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Wow, two blog postings in a week, both based on Dave Trott's output (here's the other).
The KIN Summer Workshop on 15th June is on 'the psychology of knowledge sharing'. Something dear to the hearts of all KIN member organisations trying to achieve collaboration and knowledge sharing in increasingly tough times.
Dave Trott's blog posting on 'Singaporean Choice Architecture' is not some a missive on Oriental building design, but rather on 'how to engineer choice'. This is particularly appropriate for our Summer Workshop theme, as I think what we are trying to be is 'architects of collaboration'.
Dave concludes with a great quote from McDonald's Ray Kroc; “The art of salesmanship is letting people have it your way.”

Dave Trott on 'Just enough information but not too much'

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Dave Trott is in advertising.
He is revered as a skilled commentator and communicator.
I enjoy his blog and would like to share him with you.
In particular this post on Colin Powell's '40/70 rule'.
Comments left by his readers are also worth a look.
Enjoy

Interestingness

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What do 'Being a Gentleman', 'Innovation in Cartoons', 'DNA Synthesis' to 'why frivolity is important' have in common? They are just a few items that featured at the Interesting2009 event. I've followed Russell Davis' eclectic blog for quite a while; his quirky view on life is refreshing and challenges conventional thinking. As well as a regular contributor to Campaign and Wired, Russell is one of the people behind the Interesting events.

KIN Members tell us that the diversity of organisations that participate, is one of its main strengths. This stimulates lateral thinking and sparking unusual ways of thinking about common problems. You can't get more diverse than the speakers and participants at an 'Interesting South' or ' Interesting North' event. "Interesting is a 'theatre of ideas' – very informal, with a very 'open source' approach. If there was a single shared quality between speakers and participants it was curiosity".
I'll be trying to get a ticket to ' Interesting North' on 13th November, but they sell out really fast.

'We trust you with our children, but not the internet'

Image by Scott McLeod via Flickr

Members of the KIN 'Enabling Technologies' Special Interest Group have been aware for some time of the futility of trying to 'manage' social media by edict or restricting access to web apps. Instead, members have shared their good practice in clearly and unambiguously setting out their organisation's policy and what is acceptable practice. There are two very good resources that I'd like to point you to:
Carl Haggerty's blog has links to sound policy and practice for Social Media. This is aimed at UK Local Authorities, but I defy anyone to say this is not applicable to any large organisation.
The second is from the always excellent Commoncraft on the topic of Protecting Reputations Online

Open Linked Data - a new frontier for knowledge diffusion

If you are not familiar with 'open linked data', allow me to introduce you to something that has the potential to take knowledge sharing in organisations to a whole new level. Tim Berners-Lee's TED presentation is a great introduction to the concept. Berners-Lee's vision is to

Image via Wikipedia

connect data on the web in much the way as we connect web pages now. Data drives a lot behind the scenes in our lives, but why not connect data about people, places, products in much the same way as web pages?

The Obama Administration is committed to making all US Government data available as open linked data, and the UK has made a great start with www.data.gov.uk and the London Datastore. It is a central part of Mygov, launched today. A great example is Dextrous Web have made all Greater London Authority expenditure over £1k accessible through open data. Mayor Boris Johnson sees this 'democracy of data' as a way of driving down costs, so both citizens and the GLA benefit. There are some great 'visualisations' of open data, for example cycle accidents blackspots shown on a google map.

The potential power of open linked data in breaking down silos and creating new insights from data on the web is phenomenal. This got me thinking. Why not make proprietary data 'open and linked' format within the corporate firewall? Why should logistics data or product data or markets data only be produced and used for a single purpose? It is after all a corporate asset. Who knows what might result if you were to provide access to the data and mashup or mapping capabilities? We all know the problems in getting siloed divisions and teams to share documents and knowledge. If the corporate standard were to publish all data in open linked format as well as documents (clearly there will be exceptions such as personal and contracts data), there would be no argument. By utilising a ubiquitous asset that has already been paid for, its data, I believe that an organisation might grab huge competitive advantage.

If you would like to know more about open linked data, there are some good tutorials and other resources on open linked data here.
KIN organisations will have the opportunity to explore this further at the member webinar on this topic on 18th May.