Unlike computers, processing and memory are performed by the same components in the brain

Computers process information from memory using CPUs, and then write the results of that processing back to memory. No such distinction exists in the brain. As neurons process information they are also modifying their synapses - which are themselves the substrate of memory. As a result, retrieval from memory always slightly alters those memories (usually making them stronger, but sometimes making them less accurate - see here for more on this).

I remember reading an article covering a speech by Bill Gates, where he encouraged undergraduate engineering students to pursue multiple fields. He said that knowing how to write computer code wasn't sufficient, a knowledge of chemistry, biology, music or whatever would help them become innovators.

Core Knowledge Management Concepts

• Corporate memory - a collection of best practices, heuristics, process documents and other texts that help define how a business operates. (related terms: organizational memory or group memory). Capturing, maintaining, and growing a knowledge base, selecting appropriate technologies, and motivating quality contributions are all key KM themes.

• Intellectual capital - the intangible assets of a firm. These include competencies, culture and connections that enable and foster innovation, agility, awareness, adaptation and corporate survival. KM plays a role in mapping, recording, evaluating, stewarding, marketing and growing intellectual capital and knowledge assets.

• Personal knowledge management - a KM theme that focusses on individual responsibility for learning, connecting, organizing and producing knowledge. This is closely tied to blogging, personal information management and branding.

• Additional concepts - tacit knowledge, knowledge harvesting, business intelligence, knowledge sharing, knowledge transfer,social capital, social networking, trust (sociology), Knowledge_representation, DIKW (data / information / knowledge / wisdom)

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Lesser KM Concepts

What one should know to be considered a proficient KM adviser and knowledge worker

• codification vs. personalization - the trade-off between capture and storage of explicit information and making connections to people who know as well as to acquire external knowledge yourself.

• exploration vs. exploitation - should an adviser focus on gathering external information and buying (recruiting) expertise or capture internal best practices and grow local competencies?

• practice vs. process - the balance between informal learning and strictly defined repeatable activties.

• best practices - pattern language, distinctions, collaborative writing, ontologies, inquiry, reflection, concept mapping

• after action reviews (AARs) - learning by gathering participants after completion of a significant project, exploring, reflecting, recording advances and mistakes.

• peer reviews - inviting colleagues who have experience with similar projects to share their tips, tricks and lessons learned before starting out.

• knowledge mapping & audits - discovering opportunities, knowledge gaps and charting flows. A survey to understand where current knowledge is created and who needs it.

• lessons learned (learning histories) - a systematic review of failures and successes conducted by a neutral party.

• 'Ba' - a physical or virtual collaborative space, where participants feel safe and exchange insights.

• induction (aka data mining) - searching for patterns, rules and interesting insights from collected (business) data.

• source documents - collaborative scripts that set forth the intention and vision of the firm or group.

• web standards & protocols - HTML, XML, XTM, RSS
• principle of meta-data reciprocity
• web-conferencing
• knowledge diffusion & sharing
• CRM - customer relationship management
• SCM - supply chain management
• auto-profiling
• classification
• stories
• helpdesks
• memes
• heuristics
• ontology (taxonomy / thesaurus / index)
• community - CoP, CoI, (facilitation, development, sustainability)
• group dynamics

Some examples of factors that can affect your search engine ranking:

• Number of links to your site from related sites
• Number of years for which your site’s domain name is registered
• Age of a specific page on your site
• Quality of writing on the page
• Use of headings within the text
• Number and frequency of updates to a page
• Use of keywords in the URL
• Amount of text on a page
• Rate of external linking to your site
• Number of pages on the site
• Domain extension (.com, .net, etc.)
• Use of frames, Flash, or PDFs
• Downtime of your web server
• Geographic location of your web server

Bucky Fuller's advice: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

The real story here isn't that people are "happy to work for free" (they aren't...we work for many factors, money is only one. Reputation, connections, personal growth - these are all drivers of why people engage in activities without a monetary benefit. For many, monetary value comes in different channels - bloggers may share their ideas for free, but they gain consulting opportunities...

The whole concept of the Web is fundamentally opposed in every respect to the current operational requirements of IT within an Enterprise, and that’s why Enterprises a) are not using the Web as much, or in the same way as home users, and b) are not interested in the global excitement of the thousands of highly skilled people who are creating a new set of Web functions and capabilities, loosely defined as Web 2.0 to cover some of the shortcoming of Web. Its gets worse, because the very shortcomings that Web 2.0 is looking to address actually extend the concepts of use that the Enterprise CIO likes least!

"Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful." Herman Cain

The popular open source CMS and portal Plone community has just lost one of it forceful leaders. According to recent news Alexander Limi has left for a new position as User Interface Designer at Google.

Anyhow, we should leave the design of user interfaces to user interface designers, and leave the software engineering part of that to, well, software engineers.
Rich Internet Technology (RIT) is an emerging technology that, imho, should be taken very seriously. Traditional Internet Applications usually have awkward, uneffective, "click-and-wait" user interfaces. RIT enables us to build effective and highly usable internet applications, but - like any other technology - it must be applied wisely.

8. Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as complex as a protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by chance.

Chance plays a part in evolution (for example, in the random mutations that can give rise to new traits), but evolution does not depend on chance to create organisms, proteins or other entities. Quite the opposite: natural selection, the principal known mechanism of evolution, harnesses nonrandom change by preserving "desirable" (adaptive) features and eliminating "undesirable" (nonadaptive) ones. As long as the forces of selection stay constant, natural selection can push evolution in one direction and produce sophisticated structures in surprisingly short times.

As an analogy, consider the 13-letter sequence "TOBEORNOTTOBE." Those hypothetical million monkeys, each pecking out one phrase a second, could take as long as 78,800 years to find it among the 26¹³ sequences of that length. But in the 1980s Richard Hardison of Glendale College wrote a computer program that generated phrases randomly while preserving the positions of individual letters that happened to be correctly placed (in effect, selecting for phrases more like Hamlet's). On average, the program re-created the phrase in just 336 iterations, less than 90 seconds. Even more amazing, it could reconstruct Shakespeare's entire play in just four and a half days.

"The fatal flaw in thinking in terms of knowledge management is in adopting the perspective of the organization as the relevant beneficiary. Discussions of knowledge management start from the premise that the organization is not realizing full value from the knowledge of its employees. While likely true, this fails to address the much more important question from a knowledge worker's perspective of 'what's in it for me?'." (McGee, 2003)

In the not too distant future, in the Enterprise 2.0 world, knowledge workers will write once, link often, search even more and truly start to leverage their collective knowledge. But, they will do it as a part of their regular work flow; not as separate add-on task that only slows them down.

Most CKOs have built their career upon investments in an older generation of technology. The right thing to do now is to give up on sunk costs, and move forward. But the right thing to do isn't always the easiest thing to do when corporate politics rears it's ugly head.

in contrast to controlled vocabularies or formal taxonomies, folksonomies are inherently open-ended and can therefore respond quickly to changes and innovations in the way users categorize Internet content.

I recently saw an example of that same top-down approach applied to sharing resumes internally at a large firm. Instead of going to a flexible folksonomy orientated Web 2.0 approach, such as using People Blogs, the firm asked each of it employees to fill out a 700 question form, which attempted to categorize every skill a person could possibly have. Needless to say, the employees have not filled out the forms.

Large companies do not need one universal enterprise 2.0 solution.

Instead, large organizations probably need many different tools for different types of users and different types of problems.

The guys at 37signals have written a great book on developing applications. It's called Getting Real. If you buy or build software, you should read Getting Real. Here's one of their suggestions:

A great way to build software is to start out by solving your own problems. You’ll be the target audience and you’ll know what’s important and what’s not. That gives you a great head start on delivering a breakout product.,

In many organizations today, there are going to be passionate users who are trying to set up internal blogs, internal wikis and other Web 2.0 tools.

Charlene Li has told me about CTOs who come to her and ask "How do I stop them? How do I control this?"

Charlene response is simple: "Why would you want to stop it? Why would you want to control it? And besides, think of all the benefits your company is getting from having a more productive, more engaged, more passionate work force."

CTOs and CKOs may say that it is hard to run multiple platforms. The truth is that costs are not that high. Web 2.0 technology costs less than a tenth of the price of old KM systems. Web 2.0 blog servers or Wiki servers might prefer Linux and databases like MySQL. But these open source systems are cheap, if not totally free, and finding the odd additional engineer to run them isn't that hard.

Instead of trying to focus on what ideal, one size fits all system the company needs, CKOs have to dump their old approach in favor of allowing any system, so long as it complies with some basic open Internet standards. Specifically: HTML, RSS, ATOM. The server has to work with the internal authentication system: LDAP, Novell or Active Directory. That's it.

A PlayPump is a children's merry-go-round/roundabout attached to a water pump and water storage tank, that provides clean drinking water to children and families in rural Africa.

Several days ago, I wrote an article titled, “Dear Google, You’re Giving Me a Headache.” To my surprise, they sent me the pain relief I requested.

After a meeting at Fortune Interactive, where I was actually discussing Google reporting, I went to my desk and found an envelope from Google. I opened the envelope and a small pack of acetaminophen fell out. The hand written letter said:


Dear Al,

I hope this helps you keep up with the many Adwords changes.

PS – You are reading the Inside Adwords Blog, right?

Google continues to amaze me. Even though they are a huge company, they obviously found my article on Marketing Pilgrim, got some acetaminophen, wrote a letter, and mailed it to me. This may not have taken much of their time, but I am sure it is the small things, like this, that make their employees love working there.

I took the acetaminophen, read their “Inside Adwords” Blog, and I feel a lot better. As a matter of fact I feel so good I am preparing my next article, “Dear Google, I Need a Vacation.”

left more than a gig of email at Microsoft. And that was after deleting all the crud out of it. What knowledge was in there? Tons of stuff about Channel 9 that would have been awesome for someone to use to learn about how things get onto Channel 9 and how it evolved. Gone. Deleted.

Jeffrey Treem talks about this on his blog “Inside the Cubicle.”

I hope this is the last job where I have to throw away knowledge when I leave.

A blog seems to answer a more direct human need for evaluating people, and placing trust on the judgment of people we can relate to. What Ron and I are doing is open; you know who we are, and have some sense from our roles in Capgemini as to the amount of trust to place on our opinions; it's honest in the sense that we are writing about our personal views, and not a Capgemini corporate press release; and over time you can decide if we are relevant, or aligned to you, and your own experiences.

A blog seems to answer a more direct human need for evaluating people, and placing trust on the judgment of people we can relate to. What Ron and I are doing is open; you know who we are, and have some sense from our roles in Capgemini as to the amount of trust to place on our opinions; it's honest in the sense that we are writing about our personal views, and not a Capgemini corporate press release; and over time you can decide if we are relevant, or aligned to you, and your own experiences.

It's an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will "interact" with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.

Databases, more precisely relational databases, shred those assumptions, and they do it for very good reasons; to avoid redundancies, reduce inconsistencies, and to allow the data to be searched, sorted, joined and remixed in a variety of ways, but without any consideration for centuries of accumulated experience with "documents".

Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984)^[1], also known as the "Betamax case", was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States which ruled that the making of individual copies of complete television shows for purposes of time-shifting does not constitute copyright infringement, but is fair use. The Court also ruled that the manufacturers of home video recording devices, such as Betamax or other VCRs (referred to as VTRs in the case), cannot be liable for infringement. The case was a boon to the home video market as it created a legal safe haven for the technology, which also significantly benefited the entertainment industry through the sale of pre-recorded movies.

Red tape is a derisive term for regulations that are considered excessive or for bureaucratic procedures that are considered time- and effort-consuming. It is usually applied to government, but can also be applied to corporations.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_tape

David Snowden points the way:
Context is difficult to explicate and there are grave problems with bias, extrapolation, unintended "Hawthorne effects", sampling representation and question structure. It is not possible to overcome these through simply conducting a pilot, including open-ended replies or allowing free-form answers. Any understanding of knowledge work requires collecting anecdotes, surfacing implicit knowledge via dialog, observing complex interactions between team members and boundary objects and unraveling the nature of distributed meaning, memory and learned responses.

Studies of knowledge work require immersion, careful ethnographic procedures, engagement, and a deep knowledge of the environment, actors, culture and assumptions that encapsulate the situation. Studies of sense-making, knowledge sharing, learning, decision making and tacit transfers, take time, need expert observation, require trust and do not suffer short-cuts lightly.

"A project page should do at least three things:Improve communication within the project team, Make sure the left hand knows what the right hand is doing by improving communication between the project team and the rest of the organization, Build a searchable reference for future use.”

I must have dburka's baby for having the world's fastest RSS reader on kevin rose's site that hasn't been updated in months

I must have dburka's baby for having the world's fastest RSS reader on kevin rose's site that hasn't been updated in months

What happens when a department who's grown tired of the slow reaction time of the corporate ITdepartment decides to buy the cheap services of a web2.0 provider like Salesforce.com instead of using the obsolete corporate CRM tool? It becomes more productive, but it also becomes more isolated from the rest of the company.

Lors de la ruée vers l'or ce sont les vendeurs de pelles et de pioches qui firent fortune et pas les chercheur d'or. Esperons qu'il n'en sera pas de même avec les réseaux sociaux dont le succès colossal ne profite pour l'instant qu'au réseau de diffusion qui sous-tendent leurs contenus...

En opposition aux analyses marxistes, Bourdieu critique le primat donné aux facteurs économiques, et entend souligner que la capacité des acteurs dominants à imposer leurs productions culturelles et symboliques joue un rôle essentiel dans la reproduction des rapports sociaux de domination.

They should've hidden video cameras in the pizza boxes. :) That would've been the best modern trojan horse to date. ^^

In the beginning, there was little content on the web so we could organize it in directories, hierarchically. Then the number of the pages has increased, and we needed search to find our way around. But searching for the text in a page wasn't enough to bring relevant results. So we looked at the links in a page, to understand the authority of a page by looking at the authority of sites that point to a page. Now we have relevancy, but the search is still textual. So the next step would be to grasp the meaning of a page and of its parts, to create a semantic web algorithmically.

et ne puis m'empêcher de penser, avec une certaine fierté, permettez moi de compter sur votre indulgence, que le dialogue que le ministère de la culture a tenté d'instaurer artificiellement sur un site lancé à grands frais par une boîte de com', finalement, il commence à se faire, tranquillement, gratuitement, sur les blogs, dont entre autres le mien, ce dont je me réjouis

Le pénal concerne la réponse de la société face à un comportement interdit et antisocial. Le civil concerne la réparation due par l'auteur des faits à sa victime. L'affaire n'est pas jugée deux fois, ses deux aspects sont jugés chacun une fois.

Il s'agirait dans ce cas de laisser les utilisateurs décider eux-même de l'utilisation qu'ils souhaitent faire des wikis puis étudier les pratiques a posteriori. Il ressortirait très probablement d'une telle approche de nouveaux usages, c'est à dire une utilisation des wikis pour des problématiques qui n'auraient pas pu être adressées par des outils existants.

