Where is knowledge?.

Knowledge is embodied in people gathered in communities and networks. This is one of the most powerful descriptions of what knowledge and knowledge management should really be all about that I have ever come across. Notice 'technology' is not mentioned!

Knowledge is embodied in people gathered in communities and networks.

The road to knowledge is via people, conversations, connections and relationships.

Knowledge surfaces through dialog, all knowledge is socially mediated and access to knowledge is by connecting to people that know or know who to contact.

In the knowledge economy, connections and relationships count more than personal knowhow and access to content.

The environment changes so fast, the optimum knowledge strategy is instant access to people & their ideas and continuous awareness & learning in a supportive community.

People and discourse communities provide the 'filter' mechanism for alerting and awareness.

This helps to keep your focus, provides market intelligence and affords a platform for negotiating meaning and value.

- Denham Grey

[Gurteen Knowledge-Log] [Seb's Open Research]
7:06:47 PM  #  comment []

Group-forming mailing list.

Following the recent discussions on group-forming and a little email exchange, Eric Hanson and I are going to start a mailing list on that topic. I've written Group-Forming Mailing List, a little background document which anyone interested is encouraged to edit and improve upon. Here's a bit of what I wrote this morning:

Background

One thing that's exciting about the Internet is that it allows new communities to form at very low expense. This opens up many possibilities that were not previously available. In particular, it allows activists, thinkers, and other creative, change-oriented people to find one another, regroup, share information and learn more easily. This helps those people progress towards their goals more effectively. Successful examples of lively, focused communities include ShouldExist, InfoAnarchy, IndyMedia, and MeatBall.

Although we already see social clustering happening in certain areas, it is still difficult to create high-signal, lively groups around issues that are not (yet?) very popular or well known. We need to better understand how the process of clustering happens, in order to figure out how we can make it easier and more efficient.

People and their interactions are obviously at the center of this process. Thinking about social clustering will require us to consider individuals, motivations, and communication.

Observation and reflection are not the only means to probe this issue. We also want to try things out, experiment hands-on with new means of clustering. This way we will learn what helps people pull together and what doesn't.

The mailing list

This mailing list will be created to foster discussion both at the practical and theoretical level on such questions as:

• How and why are new communities born?
• How do they grow? Why and how do people learn about them and decide to participate in them?
• How do those communities persist over time as some people leave and new ones jump in?
• How can technology, and in particular the World Wide Web, facilitate the process of social aggregation?

I'll let you know as soon as the list is up and running.

[Seb's Open Research]
7:00:58 PM  #  comment []

Frontier 9 Starting from Scratch Leveraging Frontier 9 on OSX for education purposes has been an adventure in frustration for two reasons. First, the lack of admin documentation for OSX is a big no no. Second, The website for Frontier on OSX hasn't been updated for over a year! How about a K-Log on administrating Frontier 9/ Manila on OSX! Would it make good buisiness sense for Userland to update this information. Would more organizations jump on the weblogging band wagon if was explained how "easy" it is to leverage this great piece of software for a variety of I should also get onto the topic of Apple's lack of support for educators on administering OSX for the Internet. Whew!

The other problem I had was trying to get port 8080 open by the CPS Wide Area Network administrator. He had seen some red flags show up after a security scan on the ports of a domain in question was performed. After making some adjustments, even the second test showed a couple of red flags. Since time was passing, and I had not settled on where to park the Frontier Server, I decided to keep on port 80 and get to working.

Maybe in the future Userland and Apple will get around to helping us OSX users configure OSX for the internet and get documents with screenshots from Userland on how to be a decent administrator. Christmas is coming soon. I hope I do not coal again on the OSX and Frontier front.

http://www2.whittier.cps.k12.il.us/ is the parking space.
1:43:46 PM  #  comment []