From the lack of posts here, it may seem that I’ve been slack. In fact I’ve been busy with paid work and the public outings that I have done haven’t necessarily involved presentations & notes. I thought I’d just note what these were:

• Sharon McGann & I ran a session at the Sydney Facilitators Network in August entitled “Living a Sustainable Life“. We wanted to explore that sustainability means beyond just recycling your potato peelings and people seemed up for it.
• I ran a session at Oz-IA 2009 using the Straits Knowledge Methods & Culture cards & also Arthur Shelley’s Organisational Zoo cards too. I enjoyed it – although the World Cafe card generated much angst (nay, derision) from the information architects assmbled.
• I was called in at late notice to run a session at the Ark Group’s Collective Intelligence event. I ran a reverse brainstorm: How can we ensure that our organisations do not use the collective intelligence present in them?
• I was a stooge collaborator with both Patrick Lambe & Cory Banks for their respective sessions at KM Australia 2009.
• I did some facilitation-y stuff with the joint NSW KM Forum / Sydney Sharepoint User group love-in. More here.
• I will probably be at the Tonkin Corporation’s Knowledge Management & People Development Conference next week, where I will be revisiting one of my fave topics.

If you enjoyed any of these events and would like to catch for a coffee then don’t be shy – drop me a line!

I’ve not done a lot of presentations recently. I’ve preferred to do something a little more “interactive”. So when the call for papers came out for actKM 2009, the last thing I wanted to do was a paper. Instead I was interested in exploring the edges of knowledge management. I wasn’t really sure how to do that but I had something in the back of my mind from the Mindell’s process work. This can involve exploring psychological “edges” using physical movement and other techniques. So I dipped my toe in the water and sent out a question to the actKM email list concerning disciplinary boundaries. The response I got back wasn’t particularly helpful and this indicated that I couldn’t do anything too confronting.

Then the thought struck me. Get the participants to draw maps. So that’s what I did. Six tables, six maps. In each case I asked them to map out knowledge management as an imaginary nation and then identify who else this nation might interact with (through trade, war or something else).

Some comments:

• “Finance” crops up as an ambiguous/hostile power is a couple of maps – and as the “Resource Shark” in another.
• Some of the maps are a little idealistic – how things should be rather than how they are.
• One of the maps positions KM’s neighbours as process-based – e.g. six sigma, BPM, Lean, TQM.
• One group had the occasional KM guru on the map – but up a mountain separate from practitioners.
• Technology is often mentioned but rarely given centre-stage.
• One group started identifying KM’s neighbours (e.g. Project Management, Organisational Development) without any prompting but others took a more KM-centric perspective.

What do you see?

Here are the slides & notes for a presentation I gave last night to the Sydney Sharepoint User Group on the topic of Sharepoint & Taxonomies. The presso is basically in 3 sections.

Slides 2-14: Introduction to Taxonomies

I started off by asking the audience how they might group wine together (or classify it) – the answers included colour, variety, vintage, region, bottle shape, sweetness. Then we had a look the way a wine shop orders them. The point here (apart from giving Brendan a bit of a plug) is that there are many ways to group things – and some of the most useful ones for users/consumers are not necessarily obvious from the object itself. Hierarchies & facets were then discussed via the systems of Dewey* (Dewey Decimal) and Ranganathan (Colon Classification) and some real-world examples.

The “we don’t need structure, we just need search” comment also got a mention – which resonated with a few people in the audience. The answer(s) to this include: i. taxonomies & metadata can make search better & ii. taxonomies & informtion mapping are about more than just findability. We ended that segment with Patrick’s taxonomy map.

Slides 15-25: Taxonomies in Organisations

This section could be represented by a 3 x 3 matrix – who is involved in taxonomies vs what they are doing. I split the “who” into 3 broad groups:

• Experts – and here I mostly mean taxonomy experts but it could also be subject matter experts.
• Machines – language processing / semantic software (but this could also include process automation software as well).
• Users – general people who just do, y’know, stuff.

You need to involve all 3 groups but each has their strengthens & weaknesses. And then I tackle 3 broad activities:

• Building a taxonomy (or folksonomy or ontology).
• Applying terms to documents.
• Consuming – which in this situation means doing things with documents based on their metadata. This could as simple as someone searching & finding something or some fancy processing based on an ontology.

