While I came with the communication egg model to talk about things missing in distributed teams I feel that it could be useful in more contexts. In particularly to talk about the differences between different types of social constructions in the knowledge management context.

[At this point it makes sense to go and read Shrunken communication in distributed teams (the egg of communication :)]

One of the things I came up when playing with different ideas was to position teams, communities and networks in respect to the most prevalent forms of communication in each case (in all cases the other forms of communication are there as well, but are not at the core of it).

Team communication is heavily shaped by the shared goals and agreed communication formats/processes. It’s very much about getting things done together and strong ties that needed for it.

Communication in communities is a bit further from actual work, but still has lots of connection with it (e.g. Q&A mode, where one uses an opportunity of being together with other experts to ask for solutions for a problem). It’s usually a mix of stronger and weaker ties that help to open up and share local practices. There is enough commonality and trust to hold people together and enough diversity to support learning.

Network communication is more opportunity-based and informal. There is not much in terms of shared goals and recurrent conversations, the ties are weak or latent. However, there is enough connectivity and opportunities to communicate that result in cross-fertilisation and emergent ideas and practices.

I guess the things on the diagonal could be also about the types of communication that is supported by specific managerial practices (performance – knowledge management/professional development – informal learning/innovation) or social tools (groupware – community tools – social media).

You can also use this framework to think on what is needed in terms of moving between different types of social constructions: e.g. moving from network to community by picking shared interests and adding a bit of structure (rhyhm, roles) or community-born projects, where shared goals and even more structures (e.g. deadlines :) appear to make sure that things get done. In the opposite direction you might think of “usual” KM practice of spotting overlaps between teams and establishing semi-structured community spaces and processes to make sure that practices are shared across and going to networking events or sharing one’s traces online to create opportunities for informal interaction that brings new contacts and new ideas.

***

Does it make any sense? I’m actually more happy with the picture than we the text around it, but anyway all of this stuff is thinking in progress, so hopefully will eventually evolve into something more understandable.

• CoPs people are becoming aware of weblogs value
• Learning: communities vs. courses (4) – learners’ skills and motivation
• NetWORK and knowledge work

This is an English draft for the second of two articles I wrote on blogging for Dutch magazine Informatie Professional (the first one – Blogging for knowledge workers: incubating ideas). The Dutch version should appear very soon, but I’m too impatient to wait for it to share the draft :)  I’ll add the reference/link as soon as it’s there.

Update – see: Efimova, L. (2010). Bloggen for kenniswerkers: het nieuwe netwerking. Informatie Professional, February 2010, pp.22-25.

This piece is based on the study of networking practices of KM bloggers. Practically everything from the study (including interview summaries) is covered in my blog and Chapter 5. of my dissertation, but this article provides a condensed version of the insights.

***

When I interviewed early adopters of weblogs for my PhD research many of them mentioned their surprises that blogging can go beyond documenting own thinking or publishing to the world and that it actually helps to build relationships with others. Bloggers talked about “explosion” of their professional networks as a result of blogging and meeting people that they would not be likely to meet otherwise.

These days, people almost count on social effects of blogging, however it is not always obvious how exactly blogging helps to build reputation and relationships and what is required to make it work that way. Below is what I’ve learnt from the study that looks at networking practices of knowledge management bloggers: how weblogs help bloggers to discover each other and to build relationships.

Finding others and being found

Weblogs help to discover interesting others by serving as magnets and filters. Similar to a magnet that can help finding a needle in a haystack, passionate writing attracts people interested in topics you blog about, inviting them to comment and link back. Filtering works similar to personal recommendation: following links in blogs of people you trust you are more likely to discover interesting others than by direct search.

Connections established as a result of blogging often cross geographical,topical and hierarchical boundaries. Since weblogs are rather person-centred than strictly focused on a predefined topic, a blogger often writes about a variety of personally relevant issues, exposing readers to potentially new and unexpected topical areas and other bloggers within those. Also, in the blogging world interesting content often means more than one’s age, gender or place in an organisational hierarchy: for a new reader it is blogger’s thinking that it visible first, not the profile information. This makes blogging especially useful for newcomers and “minorities” in a particular field, giving them an opportunity to be visible next to the established experts. Those who have reputation and visibility prior to blogging might have a headstart in amount of readers, but they will have to prove that that attention is worth it with every post they write.

Public figures and quiet observers

A weblog serves as “living portrait” of its author. It is different from a well-written biography or professional website. Rather, the impressions of who the blogger is are formed by picking up personal details and cues about one’s personality and passions from multiple blogposts and by observing one’s thinking and interactions over time, similar to making an opinion of public figures by the media coverage of their life.

