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Tuesday, June 10, 2003 |
The milk meets the cream - The PEI A list meets the newbies - Now you will know the difference
10:54:54 PM 
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I am a slob. I can't stop being a slob on my own. If I was an alcoholic, I would not be able to change my life alone either. Is getting fit merely being "disciplined" or does it need the help of a community?
Eireann Rigby is working to create a supporting community here on PEI to help us find the help to take charge of our eatiung and exercise. Have a look at how UFIT works.
9:45:44 PM
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Thanks Dave
SOCIAL NETWORKING, SOCIAL SOFTWARE AND THE FUTURE OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT.
I've been trading comments and e-mails with Gary Lawrence Murphy at Teledyn about the current craze over Social Software and Network Enablement, and how that plays into the current sorry state of Knowledge Management. A big problem with KM is that, like the six blind men feeling different parts of the elephant, the term has come to mean many different things to different people, and hence nothing at all:
- Academics: KM is anything that allows us to do something better in business than we can do without it
- Consultants: KM is an aspect of business process improvement
- IT People: KM is any software that concerns itself at least vaguely with databases or content management systems
- Librarians: KM is the new name for what special librarians have always done
- HR People: KM is the process surrounding non-classroom learning curricula
In most organizations KM is epitomized by the corporate intranet, the extranet, community-of-practice tools, sales force automation tools, customer relationship management tools, data mining tools, decision support tools, databases purchased from outside vendors, and sometimes business research and analysis. In other words, it's certain specialized technologies and information processing roles, with a thin wrapper of 'knowledge creating' and 'knowledge-sharing' processes.
Most of the organizations that have implemented KM bemoan their people's inability to find stuff, the lack of demonstrable productivity improvement, the complexity of the technology, and the absence of significant reusable 'best practice' content.
Now along comes Social Networking and Social Software, also with its adherents from academia, consultancies, and IT. Beneath the torrent of hype and theory, it may reveal an important truth about KM, business, and how we learn: Social networks can provide the essential context needed to make knowledge sharing possible, valuable, efficient and effective .
What are 'social networks'? They are the circles in which we make a living and connect with other people. They transcend strict delineation between personal and business (there's often overlap between the two). They transcend organizational boundaries and hierarchies (we often trust and share more with people outside our companies, and outside our business units, than those inside, and often get better value from the exchange to boot). We are beginning to suspect that the essential yet elusive lesson of the PC is also the essential lesson for KM: It's all about portability and connectivity, not about processing power or content.
If we were to 'reinvent' KM as, say, Social Network Enablement , what would change?
- Intranet as connector and link harvester: The intranet would become a people-to-people connector instead of a content repository. It would become a 'link harvester', scanning all traffic across it and dynamically identifying connections to people and their knowledge. New tools would be needed to allow such functionality.
- Decentralized content, with blog as surrogate for the individual: Content would shift from centralized, shared databases to personally- or team-owned databases, journals and stories, where the owner(s) provide essential context. (See my post on The Weblog as Filing Cabinet ). Each individual's subscribable, personally-indexed Weblog would be a surrogate for the individual when s/he's not available personally.
- Decentralized security, organizational boundaries blurred: Organizational boundaries become irrelevant. It doesn't matter whether the person you are sharing with is a work colleague, a supplier, customer, friend or advisor, an individual or a team, inside or outside the company. You share what you know with those you trust, the same way regardless. Security would be provided at the individual level, not managed by the enterprise. The same way employees know what hard-copy documents can be shared with whom, they set up subscription access to their blog categories correspondingly.
- Greatly enhanced weblog functionality, emphasis on access: Today's blogs are not nearly enough to fully enable social networks. They need much more connectivity functionality. A user should be able to call up a visual of their own network, or the network of expertise corresponding to a particular subject. The tool that does this would operate much like a search engine except it would retrieve people (and links to people) instead of documents. It would also have to aggregate various means of access to those people: e-mail, voice-mail, video and whiteboard, meeting scheduling, IM, weblog subscriptions and commenting, and new means of access just being developed. And it would need some mechanism to create a 'biography' of the user by automatically summarizing the total content of their weblog.
- Enhanced organizational change functionality: The exhaust from the increased connectivity could be browsed and canvassed to identify organizational change opportunities. Popularity indexes could pre-sage emerging business issues needing management attention, and could be used as a key part of the performance evaluation and reward process, and to identify de facto organizational thought leaders and potential strong recruits. It could incorporate Tipping Point functionality to propagate important ideas, Power Law analysis to identify and spell employees suffering from 'network overload' , and perhaps even new "Network Traffic Analyses" to identify communication logjams and disconnects. Intriguing, and perhaps a bit scary.
