I was about to write a post on procrastination that keeps me from writing, but now I have something better – a couple of comments my post on bloggers as public intellectuals to follow-up.

Jack Vinson [bold is mine]:

…what I take from this is the larger picture of how people work together to develop new and interesting ideas.  Academics, the focus of Lilia’s discussion, naturally talk to one another and hammer out ideas.  It’s hard enough to see where an idea truly originates even amongst a few people.

But when the conversation crosses tens or hundreds of people AND locations AND sources AND time, then the genesis of ideas is up in the clouds.  We know this – at least this seems like something I learned through my education.  But we still insist in our society on finding THE person who came up with some invention and pouring the credit upon her.

I guess those things happened before, but with current interconnectivity the process of “cloud idea generation” becomes wider and faster. It also becomes more visible – with so much of interactions being technology-mediated it’s now more easy to see how bits of ideas travel and change.

“Pouring the credit” is an interesting issue. As a person, I’m happy inventing ideas and even more happier to see them travel and being used: knowing that a bit of my thinking was useful for someone else is rewarding by itself. In this respect I don’t really need credits, but I definitely appreciate having “trackbacks” – some way of knowing where my ideas travel and what happened to them.

For me as a professional things are much more difficult: I still get hired and get paid as an individual, not as part of the cloud. The current rules that govern my work are pretty much based on the number and quality of the ideas that could be traced to me as a contributor. In this sense, credits are essential.

While I love doing research, one of the reasons I’m not planning to stay in the academic world is the system that ties formal professional growth (which is about the scale of challenges to deal with and available resources next to the salary scale) to channelling ideas into forms and spaces (e.g. A-list journals) that might work better for credits, but do not necessarily for helping ideas to travel wider and faster.

Interestingly enough, this is also the issue that makes me thinking of getting back to my HR(D) roots after I’m done with the PhD research. I believe that many new ways of working are not getting where they could be in organisations because they do not fit with the ways the work is evaluated and rewarded.

• Bloggers as knowledge animals
• Relational qualities that promote effective knowledge sharing
• Documenting mistakes publicly

Must read: BusinessWeek’s The Real Reasons You’re Working So Hard… (via Ingo Forstenlechner).

It’s on many things: long working ours, information overload, overheads of unnecessary communication, social network profiling, knowledge mapping, an even blogs and wikis… A bit too much to mix, but definitely along the lines of the work we do, my PhD research and my personal struggles.

And a quote about things that I believe are behind many of those issues – knowledge work governance and knowledge worker flexibility:

…in terms of reducing work overload, perhaps the biggest and most difficult step will be for corporations to give their knowledge workers more freedom over their own time. “The Industrial Age approach to management dies a pretty tough death,” says Babson’s Davenport. “Even today people end up being evaluated not only on how much they produce but also on how many hours they are in the office.”

Of course, there’s one shiny new example of where output matters more than process: the Web. Nobody cares how long it took or what time of night it was when someone wrote a blog entry — all that’s seen is the final result. Similarly, the success of open-source development projects such as Linux and Apache, the most popular Web server software, rests on the competence of the programmers involved, not on how many hours they log.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/09/29.html#a1679; comments are here.

• Personal KM: one-person enterprise
• Knowledge work as discretionary behaviour
• Personal use of corporate computers is good

Thanks to Denham Grey I have discovered Yahoo group kw-km · Knowledge Work & Knowledge Management with:

Instructional Strategies for Knowledge Development that lists learning strategies for four Nonaka&Takeuchi modes of knowledge creation (by Don Clark, who was one of my first discoveries of HRD resources on-line).

How do you say a person is doing a knowledge work… ???

One question that has been troubling me is how to operationalize knoweldge work… i.e.

a) How do you measure the performance of knowledge workers..?

b) Other than output from knowldge workers — the output which may come out after years e.g. a scientist may or may not dicover anything.. but is defintitely using brains and doing knowledge work. How would you be sure that the scientist is working or doing knowledge work and not pretending .. doing such work.. day dreaming?

Please give your opinion or view points or suggest some research studies?

I would also be very thankful to you if you can send some research articles related to any aspects of knowledge workers.

This is one of the questions I have to tackle in my PhD research. So far answers in the thread are not very useful, but I hope to see more.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/02/15.html#a461; comments are here.

• Keeping found things found on the web
• Recently online on knowledge workers
• Knowledge workers time spent finding information

I’m thinking about the impact of public and private discussions in communities ideas for my PhD. One of the challenges I have is to measure knowledge sharing and learning as invisible part of knowledge work. I thought that looking for technology-mediated settings would be one of possible solutions.

But it seems that if I study knowledge sharing in virtual community by analysing on-line discussions I’ll miss 70% of what I want to study. Probably blogs would give a better number, but it will never be 100% – we still mail to other bloggers and hope for face-to-face meetings. So, I have to invent something else :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/02/06.html#a445; comments are here.

• Researcher vs. blogger: researcher influence
• Hard choices: researcher vs. blogger?
• OKLC04: useful links for KM PhDs