This visibility comes with both benefits and challenges. From one side, it provides others with an opportunity to get to know a blogger personally before deciding if and when to engage further. In the professional world a weblog could be the starting point for inviting its author to speak at a conference, to work on a project or even to apply for a job. And, in  contrast to celebrities, whos life is covered by others, the blogger himself has a great deal of control about the information that appears in his weblog. If a weblog provides a true reflection of its author’s interests, then the contacts that follow from it are likely to provide personally relevant opportunities for further conversations and growth (bloggers tend to expect it and frown at marketing emails that are not personalised based on information in their blogs). Finally, reading weblogs also helps to stay in touch with one’s existing contacts, providing information about their thinking and relevant events without a need to ask them directly.

From another side, such visibility might be a challenge. Since it’s easy to read weblogs without making yourself visible, contact that might follow are often asymmetrical: bloggers have to figure out how to deal with socially awkward situations talking to strangers who know them pretty well. It is also difficult to control what exactly others pick up in a weblog and what do they read between the lines, especially since weblog content might be easily exposed to the audiences that the blogger didn’t have in mind while writing. In addition, a weblog provides a visible trace of one’s actions and mistakes: what is written may stay “out there” forever and be searched, aggregated, transformed and linked back to the author, so it is essential to learn how to make mistakes in public and how to handle them gracefully.

Relationship-building interactions

While writing a weblog helps to be discovered and known, it takes more to turn first contacts into trusted relationships. The connections between bloggers grow through interacting over time, starting from conversations in blog comments and between weblogs.

Participating in weblog conversations is not easy, since the replies appear in many places: in the comments to particular post, in posts by other bloggers that link back or even outside of blogging, for instance when the link is passed along on Twitter. Bloggers stress the importance of monitoring where the comments on their thinking appear to be able to continue the conversation and to let the readers know that their attention is appreciated. Interactions with others, fragmented over time, help to build trust and knowledge of each others. Also, the distributed nature of these conversations provides good opportunities for collective sense-making: ad-hoc conversations that can be picked up a few weeks later, unexpected connections when one’s ideas become visible outside of the usual circle and emergence of patterns based on where the attention of others goes.

With mutual interest initial engagement via weblogs is continued connecting via other tools: email, phone or instant messaging for more focused or more private discussions, wikis and shared documents to collaborate on writing, social networks, photosharing or microblogging tools to share updates in alternative formats. Meeting in person plays an important part as well: bloggers tell stories about making an extra effort to meet other bloggers and about the excitement from being able to continue conversations started via weblogs while sharing food and drinks. Over time the knowledge of each other, trust and a history of interaction becomes a valuable resource, allowing bloggers to tap into their network with questions and problems or collaborate on specific projects.

Is it worth it?

The networking effects of blogging do not appear in a few days: it takes time and effort to produce engaging content, to monitor where comments appear and to continue conversations via weblogs and other tools. Visibility can also turn into an information overload, with more interesting people to connect to than time for meaningful connections. However, initial effort that goes into establishing one’s online presence via a weblog, building relationships and learning the specifics of doing that via blogging often pays back over time. This is when the wealth of posts accumulated in a weblog continues to attract new readers, having a broad network to rely on helps to get work done faster and smarter, while the effort of staying in touch is minimal.

It also helps to think of a weblog as a front garden: while it’s nice to impress passer-bys or strike a conversation with neighbours, it makes much more reason to invest in it if it’s also valuable for oneself – to sit there with a book or to pick up the flowers for a bouquet. Similarly, networking via blogging is more sustainable when it comes as a side effect of creating personally valuable weblog content rather being the main reason for blogging.

• Socio-technological approaches to facilitating knowledge sharing across disciplines
• Blog networking study: non-personal relations and lurking
• Blog networking study: bonding through interaction

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.

• Weblog as an easy way to stay in touch
• PhD conclusions in a thousand words: blogging practices of knowledge workers
• Weblog as knowledge networker instrument: questions

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.

• Socio-technological approaches to facilitating knowledge sharing across disciplines
• Skype: joined the club
• Blog networking study: establishing and maintaining relations via blogging

Martin Dugage on Collaboration tools for communities of practice:

I have never been really satisfied with various studies and white papers on collaboration tools because I believe that the tools you use to collaborate depend on the level of trust you have established between the parties involved. There is no point in blogging if you don’t want to engage into conversations, and it’s no use introducing instant messenging in an organization where nobody trusts each other. So I tried to summarize this is a little diagram which I have found to be helpful in my communication.

I took the liberty to copy and resize Martin’ diagram, since I believe that it’s worth attention of a broader audience (and the visual is better than any summary I would make :)

Loved the approach! A few thoughts:

Thinking of correlations with my long-term thinking on relation-building stages and blog networking.

