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.

• Personal KM: one-person enterprise
• Notes on my PhD methodology: weblog studies
• Trustworthiness of messy research: using research audit?

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.

• Improving Knowledge Workers’ Productivity and Organisational Knowledge Sharing with Weblog-based Personal Publishing
• Distributed network of interacting knowledge workers
• If most of the things I want to say in my PhD are already in my weblog, what’s the added value of the dissertation?

From today’s workshop on information overload:

• my presenation (on two things: (1) connecting PKM and information overload, (2) some relevant input from personal information management research)
• Information strategies: exposure, channels, tools
• Information “properties”

• knowledge (value/relevance/etc.) – information (artefacts) – “meta-data” – “meta-meta-data” (Ton’s forest)
• categorised/not
• useful/not
• hot – warm – cold

[I wanted to add more things, it's not working that way, so just posting from drafts]

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/03/03.html#a1513; comments are here.

• What supermarket shopping has in common with information overload?
• PKM: purposes and practices
• A bit of reflection on personal information management

Following yesterday’s post Piers started knowledgenetworker wiki page to think about PKM handbook:

The idea behind the knowledgenetworker handbook is to try to define the routines and practices that help people successfully ‘manage’ both their knowledge and their network, and which work best.

It gets into the hart of my current PhD struggle. After countless drawings and discussions it’s probably a good time to blog it. It’s not going to be easy, since thinking is not ready to be turned into a coherent text yet, but hopefully making an effort will help moving forward.

The core of my PhD struggle is thinking about conceptual language to talk about PKM. So far I talk about goals, practices, activities, methods, tools, artefacts, awareness… Those are things mixed in PKM model (in both versions) and I need to tear them apart, to come up with good names for conceptual categories and to get a bit more clear about their relations in order to have a conceptual frame to put in examples and instances that come from my research.

I’ll start from separating purpose and practice:

• Purpose: What and why?
• Practice: How?
  • methods
  • tools
  • artefacts
  • process
  • awareness (to be fair I’m not sure where it belongs, but it’s important, so it’s here :)

Purpose is about what and why – e.g. capturing ideas, so they do not fly away and are available later. Practice is about how – e.g. writing ideas down as weblog posts or creating concept maps.

Practice needs further elaboration – I have some categories in mind, but they do not fit together well.

I’m thinking of methods and tools (methods more about strategy and tools are needed to execute it). For example, for documenting ideas a strategy would be to catch bits of ideas separately and to establish their relations to each other. This could be done by many tools, e.g. by writing in a weblog and linking posts with categories or links, by creating a concept map, by writing ideas on pieces of paper and then sorting them in groups… Tools that we have at our disposal and are capable of using influence our choices of strategies, but strategies invoke search for better tools…

Process is about steps – what to do when (e.g. get an idea, tink of blogging it, find time to blog, start writing, think of relations, find other relevant posts and add links, finish, click submit button).

Artefacts are “things” used or produces in a process: weblog posts, concept maps, paper cards with ideas…

Awareness is a strange thing… I can’t define it properly, don’t know where it belongs, but know that it belongs to the picture.

There are a few issues around purposes and practices:

• PKM purposes are often implicit, so choices of corresponding practices (=implicit and may be not optimal)
• Practices are often invisible (=not accounted for)
• Practices are interrelated: we use similar strategies or same tools for different purposes, we multitask on processes and have to fit them into definite time and artefacts could play different roles (e.g. as input, output or tool) (=all these things collide in time and space, leading to interruptions, dublication, conflicts and other non-productive things).

Coming back to the PKM handbook: I don’t think we can talk about “good practices” without understanding purposes. Not only from the scientific interest, but simply because choices of how? depend on what? and why?. And, since, practices are interrelated, choice of how? in a specific case depends on all other cases of what?, why? and how? currently active in the picture.

And, to connect it to my PhD: I try to come up with model describing PKM purposes. Since often purposes are implicit, I look at practices and explore motivations behind them (intentional purposes) and effects (implicit or not anticipated purposes).

At the moment I try to put all these things together, but still searching for good conceptual language to talk about it… Please, let me know if you have any associations or answers (and especially if I reinvent an exiting theory :)

And – there are many people who contributed and still do to my thinking on this issue, but special thanks goes to Aldo de Moor for inspiration over good food after discussing papers in the Zoo :)

See also: PKM purposes and practices in knowledgenetworker wiki

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/02/23.html#a1503; comments are here.

• Case Research Methodology course
• Bloggers cited in the dissertation
• Researcher vs. blogger: researcher influence

I had a growing dissatisfaction with the way my 3 circle personal KM model (one of drafts, final version is here) represent my ideas, so the discussion on it during my PhD presentation last week was the last drop…

One of the problems with current representation seems to be the fact that this is a Venn diagram (didn’t know it was called that way, thanks to Jonathan for alerting), which is supposed to represent overlapping sets. I didn’t intend to use Venn diagram for my model, it just came to be an easy way to organise my ideas. Last few days I was playing with some other ways of stucturing them. This is what I’ve got so far:

It describes what is managed within personal knowledge management (or functions of one-person enterprise). I’m aware that ‘managed’ is a wrong word – many of activities happen implicitly – but I don’t have a better one yet.

Still not happy. Some concerns:

• me
  • Don’t know if I should keep individual as in the earlier version.
• ideas
  • I’d talk about knowledge here, but it has too many contradictory definitions.
  • Also use of knowledge would create a problem with the whole model as, for example, relations include knowledge about another person and awareness could be defined as knoweldge about contexts.
• others
  • Have communities & networks in the earlier version. Not sure what is better: of course, one can think about relation with a community, but it’s more about one-to-one relations.
• artifacts
  • Actually here I think about knowledge representations, but this label has the same problem as knowledge.
  • Also has something to do with information, but more of “information in a specific form” as knoweldge representation
  • One more problem with artefacts: they could easily be pieces of conversations (e.g. e-mail) or relations (e.g. business card). Same as with knowledge…
  • Not sure it’s a good word anyway. Sylvie is looking for synonims too.
• awareness
  • Simply defined awareness is knowledge about context. Critical for knowledge work, IMHO.
  • Awareness is even less likely to be ‘managed’, most of it is about implicit learning and picking cues from the environment. More on it to come – I’m digging out relevant research.

Your comments are welcome (I know that posting it on Sunday doesn’t help getting feedback, but I have to get it out to be able to focus on other things :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/09/12.html#a1347; comments are here.

• Crafting one’s workplace to fit personal preferences
• Who knows what you know
• Knowledge worker paradox (2)