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Sociocorpus | GroupSense Online Groups GroupServer |
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notes on the evolving life of the socius online |
Blogging in organisations is mainstream now that Microsoft, IBM and Forrester Research are all advocating it, according to USA Today.
Blogs form self-organising online social networks that "[decrease] social space between employees, and [increase] the amount of knowledge shared between people," (James Spohrer, director of IBM's Almaden Research Center).
Andy Swarbrick has a comprehensive SNA & KM site (Robotegg). It includes this list of SNA resources classified according to the developmental stage as an SNA practitioner that they are most relevant to.
Also, SNA can scarcely be used in a sentence without mentioning Valid Krebs who "provides Social Network Analysis software and services for organizations and their consultants".
This looks like a great book on the practicalities of CoPs: Knowledge Networks: Innovation through Communities of Practice.
The invitation to this Virtual Organizational Development 2004 online conference says:
"As more and more organizations embrace distributed work, virtual teams, network organizational structures, and other practices driven by globalization and technology, Organizational Development (OD) practitioners must respond with new approaches and innovative processes that address the opportunities and challenges of the 21 st century. A new breed of OD practitioner is emerging, one that understands how new processes and technologies being used by companies today can enable breakthrough interventions at the individual, team, organization, and trans-organizational levels."
What is the distinction between OD (now) and KM?
The title of this item is from Clay Shirky's article Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags.
I had real trouble putting this post in a category. I wish I didn't have them. Action: migrate to blog tool with tags.
Clay's latest excellent essay provides a detailed analysis of the influence that storage media have had on categorisation. It's the same problem that kept the long tail invisible from us: what you find out about the world is determined by what will fit on a shelf. Now that we don't need shelves any more, we can organise stuff in more flexible ways. As Shirky says, "tags enable a huge amount of user-produced organizational value, at vanishingly small cost."
But that isn't the only problem. Even the Web has been categorised in hierarchical directories. These have the problems that they are created by a subgroup who have a particular point of view. Worse, they have tended to inherit some of the rules from the physical world like "an item can only be in N categories".
The central idea in this essay is that "The Only Group That Can Categorize Everything Is Everybody". After describing some of the limitations of categorisation, it goes on to list some of the enormous strengths of the deceptively simple technology of tagging.
Effectively, it is already easier to find information on the Web than it is on a typical organisational network, or even on most individual computers. The use of user defined tags seems likely to make it an order of magnitude easier again. Apple's Tiger OS, Google Desktop Search and Microsoft's plans all go a long way to solving the desktop problem.
From a KM point of view, the key question that this raises is "how can we allow our members to tag our content?".
Well, that's a bit hard to follow but gotta start somewhere.
My friend and colleague Julian Carver has been using coloured stickers to get people to rate ideas or proposals in face to face sessions. I've used this too.
He discovered that this is called Dotmocracy. Coop Tools have developed a technique called Advanced Dotmocracy that scales for large groups and have written detailed instructions.
We become so accustomed to being able to rate things easily online. It's useful to remember that there are good ways to do this offline, too.