Martin calls it “community space”, but some of the tools (e.g. IM) are primarily one-to-one tools… Wondering if/how we should take into account binary relations between people within the “community cloud” (also: degrees of trust in the community “in general” and between specific people may differ substantially).

Not sure I’d place IM/Skype into “shared values” space: personally I’d often use it in “information” or “cognitive space” (intrusiveness of IM is defined not only by the tools themselves, but also by social conventions around – this can redefine uses).

Wonder if next to the “trust” scale there is a need some another scale (“purpose”?) – at least to account for the “action” end of collaboration (thinking about the observations of bloggers switching to email/IM/wiki when it comes to joint actions.

See also: comments and an example from Jack Vinson

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/03/20.html#a1742; comments are here.

• Just citations
• Single community space: weblogs + forums
• Accelerated leadership trajectories in communities of practice

That was too fast thinking that I could get over jetlag in 24 hours. I was happy yesterday feeling nice for the whole day until it got me at night – I couldn’t sleep. This, as well as WiFi that didn’t work got me into reading What Binds Us When With Whom? Content and Structure in Social Network Analysis by Frans Stokman, downloaded just a few hours before that following a hint from Bill Ives

The paper gives me mixed feelings. From one side I immediately get into the feeling that Frans has some answers for a couple of community/network questions that has been fighting with:

• What is the difference between a network (individuals with their interconnections) and a community (something with a sense of a “whole – norms, practices”)? Why/when/how a network turns into a community?
• What is the difference between someone’s relation to a community as a whole and relations with it’s individual members? How those influence each other?

From another side, I’m feeling helpless – the paper goes in the theories and methods I don’t know. Directions for the answers I want are there, but I can’t get them out (I guess unless I change my PhD research topic and work for a few years on social network analysis :) I wish I’d have someone near by to translate the complexities into a language I can understand…

Anyway, the paper gives some leads. And Frans Stokman is at the University of Groningen, which is just a few hours away, so I can try to contact him to see where it goes.

And a quote:

In network evolution, two processes take place simultaneously. On the one hand, social actors shape the network by initiating, constructing, maintaining, and breaking up relationships. On the other hand, attributes (behaviour, opinions, attitudes) of social actors are partly shaped by their relationships. (p.24)

Hope jetlag gods will let me sleep now. To be posted in the morning :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/01/26.html#a1487; comments are here.

• A Socio-Technological Approach to Sharing Knowledge Across Disciplines
• Going Plazes
• MILK: multimedia interactions for learning and knowing

A piece from the paper:

An individual weblog is not likely to represent a community, while shared social spaces seem to emerge between weblogs, like in a city where life between buildings accounts for many social activities of its inhabitants. As in cities, blogger communal spaces are not evenly distributed: some neighbourhoods are full of social activities and conversations, while others look like a random collocation of houses where inhabitants have nothing in common. Blogger communal spaces may have visible boundaries, but more often indicators of a community are subtle and is difficult for a non-member to distinguish. Just as a local garden is not likely to have a sign indicating that there is a chess-player community that inhabits it every Sunday, blog communities do not delineate obvious community boundaries.

Somehow city metaphor was hitting me hard during last half a year…

I guess it’s started from A city is not a tree. Then it was reading Emergence and talkings about communities, shared spaces and weblog reading at BlogWalk 2.0, Ton’s post on founding a City in Cyberspace, Torill‘s Dialogue in slow motion at BlogTalk.

And a post by Anna Vallgårda pointing to Life between buildings by Jan Gehl… Just a quote from this book:

Life between buildings offers an opportunity to be with others in a relaxed and undemanding way. One can take occasional walks, perhaps make a detour along a main street on the way home or pause at an inviting bench near a front door to be among people for a short while. One can take a long bus ride every day, as many retired people have been found to do in large cities. Or one can do daily shopping, even though it practical to do it once a week. Even looking out of the window now and then, if one is fortunate enough to have something to look at, can be rewarding. Being among others, seeing and hearing others, receiving impulses from others, imply positive experiences, alternatives to being alone. One is not necessarily with a specific person, but one is, nevertheless, with others.

As opposed to being a passive observer of other people’s experiences on television or video or film, in public spaces the individual himself is present, participating in a modest way, but most definitely participating.

And it’s got connected with lurking, degrees of strength in relation building and some others things that I can’t articulate yet…

This post also appears on channel BlogWalk

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/11/15.html#a1429; comments are here.

• Edges
• Weblog networking: two way awareness and different degrees of strength
• Collaboration tools in relation to the level of trust

Valdis Krebs in From Social Networking in Academia – The Erdos collaboration network:

Experts have long argued about the optimal structure of a person’s professional network. Some say that a dense, cohesive network brings more social capital, while others argue that a sparse, radial network, one that provides opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurial activity, equates to greater social capital. Erdõs’s network shows both patterns — a densely connected core along with loosely coupled radial branches reaching out from the core. According to Ron Burt — a leading expert on social capital — this structure may be the optimal pattern for success. According to Burt, radial ties reach diverse information and knowledge to create value, while the dense, trusted ties deliver value in discovered opportunities. For a complete analysis read Burt’s seminal work — The Network Structure of Social Capital[PDF].

