On déménage !

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À noter que les anciens fils ne seront plus mis à jour.

9:07:27 PM    

What a long time of preparation for just a 15 minutes speach ! Anyway, it is done now ! You can read this presentation, entitled Community as place : from a local perspective.

The journey was not only for this short speach... I was able to meet researchers and practitioners in community development, mostly from the USA - members of the Community Development Society. Knowing a bit more on this rich network should open doors and ways of collaborations between the Quebec's network and this one.

It was also my last participation as a member of the board of International Association for Community Development where I was elected in 1999, at the Edinburg Conference. No more a member of the board but still active on different projects : a Digest project; a North-American Conference, for 2004; some help on the 2005 Conference in Yaounde, Cameroun... So, I'll keep in touch with these charming people I met a few times around the Globe during the last five years : Edinburg (Scotland), Montreal (Quebec, Canada), Rotorua (New-Zealand), Cleveland (Mississippi, USA) and Ithacca (N-Y, USA).

9:54:01 PM    

Statistiques d'adoption de la gestion de la connaissance au Canada. Une étude fort intéressante de Statistique Canada: La gestion des connaissances en pratique au Canada, 2001 [AmeliorAction - Le Carnet]

Une parution qui amenait un commentaire critique d'un lecteur canadien

Speaking as a Canadian, it is hard not to feel somewhat dismayed by the
report.  Of note is the fact that the word "community" (let alone community
of practice) does not appear once in the document.  Further, on page 13,
the study says that "almost every practitioner ascribed the responsibility
for their knowledge management practices to managers or executives", from
which the report intuits the "importance of leadership to KM" rather than
denoting the lack of ownership in KM programs.  Leadership was the top KM
practice and Knowledge Codification was second from the top.

For me, this report implies that neither Statistics Canada, nor the
departments they surveyed really *get* next-generation KM.  Am I being too
harsh?  Do they simply have a different definition of KM? [com-prac]

10:20:51 PM    

I finally managed to finish a first draft of the text I wanted to write for the IACD board who have to brush an international landscape of the community development practices, at the end of this month in Hungary.

Made it in English... cause it is easier than write it in French than translate it !

8:41:01 AM    

It's been a while since I drop a line here... a real line I mean.

And it is quite amazing to look behind to see where I was a month ago... or two. This is, it was at least, the idea of an english page on this blog : to summerize the last period, have a zoom-out on the production of the last month.. or two.

Already the end (almost) of january ! Last december I was planning some readings in KM for the holiday but, having a friend home from Toronto who is more habilitated than me in the Unix and computers... It gave me the audace to download and install Movable Type on teh Unix server of our ISP.

The installation was so fluent... I could'nt resist the idea of knitting a few directories and hypothetical blogs for friends, as a new year's present ! So I worked (my wife would say like a slave) with enthousiasm to launch a collective blog, with some individual ones... made a PDF How to guide and a webmaster blog to follow the implementation... Four out of some 10-12 propositions were retreived par the proposees... Not a bad record ! Probably I chose the good ones !

I am thinking of a second wave, where I will ask to the 200 subscribers of the RQIIAC list... How many will answer ? We'll see.

Form the moment I am searching for the best "kit" for newcomers : MT blog + newsreader... Been discussing the comparative appeal of different products, most of them being in pretty hot development : Newsgator, Syndirella,  Hotsheet, Amphetadesk, Aggie...

And I changed the Radio's stylesheet of my blog... Thanks to Brian Bell ! It gave me a few more hints on CSS.

On another front, I'll be working during next weeks on the mapping of data from the last census in Canada (for my local neighbourhood).

9:34:00 PM    

Titles only, though. You'll still have to visit the site to get the full post goodness! RSS feed now available [31 Days - Ed Bilodeau Weblog]

8:49:04 PM    

Found this article titled "The role of social capital in collaborative learning." Isn't that what we do in this crazy space? [Blogging Alone]

Here another page coming from New Zealand. From the same Blogging Alone (Hey, I'm just catching on the blink to Bowling Alone  !!) that gave me the pointer toward the Framework for the measurement of the social capital in New Zealand. It's not enough to retreive and store the URL... I should read this paper !

1:53:34 PM    

De la part de C. Kimble, un message envoyé à deux listes que je prend la liberté de reproduire ici car il alimente de belle façon le débat sur la nature des réseaux de carnets / From C. Kimble, a message sent to two lists adding to the debate on the nature of the weblogs' network communications

In a previous message to com-prac@yahoogroups.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/com-prac/message/2713

I made some observations about the speed at which an article that Paul Hildreth and I had written
http://informationr.net/ir/8-1/paper142.html
had been picked up by blogs and asked the question:

> Has anybody else noticed this happening before or have I just been
> missing the obvious (or am I simply missing the point of blogs?)
>
> I am really quite surprised at how quickly an idea can spread. Does
> anybody have any thoughts on the role of blogs in communities of
> practice and/or KM?

This prompted a few replies both here and elsewhere, some of which I thought might be of interest. For me, they also raised a new question (see the end of this message).

The first item of interest came from a blog by Gilles Beauchamp:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0101569/categories/gillesEnglishCorner/
This contained a reference to a presentation from Joe Katzman, Queen's
University, Kingston, Canada. http://business.queensu.ca/kbe/docs/blogs.pdf
The presentation deals with the issue of blogs, KM and CoPs directly. It contains an overview of blogs, a review of some of the problems of achieving a successful Knowledge Management implementations, some observations on the requirements for supporting CoPs and blogs and concludes with some interesting comments on "boundary spanners"

The second comes from Lilia Efimova at http://www.knowledgeboard.com/ who suggests an article by John Hiler
http://www.microcontentnews.com/articles/tippingblog.htm called "How Weblogs Can Turn an Idea into an Epidemic". The article describes a similar experience to my own and again makes some observations about how blogs can act as "connectors" between groups of people.

On a personal note, I thought that the observations about the role that blogs play in crossing boundaries were quite interesting and had a number of resonances with the role of boundary objects that Paul and I have observed in some of our previous papers, e.g. Communities of Practice: Going Virtual

http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~kimble/research/13kimble.pdf 

Does anybody else have any thoughts on this?

Chris Kimble
Department of Computer Science, University of York,
Home: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/~kimble
MIS group: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/mis/

12:30:21 AM    

McGee's Musings is a good finding : the pointer to the Serious Instructional Tech PDF but also other finding on the same topic : Sveiby Knowledge Management, with his Toolkit in addition to his text on  Building Horizontal Companies - The Job KM has Come to Finish. Thanks Stephen.

Weblogs along with News Aggregators make my daily browse so much faster. I still spend the same amount of time but have increased the number of sources in my daily browse by what may be a factor of 10.

Weblogs, knowledge management, and communities of practice.

Weblogs and Communities of Practice (pdf). Presentation about weblogs and how they fit into knowledge management and the concept of communities of practice. [Serious Instructional Technology]

This offers a good, executive level overview of what weblogs are, and why they matter in the context of knowledge management. [McGee's Musings] [Blogging Alone]

5:43:37 PM