Four important unanswered questions:
- What role can Social Network Enablement and social software play in enhancing individual and organizational learning?
- How do you measure and reward contributions to a network (a) by full-time knowledge workers (people in the organization, like researchers and help desk staff whose sole value is contributing to the network) and (b) by network 'players' outside the organization?
- How do organizations equip and foster networks without unduly controlling their actions and membership and therefore crushing them?
- How do we capture summaries and abstracts of organizational conversations that occur in other than written form (voice-mail, teleconferences and meetings), so that the blog record of networks is complete?
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SOCIAL NETWORKING ENABLEMENT IN ACTION: AN EXAMPLE
The diagram at the top of this post is repeated below, to save scrolling.
Suppose you are the person in the lower right corner of this chart, the CFO of Company Y, and you need to find out about a proposed change to the tax code for Research Tax Credits. Before Social Network Enablement (SNE), you would have typed the term into the intranet search engine, checked the public IRS website or some purchased tax service your company buys, or just picked up the phone and called Jan, your accountant who works for Company X. Alas, Jan just left on a three-week vacation.
Since you've implemented SNE, however, everything gets easier. You key the term into your Expertise Finder and up pops the picture below. As you expected, Jan appears (the person depicted at the bottom of the Company X oval) but that's just the start. This Expertise Network diagram shows only the experts and connections related specifically to the subject of Research Tax Credits. It tells you that the R&D department of your company has some information on tax credits on their team blog, which they've posted to the R&D Community of Practice intranet site. It also tells you that Jan has access to this intranet site, and that this intranet site subscribes to Jan's Tax Credit blog category. It also identifies two other people at the accounting firm that have expertise on this topic, since Jan is unavailable, and a customer of both your company and your accountant, who outsources his R&D to your company and qualifies for a 'flow-through' of the Research Tax Credit and hence is very knowledgeable about how these credits work. And a supplier who sells a Tax Credit Analyzer to your accountants, and a tax credit expert advisor to your accountants who, it turns out, went to high school with you and might cough up the knowledge you want for free, are also identified.
So you have lots of alternatives. In Jan's absence you can phone or e-mail or IM any of six other identified experts, or subscribe to their blogs, or buy the Tax Credit Analyzer yourself (knowing your accountants thought it good enough to buy), or tap into the R&D group's CoP tool or the accountants' extranet. Problem solved.
 | [How to Save the World]
9:37:02 PM
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When I feel attacked I recall the wisdom of Bugs Bunny - (Thanks Wikipedia)
He is noted for his feuds with Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, Daffy Duck, and even Wile E. Coyote, who usually takes on the Roadrunner. Almost invariably, Bugs comes out the winner in these conflicts, because that is in his nature. This is especially obvious in films directed by Chuck Jones, who likes to pit "winners" against "losers". Worrying that audiences would lose sympathy for an aggressor who always won, Jones found the perfect way to make Bugs sympathetic in the films by having the antagonist repeatedly bully, cheat or threaten Bugs in some way. Thus offended, (usually 3 times) Bugs would often state "Of course, you realize this means war" (a line which Jones noted was taken from Groucho Marx) and the audience gives Bugs silent permission to inflict his havoc. When Bugs meets other characters who are also "winners", however, like Cecil the Turtle or, in WWII, the Gremlin, his record is rather dismal; his overconfidence tends to work against him.
8:33:53 PM
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Some of my readers - you know who you are - have complained about too many charts today "Pictoral Masturbation" was a term used
For you - One of my favourite pics from the Reverse Cowgirl
6:02:45 PM
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The forces for cultural stability or equilibrium are very powerful (more graphics from the Cultural Creatives) The closer, you get to the boundary, the powerful the response. What we are seeing today are two main responses to what can be described as Modernism - our bigger is better mindset which is the prevailing world culture today. It is what the Fundamentalists hate in the Arab world and the Kids hate in Seattle.
Ray and Anderson's thesis is that Fundamentalism and the Cultural Creatives are involved in a titanic struggle. The Traditionalists and Fundamentalists to find a mythic past when women knew their place and where God though his agent man rules and controls the world and the Creatives who seek an integration with nature and who embrace the individual aspirations of all people.
The last time we had this type of split was during the reformation which drove a century of religious violence before settling in the birth of the Modernist world.
12:04:29 PM
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Here is a graphic from the Cultural Creatives. It shows the passage from equilibrium to transformation. We see the signs or harbingers of change as the swings in the state of equilibrium increase in amplitude. Instability in weather, in markets, in mood in any modality are all signs of impending system change. Then come the point of "criticality" or the Tipping Point. You die, fall back or breakthrough.
Example - Air Canada's response to the discount threat. Will AC die, fall back and die or breakthrough. This is the choice we all have at these times. Will your organization see the turbulence for what it is - a harbinger of structural change - or ignore it and merely try harder to keep on the old track. Will Robin and I miss the signs of what Cancer offers us or also fall back. Not small stuff when you take it off the abstract and think of your own life!
11:55:54 AM
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A simply brilliant website that I found by accident while seeking to find a link to "Art" after the Language Revolution. It give the viewer a sense of the deep mystery of how a person might discover the symbols of his beliefs and his people as he was initiated into adulthood
10:50:19 AM
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Understanding Cosmic Creativity. Elisabet Sahtouris on shifts in humanity's collective consciousness:
We must collectively recognize what western science is only now discovering: that humanity and the rest of our living world are embedded within a far greater and fundamentally different reality than is encompassed by our current scientific worldview or paradigm.
We are replacing the view of a non-living material/ electromagnetic universe with a greater non-physical reality of conscious intelligence as the never-ending source of scientifically known energy and mattera cosmic source that has been known in many human cultures from ancient times.
It is fundamentally conscious and creative, transforming or transmuting into material universes and other creative ventures. As Nobel laureate biologist George Wald of Harvard put it, "The stuff of the universe is mind stuff."
Once this greater, consciously intelligent reality is acknowledged as existing both within and around us, we will recognize that we collectively co-create our experienced daily reality from our individual consciousness fields, from our collective beliefs about reality, including the belief that what we see or measure with instruments is all there is.
[Ming the Mechanic]
Right on!
Robin has been suffering a great deal from the side effects of chemo. In desparation she has gone to an energy practitoner here on PEI. Within days she is feeling better. Quackery? Mind over matter? I don't think so. If you take an electro cardiagram - you will see that we have a field of energy. Hold your palm up to another person's and you will sense the field. At dinner with friends, see how close you can get to all of the party one by one. You will find that you both have a field. You may also find that this field has collapsed with the one that you love.
I think that this is connected to intention. When we deeply wish for something - it often happens. Our thinking creates our world.
Homo Noeticus is a term I heard first from Caroline Myss. HN would be a group of people who are aware of these energetic powers and who can strt to use them consciously. She thinks that such a group may the the next step in evolution. I wonder? What was it like to be the first humans to have an effective language? It was only 45,000 years ago. What happened? A huge breakout in art, culture and innovation. It was also the end of Neanderthal.
Does such a group exist already? I think so. How big is this group? Maybe 50 million according to the book the Cultural Creatives.
What is holding us back? We are not linked - we are anti group anyway. Maybe blogging and social software may help?
10:30:46 AM
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If Canada is getting older - who are the next generation that will have to shoulder the burden? As I read this article in the Globe this weekend it also struck me that we are in for a huge shift in values. What does this mean? It means more than a shift in consumer behaviour. It means an earthquake in politics, in how we practice religion. What the new values need is a way of getting organized. When this occurs, watch out!
"Canadians in their 20s are the smallest group of young adults in decades, accounting for only 13 per cent of the population. They have abandoned the country for the city in swarms, completing an urbanization that now has half the population living in the greater metropolitan areas of Vancouver, Edmonton-Calgary, Toronto and Montreal.
They take on the traditional trappings of adulthood about a decade later than their parents did: the average age to move away from home is now 27 years old, and it is more often young men who are staying.
They are a highly educated lot: In 30 years, the proportion of Canadians in their 20s with a university degree has more than doubled, to 18 per cent in 2001, from 8 per cent in 1971. The number of twentysomethings in school has increased by more than 50 per cent, and the largest gains have been made by young women, raising questions both about the future nature of work and the future prospects of young men.
Those without skills or education find themselves outside the walls of Canada's new knowledge economy, trapped in low-paid jobs and financially unable to start adult lives or even find the money to upgrade their job-market qualifications.
They are not voting. Just 21 per cent of 20s Canadians marked a ballot in the last federal election — a harbinger, political scientists warn, of the generation's political behaviour as it ages. This is the result not of apathy, experts suggest, but ignorance and alienation: There are those who don't know and don't care how the system works, and those who do know and think it works very badly.
What is clear is that Canadians in their 20s do not see traditional political institutions as the route to change or progress. Raised in the years since the Charter, they have a higher trust for the courts than for the federal government. They put their faith in what they see working: While politicians have stalled on issues that young people support — from gay rights to the decriminalization of marijuana — the courts have stepped in and made rulings.
They are the most likely to believe that the route to change lies with advocacy groups, not political parties. They are global in outlook. with the Internet as their public square.
They are also less involved in another traditional institution: the church. In 2001, 21.4 per cent of 20s said they had no religion, compared to 6.4 per cent in 1971. If they do attend a religious service, it is far less frequently than their counterparts of an earlier generation, and the deity they worship is less likely to be Christian — a result of the country's increasing ethnic diversity. The Muslim faith, for instance, wasn't even counted separately in the 1971 census; while its followers are still a relatively small number, it has made a leap since then to become the second most reported religion among 20s.
Just two decades ago — the point at which the Statistics Canada began tracking visible minorities through the census — the percentage of people in their 20s who belonged to a visible minority group was less than 5 per cent, roughly the same as for the whole population. In 2001, the number has tripled to more than 16 per cent, compared to 13 per cent of all Canadians. And their composition is different: the largest group among visible minorities in their 20s are South Asians; the largest for the population as a whole are Chinese. A sign of Canada's now varied origins: In 2001, the census tracked more than 200 individual countries; in 1971, it asked about only 60.
The growing diversity of 20s, and the fact that they are likely to live in the most multi-ethnic centres — the nation's cities and universities — has led to a steady increase in the number of mixed couples. The census looks only at intermarriage by race, not by ethnicity; but one in 20 young Canadian couples fits even this narrower definition. Mixed couples are more likely to have a university education, and are most often someone from a visible minority group married to a white Canadian. In Vancouver, the city with the highest rate of intermarriage, the census puts the number of mixed couples at about 13 per cent of all pairs in their 20s.
And for the most part, these are not choices made in adversity: These couples are proud of the unions that are creating post-ethnic identities, and relatively free of concern for their children's futures. Said one groom on the eve of his wedding: "My mother cannot see the country that I do."
One in six Canadians in their 20s are immigrants, and one in five are the children of at least one immigrant parent. More than half of the second-generation immigrants, as they are known, live in Ontario. By education, they are some of the most successful Canadians of their generation, pushed by working-class parents who were determined to see a better life for their children.
What is remarkable is how quickly immigrants buy into the Canadian way of life." Globe and Mail
8:58:14 AM
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This aging of the population is a global issue for developed nations. The one exception the USA. Here large scale immigration and high birthrates for immigrants will keep the age distribution more like a pyramid. But the US will become increasingly a Latin and Catholic country with a very large Asian segment. It will no longer be so focused on white and black.
As the developed nations creak with an aged population - who will pay the taxes? Who will do the work? Who will raise the next generation? We are going to have to change our ideas about aging and life. When you look at the grapgh, it may seem that we have lots of time. The system tips in 2020. But in fact we have only now to plan and to act as when the system tips, it will be too late
8:03:58 AM
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We are addicted to drugs. Drug use is the fastest growing aspect of healthcare spending. The users? Mainly seniors. Why? Because they expect to get a presrciption when they go to the doctor. Many are on so called lifestyle drugs to lower chloresterol, to help with hyper tension an so on. My mother in law is a typical she has no heart disease, she is 78 and yet she has a long series of medications aimed at preventing this type of issue.Why? Becuase she asks for them and the doctor prescribes to get her out of her office. Drug use will exceed all other health care spending areas in the next 10 years if unchecked.
7:56:30 AM
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With no reform to the healthcare system and with no rethink about hwo we die - we will be overwhelemed.
This is the normal skew on health care spending as we age in the current system.
7:45:30 AM
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We all know that as a population we are getting older. We nod when we hear this and then get on with our lives. But I have found that when I see graphics about this trend, I start to see that we will live through a revolution. Never before in the history of any species has the population distribution been skewed this way. It will be worst in Notrth America in Canada and in Atlantic Canada where there is so little immigration.
Yet in a year when many Atalantic provinces go to the polls - do we hear a word about this issue? No In the next few posts I will show pou how this will effect us. Then judge whether this is an issue of importance or not.
7:41:57 AM
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© Copyright 2003 Robert Paterson.
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