Connecting and collecting (and being lazy)

On the Knowledge Management for Development a discussion took place about 'knowlege products' to which I posted a remark about the importance of striving for a balance between connecting and collecting. I forgot where I read about it, but since then it the concepts have stuck with me. Every now and then, I have the impression a community of practice is either leaning completely on the side of connecting, nor producing anything tangible, or is going to the extreme of collecting a lot of information without making sure people re-connect to the information collected. I'm convinced this balance is very important to get right.

I was too lazy to search for documents where I picked it up, but Stan Garfield read my question and was so kind to make it into the Knowledge Management Question of the Week. It's a good idea to read the full post with references, but in short he cites two sources. Thomas Stewart, writes:

"Connection, not collection: That's the essence of knowledge management. The
purpose of projects, therefore, is to get knowledge moving, not to freeze it; to
distribute it, not to shelve it."

David Snowden writes:
"Many years ago I formulated three rules or heuristics of Knowledge Management:

1. 
   Knowledge will only ever be volunteered it can not be conscripted


2. 
   We only know what we know when we need to know it


3. 
   We always know more than we can tell and we will always tell more than we can write down

Unfortunately neither of them writes about the balance between connection and collection. I would like to know more about what makes people inclined to focus on one or the other. So maybe I have to search back in my files after all...

The other aspect I've been thinking about is whether connecting and collecting is the same as participation and reification in the theory about communities of practice. I reread some of the explanations from the book 'Beyond Communities of Practice'. I think these concepts are more subtlely described. Reification can also be in terms of a new concept, and is not necessarily something tangible. I guess the connecting and collecting may be concepts that 'speak' to a wide range of people more easily than participation and reification.

Prinsjesdag as example of local knowledge

Today is 'prinsjesdag' in the Netherlands, the day that the queen reads the 'troonrede' with the governmental plans for year to come. There's a ceremony that a golden carriage takes her through part of the Hague to the place where she reads the plans.

I didn't know that all schools in the Hague have a holiday on that day! Something which is common knowledge for the habitants of the Hague. Not a big disaster, but you have to arrange child care or be at home etc. I learned about it through the schoolcalendar.

It made me think about the enormous importance of being able to access relevant explicit, local knowledge when professionals are more and more working on a variety of jobs and change jobs. When I lived in Den Bosch, it wasn't very important to know that schools in the Hague are closed. But when you move here, it's part of the necessary brain-luggage of a parent with school going children. So rather than knowing a lot, it's better to become good at accessing the most relevant information - and distinguishing between relevant and less relevant information.

Working room with a view

Since we moved to the Hague I have my own working room/office at home. I used to work from the kitchen table at home. The difference is huge: it's now very easy to make a conscious decision whether to work/not to work and that leads to reading the newspaper more frequently, not checking my mail during lunchtime while talking to the kids, etc.

As a point of reflection, it makes me think about the importance of living through something. When I was working from the kitchen table, I could reason that it was not an ideal situation, but I could not image the enormous difference. Secondly, it's also an example of learning through comparison. It's only after the situation changed, that I can really see the difference in retrospect. In my old situation, working from the kitchen table was such a habit, that I could no longer see how it influenced my time and working/checking mails etc was such a constant thing that it influenced my ability to quietly read the newspaper.

I collaborate, e-collaborate, we collaborate

We produced a booklet with stories of how people and organisations in the development sector in the Netherlands have experimented with new e-tools to improve collaboration and communication. We have distributed hardcopies, but you can also download the booklet called 'I collaborate, e-collaborate, we collaborate from this page. Furthermore, you can find more stories on the blog with the same name.

Organisation 2.0

I'm preparing myself for a meeting with Agri-profocus. They want some advice for their website and database and communication between the partners. As far as I can see they don't use any web2.0 tools (yet). So how about the organisation2.0?

In his blogpost about enterprise2.0 Nic Brisbourne talks about enterprise2.0 as being about emergent structures rather than imposed ones. A sort of democratization of the workplace, which fits well with the trends of self-managing workteams and more horizontal structures in organisations. What he writes:

"The notion of “emergent structures” is a complicated and slightly counter intuitive one, yet I am thinking it will be very important in understanding the importance and power of enterprise2.0 apps. Emergent structures are patterns of intelligent behaviour which emerge bottom up from the independent actions of agents with no central control. They are common in nature - ant colonies are an oft cited example. This notion is counter intuitive because it is hard to see how the agents know what to do. The slightly unsatisfactory answer is that this knowledge somehow forms by natural processes of evolution and the agents somehow learn their role. I guess you could make an analogy to the roles people play in teams."

Peter Shelton pointed to this blogpost of Andrew McAfee with an example of a 1000-employee firm in Seattle helping clients with digital advertising and marketing, including intra-and extranets. Their own traditional static intranet has been overtaken by web2.0 tools with built in interfaces using social bookmarking site delicious, voting news site digg and photo sharing site flickr.

"AARF employees have learned to add the tag 'AARF' when they come across a web page (using del.icio.us), a photo (Flickr), or a news story (Digg) that they think will be of interest to their colleagues. Shortly after they add this tag, the bookmark (look at the top of the box), thumbnail of the photo (middle) or headline and description of the story (bottom) show up within the AARF E2.0 Intranet. So AARF has found a fast and low-overhead way to
let its employees share Internet content with each other. It's also free;
these interfaces with del.icio.us, Flickr, and Digg require no fees and no
permissions. I find this simply brilliant." ..."The rightmost section of the page shows the most recent blog posts. At AARF, these include emails to group mailing lists, which are automatically posted to a bloglike page."

Check out the full blogpost for screenshots and more examples. It wasn't hard for the employees to get used to this way of working but he adds that AARF is not a typical workplace, being full of people who slap together mashups in their spare time. Nevertheless, I think web2.0 tools offer an opportunity to have more relevant content with less effort. Now how to introduce this is the big challenge....

Handwritten letters are moving again

We are going to move to the Hague soon. I decided to clean the attic and throw away stuff, when I found old letters my husband wrote me when he was in Tanzania and I was in the Netherlands (must have been 1989 or so). It is very funny to read the details of things you have forgotten. He had earpain and went to the hospital where the doctor took one hour to find the key to the cupboard where the ear-inspection-device was stored.

It struck me that I hardly receive letters now, and that I don't keep an archive of my mails (though with gmail you have a large archive, I doubt I will ever go back). And then you hardly write a long and intense mail as you used to write letters.

The letters was number 11 and he mentions that he needs to start keeping a diary with numbered letters, so that we can track the arrival of the letters... He is commenting on a job interview I had and I probably had to wait 3-4 weeks to get an answer, the difference is just so big with internet and mobile phones nowadays! When I started emailing (this started roughly in 1997 for me) I remember for a long time I still used to send hand-written letters to my friends, as emails felt so public, with a letter at least you knew that it would only end up in the hand of the person you write to. When I finally took to mailing girlfriends, we wrote less about our boyfriends, as we were not sure they would read it at some point. So technology does bring its own codes and changes your communication patterns.

Some bloggers meet

Yesterday I went out with the GINKS secretariat to meet Emmanuel K. Bensah, one of the most fanatic bloggers in Ghana. I met Emmanuel through his blog. When we connected on facebook he had stated (ticking a box by mistake) that we met in school, but actually the category 'met through their blogs' is missing...

It was very nice to exchange blog and vlog tips, and discuss the Ghanaian blogosphere which is too quiet according to Emmanuel. He is an author for the globalvoices for Ghana. This means that he reads about 15-20 blogs and when he thinks something is interesting for a global audience that doesn't know much about Ghana he writes a review to the editor, who then edits and puts it up the globalvoices site. See an example of a review here. This is a huge opportunity for bloggers to get known (this is how I found Emmanuel's blog) and to be crossposted to a wider audience. He told us globalvoices now has a feed into the Reuter's Africa site. On each country page there is a feed with blogposts, see the example for Ghana. We discussed ways of leveraging the GINKS vlog with ICT4D stories, a possible blogmentoring project and tried to start a Ghanaian vloggers group (so far with 3 members :). I forgot to ask whether the Ghanaian bloggers ever meet.

We had a good brainstorm about the developing of ICT uses in Ghana. Emmanuel was very enthousiastic about his GPRS phone which allows him to connect to the internet by mobile phone. It is not extremely expensive and you can set it to see what you used. When he's offline, he uses his onetouch (onetouch is a Ghanaian telecom service) pay-as-you-go subscription to check and reply to mails and even to go to facebook. I still have my video-ipod dream (in combination with videoblogs) . Mobile television is coming through ghana telecom/onetouch. So enough work for GINKS...

Zentation to combine videos with powerpoint presentations on the web

Via Erwin Blom I discovered Zentation, you can upload a powerpoint presentation and link it to a google video presentation! Very useful. though some of the slides on slideshare are quite self-explanatory, it can be more powerful in combination with a video. (or would be video with the slides be enough?)

Blogger integrates feedburner feeds

A short blogpost to alert all blogger-bloggers to the fact that feedburner and blogger have apparently collaborated to make the integrating of a feedburner feed into your blogger blog easy. You go to settings, then site feed and add the URL of your feedburner feed. Having a feedburner feed is very useful if you want to monitor the subscriptions to your blog. You can read more here.

The news: no news

In Ghana, the Volta River Authority (VRA)'s main function is to generate and supply electrical energy in Ghana. For some time now, there is an energy crises in Ghana and every other day, you'll be 12 hours off electricity (alternating day and night shifts). This includes ministries and business areas, so you can imagine it affects work seriously, let alone the domestic troubles it gives. Yesterday one of the news items on the Ghanaian television was that there is no news on the energy crises. There was a briefing for journalists by officials of VRA planned on the energy crises yesterday by 9.00. By 12.00 someone came to explain that the briefing would not take place... So this became the news item.

I'm not blogging this to ridiculize the VRA officials, but I do think it shows how they continue to think and act according to a pre-media model, where officials can arrive as late as they want, and can even cancel meetings after letting people wait for hours. Yet, currently with the new media like television and internet, this will become the news itself. Strikingly, the meeting was called 'briefing for journalists' and not a press conference.

Great resource on communities of practice in a development context!

Dorine had a blogpost on their work on communities of practice in the development sector. I planned to reblog it, but didn't find the time, till here in Ghana (as the saying goes, in Europe we have clocks, but here we have time). Dorine participated in the online community of practice workshop and did a project with Bill Williams and Patricia Mantey. They made their small project quite big, as it resulted in a large and resourceful document with all kind of references that you can find online here. They had 5 main topics:
1. Life after funding
2. Gaps in technology
3. Differences in communities
4. Multiple cultures and languages
5. Donor pressure and expectations

They looked for cases and interviewed people. I was amongst the people they interviewed by mail, not know that these answers would be posted integrally in the report (I assumed they'd use it to inform their own opinion and write something condenses). It felt very ackward to be quoted as an 'expert' on all these big questions I don't really have an answer to, and then amongst the responses of other experts, sometimes completely contradicting. Would have been more fun to have an exchange! The biggest difference in opinion as I recall was my opinion that funding can be helpful (but tricky ofcourse) compared to Ueli's answers which go into the direction of banning funding for effective communities of practice. (I'm lazy to search for quotes, but if it's interesting to you, you can find it in the document). They are hopefully going to organize on online exchange still (the intention is there at least).

What I personally learned from it, is that I can see the parallel between funders and communities of practice and the manager's paradox. Both funders and managers should refrain from too much trying to control the domain discussions, but engaging in it in the right way can be energizing.

The tech forum in Ghana meets face-to-face

Today I co-facilitated a meeting of the 'tech forum' a group of ICT technicians who are active in ICT4D. We started last year with a meeting, and had a year of online exchange, which never took off full speed. Nevertheless, more than half of the people present had participated in the previous meeting and were still 'in the mood' and enjoyed their connection. I found out a lot of invisible connections had continued either by mail or meeting people.

It's always encouraging to see how energizing it is for people to engage in practice-related discussions, also today. Even though I'm not a practitioner myself, you see it from the body language, and the break discussions. We had a peer assist session where 4 people could bring in their cases, and I had worried about the others (the non-caseholders), but I noticed that it was as energizing for the others to think along the questions of the 4 case holders. For instance, one question of the delay in seeing the content on a website after uploading it to a CMS was a real puzzle, and we got all intrigued by it. Another very practical exchange was how to load your cell phone battery while travelling (by connecting the poles of your phone battery to a normal battery)...

Something I learned myself is how to use flickr images in blogger. It never worked, and when someone asked me, I felt encouraged to try and find out and I managed (click on other sizes and you can grab the flickr URL).

People thought it was really participatory and peer learning, but what was missing is some thought leaders, and some inspiring new ideas. A reminder that it is not easy to get those people engaged for a long period of their time. That's a process in itself. Secondly, we had done all our best to get the online forum going, but it never really took off. Now, through the face-to-face connections, there are new topic leaders emerging, and there is a plan to have a new topic every month, with a topic leader and monthly online chats, Fridays at 17.00 (without voice because people might not be able to talk outloud in their offices). This is really a breakthrough in energy level that would have been hard to achieve online.

Commoncraft video on social networking

Here's the new video in the series by commoncraft explaining social networking. Ofcourse I'm eagerly waiting for the social bookmarking one after our own attempt.. But you watch it differently after you tried to produce one!

As for social networking site, I've become a member of linkln and facebook, but I don't invest in it and it doesn't work for me. For my case, the video doesn't help in explaining the principle, or do I miss the clue because I'm not looking for a new love neither for a new job?

blip.tv for development

By recommendation from Jay Dedman I moved from Youtube to blip.tv to host my videos (almost forgot I started with castpost). I thought blip had roughly the same features as youtube, but I liked the fact that when you embed videos, you don't have a large triangle and YOUTUBE on your video. Just looks better with blip.tv.

But yesterday I discovered an important reason why blip.tv is better for use in a development context. Namely, it is very hard to download videos from youtube! It's quite easy from blip.tv. This feature is helpful if you want to put the video on a server or on a CDrom to play it back to an audience with unreliable or low bandwidth connectivity. Though it is not impossible on youtube, it is not as easy as on blip.tv

Argyris and intercultural settings

Last Friday I attended a the M&O conference 'samenwerking in allianties en netwerken' (=collaboration in alliances and networks). I think it was my first real conference, you're never too old to attend your first conference... and immediately I can join the unconferencing movement. Can't say I was impressed by the general level of presentations and sessions. BUT a real treat was the presentation by Chris Argyris. And it was really cute that he was using a good old overhead projector with slides (see picture). That did not diminish the power of his presentation. It was impressive how he told a story and explained both theory in use versus espoused theory as well as model 1 and model 2 thinking and behaviour, and I felt like he had explained the book I read (knowledge for action) in less than 30 minutes. He stressed that model 1 behaviour is universal behaviour.

One question I have is whether working in intercultural situations helps to move towards model 2 thinking and behaviour. Model 2 is behaviour where you try to make your assumptions explicit, check them and ask for feedback. Unfortunately I didn't dare to ask him (even though I spotted him in the corridor)..

Beginners and experts

The advantage of a more general blogfocus is that I can more easily show off my children! So here's my youngest daughter (5 years) who has taught herself how to read. She currently reads even during lunch and dinner time. She is reading in Dutch in the video. Though there is a system for children's books (avi 1, avi 2, etc) to indicate the level of beginning readers, she actually reads anything she likes. In the video a children's book that parents are supposed to read for their children. As a result, it contains some pretty hard words like 'vliegtuig'.

Click To Play

I've always wondered what makes for a real expert. At times, people who I consider as real beginners are tasked by their organisation to do something I would reserve for an expert, and still they manage to do an impressive job. From Sil's example, you can see that she reads really slowly and has to look at the individual letters first (v-l-ie-g-t-ui-g)before she can recognise the words. In a similar way, experts are probably much faster in doing something, and can recognise pattern much more easily than beginners.

Social bookmarking - the next steps for the NPK4DEV tagging experiment

During the knowledge management for development workshop participants engaged daily in projects which made it possible for participants to work on something together. We decided to do a project about our tagging experiment. We are using the unique tag NPK4dev (non-profit knowledge management for development) to tag resources on knowledge management in a development context (you can see the tagcloud here). We worked for one afternoon, after which everyone disappeared except Christian, George and myself. The three of us then continued to produce this video to explain the usefulness of social bookmarking for individuals and groups with a common interest. We used the commoncraft videos about RSS and wikis for our inspiration! We had to make it in roughly 1,5 hours, so we didn't have time to make more drawings. We had to do it three times (the first two times we made major mistakes). The first time we had placed the drawings neatly in a row, so our task of putting the images was easy. The third time, though, every thing was a mess, so we were crazily searching for the relevant images.

Click To Play

Christian was so nice to make a timeline of the NPK4Dev tag that we are using to tag resources about knowledge management in a development setting. (here's the blogpost) The timeline is brilliant, you can see blogging and 'howto' are big hits topic and recently agriculture scored high. If you'd be a facilitator of a community of practice and everyone (or the majority) of the people are tagging, it would be a perfect tools to monitor the interests.

Some new ideas I gained:

• The way Christian is able to digest flows of information and pick up interesting stuff amazed me as compared to other people who complaint about information overload when a list produces more than 3 mails per week. I guess the keeping track of RSS feeds and scanning information is a new skill. - let alone reading it. It also depends on how you define your professional need for keeping up with information and recent developments.

• We can make a next step with our tag by offering several subfeeds by combining tags. For instance npk4dev+blogging can make for a feed on blogging for development. npk4dev+news can generate a news feed.
  

• If you'd be a facilitator of a community of practice and everyone (or the majority) of the people are tagging, it would be a perfect tools to monitor the interests and it can help you in the preparation of events etc.
  

• You can combine the feed with a customized search engine eg. google coop to make searching in the links easier.
  

• It'd help to make sense of the flow if you could highlight excellent resources, either by rating, or by adding a tag like top10. Then you could highlight the top resources in another space (wiki, newsletter, whatever) for people for whom following the feed doesn't work.

• Generally speaking, you help the users (especially for people without broadband connections) by working on the information, by printing lists, printing top information, adding top resources in websites or wikis, sharing summaries in discussion lists, etc. (you'd have to work out what works for people).
  

• Magnolia seem to offer more and better features than delicious, like taggers profiles and community spaces and better tagcloud options. (hmm, should we all shift??)

Corneille's painting again

I read in the Volkskrant that Corneille is painting again. I'm curious how painters work and learn and become masters. Corneille says he detests inspiration and just starts working, in the same way a child would paint. Starting with a stroke of paint and adding new ones. When he was 20 years, he formed a three-manship with Appel and Constant, as he explains, this followed from forming the group of the 'experimentelen' of painters and poets. The three-manship lasted only 3 years, as they prefered to continue as individuals. When they met, they did not talk about each others work, but they did talk about paint and women. Nevertheless, they did monitor the developments in each others work.

I think what intrigues me is that in the end, the basis of their development process is very individualistic. They do observe each others works, but don't discuss it. I wonder what this means for communities of practice, whether individual development trajectories are not the core of communities of practice. So we should maybe be more modest about the community part, and recognise that the basis for practice is very individualistic.

Pimping and renaming my blog

I gave my blog a new style (the new blogger templates are definitely easier than the old ones, in terms of adjusting your sidebar features!). In the old blogger you could not click on the title of a blogpost to get the link, which was quite annoying too. I decided on a new name: Lasagna and chips. Thanks to Beth and Nancy for brainstorming with me.