L'auteur donne ensuite un certain nombre de principes pas forcément neufs (v. La stratégie du projet latéral, Herbemont et César) et d'autres de bon sens qu'il est toujours utile de se remémorer:

• proposez un outil de capture d'information très simple d'utilisation afin de limiter le temps d'appropriation et de ne pas rebuter les contributeurs éventuels. Multipliez les vecteurs possibles de contribution.
• faites raconter à vos "personnes ressources" leur expérience sous forme d'histoires (storytelling) plus à même de faire passer des connaissances tacites que 15 Power Point réunis.
• reconnaissez et valorisez les contributeurs
• multipliez les occasions de rencontres réelles

Selon des prévisions émises l'année dernière par Gartner, les sites Wiki deviendront, d'ici 2009, des outils de collaboration courants au sein de la moitié des entreprises au moins. Dès l'an prochain, la gamme des applications mises à la disposition des utilisateurs par les organisations sera composée à 40 % d'outils personnels tels le blogue, la messagerie instantanée et le site Wiki - comparativement à 2 % en 2004. On dit que les travailleurs du savoir adoptent spontanément ces nouvelles technologies, bien avant que la direction en ait saisi la portée.

By the way, I'm filing a patent on learning. It's a process by which the brain of a human being connects neural pathways in response to outside stimuli. The patent includes, ipso facto, hearing, sight, smell, taste, talking and feeling. If you don't cease learning immediately, you will hear from my attorney, ab abusu ad usum non valet consequentia, ab irato, et audentes fortuna iuvat.

While the whisky market is dominated by large breweries and a small number of well-known brands, a counter-movement is (inevitably) taking place. Ladybank, based in Fife, Scotland, is one of a handful of new, artisanal distilleries, and is completely structured around the concept of consumer involvement. The Ladybank Company of Distillers Club, as the full name goes, plans to start distilling by the end of 2007, which means the first dram of malt won't have matured before 2017.

The private club will have no more than 1,250 members. Memberships are becoming available in small releases; UK memberships currently on offer are priced at GBP 3,250 (USD 6,020/EUR 4,760), and fees are lower for overseas members. For that one-off fee, members of the Ladybank Club are entitled to the equivalent of six bottles a year during the first 50 years of production. They're also welcome to visit the distillery, which is closed to the general public, and may invite guests. Furthermore, members have full voting rights on key issues.

Jaap Favier, vice president and research director of Forrester Research, highlights another issue. “I’ve spoken to quite a lot of executive boards over the past few months and I started to see a very simple answer to why organisations aren’t looking at social computing,” he says. “It’s because senior executives are alpha males. Being in control is what they’re good at and what they like, which is what brought them to the board seat to begin with. Sharing power is not part of their genes.”

My only question is this – with all this reluctance, paranoia, secrecy, and control obsession, how do these companies actually survive?

Or will they survive? We'll see.

...social computing on a wide scale has the potential to shift the power structure of an organisation irreversibly

...companies don’t want their employees to have a voice, to answer back or to question the management

Leakage of essentially private information or opinion is a major concern for companies

...organisations find it difficult to trust their employees to behave responsibly and not leak information or fritter time away when using these new systems

...concerned about training costs and the likely hit on staff performance as new systems are adopted

...older people will do their best to avoid learning new ways of working

...people will perceive different threats from social software according to their role in the organisation

...they are likely to be afraid of the unknown

...knee-jerk reaction will be to refuse to adopt it unless forced

...managers and staff are afraid of embarrassing themselves through the kind of exposure that social computing brings

there is a tendency for people to develop their own individual approaches to everything using the limited tools at their disposal and, rather than working towards more and more streamlined approaches to working as a group, they end up distancing themselves from each other and the organization as a whole.

I don’t have statistics to prove it, but anecdotal evidence suggests that people working at organizations devoted to missions other than (and arguably higher than) making money share knowledge more readily than employees at companies that emphasize the bottom line.

Pharmaceutical companies, for example, are unquestionably profit-making ventures, but most researchers are driven (and driven to seek and share knowledge) by the goal of discovering drugs that cure diseases. For them, profits are a byproduct of a scientific and humanitarian achievement.

A financial person is concerned with taking money out of the organization. HR should be concerned with putting investments in."