Elmine is doing something I should blog a long ago – working on the project about passionate professionals:

I know a lot of people that work with so much enthusiasm and passion that they keep on doing it, no matter what. Their work and life seem to blend together and demarcation between private and work life seems not that relevant to them.

This project is about them, passionate professionals, and finding out why they’re such passionate workers. Using video-interviews I want to portray these interesting people that belong to my tribe.

It was fun and scary to be the first one Elmine interviewed for the project, almost a year ago, but was very rewarding too – having an opportunity to reflect on my work and passions with a good listener in front of me.

Elmine posted part the video with my interview, where I tell why I ended up doing a PhD and share things I’ve learnt in the process. I watched is a couple of days ago, making notes – to find out later those were exactly about the things I talked in the quotes Elmine pulled out for the post:

“Doing a PhD was a way to give myself time and space to explore and to work on something for a long term and have time and hours and also choices that would be mine.”

Not sure this is the best reason to go for a PhD :) It was definitely the source of many troubles, but also provided more opportunities for risk-taking – while struggling with becoming confident as a researcher I also knew I could afford being on the fringes as I didn’t plan a traditional academic career. I’m not so sure about not wanting to be an academic now, btw :)))

“In an organization, how do you manage things that you cannot control? How do you create conditions for people to be passionate about work, because this is what brings business benefit, but this is something we cannot tell them or put in a job description?”

The funny thing that I’m still there: asking questions very similar to those that brought me into doing PhD research. Hopefully, I’m a bit further with the answers :)

“If you would ask me if I would do it again [a PhD], I don’t know, but I am who I am today also because I went through the process.”

“Being an academic there are certain rules of the game and part of doing PhD is learning about those rules and either comply or breaking or stretching them. [...] If you work in an organization or business or whatever environment there are rules of the game and unless you’re very happy with the game and very happy about the rules you still have to find your own path given the circumstances.”

Happy to have the lessons. Now transferring to other contexts.

***

Just to make sure you’ve seen it: Elmine also has a series of shorter videos where people from “our tribe” talk about education of their children. Knowing quite a lot about their professional lives I find it interesting to peak into their more private and may be more important choices. Especially given that at the moment making those choices is a burning issue for me :)

• Research results as yesterday’s news, audiences and expectations
• OneNote for recording and coding qualitative data (+ more on tagging metaphor for flags)
• Blogging as boundary practice

This is something I wanted to blog for a while, but – hey – it’s better late than never :)

I did my PhD in Utrecht University, which is old (founded in 1636) and quite traditional. The defense is in a room full of old portraits, professors wear togas and no technology (photo, video, etc) is allowed without special permission. The defense is ruled by the Beadle (ceremonymeister), the defendant is accompanied by two paranimfs (assistants, who play similar roles as best friends at a wedding :), all dressed up pretty formal as well.

In the Netherlands by the time you go to the defense the PhD work is practically done: the main critical moments happen a few months before it, when the dissertation is first approved by the supervisors and then read by the PhD committee members, who decide if it’s good enough to let you go to the defense. Failing a defense is almost unheard of, but your performance still matters for your reputation and the future in academia.

From a personal perspective it was a fun and a bit scary day. While lots of people made jokes about the schedule in the building that said very definitively that  “Promotion L. Efimova M. Sc.” would be followed by the “Reception Dr. Efimova”, the hour between those two felt as an extremely long one.

So, there I was, facing a group of distinguished academics (and I hope to be forgiven for excluding all the formal titles below :) that was chaired by Willem Koops, the dean of the Social Sciences faculty, and included my supervisors Robert-Jan Simons, Robert de Hoog and Edward Faber, members of the examination committee  Betty Collis, Mariëtte de Haan, Albert Pilot Jan Schmidt, and Jan Vermunt, Jan Schmidt, as well as Jonathan Grudin who couldn’t come, but was virtually present by sending his questions.

I had 45 minutes for the defense itself. Most of the questions were not about the dissertation itself, but various implications of the work. That made it challenging, since I had to come up with some of the answers on the fly. It felt like an interesting conversation, however too formal, stressful and way too short to enjoy it fully. I was also stupid enough not to have a watch in front of me, so I didn’t have a good idea how the time went and took a bit too short with the first couple of questions. I am still thinking of some of the questions and planning to write in more detail on that in the weblog.

Then the committee left (through the secret door that I didn’t even know was there) to discuss their opinions of the defense before coming back to award the degree. As with other PhD defenses I went to, I found those few minutes very special – once the committee disappears the room turns very informal, with making photos, greetings and chatter, and all that is covered with a scent of anticipation… And then there were my doctor diploma and all kinds of nice words, including Robert-Jan’s qualification of me as “a curious, inspiring, persistent doubter” :)

And then we all moved to the reception. Alexander, who wasn’t allowed at the defense and was running outside with his grandfather, jumped into my arms and stayed there through most of the congratulations claiming his share of attention for all the hard times he had while I was working on the dissertation… Being done with the PhD felt nice, but it was even nicer to be able to share the joy of it with others – family, friends and extended professional network.

Thank you, everyone, for making it special!

***

If you are curious for more you can see photos of the defense by Ton, Robert and all kinds of other people. While the recording of the defense wasn’t allowed, they didn’t say anything about twittering it, so thanks to @gervis and @ruudstweets I have a real-time transcript :)

• No related posts.

I want to write a very excited post that my PhD journey is over and share the details of the defense, but too tired from being active and social. So, until I find the time and energy to blog it properly:

I’m a Dr. now :)

• Knowledge networker
• OKLC04: PhD workshop notes
• Weblog research: artefacts and practices

I gave a presentation today at work to give an overview of my PhD research and discuss how the results might be useful in practice. It’s on Slideshare: Passion at work: blogging practices of knowledge workers

Most of what I was talking about is in the weblog:

• Slides 2-3: An overview of the PhD approach
• Slides 4-8: What pragmatists might want to know about blogging
• Slides 9-12: Facilitating adoption of weblogs in knowledge-intensive environments with PhD cover art story as an metaphor for slide 9 (the photo on it is A Topography of Woman by Arlee Barr).

Slides 4-12 are prescriptive. If you want something a bit more academic you can find an overview of the dissertation findings at PhD conclusions: blogging practices of knowledge workers.

• Knowledge workers redefined: responsibility and creating value by acting on knowledge
• Links
• BlogTalk 2.0: Panel 3

Promised to blog this piece from the dissertation in February (together with What pragmatists might want to know about blogging), but wasn’t happy with it. Still not happy, but here it is (in a slightly updated form).

***

From an organisational perspective, weblogs provide a people-driven way to share knowledge and to develop ideas. For example, weblogs are useful for:

• Tapping into the undocumented. Blogging provides a low-threshold opportunity to write down ideas not related to current deadlines, but important to prepare for the future. Bloggers might use their weblogs to document their experiences and lessons learnt – those that escape official reports, but are usually very useful for others to learn from.
• Making expertise visible. Weblogs provide traces of personal expertise and practices. Making it visible helps to get an idea of who knows what, which is a starting point for collaboration. Reading a weblog written by experts allows others to gain insight about their ways of thinking and working, and to learn from them.
• Unexpected connections. Weblogs support serendipity – finding ideas that fuel innovation and interesting people to talk to or to combine efforts for a shared goal.

What is essential for facilitating adoption of weblogs in knowledge-intensive environments?

Putting an individual in control

Blogging works best when it is driven by personal interests and passions. Start by helping potential bloggers to find uses of a weblog personally meaningful for them in the long term – these are essential to sustain blogging while social effects of it emerge. Impose as few rules as possible: freedom and a sense of personal ownership of a weblog are important to be able to find those personally meaningful uses. Personal investment in blogging might create tensions with organisational norms and practices; however, this is the price that must be paid: be prepared to relax rules and embrace ambiguity. Avoid the temptation to measure the business effects of blogging: most of the added value of it is in enabling work rather than doing it, which is difficult to measure explicitly.

