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.

• Too serious?
• Knowledge worker spaces
• Corporate blogs: food for thought

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.

• Email triage, focusing on not important and learning to use tools effectively
• On personal preferences that shape research
• Talking From the Inside Out: The Rise of Employee Bloggers

Today is the Ada Lovelace Day, “an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology” (more at findingada.com). Reading about the research results showing that “women need to see female role models more than men need to see male ones” made me realising how lucky I am with having my mother as a role model.

I grew up with stories of BESM-6, recipes written on used punch cards, and my mom at the driver’s seat in the car when it was pretty uncommon for a woman.  I’ve never thought that whatever technology might not be for me because my mom is always there as an example. She also taught me a couple of  important lessons about dealing with technologies.

It happened that I spent a lot of time figuring out databases and queries with Robotron to help with my mom’s NGO work just before my computer classes at school started. It was fun to be able to skip classes (as I new most of the material covered by then), but it is only now I’m starting to realise the importance of learning to use computers while doing meaningful work rather than working trough textbook exercises. I guess it’s because of this (and many similar) experiences I’ve came to view technology as just a mean to an end, not an end by itself.

The funny thing is that when technology is just a mean it’s ok not to be perfectly smart with it. Getting work done and having fun in the process matters more than having an image of being an expert. I’ve learn from my mom to ask help when I’m lost or to outsource stuff I didn’t want to or couldn’t do.

And, thinking of the things I’ve learnt from my mom I start wondering if the Ada Lovelace Day should be about women excelling with technology, not in it :)

• IM adoption
• How new tools change the way I connect with other bloggers
• Facilitating adoption of weblogs in knowledge-intensive environments

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.

• Weblog conversations revisited: an introduction
• Blogs as boundary objects
• The power of loose ends (3) or the weakness of weblogs when it comes to joint actions

One of the things I want to understand in a study I’m working now is the role of weblogs in an ecosystem of tools bloggers use to connect with each other. As part of this process I looked what changed in my own ways to connect with other bloggers as new tools appeared (=I looked only at those that appeared after I started blogging, changed something and are not “blog tools”, so email, IM, RSS readers and various blogsearch/indexes are not here):

I can imagine that for others the picture would be different, but I guess that for many of us two thing are true: weblog is only one of many tools to connect with other bloggers and with each new technology the exact niche of blogging becomes smaller and better defined.

• Blog networking study: staying in touch
• Finally getting into Flickr
• IM adoption

Two different streams of ideas from around Online Information:

• First one, covered in the panel The Facebook generation and touched by other speakers is about digital natives, those who grow up online, and their differences from the rest of us.
• The second one, outside of the conference, over food and walking with Matt is about cultural stereotypes so deeply engrained that we don’t even know they are there until we experience something that triggers reflection.

Well, those two connected to today’s talk with Robert about our fist computing experiences. For me it personal computing started with AGATs and black-and-green screen Robotrons. We had a Robotron at home for a while and I helped my mom with her NGO work by doing some database programming. I also remember my dismay when my university freshman programming course was scheduled in a class full of Robotrons and not in those with newer and fancier PCs (of course I wanted newer and fancier machines to play with ;). The teacher then said that “if you can program on Robotrons, anything else will be peanuts”.

Now, looking back at my personal computing history I’m thinking that he was probably right. Not that I can program anything now (I’ve learnt that being good at programming doesn’t mean loving it :), but I’m happy having all those “old computing” experiences – text only black and green screens, points-and-nodes BBS culture, disconnected emails, fascination with those magic WWW letters… Those are not just romanticised memories – I’m happy to have those experiences as they help me to understand what new technologies bring (and what do they take away). It helps to make conscious choices about the aspects of digital cultures I want in my life, rather than growing with them and may be never discovering that some cultural stereotypes don’t serve me well.

Ewan McIntosh said he didn’t like the whole digital immigrants/digital natives terminology. I like it, exactly for the power of the metaphor. A piece from Watching the English (discussed in another context) on the Englishness of natives and immigrants:

For those of us without the benefit of early, first-hand influence of another culture, some aspects of Englishness can be so deeply ingrained that we find it almost impossible to shake them off, even when it is clearly in our interested to do so [ ]. Immigrants have the advantage of being able to pick and choose more freely, often adopting the more desirable English quirks and habits while carefully steering clear of the more ludicrous ones. [p.18]

The metaphor also brings other concerns – those of inclusion and exclusion, integration and cultural diversity. I hope that at least I can teach my own little digital native some of non-digital cultures :)

Technorati: OnlineInfo2007

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/12/08.html#a1964; comments are here.

• Going Plazes
• Bicultural leaders, change and synchronicity
• Research on differences in technology uses (for collaboration) inside companies vs. internet uses

This time I check my referrers at Technorati (via Bloglines subscription) to my familyskyping post it feels creepy.

There is nothing there that is not online, so why feeling creepy?

The details that I usually choose not to make instanly visible are made visible in one post. It also goes across online spaces, linking my story about using Skype in the family to my wedding photos on Flickr.

This is the first time I see the weblog that links to me and it’s scary how someone “I have no idea who he is” went to collect all that details to put them in one place. I would feel totally different if it would be someone I recognise as a regular reader of my weblog.

I wonder how Robert would react to it. Not only I blogged about his communication with my mom, but now the whole story is at some strange website accompanied by our wedding photo.

Of course, things are not that scary. Very fast I figure out that the post was actually syndicated from Skype journal that I know well and that the original was written by Phil Wolff and starts from “A friend of mine, metablogger and social media scholar Lilia Efimova” invisible in the Technorati quote. And I talk to Robert – he doesn’t mind…

I feel much better now – the context Phil provides makes a lot of sense for a reader not reading my weblog, I’m not surprised that he knew all those details and I actually like how he cropped my photo for the post :)

What is still strange is how much my feeling of creepy or not with my personal online dots connected in one place depends on the context: who connects the dots, why and how…

And a side note. Phil says:

Note the Skype infection spreading through the family vector. Not just within her household (Lilia to Robert, I think) but also across households, to her mother. Someday genealogists will be mining Skype social networks to discover family ties.

Phil’s assumption of Robert picking up Skype from me actually made Robert more unhappy than any of the personal things revealed online :) So, I have to say that this is not true (both of us used SKype before getting together) and that in general Robert is pretty much the same early adopter as I am (actually, he has more gadgets than me, I just blog more :), so all ideas of who might be the first in the family are likely to be wrong.

Also – Phil has a really bunch of interesting ideas about framing Skype for the workplace and an on-going quest for Knowledge Management selection criteria for Skype.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/08/12.html#a1814; comments are here.

• WBC04: day 2 morning
• Going Plazes
• Effects of reading someone else’s feeds

Michael Angeles is looking for research on differences in collaboration, publishing and information sharing between intranet and internet users. I expect there should be quite a lot of stuff on the topic – any suggestions?

Some of the things I thought about:

Work of Dirk Stenmark on intranets (I referred to his paper earlier in knowledge vs. information discussion):

• Stenmark, D. (2005). “How intranets differ from the web: organisational culture’s effect on technology“. Proceedings of ECIS2005, Regensburg, Germany, 26-28 May 2005.

There should be also some stuff on communities online vs. in companies – at least it is discussed often if you talk to people heavily into supporting corporate communities. Andy, Martin – any suggestions here?

There are bits and pieces regarding differences of blogging outside/inside. I have some hints on the issues here and there in my weblog and will have more as my PhD progresses. Elmine had a comment on that in her talk on “blogs and Habermas”. If there is something in English it should be in this paper.

I could also imagine relevant things in the work of Jonathan Grudin – one of his interests is in corporate adoption of “internet technologies”. This one should be on the topic:

• Messaging and Formality: Will IM Follow in the Footsteps of Email?T. Lovejoy and J. Grudin, 2003. Proc. INTERACT 2003, 817-820. (PDF)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/08/10.html#a1813; comments are here.

• Best use of a new technology is hard to foresee
• Preaching to the converted: PKM is not about methods and tools, but about attitude change
• Going Plazes

If you are in weblog research make sure you email Jan Schmidt for the draft paper on blogging practices (hmm, if everyone would ask Jan he will be left without qualified blind reviewers for the journal publication he is thinking about):

Abstract. The diffusion of weblogs over the last years has led to a differentiation of blogging practices. This paper proposes a general analytical model to analyse and compare different uses of the weblog format. Its main argument is that individual usage episodes are framed by three structural dimensions of rules, relations and code, which in turn are constantly (re)produced in social action. As a result, “communities of blogging practices” emerge, that is groups of people who share certain routines and expectations about the use of Weblogs as a software tool for information-, identity- and relationship management. To illustrate these conceptual ideas, findings from a large-scale survey (N=5.246) of the german-speaking blogosphere are presented, focussing on sociodemographic characteristics and motivations of active bloggers as well as on strategies of presenting oneself, dealing with social relationships and using the blogosphere as a source of information. These are found to be partly dependent on bloggers’ age, partly on the experience with the Weblog format. In general, the majority of bloggers uses them to journal episodes and events of their private life, while keeping contact with other readers and authors through comments and (to a lesser extent) a blogroll.

I really like the paper, but I’d say that it’s really two-in-one: the first is probably the best theorising work on weblogs I’ve seen so far, the second has a very interesting results complementing other blog studies.

The main reason I see it as two papers: I don’t see how the survey illustrates the model. I find the strength of Jan’t model in articulating dynamic relations between different aspects of blogging practices, as well as connections between micro-level “specific blogging episodes” and forming of macro-level rules and relations – I do not see how those things are illustrated by the survey (Jan, may be I miss what is there – then it should be more articulate).

Interesting finding (see also highlights by Philipp Young): choices of what to blog about differ by age (teenage and older bloggers), while use of comments, blogrolls and RSS differ by the time spent blogging (less than 6 months/more than 6 months). The second one suggests the change of blogging practices over time (corresponds to similar finding in my BlogTalk paper (.pdf), other studies and subjective feelings).

I’m not sure how far one-to-one generalisations of specific blogging practices (e.g. contents or weblog posts) into broader categories (information, identity and relationship management) would hold. For example, if we talk about identity management: (IMHO) in the blogosphere your identity is formed as much by linking to others as by the contents of your weblog. This comes back to the whole discussion on artefacts and practices (e.g. archaeology and ethnography in weblog research, but I should write about it properly).

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/04/12.html#a1762; comments are here.

• Blog as a nexus of multimembership and accidental brokering
• Mapping weblog communities
• Uncovering the implicit

An interesting follow-up to my earlier comment on Martin’s framework of collaboration tools for communities of practice: Wilfred Rubens on Stages of development of a CoP, levels of trust and ICT tools.

Wilfred does a really good job expanding on the discussion about community technologies and positioning Martin’s trust stages next to the 5 stages in e-moderating by Gilly Salmon (which is new to me).

Salmon’s model is worth checking anyway: it describes the specifics of e-moderation and technical support for 5 stages of community participation (access and motivation, online socialisation, information exchange, knowledge construction and development).

Connected: Technology for Communities set on Flickr (Nancy, I can’t dig out the post in your weblog from where it comes).

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/03/28.html#a1747; comments are here.

• Talking about RSS in a company
• Facilitation lessons learnt
• You can’t participate in life via conference call: media vs. pace