Once in a while I get a comment that would be nice if I can bring more of my extended professional network into the company I work for. I’m happy to do so, but pretty much puzzled on how this might work in practice.

One side is more or less clear – relying on the network to get the work done. I blog, twitter and reach out relevant people from outside with questions that come from my work. Often, as a result, things get done faster or better.

However, I feel that bring often mean share or give others access to my network. This would be easy with a document, a piece of information, but relationships do not work that way. I can only expose my network and facilitate introductions, but at the end those do not do much for the end result. To collaborate, to get help or new projects, you need more than just a name with contact details and a vague idea of an expertise behind. You need the relationship – trust, knowledge of each other and shared history – and all of those are personal and take time and effort to develop.

And, I guess, there is another part of the equation – networking practices in my network are different from what you would traditionally expect. Our professional lives are heavily online and mainly in public, so most of the usual activities around establishing contact (e.g. meetings to introduce different parties) and maintaining a connection (sending Christmas cards and emails to check how things are) are not necessary – links are there as a starting point of an introduction and one’s activity traces are usually available via many streams. When traditionally the most of work of growing a relationship happens while meeting in person, in my network it’s often a continues stream of fragmented microinteractions online with a few face-to-face pockets in between. And when that precious face-to-face time comes you don’t want to spend it updating each other with all the things that are out there in public anyway…

Of course, many of us are caught in between two worlds anyway, dealing with friends, colleagues and clients that (net)work differently. Personally, I’m struggling to live in both at the same time (the comments I get at work should be  the result of it ;), but I guess there are some people who are better in that – would love to hear about your experiences if you are one of them…

For another angle on the issue – Nancy’s thinking on triangulation (that I should blog in more detail about :) – Triangulating for Success: a practitioner’s experience using external networks to leverage learning and outcomes within organizations and institutions.

• danah boyd: notes on Revenge of the User talk
• Sweeping in front of your doors
• WBC04: day 2 morning

Today I’m giving an online guest lecture for the course “Knowledge Management as a Theory and Practice” at Graduate School of Management of St.Petersburg State University. It’s on personal KM; since the lecture is very short I decided to do an introduction to the topic based on my own research rather than a comprehensive overview of existing perspectives.

Links that might be useful (will add a bit more after lunch :)

• Slide 3: See On definitions: personal perspective at work
• Slide 6: Personal information management activities, slightly modified from: Barreau, D. K. & Nardi, B. A. (1995). Finding and reminding: file organisation from the desktop. ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, 27(3), 39-43. doi:10.1145/221296.221307
  • For an in-depth introduction to personal information management see: Jones, W. (2008). Keeping found things found: The study and practice of personal information management. Elsevier.
• Slide 8: Key tasks of netWORK, “an ongoing process of keeping a personal network in a good repair”, from: Nardi, B., Whittaker, S., & Schwarz, H. (2002). NetWORKers and their activity in intensional networks. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 11(1-2), 205-242. doi:10.1023/A:1015241914483
• Slide 9: See Knowledge work framework (PKM + tasks)

• Personal KM at KM Europe: 9 November, 15:00-18:00
• Digital work style: The new world of work (white paper)
• Yahoo list on knowledge work

Behind my PhD research is an interest in translating practices of early adopters of weblogs into something that those that come after them might use: an understanding of relative advantage of blogging in knowledge-intensive environments and it’s compatibility with existing practices. Below is another piece from the final chapter of my dissertation, the one where I draw the implications of my findings for an individual knowledge worker, a pragmatist, who wants to know what blogging might bring for him in order to decide if it is worth the effort. [There is also a piece on facilitating weblog adoption, probably tomorrow]

Wondering how far it makes sense: would you show it to a colleague thinking about starting blogging?

***

Is blogging for me? Why? What do I need to know before trying it out? Although answers to these questions should be specific for each particular person considering blogging, this section might provide a starting point for formulating them. Here I outline the characteristics of weblogs that make them useful for one’s work and the changes in working practices that blogging might require.

Switching gears

Flexibility is a main characteristic of blogging tools: weblogs allow to “switch gears” using them for communication on a variety of topics in a number of ways.

