Flash: Blogging Goes Corporate. Weblogs being the trend du jour, Macromedia attempts what may be a new type of marketing strategy: getting bloggers to push its products. By Farhad Manjoo. [Wired News]

Interesting article both about what Macromedia are doing (having their product community manager's create blogs on 3rd party sites) and also in what it says about product support.

It seemed to me that these managers are attempting to establish communities of practice with these products using the blog as a means to start the process.

The Wiki application I have chosen to start with is JSPWiki.  I chose this because it is, as the name implies, implemented as a Java Server Pages application.  Whilst I can still recall a little perl, I would much rather get involved in a Java project.

JSPWiki already provides an XMLRPC interface allowing other applications to interact with it.  SOAP may follow in the future.  It also provides some basic RSS capabilities so might be compatible with weblogging tools...

Here is an article about the new requirements for agents in multi-function contact centres.  It correctly identifies that new media such as text chat and email require greater skills on the part of agents (as well as offering more rewards for the dynamic and easily bored).

However the analysis concludes that training is the answer.  I wonder.

I'm not at all convinced about the value of training, especially in the case of contact centre agents (where scripting of responses is increasingly becoming impossible).  It is my belief that tacit knowledge is going to be important.

[Ref: Myers, C. & Davids, K, (1992). Knowing and doing: Tacit skill at work. Personnel Management, 24, 45-47] -- Does anyone have an online reference for this article?

CoP for Agents?  Do they exist in any organizations yet?

Here is an article I read recently (originally published 1995), written by JSB and Estee Solomon Gray.  This excellent paper is cited just about anywhere people discuss Communities of Practice (CoP) and rightly so.

It makes a number of key points:

• You can't build processes without the practices to implement them
• The most effective practices grow from the grassroots
• With groups, tacit knowledge exists in the distinct practices and relationships that emerge from working together over time
• Learning is less about absorbing information than it is about becoming part of a community
• Organisations are webs of participation
• You cannot compel enthusiam and commitment from knowledge workers

and critically,

"Only workers who choose to opt in -- who voluntarily make a committment to their colleagues -- can create a winning company.  When a company acknowledges the power of community, and adopts elegantly minimal processes that allow communities to emerge, it is taking a giant step towards the 21st century."

I'm interested in how communities work, what their lifecycles look like and in tools that facilitate them.  Especially I am interested in online communities.  At the moment I am looking at blogging tools such as Blogger and Radio, but I am also very interested in Wiki.

I think it will be interesting to see how these kinds of tools will fuse with the P2P world of Groove and PeerMetrics, learning management systems and the more formalized world of Knowledge management.

As a very quick and informal way of enabling communities to form I think Wiki takes some beating.  The low barrier to entry and "everyone can edit" philosophy seem, in my experience, very condusive to collaboration. However I have some concerns about the longterm viability of structures which grow in this fashion. 

The idea of page refactoring (re-editing pages to simplify them as the ideas and arguments expressed move towards agreement) as a means of keeping a Wiki fresh and relevant is a good one, but I have yet to be convinced that it actually works.

It's too early to say what I think about tools such as Radio for myself.  I'm not at sure who would read this, or why.  Hmmm...