Monday, October 28, 2002

No Way!! This is so cool and a definite blast from my own past. I went to De Anza College in 1976-1978. Institutional blogging.. How cool is this, I ask you... The extremely talented technology team at De Anza College has put together a wonderful support site for their faculty.  Lots of great how-to's and training material for using Manila to create interactive faculty websites.  Bravo!  This is not only a template for how to effectively roll out weblogs to faculty members and students, it is also a template for doing this on corporate Intranets. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] [klyjen.blog] 10:51:53 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

Evolving online communities.. As an active member of several online communities, revolving around a variety of issues, I found this article about Building Online Communities interesting.   from Building Online Communities [Slashdot] My first objection, though, is semantic--a "planned" online community is similar to a planned community in real life; anyone who has visited Reston, Virginia (a model "planned community") will understand what I mean--while it is clean and organized and neat, it lacks the character that make spontaneous, evolved communities so interesting.  (Think Hayek.)  That said, though, the planned route is useful for communities that are, well, planned--a listserve, or the WOPR boards, or Experts Exchange, or something like that.  While they may be rooted in spontaneity, their usefulness to their members would be hampered without some top-down organization.  You might lose some of the character, but the tradeoff is worth it. The author also talks about shared history, in-jokes, and language... A healthy community also develops a sense of history and in-jokes. The phrases "Thanks, applied" and "Rule one" mean something very specific to Perl 5 porters. Everything 2 afficionados understand the intrinsic humor of "Soy." Highly-ranked and respected Perl Monks regularly cite precedents when controversial topics reoccur. These bits of culture tend to cross communities. It's online syncretism at its finest. Bring up "the September that never ended" at a LUG meeting, and chances are you'll find a longtime Usenetter. Community members identify each other elsewhere by these identity badges. This is one of my favorite aspects of online communities that evolve beyond the ultra-organized and restricted threaded boards...the ability to reference "color wars" and have a wide range of people immediately understand your context. One thing that isn't discussed in depth in the article, though, is the extent to which the underlying technology sets the tone for the community, aside from a brief warning about keeping the posting process simple.  In my mind, the posting process is less relevant to the resulting community development than the reading process.  I personally find threaded discussion boards incredibly irksome--too many places to have to search for parts of a conversation.  That said, participants on threaded communities have more control over their content.  Linear boards (essentially, one chronological thread) expose participants to more conversations because everything is in one place, but at a certain threshhold the white noise can be deafening. One of things I like about the technology behind the Radio community is that the aggregator functions to to combine the best of both types of worlds--clearly, each blog and news source is its own thread, but I can pull them all together to simply see them in one place.  Relying on my newsfeed for links to reading material certainly limits my exposure to new blogs, it is certainly better than having to visit each site myself daily, which I'm having to do with sites I've found that can't be syndicated.  I tend to see new information on non-aggregated sites in a much less timely manner, and am sure I miss posts as well. In any event, this post is coming close to matching the length of the article I referenced, so I'll sign off here. [klyjen.blog] 10:48:33 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

Heading into knowledge metrics. One of my key challenges right now is to work out how to measure the impact of knowledge-logging.  How does it impact the effectiveness of a person, of a team/project and of a business.  How can we measure this?  How can we evaluate it? Anyone have any good stuff? This 1994 U.S. Army paper on evaluating productivity looks like as good a place to start as any.  The Summarizer summary is very poor for this one but here it is anyway: The U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratories (USACERL) is developing a computer-based performance support environment intended to improve the productivity of Army knowledge workers. This product, the Knowledge Worker System (KWS), is designed to help work groups enhance their performance while documenting and distributing business process information. The literature suggests organizations categorize work by content, then select the most appropriate measurement technique based on implementation costs. Sardina and Vrat say those who measure productivity should have three objectives: (1) to identify potential improvements; (2) to decide how to reallocate resources; and (3) to determine how well previously established goals have been met. It is most simply Output divided by Input." The literature review shows that productivity measurement is discussed from a wide variety of viewpoints. "Structured" is inversely related to "Complexity," so these two components are at opposite ends of the graph. It can be seen from the above discussion that any proposed productivity measurement technique should be examined to determine what it requires to function well. Bridges, Bernisha M., "To Measure or Not to Measure, That is the Question," Productivity and Quality Improvement in Government, edited by John S.W. Fargher (Institute of Industrial Engineers, 01/92), pp 412419. Shell, Richard L., and O. Geoffrey Okogbaa, "The Effect of Mental Fatigue on Knowledge Worker Performance," Issues in White Collar Productivity (Industrial Engineering and Management Press, Institute of Industrial Engineers, 1984), pp 224231. Sink, D. Scott, and S.J. DeVries, "An InDepth Study and Review of 'StateoftheArt and Practice Productivity Measurement Techniques,' " (Institute of Industrial Engineers 1984 Spring Conference Proceedings, 01/84). [Curiouser and curiouser!] 10:40:31 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

Very Interesting Ideas!!! I was thinking that the Software world was the progenitor of the ideas for FUD and Vaporware, etc. Now I am thinking that we just came up with the descriptive words and not the actual problems. History is a great thing to know. I need to read this book! Edison's World. Lately I've been reading a biography of Thomas Edison, one of history's great tinkerers. (I recommend the book: Edison by... [Freedom To Tinker] 10:36:48 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

User-centred design for web designers. Peter-Paul Koch discusses user centered design, in the language of a web developer. This article provides a simple, no-jargon, introduction to the importance and benefits of "client-centred design". To quote: Unfortunately there is no general rule for the task of... [Column Two] 8:42:05 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

An Introduction to XML for Knowledge Managers. Well, I am pleased to announce that Standards Australia has released my new supplement: An Introduction to XML for Knowledge Managers I've written this supplement to help implementers to get a handle on how XML can assist in their knowledge... [Column Two] 8:34:27 AM    trackback []     Articulate []