More examples of tacit to explicit transformations

dragonfly wingsby tanakawho

KM 2.0 is about “showing your workings out”:
[Via Library clips]

Two of my posts have linked and quoted blog posts that are bringing to light the difference that the renewed push in KM brings, in a shift to a “work in progress” mentality.

I have mentioned several times that km 2.0 is a social way of doing work, it’s not a separate task, instead it’s blended in our work routine.

Firstly people are working this way on the open web, and they are also using social computing tools in the enterprise, these people are sometimes referred to as IT rogues. The second difference is the fact that the new interest in KM (by early adopters), is being initiated by the workers…social productivity. Whereas the first wave of KM was more a mandate by management, KM 2.0 is coming about by workers saying to management, “I’m really productive in a social way, it’s how I get things done, can we use these social computing tools”…and management would say, “Is this the new KM way to share tacit knowledge”, and the workers would say, “I’m not too sure what KM is, but I get things done by collaborating and connecting with my network.”

Anyway I want to once again point to the Transparent Office blog (this is becoming one of my favourites), Michael Idinopulos posts about the real essence of the new KM. It’s about thinking out loud, more open collaboration, your workings out are visible (less private). People get to share, engage and nuture, insights and works in early stages or in the thought stages…before all the cream is sorted, and formalised into a final product.

Perhaps KM 2.0 is like showing all the workings out of your maths solution…we get to see how you got there. It’s this “how you got there” that we are trying to tease out, actually as you are sharing, others can help shape your path, and bring you to perhaps a better place…the social capital at work. Also, others can read about the stages in your path, and utilise that know-how for a totally different work at hand, eg. an approach, experiences and insights a blogger shares about her workings towards a “engineering” deliverable, could very well be usable by an HR person.

A HR person is not going to read an “engineering” deliverable, but if they happened to come across a post (a fragment) about a research method the engineer discovered and applied in the “engineering” deliverable, the HR person may be able to use that info in their research task.

[More]

KM 1.0 was usually a top down approach where the transformation of tacit knowledge into explicit form was non-obvious. It often did not fit the way many people actually work. But Web 2.0 approaches allow people to use low level technologies to make this transition (tacit to explicit transformation) themselves, using the path they find useful.

And in doing this, they often make much clearer the path they took. This makes it easier for others the learn (explicit to tacit transformation) as well as help (explicit to explicit).

Web 2.0 approaches greatly accelerate the creation of knowledge by easing these transformations. The easier tacit and explicit knowledge can be moved and changed, the faster knowledge can be created, permitting a wider range of problems to be attacked and solved.

So, Web 2.0 approaches are firstly important and useful for the individual user. They have to be or no one will use them. But, an almost emergent property of these approaches is that normal human social networks can vastly leverage these individual actions to create a large storehouse of knowledge.

Of course, the organization really likes the fact that tacit information, hitherto only found in someone’s head, is now in a location that the organization can access and use. At least some organizations. The ones where the creation of knowledge is a core value.

Technorati Tags: ,

The Flickr of Slideshows

palms by muha…
Have you discovered SlideShare?:
[Via Gurteen Knowledge-Log]
By David Gurteen

Have you discovered SlideShare yet? I post all my public powerpoint presentations to it and there is even a Knowledge Management group on the site with 130 slideshows.

You can see my slideshows here.

Better still you can embed people’s slideshows in your blog or personal website just as you can with YouTube. Here is an example:

Until we get Flash working correctly, you have to view this directly at David’s Slideshare site.

Just as the ability to post photos online, and share them with others, so Slideshare allows people to share their presentations. While not a wonderful as being there, it is a very good way to see how others are presenting information. I expect that scientific conferences will begin to use something similar. At the moment, you can go to some, such a the Pacific Symposia on Biocomputing, and see the written materials for each of the last several years. Having slides would be very nice also.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Social network analysis

network
by jurvetson
Six degrees of messaging : Nature News:
[Via Nature]

I’m not sure if anyone can see this or if you need a subscription. But, this being the Information Age, you can read the abstract of the paper itself and download a PDF of the paper. It discusses work done at Microsoft examining the connections used by its IM customers. The researchers examined the data from one month. this worked out to “255 billion messages sent in the course of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people during June 2006.” A lot of data.

After crunching the data they found some interesting numbers regarding this network – the average number of connections between people on the network, its width, was 6.6. This is very similar to what others have reported, even though the approaches were quite different.

