Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness

Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness
Inquiry and learning into social networks, organizational network analysis, and the relationships among people and systems in complex organizations and networks.

Sunday, September 26, 2004

The annals of publishing

I've just heard from Madan Rao that
Knowledge Management: Tools and Techniques has been published by Reed Elsevier. Madan requested a chapter from me on social network analysis when I met him at InfoWorld in the spring of 2003. I submitted my chapter over a year ago and had almost forgotten about it (except I did grab a few choice bits for my current project). I'll post some comments when I get my copies and get to see what my co-contributors (an amazing group to be in) have offered. The list of case studies looks fantastic. It's quite a collection.

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Sunday, September 19, 2004

Reading blogs about blogging

Reading blogs about blogging by people who are reading blogs about blogging can be a very dizzying exercise. I'm looking for golden nuggets to share with a client as as work suggestions for augmenting personal and organizational networks. Most of the really good stuff happened live at the "Social Tools for the Enterprise" KM Cluster in London in July, hosted by Stowe Boyd (and already referenced in an earlier post...I was probably at a wedding, as I have three of them this summer, along with a family reunion, and a week at the beach. No wonder I'm tired and repeating myself and dreaming of Belize in February.)

I found another good summary and linked list on Martin Dugage's site (Mopsos). Another good set of notes came from the KM Cluster site, written up by Margaret Goold, but you have to be a KM cluster member to get them. The event was attending by people who blog regularly and also "sell" blogging as part of their business, so they really know their stuff. Digging through all the sites will unearth not just a nugget, but the entire gold mine -- enough for a book. (Oh, that's right. I first heard about the KM cluster summary from Bill Ives, who is writing a new book on blogging.)

I especially liked reading Phil Wolff's learning curve progression of the average blogger:

My first weblog
My first design change
My first category/topic
My first comment
My first referrer
My first recap
My first evangelism
My first reader mail
My first Google ranking
My first hundred posts
My first comment span
My first "blogthday"
My first blogging break

A sweet little roadmap.

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Tuesday, September 14, 2004

The writer and the web

Who is this demon who sits on my shoulder, 24 hours before a deadline? Reading a summary of the KMCluster London Symposium on Social Tools for the Enterprise, sent to me by Bill Ives, reminded me that looking up Stowe Boyd was on my list. I need to confer with him about material of his that I am including in the Report (38,000 words and counting). A researcher at my client's forwarded me a link to Stowe's last posting in Darwin Magazine on The State of Social Tools without even knowing that I know him! Notes from his talk at the Spring NYC KM Cluster have been on my report pile all along. He is the expert I'd turn to regarding real-time tools for the enterprise. I have to do this now.

But from Darwin mag I click over to Stowe's blog on Corante, which I haven't seen for a while, and catch some interesting posts. Look myself up in seven different search engines (I'm far from famous), check out Joho for David Weinberger's piece on small talk, see that David has made himself supreme ruler of the i-neighborhood for Brookline, MA, check on the status of Harvard, MA's i-neighborhood, see that there is none and make myself supreme ruler there.

I observe my craziness and decide it's time to blog.

Stowe, please call you can ! Stop me before I really run out of control...

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Sunday, September 12, 2004

Pulling the pieces together

I'm finishing up a 35,000-word Report for the Ark Group on social networks and knowledge management. It's a sense-making quilt I'm working on, as I take the threads, ideas, and frameworks I've developed or found over the past three years and organize them into a set of Parts and Sections that I hope will help other people get to the sense-making faster. It's all about relatedness and language: choosing, defining, and relating to each other the distinctions in types of network, types of software, means of intervention.

I have the pile of articles, conversation notes, books, and reports. I have the outline for the report, amply (I hope) fleshed out, and I take on the pile. Read the next item, see where it fits into the outline, decide what's important, and insert it, context it, and put transitions between it and the material before and after. I'm almost done.

And then, inevitably, along comes a BIG thing to relate to. In this case, a quick "go back and look at Peter Gloor's stuff" and find that he's published his draft of Social Patterns of Innovation (previously titled COINS@Tipping Point and reviewed by Bill Ives) on his web site. Oh gosh, what do I do now? Peter has elaborated the term Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) and added its cousins CLN (Collaborative Learning Networks) and CKNs (Collaborative Knowledge Networks).

Do I change my framework? Change my terminology? Cry because Peter's done such a great job of creating and bringing to life a new distinction, the COIN? Deadline is Tuesday. I just have to sharpen my knitting needles, find the right entry points, and weave.

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Saturday, September 04, 2004

"Lost Knowledge" is out !

Just had a note from Dave DeLong yesterday. Lost Knowledge: Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce is out, it's available from the usual sources. My glowing review will be published in the October issue of Knowledge Management Magazine. Dave does a bang up job talking about the basic issues of knowledge retention, has great case studies, and in the process manages to provide a really good perspective on the knowledge management toolkit (including using SNA with age demographics to identify key risk areas).

Dave was interviewed by Steve Inskeep for NPR's Morning Edition on Labor Day (how appropriate). Hear the recording.

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Friday, September 03, 2004

My head hurts when it wobbles

I was in a client meeting on Thursday; the topic was "taxonomies" of various sorts and the question arose as the relationship between different taxonomies of users. The answer: "they are orthogonal." Talk about about term that makes my head hurt. I first heard "orthogonal" when I joined Digital Equipment Corporation; my first project was on the storied VAX/VMS. I was writing a system services manual and attending a lot of the hardware and software design sessions. They talked about orthogonality a lot. Official definitions of orthogonal indicate that it means "at right angles" or "statistically independent." The closest definition to how it relates to the VAX is (not surprisingly) in the Jargon File:

adj. [from mathematics] Mutually independent; well
separated; sometimes, irrelevant to. Used in a generalization of
its mathematical meaning to describe sets of primitives or
capabilities that, like a vector basis in geometry, span the entire
`capability space' of the system and are in some sense
non-overlapping or mutually independent. For example, in
architectures such as the PDP-11 or VAX where all or nearly all
registers can be used interchangeably in any role with respect to
any instruction, the register set is said to be orthogonal. Or, in
logic, the set of operators `not' and `or' is orthogonal, but the
set `nand', `or', and `not' is not (because any one of these can be
expressed in terms of the others). Also used in comments on human
discourse: "This may be orthogonal to the discussion, but...."

Got it? Okay, so understanding the distinction "orthogonality" is something that made my head hurt in 1976 and it still makes my head hurt. What is it about head hurting? Last week, on the wonderful discussion led by David Hawthorne on AOK about Knowledge Markets, Bernice Johnson and Verna Allee exchanged messages about a 3rd cost factor in deciding about knowledge acquisition and program implementation (the first three are time, energy, and money): the hurt factor:

"I don't know yet and it hurt too much to think about for long."

That conversation got me thinking about wobbling while learning something new (which David Hawthorne had referenced in one of his posts). Gaining a distinction, like orthogonality, is like gaining the distinction for balance, which is what you need when you learn to ride a bike. You wobble on that bike until you "get it" -- balance -- and then you never have to learn it again. (This analogy is not original; I first heard it about 12 years ago, and many times since.)

Taking on something that makes your head hurt is in the nature of wobbling, a new concept or set of ideas that you haven't quite made sense of yet. Sensemaking comes through connecting new things with things that you already know and have language for. This hurt factor adds a dimension of choice: you have a choice to go into new territory, knowing that you are bound to wobble.

Or you can not think about orthogonality for a really long time and have to wobble again when it comes unbidden back.

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patti anklam. How to make networks work.

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