In most cases weblogs are used as personal tools. Unless intended to be used for a very specific purpose (e.g. to communicate to customers about a product) or within a very restricted environment (e.g. in prison*) one can use a weblog to write on personally interesting issues in a personally meaningful way. However, since weblogs are public, it is useful to think about them as one’s front garden: it’s up to the owner to decide what should be in there, but general cultural norms do apply (e.g. cursing might prompt neighbours to take another street to walk).

As a tool weblogs might be also used in different modes. Publishing to a broad and often unknown audience is what weblogs are primarily known for: one can use weblog tools to make particular piece of information available to others without pushing it to them. In addition to that weblogs could be used for conversations with self and interaction with specific others.

Uses of a weblog for conversations with self are up to an individual blogger: a weblog can serve as a tool to collect personally relevant notes and organise them in a variety of ways; this collection then provides an input for reflection and reuse.

On the other hand, weblogs could be also used for an in-depth interaction with others, allowing to build relations and trust and to develop ideas in dialogue with one’s contacts. Weblogs are not perfect as a conversational tool: there is no guarantee of a reply and once a conversation started it might become fragmented between multiple weblogs. When topics and people for conversation are known it is better to choose other tools, however, blogging works well as a conversation starter since others could choose topics that interest them.

Enabling work

Blogging might fit one’s work when some elements of it require publishing, conversations with self or unexpected interaction. For example, it might replace email for sharing news with a team, be used for documenting one’s work to reflect on it over time, or to find out who might be the person to discuss a problem.

However, in many cases the open-ended and public nature of weblogs does not make them a good tool to do one’s job directly; in those cases their strength is enabling work by developing ideas and relations that might be needed in a future. Weblogs are about microcontent: writing and reading in small bits does not require much effort, so blogging might fit in moments between other tasks. In addition, a weblog post does not have to communicate a specific idea to a specific audience, so weblog might work well to collect notes that do not fit anywhere else. Over time, this collection of thoughts provides an overview of one’s ideas and expertise, enabling unexpected connections across boundaries.

Weblogs are probably most useful in settings where one doesn’t know what is waiting “down the road“. Which of the current ideas might be needed for a future project? Who is the best person to ask for help? What jobs I never thought about I’d love to do? In those cases weblogs help to build a foundation: to collect ideas “just in case”, to grow a professional network, to make one’s expertise and passions visible.

Emergent social

While weblogs support publishing and interaction, an audience for it does not come automatically; it emerges through discovery and interaction over time. In addition, while it’s easy to “place” an email into one’s mailbox, it is impossible to make others to read a weblog. What does it mean in practice?

• Writing needs to be enticing; readers come when a weblog adds value for them. A good way to do so is to write on the issues one is knowledgeable and passionate about.
• Bloggers discover each other through comments and recommendations. Taking effort to find interesting bloggers and commenting to their work is a good way to be found. Engaging with people who comment to one’s own weblog, tracking who is linking to it and following links from one’s favourite weblogs are other ways to get into contact with bloggers.

It takes time and effort before one can enjoy social effects of blogging. To sustain blogging before those effects appear it is important to have a personally meaningful way to use a weblog. For example, while documenting ideas about work might result in finding like-minded people in the future, it is easier to carry on doing it knowing that doing so is useful even if nobody appear to be interested (e.g. as a reminder of one’s activities for a progress report).

A learning curve

It is relatively easy to learn how to use blogging tools. However, productive uses of weblogs in relation to one’s work require another type of learning: personal nature of blogging, as well as visibility and boundary crossing that it brings might challenge one’s existing working practices. Blogging is likely to bring cultural shifts to be addressed and lessons to be learnt**:

• Personal passions have a legitimate place at work. Personal stories and voices turn into trusted relations. People are more likely to believe another human being than an organisation or a computer. Showing emotions, telling personal stories, being passionate in hierarchical environments could be a challenge, but it is becoming an essential part of work.
• Transparency is here to stay. Weblogs provide a visible, often public, trace of one’s expertise, actions and mistakes: what is written may stay “out there” forever and be searched, aggregated, transformed and linked back to the author. When there is no way to escape one’s past, it is essential to learn how to make mistakes in public and how to handle them gracefully.
• Visibility can turn into information overload. Being visible as a weblog author might extend one’s reach, but may also bring an unexpected explosion in communication as a result. With its low threshold for online publishing, blogging brings into public spaces ideas and stories previously hidden in private collections. Blogging requires reconsidering one’s routines of working with information in order to be able to deal with fragmentation and abundance.
• Everyday routines matter. Unless one has nothing else to do, blogging survives only if integrated into the everyday world. Starting a blog is easy, continuing requires more – embedding the activity into one’s information routines, work processes and interpersonal practices.
• Authority becomes fluid. Formal hierarchies are still there, but blogging provides alternative routes. However, new blogging authorities are only as good as posts on their homepages, networks constantly evolve and anyway the share of attention one gets is more and more mediated by search engines.
• Organisations might set the rules and create conditions, but at the end it’s up to an individual. Making judgments, taking risks, taking responsibility. Crossing boundaries. Having fun.

From the reality of working in an “average” business environment the challenges that have to be addressed to make blogging work might look like too much trouble to deal with. Before that scares you, it is important to take into account that they also reflect some of the broader shifts in the nature of work, so embracing them as a result of blogging might help preparing for those.

***

* I keep wondering if “prison” is too irrelevant in this context (it comes from a story of blogging from prison told by Bev Trayner :). May be I should use something more business-specific, like an example from a company that should stay unnamed where super-secret R&D researchers started blogging.

** Yes, you’ve seen it before: ‘Beyond blogging’ lessons learnt.

• Two papers, me in between
• Common visual design elements of weblogs
• Learning of knowledge workers

In case you were wondering: I’m almost there, submitting dissertation in two weeks. I can not wait to share it, but it will take a while before I have a version to post online (I guess in April). So, for those who do not want to wait that long I have conclusions of my PhD research in two versions.

The short version in this post describes blogging practices of knowledge workers in respect to specific parts of the framework below that provides a view on what knowledge work entails. The long version includes that plus summaries of the relevant results from the studies I did. Both are from a draft of the final chapter of the dissertation. [Update: see also final version of the dissertation]

Ideas

• Weblogs are used to maintain awareness of the ideas “out there” through reading in small bites, using weblogs of others as trusted sources and own network as a filter.
• Weblogs provide a space for articulating and capturing ideas that might be undocumented or hidden in private collections otherwise, parking them in a trusted external repository shared with others.
• Blogging is used for sense-making supported by writing, multiple ways to organise and assess one’s own blog posts and conversations with other bloggers.
• When developing ideas the person-centric and open-ended nature of blogging brings unexpected insights that cross topical boundaries.
• Over time ideas captured and organised in weblogs provide a fertile ground for reflection and reuse.

Conversations

• Weblog conversations are informed by and embedded into histories of writing in individual weblogs as well as history of interactions and relations between participating bloggers. Those contexts are not necessarily explicit and visible to everyone who participates.
• Since weblog conversations involve communicating via comments to a specific weblog and via linking across weblogs they are fragmented and distributed over multiple weblogs. In addition, those conversations may be supplemented by interacting via other media. The distributed and fragmented nature of weblog conversations results in exposure to different audiences, crossing multiple topics, combining individual input and the power of dialogue.
• In comparison to other tools, participation in weblog conversations requires extra effort that includes manually connecting conversational fragments by linking, and well as creating and maintaining an overview of those fragments. This effort limits the scale or frequencies of such conversations and also makes them more likely to happen within densely-knit networks of bloggers.
• Weblogs provide a possibility for an occasional interaction rather than support constant conversations. They are not particularly suitable for goal-oriented conversations, but provide a fertile ground for exploring ideas, especially those that cross topical boundaries or where the interests of others are not known in advance.
• Participation in weblog conversations contributes to developing ideas and relations that often cross boundaries and exclude intermediaries.

Relations

• Personal nature of blogging plays an important role in establishing professional connections. Weblogs are often treated as online representations of their authors, living business cards.
• Weblogs are used for establishing and maintaining both, personal relations with other bloggers and informational relations that involve treating other bloggers as trusted information source without engaging in person.
• In both cases it is “connecting through content“, where the person-centric nature of blogging plays an important role in establishing trust (either in blogger as a person or as an information source) and connecting across boundaries.
• Networking via weblogs is enabled by publishing and interaction. Publishing allows efficient broadcasting on a variety of topics to often unknown audiences and is essential for being present as a blogger, getting to know others and making informed choices about engaging with them, and as a low-key way to stay in touch. While bloggers do not actively interact all the time, it is the conversations between them over time that help to establish personal bonds that eventually enable getting things done together.
• While personal relations are often initially established via blogging, over time multiple channels come into play to monitor others and to interact with them.

Tasks

• The open-ended and public nature of weblogs does not necessarily makes them a good tool to work directly on tasks, so in most cases weblogs are used for enabling work, rather than doing it. Weblogs influence one’s work indirectly when they are used for developing ideas, engaging in conversations and establishing relations that might be needed in the future:
  • documented ideas might be reused and reworked, accelerating working on tasks;
  • relations with others make it possible to engage them when needed;
  • conversations result in unexpected ideas and relations that can turn into new projects or contribute to the on-going ones.
• Blogging might became more closely integrated with one’s work when it requires working on tasks that match the medium, for example, those that require documenting potentially useful ideas, relationship building or communicating to a broad audience.
• While in some cases blogging might become the required way to perform one’s work or a focus of it, in most cases it is added to a pool of various tools one can use to work on a task. Knowledge workers choose to use blogging as an instrument when it works for them and do it intentionally, ad-hoc or in retrospect.

Context

• Blogging on professionally interesting topics often results in a degree of integration with work, even when started without such an intention. In business settings blogging is neither purely individual nor business-driven – the choices that shape a particular weblog are multifaceted and weblogs of individual knowledge workers are positioned on various places between the extremes.
• Bloggers have to deal with the effects of visibility that comes as a result of blogging. While visibility might be a driving force for blogging and a reason for many positive effects it brings (e.g. ideas and people being found) it also comes with challenges of dealing with expansion of networks and information overload, changes in power distribution when crossing hierarchical or organisational boundaries, raised expectations and making mistakes in public.
• Given that blogging is shaped by and useful in different contexts that often result in incomparable requirements, bloggers have to make choices and draw the boundaries deciding if they blog for themselves or others, do it for connecting with peers or a business gain, or how personal their work-related weblog should be.
• Blogging is creating microcontent, but the value of it is in the connections and patterns across those fragments over time. It is also efficient in exposing a blogger to a great number of ideas and people across various boundaries. So, learning to deal with fragmentation and abundance is part of blogging practices.
• Choosing, managing and ‘working around’ tools is part of blogging. Next to making choices about the technology set-up for their weblogs when starting, bloggers constantly deal with making choices about media to engage with others. Various tools used for that purpose require the effort of maintaining contacts across them and learning how to maximise their potential and account for limitations.

• PhD as jigsaw puzzle
• Davenport on personal information and knowledge management
• Public vs. private discussions in communities: research implications

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.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/12/03.html#a1961; comments are here.

• Blogging and paper writing
• Writing PhD dissertation
• Personal vs. business dimensions of employee blogging: other bloggers

Over time my PhD research has gone through several shifts of focus: since the end of 2003 my research questions oscillate in a space that involves knowledge work and blogging (e.g. PhD outlines in December 2003 and Audgust 2006). In all that process it looks like I moved away from my work on personal knowledge management, which is not truly so.

In my approach of understanding PKM using weblogs as a lens (starting here, more refined), I was torn apart between focusing on the PKM side of knowledge work and focusing on weblog uses by knowledge workers (that in turn should be shading light on PKM). At a certain moment I had to make choices: I decided to reduce the complexity by focusing on blogging practices of knowledge workers*. So, my work on PKM became a way to inform and structure my research on blogging, rather than a research focus.

In my earlier work I tried to define PKM as an alternative to the task-based view on knowledge work and to focus on a knowledge worker perspective as an alternative to an organisational perspective on KM. Since my interest have always been in the middlespace between personal and organisational issues around knowledge work and PKM model (version 1, version 2) was pretty much at the personal level, I ended up struggling with figuring out how to integrate the organisational dimension in my research (one attempt is here – blogging practices in three contexts).

However, recently I found myself coming back to my PKM models as a way to position the choices of case-studies for my dissertation. In that process I’ve got some ideas of how to address the issues that didn’t make me happy.

Two posts to come :)

*That was after coming back from Microsoft and also had a “pragmatic” side to it – I had lots of good insides on the blogging practices of knowledge workers, but also figured out the complexity of generalising those to PKM/knowledge work in general.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/08/02.html#a1927; comments are here.

• eLearning’s Next Chapter
• Trees vs. webs
• Learning of knowledge workers

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.

• System administrator appreciation day and invisible colleagues
• BusinessWeek on stress, collaboration and work-life balance
• Ideal intellectual communities

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.

• Non-linear writing
• Three categories of knowledge work
• RSS feeds: PhD progress and weblog research

Our IT guys send an email with a gentle reminder that today is a System administrator appreciation day. A quote from the web-site:

A sysadmin is a professional, who plans, worries, hacks, fixes, pushes, advocates, protects and creates good computer networks, to get you your data, to help you do work — to bring the potential of computing ever closer to reality.

So if you can read this, thank your sysadmin — and know she is only one of dozens or possibly hundreds whose work brings you the email from your aunt on the West Coast, the instant message from your son at college, the free phone call from the friend in Australia, and this webpage.

Friday, July 28th, 2006, is the 7th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. On this special international day, give your System Administrator something that shows that you truly appreciate their hard work and dedication.

Having read a lot on invisible work and coming from working environments where lots of things I had to do myself I’m starting to realised how much “overhead” or “infrastructure” work can be easily taken for granted. Secretaries, sysadmins, information specialists and many others internally called “support stuff” keep me working on what I do best, providing a space where I’m not bothered with many “non-core” small things. I go to them only if things break or I need an extra something. If things work their efforts is so invisible, that they can easily become non-existent.

Just an example: talking to a colleagues running our information center I realised how much work she has to do “behind the scenes” to make sure that I can access all those papers from online databases. I find something, click and access the source not knowing that that the only reason I can do it is that my IP address sits in some contract that gives us access to some database. I don’t have to bother about contracts and databases, budget and legal negotiations, technical details – I can just get the paper and continue to work on my own stuff.

So, once in a while it could make sense to think about your “invisible colleagues” and do something to let them know that their work is important for you – appreciate your sysadmins, worship a librarian or give flowers to a secretary.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/07/28.html#a1809; comments are here.

• Why sharing a team room might be not so good
• On reading in a train and problems with task-based view of knowledge work
• My boyfriend or why I don’t make things instantly visible

Via Hugh MacLeod I come to English Cut, a weblog of Thomas Mahon, “bespoke Savile Row tailor”, which is a facsinating window onto a very specific practice. Apart from lots of insight on good suits and work of people who make them there are a couple of quotes that caught my attention.

On gut feeling in drafting patterns:

…we all prefer to have figures and defined points to work with. These had been obtained by a scientific method, so they had to be right, Right?

Wrong. Because what I found out ‘the expensive way’ was that there were times when I had drafted a pattern, checked and double-checked it, and although the measurements were exact, something still looked wrong.

I was blinded by science, not creativity.

This is something everyone in this or any other business has experienced- a gut feeling that you wanted to listen to, but logic wrongly forced you to ignore. Then sadly you’d proceed down this path, and as soon as you saw the results at the suit’s first fitting, you knew your gut was right all along, and you have to kick yourself.

Often when creative matters are involved, ‘practice makes imperfect’.

And another one on human touch:

OK, I’m sure you’ve gathered by now I want everyone one to wear hand-made. I don’t care if it’s from me, from Savile Row, the guy in Chinatown or the big department store in Chicago, I’m partial and I’m biased. If enough people buy hand-made, that way we’re going to keep the craft going. [...]

By choosing to buy the most humanly-touched products we can afford, or at least striving to do so, we’ll not just benefit the craftsmen out there. It will give you the impassioned knowledge that someone, somewhere, has added a little of their character into your suit. No machine can imitate this. It’s what makes the coat, Bespoke or otherwise, truly unique and frankly, that’s what keeps the customers coming back. Yes, the fact that their coat has a human story behind it makes it seem more special to them.

Funny enough I was about to write another post, saying that I always start reading PhD dissertations from an acknowledgements page, not from introduction or conclusions – for me personal story of an author has to come first and then the rest could follow.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/07/13.html#a1800; comments are here.

• Knowledge networker
• Knowledge networker needs
• Making methodological choices