Supporting an ecosystem

Blogging is about microcontent – publishing small pieces of thought and commentary, anchored with permalinks and carried away by feeds. However, the real value is not at the post level – ecosystems between blog posts and connections between their authors are more interesting and more important. When thinking about introducing weblogs in particular settings, it is essential to create conditions for weblog ecosystems, rather than only supporting individual weblogs. The essential ingredients for this are:

• Readership. Introduce newsfeeds and newsreaders as part of the practices of working with information. Make sure that intranet weblogs are accessible via those.
• Scale. Facilitate the broadest possible reach. Communicate clearly that blogging is supported in your organisation. If there are things that should not be blogged in public, make those exceptions known.
• Visibility. The infrastructure that supports visibility of public weblogs (weblog indexes, aggregators, search engines) has to be recreated if weblogs are used within an organisation.
• Feedback. Bloggers need tools to monitor the interest and reactions of others to their writing, which are often missing when weblog infrastructure is provided by an organisation. Statistics about references and traffic should be made available to the weblog authors.

Making the best out of it

Although blogging looks simple, in practice it requires navigating a number of challenges. To help potential bloggers with those it is necessary to address several points:

• Some uses of weblogs are not obvious. Make sure that unexpected practices of blogging that are useful in relation to work are shared between bloggers.
• Think of blogging as a new tool for old tasks. For example, why not start a weblog for trip reports that are currently lost in separate documents? Lab notebooks, course notes, progress reports, customer communication and many other activities could be shared more easily via weblogs.
• Learn about the risks and benefits of blogging. Discuss those with the people in your organisation and then trust them in knowing what not to talk about in public.
• Provide blogging tools if you can, give basic how-to training or, better, ask a few experienced bloggers to coach newcomers by giving them time and recognition.
• Make it part of “work as usual” – make sure that spending some time on blogging is perceived as normal, account for it in performance appraisals, integrate it with other technologies in your organisation.

If people in your organisation are already blogging, is there still something to do? Definitely: help others to navigate the sea of blog entries, support cross-fertilisation, find ways to reuse quality entries and recognise good authors. This could include, for example, making sure that employee weblogs (and also external ones) are indexed by an intranet search engine or creating a “best of blogs” column in your monthly newsletter. Blogging is best driven by personal passions, but once there, weblogs need to be embedded into organisational practices to bring business value.

• Notes on my PhD methodology: introduction
• PhD cover art
• Links

The deadline for submitting this paper was just a couple of weeks before the due date for my dissertation, so I hesitated a lot deciding to work on it. I’m glad I did: it provided a great opportunity to transform the insights from the study of my own practices of using weblog as an instrument to develop PhD ideas (Chapter 3 of the dissertation) into something that can live its own life.

Efimova, L. (2009). Weblog as a personal thinking space. HT’09: Proceedings of the twentieth ACM conference on hypertext and hypermedia, June 2009. New York: ACM. DOI=10.1145/1557914.1557963 (.pdf)

Abstract. While weblogs have been conceptualised as personal thinking spaces since their early days, those uses have not been studied in detail. The purpose of this paper is to explore how a weblog can contribute to the process of developing ideas in a long-term complex project. To do so I use autoethnography to reconstruct my personal blogging practices in relation to developing PhD ideas from two perspectives. I first discuss my practices of using a weblog as a personal information management tool and then analyse its uses at different stages in the process of working on a PhD dissertation: dealing with fuzzy insights, sense-making and turning ideas into a dissertation text. The findings illustrate that next to supporting thinking in a way private notebooks do, a weblog might serve similar roles as papers on one’s office desk: dealing with emerging insights and difficult to categorise ideas, while at the same time creating opportunities for accidental feedback and impressing those who drop by.

© ACM, 2009. This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in HT’09: Proceedings of the twentieth ACM conference on hypertext and hypermedia, June 2009. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1557914.1557963 [This is the first time I actually tried to negotiate something different from the default copyright agreement; it didn't work.]

See also: short, practitioner oriented version of the insights from this paper – Blogging for knowledge workers: incubating ideas

• Researcher vs. blogger: researcher influence
• Personal effectiveness, improvement.ru and boundary spanning
• Deadline silence

Update Nov 2010. Surprisingly many search queries end up at this post. Whatever search brings you here you might be better reading this one – Preventing Burnout: signs, symptoms, causes and coping strategies – and talking to someone who has an idea how to recognise a burnout. Wish I did it when I wrote this post…

***

Like my house right now this blog is loved, but neglected space: finishing my dissertation and being a happy mom doesn’t leave much energy for anything else. I’m almost there, starting to look forward to “after the PhD” life, like moving to an unknown country…

This is what I wrote a few months ago as a welcoming message of my weblog. Now, even more than when, I feel that my house represents the state of other things in my life.

While being busy with the PhD work didn’t take all my time, it occupied my mind and also sucked a lot of energy. While urgent things in the house and general cleanliness were taken care of (it’s not falling apart and in the state of “ok to have friends for dinner” ;), I feel surrounded by all kinds of unsorted things in wrong places and unfinished tasks that accumulated over time. I try tackling them one by one in the pockets of time between other things, but feel that that those are changes on the surface, that more is needed to turn the house into a place I want it to be.

I also feel burnt out physically, mentally and emotionally. When finishing the dissertation I thought that the worst was over. I did compare working on the dissertation to pregnancy, but didn’t realise that after the “birth” the parallels can go further:

Quote from: untenured on August 18, 2006, 10:42:02 AM

Perhaps there is an analogy to post-partum depression.  Instead of child, you birthed a thesis.   I bet your gestation period was a lot longer than nine months.

That is a good analogy, Untenured.  In fact, I experienced more weirdness and depression after finishing the diss than I did after the birth of either of my two kids.  I’m thinking maybe it’s because a 400+ page thesis is not at all cute and cuddly, plus you can’t breastfeed it.  :)

Some call it Post Dissertation Stress Disorder. Don’t think that I have the worst form of it, since I don’t have all the the symptoms (only those: Foggy brain, Inability to concentrate on anything longer than 10 minutes and Pure laziness :) Fun aside, wish I knew earlier that something like that should be expected after finishing the dissertation.

Ideally I would take a few weeks off right now, but I’m not done yet. So, I’m taking it (=everything) easy, starting to sort out things in the house and hoping that the rest will follow.

• How far from activity theory?
• Hypertext writing
• Hard choices: researcher vs. blogger?

I am glad to see that people like the cover of my PhD dissertation and ask questions about it. Here is the story…

I wanted the cover to reflect the nature of what my dissertation is about. I wanted something hand-made, thinking of the parallels between knowledge work and craft. I also wanted it to represent interconnectedness and variety, something that would give a picture of the blogosphere, where fragments coming from different weblogs are connected into a bigger whole. I wanted it to be personal and passionate.

After many photos on Flickr (where else? :) I found “A Topography of Woman“, a work-in-progress photo of a textile art by Arlee Barr, a Canadian mixed media artist. It was more than a pretty visual, it came with a story that I could connect to in so many ways.  A piece of it:

A work in SLOW process!!!!!! I’m really liking the heavy layering of paint and texture lately in my art, and have been working on this piece for almost 6 months. It keeps adding to itself, changing colours and feel, and i think is finally in a background state as i much as i care/want to have it.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about family, relationships, legacies and history. What comes from within us that was shaped by our familial circumstances isn’t always obvious. The colour of the eyes and a liking for cottage cheese, a certain gesture of the hand or a timbre of laugh is not all that connects us, that makes us part of that circle. I think it’s an intangible quality that is just *there*, and i recognize these traits as an inherited (in the sense of nurture)/genetic (biologically speaking)/cultural (the “style” of upbringing, not whether you are brownwhiteblackgreen catholicprotestantevangelical canadianirishswahili) sameness.

It’s the Feminine in my family that most stands out–of course, there are men in the family, but it’s the women i remember the most, as being the power, the powerhouses, the ones who delegated the power. My lineage is Matriarchal in all respects but for surnames.

I read Arlee’s journal: it was fascinating to see blogging about work-in-progress in the area so different from those covered in my own weblog and weblogs of others studied in the dissertation. Yet, it had many parallels – stories to connect with, getting insights into the essence of the work and tricks of the trade, learning about the person behind the text and the community around it…

So, I kept my fingers crossed (because at that moment I couldn’t think of anything else for the cover :) and contacted Arlee. She agreed. The artwork had changed since the photo I wanted was taken; the one used for the cover is of a later version, so you can have the fun of exploring the changes.

And, the thing that I love most is that this is a visual example of how blogging works: it is about connecting with people from far away, crossing boundaries between different domains, being able to build on someone’s work in progress in your own work and then telling stories about it :)

• Final chapter of my dissertation for a review
• The role of chocolate in PhD research
• Lost with PhD ideas

[This is a working page - I may edit it and eventually add a printer-friendly version of my dissertation and specific chapters].

Efimova, L. (2009). Passion at work: blogging practices of knowledge workers. Enschede, Netherlands: Novay.

Print: you can order a copy from Novay (it’s €25; scroll to the bottom for the instructions)

Download: 2,6 MB .pdf (the whole book), printer-friendly version to come.

© 2009, Novay, The Netherlands. Some rights reserved. Except where otherwise noted “Passion at work: blogging practices of knowledge workers” by Lilia Efimova is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Netherlands License.   Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at copyright@novay.nl

ISSN (print) 1877-8739; No. 024
ISSN (online) 1877-8747
ISBN 978-90-75176-77-3

Cover Photo: “A Topography of Woman“, work-in-progress. The artwork
and the photo are by Arlee Barr, a Canadian mixed media artist. The story about it is at PhD cover art.

Table of contents

Preface vii

Chapter 1. Introduction 1
1.1 Blogging in knowledge-intensive environments 2
1.2 Understanding knowledge work 7
1.3 Research overview 13

Chapter 2. Research approach 17
2.1 Interpretive qualitative research 18
2.2 Researching weblogs: artefacts and practices 19
2.3 Research choices: methods, participation, writing, ethics 26
2.4 Judging quality 38

Chapter 3. Blogging PhD ideas 47
3.1 Useful lenses: PIM, GTD and advice on writing 48
3.2 Research approach 51
3.3 Results: the weblog as a personal knowledge base 57
3.4 Results: from early insights to a dissertation 65
3.5 Results: dealing with challenges around blogging 76
3.6 Discussion 86

Chapter 4. Conversations between KM bloggers 91
4.1 Weblogs as a conversational medium 91
4.2 Research approach 93
4.3 Study 1. The Actionable Sense conversation 100
4.4 Study 2. Conversations with self and others 110
4.5 Discussion 127

Chapter 5. Networking between KM bloggers 131
5.1 Networking practices of bloggers 132
5.2 Research approach 135
5.3 Participants and their networks 139
5.4 Results: networking practices 143
5.5 Results: challenges of weblog-mediated networking 156
5.6 Discussion 165

Chapter 6. Employee blogging at Microsoft 173
6.1 Employee blogging 173
6.2 Research approach 175
6.3 Blogging at Microsoft 179
6.4 Results: blogging practices of Microsoft employees 183
6.5 Results: tensions between personal and organisational perspectives 191
6.6 Discussion 199

Chapter 7. Integration 207
7.1 Blogging practices of knowledge workers 207 (blogged: short version, long version)
7.2 Ingredients for a theory: accidental brokering, artefact-based connections and edge zones 218
7.3 Implications for practice 227 (blogged: What pragmatists might want to know about blogging and Facilitating adoption of weblogs in knowledge-intensive environments
7.4 Looking back 233

Summary 239

Samenvatting 241

References 243

Curriculum Vitae 255

• Knowledge work framework (PKM + tasks)
• PKM models revisited: background
• Away from blogging

In case you haven’t seen it via all other channels yet: my PhD defense is at 16:15 on 22 June in Academiegebouw, Utrecht (see on the map) and I would love to see you there (please, let me know if you decide to come, especially if you are from far away and I don’t expect you can make it :).

• Stellingen
• PhD: experiential research and everyday grounded theory
• OKLC04: PhD workshop notes