When I started blogging, I did not want to have a personal blog, but rather a thematic blog- about communities of practice for development. After 1,5 years, I feel this theme is rather limiting me, I prefer to make this my personal blog - to blog about innovation and creativity, stimulated by either communities of practice, new ways of working, or exposure to new ideas. And anything else I'm thinking about.

The name lasagna and chips came up become while I was in a restaurant where we ordered lasagna and the waiter asked whether we wanted chips with our lasagna. Being brought up with the idea that you have only one starch item in every meal, this made us laugh. But when you are not brought up with that idea, why not? So interacting with people who think differently, you are more exposed to the way you are actually thinking.

Introduction to delicious: lots of resources

For a session next week about our npk4dev tagging experiment, I compiled a short introduction to del.icio.us, thanks for an easy start-up due to a blogpost by Dorine Ruter. I thought I might as well crosspost it here, will be easier for myself too to find it.

Delicious is a social bookmarking site that we are using to collectively gather websites, wikis, blogs and other online resources with interesting content about knowledge management in the context of development cooperation. We have chosen delicious because it is used by a large number of people, but have found out it is not so intuitive for everyone, so if you are new to delicious, it may take some time to get used to it.

But what is social bookmarking in the first place? Social bookmarking is the practice of saving bookmarks to a public website and 'tagging' them with keywords, meaning you add information about the content. The tagging allows you to find your resources lateron, but also to follow other people's resources with the same tag. If you like to know more: here are some good starter resources.

Del.icio.us basics

• http://del.icio.us – The del.icio.us website


• http://del.icio.us/help/ – Useful start-up information


• Del.icio.us cheat sheet – Explanation of del.icio.us by Beth Kanter


• Seven things you should know about social bookmarking – Introduction on social bookmarking in general


• http://slackermanager.com/2005/12/the_several_hab.html - the several habits of wildly successful delicious users with good tips for starting delicious users


• http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/webbuilding/page5508.cfm- 13 tips for effective tagging

Examples of del.icio.us users

• http://del.icio.us/joitske – Joitske Hulsebosch’s links on Communities of Practice, ICT4DEV / KM4DEV and online interaction


• http://del.icio.us/choconancy – Nancy White on online interaction and facilitation (tools and processes)


• http://del.icio.us/dorineruter – My own links on KM4DEV and online interaction

Examples of how del.icio.us is used by other development organisations or individuals

• http://del.icio.us/euforic – Use of del.icio.us within an organization / network


• http://euforic.org (click on RSS feeds) – Example of tag display (at bottom of page)


• http://www.iaald.org – Example of most recent bookmarks displayed elsewhere via an RSS feed


• http://www.km4dev.suprglu.com – Combined feeds of 6 people joining in a KM4DEV tagging experiment


• http://joitskehulsebosch.blogspot.com –my own example of npk4dev resources via the feed in the sidebar - just here on the right side


• http://www.r-mail.org/ – Tool (one of many) to keep track of new items via e-mail


• http://del.icio.us/dorineruter/bookmarking – Some of Dorine's bookmarks of del.icio.us related tools, to use once you have gotten to know del.icio.us

Learning more about delicious

• http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ydn-delicious/ - A yahoo group about delicious


• http://socialsourcecommons.org/tool/show/67/support - for more links about delicious


• http://www.twoantennas.com/projects/delicious-network-explorer/- to explore your own delicious network


• http://www.ivy.fr/revealicious/index.html - for visual representations of tags


• http://tagcrowd.com/ - to create a tagcloud
• http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/browse/visualizations - more visualizations including per tagger


• http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/webbuilding/page5719.cfmm - tips for tidying tags


• http://www.econsultant.com/delicious-by-function/index.html - delicious from A to Z
• http://www.unthinkingly.com/experiments/nptech/understanding_nptech.php - the amazing tagcloud of nptech

And here's a great and attractive presentation from Beth Kanter about tagging for collaboration and knowledge sharing: