Off Topic

Nothing to do with KIN or KM, but if anyone has noticed me being a bit slow with email replies lately, it's partly because I have been rehearsing for The Taming of the Shrew in which I am playing the role of Gremio, suitor to Kate's sister Bianca.

"Progress Theatre presents their yearly outdoor Shakespeare production between Monday, 14 July and Saturday 26 July (excluding Sunday). For 2008, the play is The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare's riotous comedy of the sexes. Breaking with traditional presentations, the show will be set in the Wild West with saloon brawls complementing the exquisite verse."

For more details (and to book tickets!)
http://www.abbeyruins.com/shakespeare.html

We've just had our first dress rehearsal and we think we have a terrific show. See you there ?

KM activists, soundings, patterns and Learning Organisations

This week's blog post comes courtesy of KIN member Paul Whiffen. Thanks for letting me use this Paul.

Paul wrote:
"A couple of times lately I’ve used an analogy which makes some nice parallels with organisational learning. Thought I’d share it with you.

I used to do the navigation and positioning for 3D Seismic Exploration offshore. We’d be on a ship towing an array of airguns which every 10 seconds or so would detonate sending sound waves to the seabed and many thousands of metres beyond into the structure beneath. They’d reflect off the structures down there (anticlines, layers, faults etc) and rebound back up to the 100s of hydrophones we would also tow behind in streamers up to 4km long (would be quite normal to have 3 such streamers behind the ship). As you can imagine, navigating this thing around the place took a lot of planning ahead and negotiation with fishermen, oil platforms etc not to mention the guns shaking the ship every 10 seconds 24 hours a day!!

By sailing in a single line you get a 2D cross section of the earth’s structure and by sailing many of these lines in parallel you could build up a 3D model of what’s down there, hence it would become 3D seismic exploration. You couldn’t directly see the oil and gas, only the geological structure below and then you’d interpret where the oil and gas might be (that was the geophysicist’s job) – it’s not until you bring in a rig and drill that you’d know for sure.

(Incidentally, not that it’s particularly relevant here, but the surveyor’s (my) job was to ensure the precise positioning of the air guns and hydrophones to something like absolute 5 – 10 metres and relative 2 – 7 metres using radio nav systems (replaced by differential GPS), acoustic ranging (dozens of the things each filtered and then computed in a geometric framework) and also magnetic compasses every 300 metres on the streamers to give their shape (correcting for magnetic storms etc). Without the precise positioning of the guns and hydrophones you couldn’t “stack” the signal returns from the structure accurately and the picture below would become degraded).

The point is the sound waves go deep into the structure and tell the geophysicist what the structure is like down there, faults and all. By taking multiple soundings you build up the picture of the structure and geology, the lie of the land so to speak. The client was typically the head geophysicist of the field (Forties or Magnus, say).

This is analogous to every time we do an AAR or Retrospect (or whatever we end up calling these things) or indeed KRT - we get a sounding of the deeper learning in the organisation as well as the obvious technical issues. By seeing the patterns and links of what the signals are telling us we can see the wood for the trees and filter out the deeper long wavelength signals from the high frequency noise.

This is why an emerging role of the KM Activists is to look at the patterns that come from the learning processes. As we “sail up and down” the organisation pinging away and looking across the signals that come back to us from the learning processes, so we can connect up the dots and see that bigger picture emerging, breaking down both vertical and horizontal silos. This is what starts to show a genuinely learning and self-knowing organisation, it really begins to understand itself and can take action to get the best from itself in the knowledge of how it really ticks, both strengths and weaknesses.

You can also debate that the airguns and the signals are the “collect” aspect of learning and the streamers with the ‘phones are the connect aspect taking in the learning.

What do you think? Does this analogy work for you? If nothing else, it shows that at one time I did a technical job I suppose!"

OpenID - SSO for the Web

Most Enterprises go to great lengths to ensure Single Sign On (SSO) because they know their employees hate having to remember multiple passwords. Would that that were the case on the Web!

Are you tired of creating a new account on every website you use? Do you avoid new websites because they come with yet another username and password? Do you paste stickies with password hints all over your computer monitor? OpenID is an open technology standard that solves all of these problems. SSO for the Web!

OpenID eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites, simplifying your online experience.

You get to choose the OpenID Provider that best meets your needs and most importantly that you trust. At the same time, your OpenID can stay with you, no matter which Provider you move to. And best of all, the OpenID technology is not proprietary and is completely free."

Here is a video from one OpenID provider (there are many, including Yahoo!) which explains the concept

zinzin.us

Here's what commoncraft blogger leelefever has to say about OpenID.
And if here's a suggestion if you should want to become an OpenID evangelist.

KIN Bookmarks

And now, for my next WEB 2.0 KIN experiment, I have set up a "KIN Bookmarks" group on social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia.com.

This is something I have been considering for a while but was finally inspired into action by the KIN Quarterly workshop which I co-facilitated yesterday. I thoroughly enjoyed the day: the presentations, the member case studies and the networking opportunities.
(For KIN members, all the material presented at the workshop and more besides can be found in the Quarterly workshop site on the memberspace - this site will be being updated over the next few days)

During one presentation, I was reminded that during a visit to a member organisation internal forum the previous week, I overheard one person there commenting that they had learnt one new thing: they had never before heard of 'Social Bookmarking' but were now going to try it. So I wondered if there were people in our audience that also had never heard of Social Bookmarking. (Or some of the other tools mentioned such as RSS. When I posted a poll in the memberspace, I did get a few people saying they had never heard of RSS)

So first of all, a link to one of my favourite sites, The Common Craft show:
Social Bookmarking in Plain English



And for those of you who would like to have a go:

• To visit the KIN group, go to: http://ma.gnolia.com/groups/KIN
• To join Ma.gnolia.com for free, just click the link http://ma.gnolia.com/join

I decided to use Ma.gnolia because it allowed me to set up as a moderated group where contributors can be restricted to KIN members. So everytime I create a bookmark using Ma.gnolia I can send it to the KIN Bookmarks group. And better still, so can you !
First, create a Ma.gnolia account (if you don't already have one). Then click on the 'join' button at http://ma.gnolia.com/groups/KIN to join the group. That will make you a member (anyone can see this group and become a member). Then send me an email telling me you would like to contribute to the group and (provided you are a KIN member) I will make you a moderator so that you can.

You can see how I am using Ma.gnolia (not very much - yet!) at: http://ma.gnolia.com/people/PhilRidout

So have a go, and let me know what you think !

WEB 2.0 and KM

The discussion thread about the KIN WEB 2.0 roundtable event has been continuing to grow and a mini debate seems to have started on the topic of "WEB 2.0 - the future of KM?"
I recently came across a couple of relevant blog postings along those lines which I thought it would be worth sharing (for those that may not have already come across them).

The first one "Getting into" Social Software and How It Is Changing the Role of Traditional Knowledge Management: is from IBMer Luis Suarez and introduces an article called "Getting into" Social Software.
Although the article is oriented towards extolling the virtues of IBM's Lotus Connections set of tools, the points made are interesting in themselves. For example:

Suarez has been involved with knowledge management since 2000, but the attitude towards it since then has become quite negative because the old methods didn't work very well. When Suarez first encountered social computing, he said to himself, "This is it. This is what is going to bring KM back into the spotlight because it allows businesses to place their focus where it should have been from the beginning - not on the tools, not on the processes, but on the people." His evangelism comes from wanting people to understand that "knowledge management is what they do every day, and now they are the ones in control of the conversation."
Social computing differs radically from the old KM paradigm and is more successful at achieving the ends.

The second one (also by Luis Suarez) is the first of a series that introduces and reviews a podcast of an interview with Dave Snowden on "The Impact of Web 2.0 on Knowledge Work and Knowledge Management"

"Dave comes to share how the main key differentiation from Web 2.0 versus traditional Knowledge Management from 10 years ago is how Social Computing tools "effectively self-assemble, self-organise and deal with informal connectivity learning", focusing more on the unstructured sharing of knowledge than on the structured one, which is what we have been exposed to so far for a good number of years . So in a way he mentions how if there is anything that works with social software is its immense power to connect people.

Dave seems to confirm that it is actually the people, and how they connect, that makes it all work together nicely and therefore the success from Web 2.0. So whoever was thinking that the focus should be on the tools and on the processes, probably should think about things again, because it is actually the nurturing of making those connections and empowering people to do so what actually matters in the Social Computing and Knowledge Management 2.0 space.

I actually agree with Dave 100% that if social software would have been available 10 years ago when KM was getting started, we would be talking now about a completely different story on knowledge sharing."

For those that prefer to skim read, then I recommend Suarez's series of posts:
The Impact of Web 2.0 on Knowledge Work and Knowledge Management by Dave Snowden and Jon Husband - Part I , Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI

For those that want to hear the word's from the horse's mouth, then follow the link on this page to the podcast.