depth I would introduce my assumptions about KM stressing that “of course, we can’t manage knowledge”… Sometimes it feels as a bad compromise, but I choose it instead of starting with trying to address the same thing with different terms.

So, may be I should just stick to knowledge worker and explain what I mean with it :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/01/05.html#a891; comments are here.

• Hard choices: researcher vs. blogger?
• BusinessWeek on stress, collaboration and work-life balance
• Paper: Weblog as a personal thinking space