Stocks and Flows in Social Software
When I met Lee LeFever at Vita (in Capitol Hill, Seattle), we carried on a conversation sparked by Jerry Michalski's application of Stocks and Flows thinking to communications technology. Lee has written an excellent overview of this.
The basic idea is that some technologies do one or the other better. TV does flow. TiVo does stocks. Email does flow. The Web does stock.
In the KM space, we've been thinking about Stocks and Flows in Intellectual Capital Theory since Karl-Erick Sveiby visited in 1998.
I wonder if it is worth pursuing the distinction into the three "types" of intellectual capital: "human", "structural" and "relational"?
Clearly, the role that technology plays in developing individual human competence is debatable. I for one, however will readily confess that I "know" a lot more when I have access to my PDA (especially now that it can acecss Google).
It's a no-brainer that the Web, file system, intranet, filed email, wikis and blogs are massive repositories of structural capital.
The interesting question is the use of technology for enhancing relational capital. As ClueTrain becomes a given, we are opening up media that are accessible inside and outside our organisations. Clearly blogs are a prime example, but in the Michalski taxonomy, blogs are "flow" tools.
I am particularly interested in how we can make increased use of "stocks" technologies to provide a navigable interface to the social/semantic networks that they represent.