Interestingly, these other reports used much smaller groups of people. One, in the 1960s, used only 64 people. Another in 2003 used 61,000. All three, using very different methodologies arrived a similar numbers for the width of the human social network. This is not too surprising since human social networks adopt a scale-free configuration. The hallmark of a scale-free network is that the average number of links connecting any two nodes, or people, does not increase substantially as the size of the network increases. Here the scale increases almost 4 million-fold, yet the average width of the network is still about 6.

Information in a well connected social network can percolate very rapidly. Using Web 2.0 approaches can harness the power of the Internet (another scale-free network) to disburse the information into an even larger social network much more rapidly than by utilizing face-to-face approaches.

Technorati Tags: ,

An Open Science Approach

waves by Airton kieling

[Via One Big Lab]

First draft of PSB proposal
PSB proposal up on Google Docs
PSB Open Science session proposal submitted!
PSB proposal up on Nature Precedings
PSB proposal accepted for a workshop

A very interesting progression from first draft to final approval. Exactly what one would expect for an Open Science advocate. While not all Science 2.0 approaches may be suitable for exposure on the open web, this was certainly a wonderful exercise to follow. And I learned something about the process they went though, just in case I ever want to do something similar.

I may have to find myself in Hawaii early next year, at the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. It’s the Big Island.

Technorati Tags: ,

Open Presenting

pythonby belgianchocolate


Publishing On OpenWetWare – Lessons Learned 4 – Presenting:Python
[Via Programmable Cells]

This is the fifth report of the ‘Publishing on OpenWetWare’ series. In brief, I am writing an article on OWW from start to finish: initial writing -> collecting comments -> publishing on arXiv.org -> presenting at a conference. For other articles, see one, two, three, four. In this report, I’ll share my experiences in presenting the work at Pycon 2008.

This is the most recent part in a continuing series by Julius Lucks about publishing on OpenWetWare, an example of Open Science. Initially, OpenWetWare was a great site to find protocols of all sorts. It has been expanding very rapidly to incorporate many facets of Science 2.0. This is one such. It led to a presentation dealing with his work and you can read the ‘paper’ dealing with his topic: Python All A Scientist Needs. Python is the programming language used here and it presents many advantages useful for scientists. It includes a special package, BioPython, just for biologists, which is supported by the Open Bioinformatics Foundation. So, we see an entire network of Open Source organizations that produce tools that not only make their work easier but also the work of others. By embracing these tools, one can engage the entire network and help use all the knowledge contained in it to help solve problems.

Technorati Tags: , ,

TEDTalks are the best

TEDTalks: Jill Taylor (2008):
[Via TEDTalks (video)]

We are still working on the website to permit embedded Flash. Until we do, you will have to click the link above to see Jill Taylor’s presentation.

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened — as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding — she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.

This is a great presentation. Some science. Some personal experience. The TEDTalks offer great examples of how to present difficult subjects. There are some with pretty standard approaches but they are often the best of their type. And, thanks to the Internet, we do not have to be attendees in order to see this.

But some of them display a unique method of presenting and are very useful for gaining a better understanding of HOW to present. Check out this one from Larry Lessig.

Technorati Tags:

Bumps in the road to Science 2.0

dunesby Hamed Saber

Why Web 2.0 is failing in Biology
[Via Bench Marks]

Last week I gave a talk at the American Association of Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing (AAP/PSP) meeting in Washington, DC. I was part of a panel discussion on “Innovative and Evolving Websites in STM Publishing” along with representatives from the New England Journal of Medicine, the Royal Society of Chemistry and the American Chemical Society. While the other talks were a bit more evangelical, or mostly presented a look at new technologies that had been incorporated into the societies’ own journals, I tried to be a bit more practical, taking more of a hard look at what’s currently being tried, whether it’s succeeding and the reasons behind that success/failure. I’m posting my talk below, in hopes of receiving further feedback. This talk was delivered to a room full of publishers, so it’s directed with that audience in mind. In a few months, I’m giving a similar talk to a meeting of scientists, the users of these sites rather than the creators. So I’d love to hear from users as to your thoughts on how Web 2.0 is serving your needs.

[More]

There are some very important points in this article. Essentially, researchers will not just jump on these new technologies. They do not have the time to learn. They do not see the reasons why. Now most of the difficulties described here deal with academic researchers and the problems with using Web 2.0 ‘in the wild.’ They have concerns about priority, the effect on tenure, Facebook makes no sense to their work, etc.

