Web Logs, the Place to go When You Have a Need to Know Blogging Alone discovers a vibrant and complex information ecosystem just beneath the formal org chart. To learn more I ask four customers of FM Radio with enhanced SocialDynamX what they are doing when they are doing knowledge work. What most of them told us was they search, acquire, store, retrieve, combine, buy, sell, transfer and share knowledge each day. Management practices for understanding knowledge work have been built using the factory metaphor where you assemble knowledge from raw materials. What we are finding is that a better metaphor would be a knowledge bazaar. These new discovers will lead to answers for these new questions.
- What is the difference between the consumer and the producer in the knowledge creation process in the bazaar?
- What draws people to be interested in, excited about and motivated to share knowledge and build on their ideas of others?
- What are the conditions underwhich people choose to share their knowledge and become a knowledge trader in the bazaar?
Companies face an information explosion. In order to survive some are adopting flexibility in a rapidly changing market place while others are going extinct. The company reorg is a signature of the latter where faced with challenges they simply shift the job descriptions of a few individuals and call that management. For survival new strategies are emerging, a fundamental rethinking of how companies process information in order to support good decisions.
For example, David Snowden from IBM Cynefin Center for Organizational Complexity(pdf) is trying out new methods of decision support and knowledge management. He is working to develop the Cynefyn framework with the goal of discovering the salient features of decision support for foreign policy and corporate decision making in complex and chaotic situations. Using both research and practice Snowden's work challenges the last great management movement namely knowledge or intellectual capital management which emphasized the conversion of tacit to explicit knowledge. If we could just write all we know down we would be ok assumes that everything has order that can be communicated explicitly.
The Cynefin model challenges this assumption and starts with the assumption not all things are based on order. He divides the information space into four domains but he does this in two steps. First consider that the information space is divided into ordered and unordered. Second the ordered is divided into the known and the knowable. It is clear that certain things can be known and taught to others. The ordered and know is the domain of best practices. Secondly, some things are ordered and not known. These are called complicated systems because we individually may not know but with enough resources complicated systems could be figured out with help from experts. For this reason Snowden says the ordered and knowable is the domain of experts. I may not be able to assemble an airplane but with expert help I could learn how even if I had to start by taking it apart one piece at a time and putting it back together.
The ordered is where past knowledge and human capital management focused their efforts. This continues today with exciting new content management technologies like the Wiki. There is a need for the conversion of tacit to explicit knowledge and today the Wiki is being used by groups of knowledge workers with a common goal. The Wikipedia has over 130,550 articles and still growing. The Wiki is becoming a natural fit for the domain of experts where they can collectively aggregate their tacit knowledge and argue over how best it should be explicitly recorded.
Like the ordered space Snowden's un-order space is also divided into two domains, the complex and the chaotic. Knowledge work is at times complex and at times very chaotic. Cynefin has identified a key fact that complex spaces are unknowable but patterns emerge. Successful decision makers that work in complex and unknowable spaces often report that they make decisions based on instinct or gut feeling. Snowden has used the Cynefen framework to verify the gut feel axiom and further developed practices that can be used to improve the ability of decision makers to recognize emerging patterns.
For David Snowden "Knowledge is both a thing and a socially constructed contextually situated phenomenon, both conscious and unconscious, both universal and relative - in different dynamic context." Today Snowden is discovering the value of story telling to communicate dense properties that help to identify patterns in complex information space. Personal publishing technology like Web logs are being called on as a vehicle of delivery for storytelling in complex digital media information space.
This new awarness of the social context of organizations is becoming a powerful force that is shaping the process and product of knowledge work. Jack Schofield writes in the Gaurdian about what he witnessed at last months O'Reilly Emerging Technologies conference in Santa Clara, California.
If there is a new type of social software emerging, it is clearly emerging from the blogging world. Weblogs that started as simple collections of links rapidly developed into diary-like personal platforms, and many have already turned into group discussions, as members of a clique list one another on their blogrolls and leave comments on one another's blog. Links, Rss feeds and new protocols such as Trackback are increasing the number of connections between groups of peole and their blogs, creating a parallel universe that is already known as the blogsphere.
Web logs are a narrative form ideal for sharing knowledge about complex systems. Weblogs are today being used by healthcare decision makers in combination with the Cynefin framework. Knowledge work in web logs is growing within an ongoing social system where producers and consumers are one in the same. The community of web logs is made up of individuals who choose to participate in this knowledge creation process. These knowledge investments are valued in both market and non market returns by others in the community. The duality of the consumer as producer in a knowledge exchange community looks strikingly similar to the process of exchange described by H. Geertz in his writings about meaning and order in Moroccan society.
The search for information -- laborious, uncertain, complex, and irregular -- is the central experience of life in the bazaar, an unfolding reality its institutions at once create and respond to. Virtually every aspect of the bazaar economy reflects the fact that the primary problem facing the farmer, artisan, merchant, or consumer is not balancing options but finding out what they are. (Geertz 1978)
From this work we can address the questions raised at the beginning of this article. First like a game of chess where we are simultaneously producing and consuming entertaiment for each other in a knowledge bazaar the consumer is also a producer in the value creation process. Second, people are drawn to participate in the knowledge exchange of sharing that takes place in web logs because like in the bazaar the complex system of social relations and the currencies with which web loggers acquire and trade links reflect their pursuit of social as will as monetary gains. Like a bazaar, exchanges of knowledge in webblogging occurs across time with ongoing participation in the exchanges by its members ensures that no one exchange is truly independent from others, relationships form, communication takes place and reputation matters over time obligations emerge.
Finally, under what conditionings to individuals choose to participate in the knowledge exchange process is best answered by asking web loggers themselves. When we ask bloggers explain how others bloggers gained status in the blogging ecosystem by sharing their ideas with others who valued that knowledge. The affordances of web logs where each person owns their own page and others can't muck it up without permission ensures that first it is inexpensive to gain a reputation and second you get credit for creative contribution. Under these conditions the option of choosing weblogs as the market of choice for knowledge exchange is clearly seen by bloggers as being better than all other options available [via Ed Cone] to them at this time. What we are seeing is that when information is so freely available those that give it out most freely benefit more by becoming known as a place to go when you have a need to know.
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