Mathemagenic » transparency http://blog.mathemagenic.com Lilia Efimova on personal productivity in knowledge-intensive environments, weblog research, knowledge management, PhD, serendipity and lack of work-life balance... Fri, 30 Dec 2011 22:25:35 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.5 Expecting: more kids and challenges http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2010/02/03/expecting-more-kids-and-challenges/ http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2010/02/03/expecting-more-kids-and-challenges/#comments Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:46:23 +0000 Lilia Efimova http://blog.mathemagenic.com/?p=3087

I never know when it’s time to tell personal news online and how far it actually makes sense to tell them explicitly instead of letting people to figure it out by themselves by picking up signals here and there… Anyway, in case you haven’t heard yet: another kid is on the way – I will be on maternity leave from the beginning of May.

The fun of anticipating and preparing for a new arrival comes together with challenges of figuring out how to combine it with my professional life, especially given that I just started figuring out what and how I actually want to do after my post-PhD dip.

And it’s more difficult when the first time – now I knowing what being a parent actually means, how much (or little ;) you can actually do work-wise when you free time is not as stretchable as it used to be, how precious is the time when they are so little and how fast it flies. I know that getting back to work after the usual three months is tough, especially now, when I don’t have the PhD finishing line in sight, that I’ll have a couple of seasons when going to a conference would be a big challenge, and don’t even get me started on the long-term issues of combining work and motherhood (we have an extremely inflexible Dutch school system on the horizon)…

Well, there are still three months to go and lots of fun things to do work-wise. I’ll eventually figure out how to make the equation work, but at the meantime would appreciate your thoughts and pointers to success stories (especially those about women who managed to have it all :)))

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Related posts ]]> http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2010/02/03/expecting-more-kids-and-challenges/feed/ 7 Why sharing a team room might be not so good http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2009/11/27/why-sharing-a-team-room-might-be-not-so-good/ http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2009/11/27/why-sharing-a-team-room-might-be-not-so-good/#comments Fri, 27 Nov 2009 18:27:23 +0000 Lilia Efimova http://blog.mathemagenic.com/?p=2935

Just reflecting on a couple of cases where team performance – by design – depends a lot on sharing the same room. Sharing a room is good for productivity and builds on all kinds of powerful activities that happen in  physical space. However, there are a couple of issues with that.

Operating in a shared space makes various interactions informal and their value implicit – everyone is there, questions are asked and answered, insights and artefacts shared, actions observed. However, this means that if someone is not in the room for whatever reason (ill, off-site, etc.) they miss important bits and don’t have an idea of what they have missed. Strong reliance on sharing a space usually means that there are not many backup information flows (to revisit from a distance or later) and that communication practices are not well articulated (so it’s difficult to change them or “move” to another – digital – format if the need arises).

Sharing a room creates convergence, but also thicker group boundaries. Developing shared understanding of what and how have to be done is great for getting things done, but also “locks” the team in it’s own practice. This makes it more difficult to change and to incorporate external influences. And it’s difficult to extend a group like that since it’s difficult for a newcomer to get “up to speed” fast and to bring own ideas to the table.

So, where a team room makes sense?

  • projects that are more about getting things done than about interconnections
  • projects with little travel or flexible work
  • relatively short term projects, so needs to extend the group or change it’s practices are not that likely

Doesn’t mean that teams shouldn’t share rooms in all other cases, just that they have to make sure that they articulate their own practices and establish alternative mechanisms for developing awareness,  communicating and creating opportunities for incorporating external influences.

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Related posts ]]> http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2009/11/27/why-sharing-a-team-room-might-be-not-so-good/feed/ 5 Bloggers cited in my dissertation http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2009/03/16/bloggers-cited-in-my-dissertation/ http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2009/03/16/bloggers-cited-in-my-dissertation/#comments Mon, 16 Mar 2009 11:42:40 +0000 Lilia Efimova http://blog.mathemagenic.com/?p=2322

I made a page to include references to the people weblogs of whom I cite or discuss in some way in my dissertation, this post is a shortened version of it. It is here to notify bloggers that quotes from their blogs (or links to them) appear in the dissertation text.

If you are the blogger listed here you might want to know that:

  • I treat weblogs as a publicly available texts and do not ask permissions for citing them. The reasons for this and other choices in respect to referring to bloggers in my dissertation are discussed in the research ethics section of it.
  • If you have a concern about your weblog being cited, I’m happy to share the text where it appears and remove the citation if you have a reason for doing so. This could only be done until the dissertation text is finalised (somewhere end of April-mid May 2009), so if you have a concern it’s the time to act.

Bloggers are listed in the alphabetical order according to their surnames (blog titles if I couldn’t figure out the name); next to the names I include blogs that (I think) identifies the blogger best at the moment of making this list (March 2009). Titles of the specific posts cited are linked to the pages where I originally found them or, if those were moved, where they could be accessed in March 2009. The list excludes bloggers cited anonymously and those, who’s academic work is cited without discussing their weblogs.

***

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Related posts ]]> http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2009/03/16/bloggers-cited-in-my-dissertation/feed/ 3 Bloggers cited in the dissertation http://blog.mathemagenic.com/phd/bloggers-cited/ http://blog.mathemagenic.com/phd/bloggers-cited/#comments Wed, 24 Dec 2008 15:27:32 +0000 Lilia Efimova http://blog.mathemagenic.com/?page_id=1958

[There are still few things I might fix on this page]

This pages includes references to the people weblogs of whom I cite or discuss in some way in my dissertation. It is here for two purposes. First, as an easy way to jump from the printed dissertation text to the specific weblogs that appear there. Second, as a way to notify bloggers that quotes from their blogs (or links to them) appear in the dissertation text (a version of this page also appears as a blog post to make trackbacks and indexing work better).

If you are the blogger listed here you might want to know that:

  • I treat weblogs as a publicly available texts and do not ask permissions for citing them. The reasons for this and other choices in respect to referring to bloggers in my dissertation are discussed in the research ethics section of it.
  • If you have a concern about your weblog being cited, I’m happy to share the text where it appears and remove the citation if you have a reason for doing so. This could only be done until the dissertation text is finalised (somewhere end of April-mid May 2009), so if you have a concern it’s the time to act.

My own weblog

Since many of my own weblog posts appear in the dissertation, I do not provide an extensive list here. All references to my weblog are accompanied by the title and the date, which could be used to retrieve them:

  • by title: use the search field
  • by date: go to blog.mathemagenic.com/year/month/day/ (e.g. blog.mathemagenic.com/2002/06/21/ for 21 June 2002); scroll if there are multiple posts on the page to find the right one

Alternatively, you can also browse cited blog posts per chapter: 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7

Weblogs of others

Bloggers are listed in the alphabetical order according to their surnames (blog titles if I couldn’t figure out the name); next to the names I include blogs that (I think) identifies the blogger best at the moment of making this list (March 2009). Titles of the specific posts cited are linked to the pages where I originally found them or, if those were moved, where they could be accessed in March 2009. The list excludes bloggers cited anonymously and those, who’s academic work is cited without discussing their weblogs.

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Related posts ]]> http://blog.mathemagenic.com/phd/bloggers-cited/feed/ 0 Weblog as a backstage: performance is counterproductive http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2008/12/13/weblog-as-a-backstage-performance-is-counterproductive/ http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2008/12/13/weblog-as-a-backstage-performance-is-counterproductive/#comments Sat, 13 Dec 2008 02:46:30 +0000 Lilia Efimova http://blog.mathemagenic.com/?p=1929

This post is kind of related to the blog networking study, but please treat it as not very scientific thinking in a middle of the night. It’s on the study results in respect to presenting oneself through blogging.

One issue that is not really clear there is how intentional is shaping one’s own image through blogging: from one side, bloggers do make choices about if, what and how to write in their weblogs, from another – they seem to let things emerge through their writing.

Weblogs are easily viewed as a space for identity management (re:Goffman) where blogging is a frontstage performance set to impress the audience in a particular way. I feel that blogging is rather a backstage, where you can be yourself, even if it’s in public. Like in this post by Fa Martin-Niemi:

We moved into a new modern flat a few months ago with lovely views of the harbour and ocean.  All I could think about is what we could see.  “Oh, look from this window and this one and the deck…”  What I hadn’t thought about was windows work both ways.  So one day when I was walking home, I looked up and noticed my son’s bed was unmade and he had toys all over the floor.  It took a second before I realised that if I could see this from the road, then so could all of the hundreds of people who walk and drive by our flat everyday.

Now, I am thinking that blogging may be similar.  I love reading good blog posts.  “Oh, look at this one and that.  Did you read the one about…?  Let me send you a link”  So when I created this blog all I could think about is all of the great views I could see.  But of course, this blog like most are public so every word I write can be seen by anyone passing by.  Not just by the friends and commenters who I know about, but also the unknown lurkers who happen upon it.

The funny thing is you get used to it.  I didn’t start closing the curtains when I realised that everyone could see in.  I didn’t even start cleaning.  I just decided that it comes with the territory.  If I want to look out, it means that others can look in.  So with blogging I am not going to close access and change my writing.  In fact, I welcome the casual readers.  Hope you are enjoying it, dirty laundry and all…

In the comments to the post on presenting oneself through blogging there is a discussion on why bloggers in the study post personal details on their blogs and how they might deal with unexpected audiences. My intuition (=did not check it properly with the data) says that it’s more of the discovering over time that “it comes with the territory” – it’s not only ok to be yourself (and personal), it is essentially the thing that brings those unexpected connections that are so valued.

Being yourself (like with good friends) – vulnerable, personal, multidimentional – in public, you meet others.  If weblog is an attractor, a “gravity pull” (Ton) then whatever you project outside “people will appear who appreciate that” (Martin). You start to “chat with people as they were your friends” (Dave) and they eventually become your friends. You start performing, they become an audience.

So, in a sense, performance is counterproductive.

It also takes more effort than being youself, since multiple audiences collide in one space and a performance means you have figure out how to play multiple roles at the same time. And it kills unexpectedness, since the performance defines the audience.

This also explains, why there are so many signs of “it wasn’t intented, just emerged that way” and “if you try to sell via blogging things go wrong” attitudes between the interview lines.

Still, why there is a struggle of how personal a weblog should be? My guess – while you can be yourself with friends, you probably do not want to be naked with all of them and even if you do not mind, you probably wouldn’t do it in a public place.

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Related posts ]]> http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2008/12/13/weblog-as-a-backstage-performance-is-counterproductive/feed/ 1 On attributing interviews done for my research: the dark side of transparency http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2008/10/27/on-attributing-interviews-done-for-my-research/ http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2008/10/27/on-attributing-interviews-done-for-my-research/#comments Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:31:17 +0000 Lilia Efimova http://blog.mathemagenic.com/?p=1614

My recent silence (and being stuck with the last study for my dissertation as the main reason for it) is a results of an attempt to make my research more transparent and inclusive by doing it “in public”.

My original intentions are outlined in the study description I used to invite bloggers to participate,  Networking practices of KM bloggers:

In general I prefer using real names of the participants and links to their weblogs to give credits similar to how it’s done in the blogging world. [...]

I would like to post summary of the interview on my weblog (after all interviews are done). I will email it to you before posting, so you can correct anything wrong or decide if it should not be published.

There is a chance that I will blog about work-in-progress while analysing the interview data or working on a publication. In this case I will only quote from publicly available sources (e.g. from your weblog or summary of the interview after you give permission to publish it online).

The main motivation behind this approach was to give credits to the participants and create a possibility of a dialogue around their contributions. I also didn’t expect that the things I wanted to ask would be extremely sensitive, so thought that bloggers wouldn’t mind (or even would appreciate) sharing them in public (in fact, a couple of people I interviewed said that I could just post interview summaries without checking with them first). An additional motivation for doing so was “methodological”: adding transparency to the research process as a way to improve the research quality.

Now what’s happened:

I’ve got stuck with writing interview summaries as those had to satisfy both, putting them online and analysing them for my research. For the analysis the ideal way would be to have “extended summaries”, those with as many direct transcripts of actual interviews as possible, however those would be too long and too fragmented to post in public. I could also make shorter summaries to post online, but this would limit what I could use while discussing the results since I promised to “only quote from publicly available sources”.

So I thought of analysing the data, deciding what had to be quoted and revising the summaries accordingly. But then I’ve got stuck with the analysis. For me discussing emergent interpretation with others is the best way to get “unstuck” and for this study doing that in the weblog would be really the best option. However, I couldn’t blog about anything untill posting the interview summaries online. And I couldn’t write those summaries either…

I eventually got “unstuck” with finding a way to discuss the interviews before making public summaries of them. I made anonymous summaries and used them to have a discussion on emergent themes with two colleagues who are far from blogging. With that input I could get a better picture of how to discuss the study results and which parts of the interviews are really important to include. I’m currently making blog-friendly versions of the anonymous summaries, so I can finally email those to the participants to be checked, post them online and get into blogging the results.

In the process I also figured out a few other issues with making the research data publicly available and attributed to the participants: it made more challenging including background data on the participants (e.g. age) or discussing “difficult” issues around their practices. So, my idealistic attempt for an “extreme” transparency didn’t really work – I guess I’ll be more moderate next times :)

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Related posts ]]> http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2008/10/27/on-attributing-interviews-done-for-my-research/feed/ 1 WikiDashboard: transparency, privacy and other consequences of measurement http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/12/16/wikidashboard-transparency-privacy-and-other-consequences-of-measurement/ http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/12/16/wikidashboard-transparency-privacy-and-other-consequences-of-measurement/#comments Sun, 16 Dec 2007 21:21:58 +0000 Lilia Efimova http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/12/16.html#a1965

Similar to Stowe Boyd and Jack Vinson I’m not a big fan of wikis: while they are good for collective writing when authorship of specific contributions is not important, there are much more cases where it’s essential to know who makes what changes. Of course, the history of edits is there, but it’s just too unhuman to be used systematically.

However, given that the traces are there getting tools to analyse them is just a matter of time. WikiDashboard (thanks to Jane McConnell) is a good example of what is possible: if you use it to browse Wikipedia, each page is enhanced with a visualisation representing top ten users who edited it.

Motivation: The idea is that if we provide social transparency and enable attribution of work to individual workers in Wikipedia, then this will eventually result in increased credibility and trust in the page content, and therefore higher levels of trust in Wikipedia.

I was curious to see how it works, so I used it to check who edits Knowledge_Management page:

Wikidashboard: Knowledge management

And then click on User:Snowded:

Wikidashboard: user:snowded

The second screenshot is more interesting: it’s a user page that shows what pages he edits most. As I was suspecting, the user is Dave Snowden and you can see not only which pages he edits, but also that he seems to have given up editing KM page (or that visualisations are not up to date, since this is not the case).

Well, on one hand I’m happy to see tools that add transparency and give credits to individual contributors. On the other hand, I wonder what Dave thinks of it. It’s not only about privacy concerns, but also about the potential of tools like this for messing up contributor motivations and all other consequences of measurement.

The people behind Wikidashboard are interested in the patterns that it might show, also inside companies:

We’re curious of how the Web community will use this tool to surface social dynamics and editing patterns that might otherwise be difficult to find and analyze in Wikipedia. We are also interested in applying this tool to Enterprise Wikis.

I’m interested in those patterns too, but even more in the secondary effects of having tool like that in a corporate settings. I still remember the feedback we’ve got on our innocent prototype that visualised some patterns in a corporate discussion forum. Then I was surprised not that much with the “Big Brother” title for our application, but with a little detail: community members didn’t want to have visible the number of messages they wrote next to their names, the feature that you can see often in public forums. Funny enough, they didn’t mind having a list of messages they wrote displayed next to their names. Numbers are easy to judge and easy to turn into targets, while it’s pretty clear that contribution it not about that.

See also:

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/12/16.html#a1965; comments are here.

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Related posts ]]> http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2007/12/16/wikidashboard-transparency-privacy-and-other-consequences-of-measurement/feed/ 0 Open issues for research/thinking on communities http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/22/open-issues-for-researchthinking-on-communities/ http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/22/open-issues-for-researchthinking-on-communities/#comments Wed, 22 Nov 2006 08:01:19 +0000 Lilia Efimova http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/22.html#a1857

Had a pleasure to talk with Nancy on her work on technologies for communities. Some things are still hanging out in my head, so I guess I just write them here to move on.

Open issues for research/thinking on communities (communities of practice; KM perspective).

Definitions. Ton cites Marc Smith:

… let’s shelve the word ‘community’ and use and study the term collective action instead. There are over 150 definitions of community by social scientists. If we (the social scientists) are not able to decide what it is, maybe everybody else should not be using the word either…

I agree with both that there are no good definitions and I like ‘collective action’ as a term, but I think it doesn’t work if you want to talk about specifics. It could include anything between a loosely coupled network, a community with shared language and practice or a project group with tight deliverables and deadlines. The boundaries between those are fluid, but they (at least in the extremes) are different in many respects (e.g. relational density, levels of trust, shared understanding, goal-orientedness, etc.)

Bottom-up evolution vs. top-down control in supporting communities. See the discussion at Dave Snowden’s blog.

Personal vs. social in community tools. Most of the community tools are group-focused (although Nancy is right, it’s getting more and more blurred). However, many of us are members of multiple communities and have to deal with different group tool configurations for all of them. Technology-wise I’d love to see more work on something like personal learnining environments (slides with more) for networking and collaboration: a toolset that would allow me to participate in different social spaces without learning yet another interface.

Aggregation of digital traces and social effects of those. Digital traces we leave eventually get aggregated and fed back to the social spaces we participate in or to some members of those (think of a community moderator who has access to stats on your activity in a community). They change knowledge we have about each other and eventually change the dynamics of our relationships and interactions (think of gaming the ratings or effects of metrics to measure community things in a corporate context). This is going to be bigger and scarier (at least for those people like me :), so we need to know more about it.

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/22.html#a1857; comments are here.

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Related posts ]]> http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/22/open-issues-for-researchthinking-on-communities/feed/ 1 Changing shapes http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/14/changing-shapes/ http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/14/changing-shapes/#comments Tue, 14 Nov 2006 17:47:32 +0000 Lilia Efimova http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/14.html#a1853

My weblog is not that personal. Although being personal (confessional?) style-wise, I don’t feel comfortable writing too much about my private life: this is something left to other spaces and other channels (friends-only Flickr photos, secret wedding blog, emails, Skype, f2f…). Still, major changes in my life find some way here, since for me personal and professional are not easily separated.

Some of the personal events are truly life-changing, so it’s hard to stay the same person as you have been before once you go through them and your writing can’t stay the same. Since I started blogging I has been wondering what would happen with my blogging once I get kids – will I turn into a mommy-blogger? will I start another weblog for it? will I keep that part of my life out of the web?

Changing shapesI still don’t know, but I guess I will find out soon. My own shapes are changing, so I guess the shape of this space will change as well. In both cases I know that the change is coming, but I may only guess where it would lead me :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/14.html#a1853; comments are here.

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Related posts ]]> http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/11/14/changing-shapes/feed/ 0 When others connect your online dots or More on familyskyping http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/08/12/when-others-connect-your-online-dots-or-more-on-familyskyping/ http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/08/12/when-others-connect-your-online-dots-or-more-on-familyskyping/#comments Sat, 12 Aug 2006 09:13:29 +0000 Lilia Efimova http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/08/12.html#a1814

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

Technorati quote of some strange blog linking to my post and wedding photos

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.

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