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/11/11.html#a1426; comments are here.

• BlogWalk: quiet
• NetWORK and knowledge work
• KMSS03: Knowledge networks and communities

Back from KM Europe… Some highlights:

• VIP pass from Knowledge Board team so I could go to all keynotes
• Bean bags in a coffee area that worked well as a metaphor a couple of times: talking about technology that shapes around you and thinking about shaping workplaces to make you happy.
• Getting a group of people for lunch, promising to show them “a place with a better food” and discovering that all “better food” places in a congress centre were closed.
• Free WiFi area given that commercial rates are pretty high (Martin Roell suggested that this was an intended hole in a network made by geeks for other geeks :)
• Fun of introducing people in a meaningful (I hope :) way
• KMwalk in Red Light District
• Thinking on “amplified networking” inspired by Karl-Erik Sveiby and Dave Snowden
• Martin Dugage walking to the coffee corner when I was sure he wouldn’t be at KM Europe
• 40+ people at personal KM workshop, energy of conversations in the room and thrill of facilitating it
• PKM dinner fun: people, talks, cockroach killed, food, collecting dinner payments from 35 people, more talking…
• Future PKM research planning with Piers Young and Florian Heidecke
• Finding out that Roberta Cuel comes to Enschede (this is where I live :)
• Not finding energy to join Heiko Haller for a tango party, but finding that I can actually dance it in a middle of coffee area
• Invitation from Richard McDermott to join his workshop and discovering his work on knowledge work
• Talking with John Seely Brown about weblogs, wikis, legitimised theft and meeting at Hawaii
• People I have never met recognising my face or my name or telling that they read my weblog
• Not being able to visit any vendor stands
• Meeting people, conversations and a sense of community

Thinking themes:

• “Amplified networking”
• Personal productivity factors
• Managing “personal knowledge managers”: simple rules and emergence, getting things done, organisational support and critical mass
• Triggering reflection
• “Fear factor”: fear as a barrier, fear as a driving force
• Different types of networks
• Learning to be
• Defining community and community boundaries

Many notes drafted, hope to post them during coming days (and if you want to help you can cross your fingers to make C&T 2005 deadline extended, so I can blog :)

This post appears on channel KM Europe

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/11/10.html#a1424; comments are here.

• Personal visualisations of e-mail archives
• Natural selection
• Personal effectiveness in a knowledge intensive environment

I’m not a big fun of joining YASNs just for the sake of it, but my discovery of Plazes has a little story behind it.

I guess I heard about it first in a conversation about geotagging weblogs between Martin and Rick. Then I’ve got an invitation from Matt, registered, but was too lazy to install Plazes launcher that you need to make it work. Then the story took a funny twist. I was looking for a WiFi in Florence, found Ben’s office at Plazes and as a results of some out-of-the-blue emailing had a pleasure of meeting Ben Hammersley. Today, reading about social networking and logging physical proximity in a paper by my colleague I thought of it and decided to give it a try. I guess my adoption process took around 1 month, so I wonder if I’d qualify as an early adopter :)

Anyway, I’m there now:

Once you are online and logged in Plazes show your location and allow you to see where are others. I guess it’s interesting in several cases:

• knowing where are your friends (yes, it’s YASN as well :)
• knowing who is at the same plaze – just think of the all great possibilities to meet new people at conferences and geeky encounters in cafes in strange cities :)
• knowing about interesting plazes around (including those with free WiFi) as you can search for plazes within different radius

I added it to my homepage and will see how it works… So far I added it to my home page. Not sure if I’ll keep it there as it seems to make loading a bit slower (have to check it) and shows me plazeless from time to time. Anyway, it’s still beta, so hopefully it will improve.

Features I’d love to see in the future:

• friends porting/discovery, so I don’t have to struggle in one more YASN discovering which friends are there (btw, if you are there you can add me – I’m there as mathemagenic)
• ability to hide the exact plaze and show only the city where I am (because sometimes I want a bit of privacy :)
• calendar – ability to show my future plazes (e.g. travel plans), probably at the city level as well (because I can’t know in advance specific locations I may be in

See also:

• Plazes blog
• reviews by Joi Ito, Ben Hammersley and Stowe Boyd
• adoption graphs (those are really interesting :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/10/13.html#a1383; comments are here.

• There will be no BlogTalk 3.0
• Blog networking study: bonding through interaction
• Converted to RSS reading :)