Many of these problems stem from the fact that no scientist can see what is in it for them. Few of them do anything that does not make their life easier, as do most people. An example – researchers have little time but they always (or at least the good ones do) take time to put together a good lab notebook. This is not time used for experiments but everyone knows how vital it is to a career. So they take the time to do it right.

Similar things can be done with Web 2.0 approaches. Make them understand the personal benefit. For example, most scientists will think a blog is useless and a waste of time. But show them how to combine newsfeeds from scientific journals with a blog, and now they can have a very quick repository of interesting/important papers that they need to read. They can ‘clip’ these articles rapidly and then come back to read them at their leisure.

This directly affects their productivity since staying current with the literature is normally a time-consuming endeavor. I can scan over 1000 articles in 30 minutes and put the ones I want on my blog. The researchers that do this will be ahead of those that do not. But they have to be shown the direct personal benefits first.

Technorati Tags: ,

Something to watch for at any presentation

volcano by Clearly Ambiguous

A Groundswell at SXSW: How The Audience Revolted and Asserted Control:
[Via Web Strategy by Jeremiah]

For the second year, I experienced the SXSW Interactive Festival, an event attended by thousands who have love for media, the web, and gadgets. SXSW is a bubble of the tech elite assembling, in many ways it’s a glimpse into the future, exposed on a Petri dish today.

[A Groundswell Occurred at the SXSW Interactive Festival as the Audience Revolted And Took Charge]
Last year, Twitter gained traction at SXSW 2007, this year, it fully ramped up to be one of the most prominent and power shifting tools of the festival –we witnessesd a Groundswell. What’s a Groundswell? It’s a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions. Dan Fost, writing for Fortune Magazine reports that this is Social media is putting an end to the passive role attendees traditionally play at business gatherings.

[More]

The ability of attendees to communicate with one another in realtime during a presentation will become more and more prevalent. I expect few scientists currently use Twitter during a talk but the ability to carry on back channel communications will make its appearance some day. The example at SXSW was a little more raucous than I would expect to see at the annual meeting of the AMA but it might be as rancorous.

Part of the problem here was the relative anonymity of the chatter. That is, the speakers were not seeing any of this discussion and so were unaware of it direction. I would expect that as we progress, others will monitor the channels and help keep the presenter aware of just what is happening. How about tweets posted on a monitor for the speakers?

In my personal experience, I have seen some very creative approaches used by the audience to produce some wonderfully useful items. At the second ETech meeting several of us used a program then called Hydra, now called SubEthaEdit, that allowed users to create a collaborative document in realtime using WiFi to connect. Four or five of us would take notes, often catching items others would miss. Someone would add Web links for relevant items. We could write in comments, etc. and create a very rich document that was much denser in its information content than if any of us had written it by ourselves.

I am surprised more of this is not happening at meetings or even in class. Study groups could produce very robust documents for the group. I would imagine that there even might be a market for these sorts of notes, for those who slept through the presentation.

So audiences can be more than just unruly.

Technorati Tags: ,

Change the world slowly

jets by foxypar4

John Tropea: “tools are the conduit for this culture change”
[Via Grow Your Wiki]

John Tropea says people need to understand why they should use Web 2.0 tools in organizations, not just “because everyone else is doing it so I need to as well, and I’ll just use this recipe approach.”

Web 2.0 is not really something completely different. It involves new tools that help us do what we already want to do, just with greater ease. But people do not normally make such changes in their behavior without some real knowledge of the benefits AND difficulties. It is important to help them leap the chasm between the old way and the new way. But it is only a difference in doing things.

Of course, once they start doing the old things in a new way, they will also discover how to do new things in a new way. Just as TV started out as visual radio then became its own medium, so will Web 2.0 technologies start out as something similar to email or chat before revealing its own uniqueness. You won’t get people to use it though by saying it is unique. You have to show them how it will make their life easier.

Technorati Tags:

The Government and Web 2.0 technology

pigs by artct45

Agencies Share Information By Taking a Page From Wikipedia
[Via The Washington Post]

The government seems to be jumping on Web 2.0 techniques faster than many corporations. Here they used a wiki to compile a list of earmarks. They accomplished in 10 weeks what would have taken 6 months before. This now makes it much easier to see where the pork is coming from. They maintain the wiki behind a security wall so that only invited members can post. This is easily done and can be applied to almost most wikis. The ability to allow rapid information flow and transformation makes a wiki a powerful tool. And if the Government can do it, and see immediate positive effects, then so could most organizations.

Technorati Tags: