Monday, April 24, 2006

What poets say about information management I recently started including the following lines from T.S. Eliot's "The Rock" in my work-email signature: "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?  Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"                                                    Fellow IBMer Lada Gorlenko took note and pointed me to LukeW's discussion of Dr. Weinberger's keynote at the IA Summit, about the data > information > knowledge > wisdom continuum. No sooner did I prepare to blog that than I ran into Kathy Sierra's piece on the same topic: Moving up the wisdom hierarchy. "And fortunately, even those focused on information architecture and information design often consider knowledge and understanding as well as information." (Kathy Sierra - Creating Passionate Users) [InfoDesign: Understanding by Design] Yep, it's a problem for us techy writers: it's easy to write about data (facts, procedures, requirements); harder to write about information; harder still to transmit knowledge; and wisdom? That comes with experience, and words are a poor substitute. 9:31:25 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

Offshoring redux? Interest in offshoring seems to be on the upswing: I've been contacted three times this year already to express my opinions or share what little knowledge I have on the topic. One was a peer review of a paper submitted for a special issue of the IEEE PCS magazine (no, I don't know the publication date); one was from a doc manager looking for information; another was from a student  writing her final project on offshoring. Here's another perspective on the topic: The World is Mega Uber Bloody Flat ... Friedman way underestimated it. Not that I didn't already believe I would be blown away by BarCampBangalore, but I had been told the same story time and time again that it was 'cheap and plentiful labor' that was coming out of India, and that the creative engineering efforts were happening in the Western world. Ha. Believing that will be that ethnocentric idea that leads to the dive of the North American economy. Far from being merely the rooms full of workhorse coding monkeys, performing the mundane tasks, the ideas coming out of BarCampBangalore are better than any I've heard at US camps. [::HorsePigCow:: life uncommon] Tara's saying what I've been avoiding telling anyone: technology workers in India and elsewhere are not just cheap labor: they're smart, they're motivated, and they are, to paraphrase Friedman, going to eat our lunch. And since China is buying up all our debt, it won't be long before we're working for all of them. 9:13:00 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

Not quite like being there. . . But since I can't be there I'm sure glad that some of my friends have created a blog just for me: Follow CHI 2006 through theotherchiblog.com. A few of us felt that CHI needed an unofficial blog. The official one does a great job of being the "official" voice. But we wanted something that we could have fun with - post things that were not very official. The blog is mostly an aggregator - aggregating conversation, pictures etc. But a few of us are posting. Go check it out. Its just for the conference, so a few days after CHI, we will kill the blog off! [Rashmi's Blog] Between the official and unofficial blogs and the flickr pool, it will almost, almost, be like I was there. Hey, someone grab me a proceedings DVD, eh? 9:02:35 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

© Copyright 2002-2006 Fred Sampson. Last update: 5/3/06; 12:00:41 PM.