Slides 26-37: Sharepoint

Sharepoint’s basic methods of managing metadata are:

• Content Types
• Site Columns
• Lists

This is a good start but Sharepoint has three main deficits:

• It doesn’t handle hierarchical relationships between terms in lists well – it treats each list as though it is independent.
• Metadata can easily get caught in site “islands”.
• It doesn’t do any of the fancy machine classification.

A range of third-party vendors have arisen to meet these needs – each offering very different functionality at varying costs.

*I don’t know whether to be offended or impressed by Dewey’s classification of Australia with extra-terrestrial worlds.

A recent poll stated that women spend 52 minutes a day gossiping – and before the men start sniggering, apparently they spend an average of 76 minutes daily spinning yarns with their mates. We tell stories to each other compulsively – to make sense of our experiences, to persuade others, or even just to entertain ourselves. Despite the prevalence of stories in our lives, we often don’t know what to do with them in more formal situations.

A short article on story & narrative in the AMSRS publication Research News. Here is the link to the site or the article for download.

[N.B. I should be clear here that I am not a market researcher]

We’re at an interesting stage in our open research project on how expertise is valued and leveraged in organisations. We’ve collected something close to 200 stories (which are still feeding into the project blog) and we’ve conducted four sensemaking workshops so far, three in Australia (thanks to Michelle / KMRt , Anecdote / actKM & Kim / UTS) and one just completed yesterday in Dubai (thanks to Luke Naismith and the Knowledge and Human Development Authority), with more planned for Singapore, USA and maybe Hong Kong.

The workshop outputs are being posted into the project wiki. (If you are interested in hosting a workshop somewhere, let us know… we don’t charge as it’s a community research project, we just need to figure out travel and expenses).

We’ve now got to the point where we’re starting to get some insights that we’d like to check out on a larger scale through a survey. It’s short and snappy, and you’ll get to see the responses so far once you’ve completed (or go back and visit as the survey unfolds). Please do visit and take the survey and pass it on to anyone else you think might be interested.

Here’s the link! http://tinyurl.com/expertisesurvey

The Australian Financial Review published an article last month about the negative implications of lay-offs* in which I was quoted. It mentions the Using Expertise project that Patrick Lambe & I have been working on.

*Beyond the really obvious one.

ABC Radio National’s Future Tense programme recently invited Katie Chatfield, Beth Etling & myself as a panel for a show on the Future of Conferences. You can download the mp3 or listen online via the ABC site. Many thanks to Anthony Funnell and Andrew Davies from the ABC for their fine interviewing & editing skills.

Fast Break was at Vibewire and featured 5 of us talking about Creativity, Connection, Collaboration, Commercialisation & (drum roll please) Conversation.

Here are the notes to support the slides (which I didn’t really use):

• A key challenge to innovation is noticing. Or the willingness to be surprised.
• Conversation plays a key role here – in conversation we can allow ourselves to be surprised.
• Lovely quote from Theodore Zeldin’s book Conversation: The kind of conversation I like is one in which you are prepared to emerge a slightly different person.
• Finally, 3 suggestions to improve the process:

1. Find people who are not like you to converse with. The more alien, the better.
2. Listen as well as talk.
3. Do something about it afterwards.

This was a presentation that I gave at Wiki Wednesday on 6 May 2009. Here are some notes:

1. The style of these slides is a blatant steal from Jye Smith’s current presenting style. Jye – sue me.
2. Slide 2 is a drawing that appeared in an edition of 70s punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue. The metaphor here is that social software is basically punk rock and that punk emerged in opposition to the world of prog rock. Many Flash-based web sites feel like 10 minute guitar solos – i.e. technical masturbation.
3. You don’t need to be able to code to create a web site with a wiki. You can just do it.
4. Slide 4 is a picture of Indian tea cups. Some are made of clay. You drink them and then throw them away. They are designed to be disposable. They have a built-in obsolescence. On the other hand, plastic cups persist in our environment. Many corporate information environments seem to be full of trash that won’t go away.
5. We need to design our environments with this obsolescence in mind.
6. Example 1 – built very quickly, iteratively and now no longer used.
7. Example 2 – built very quickly to prototype an idea.
8. Example 3 – built very quickly, adapted and still in use.
9. 5 simple conclusions. The last point seemed to excite most interest  so the discussion focused on information lifecycle issues rather than the rapid prototyping thing.