categories: Personal Stuff, Weblog Technology Stuff

KM Europe 2003 - Links and Notes - Thanks elearningpost

Headshift: KM Europe 2003.

Headshift: KM Europe 2003

In-depth writeup on KM Europe 2003. Apart from notes on the key presentations (Dave Snowden Verna Allee, Sam Marshalll, etc.) there are also links to downloadable conference presentations and other articles on the web.

[elearningpost] comment [] 176 8:26:44 AM G!.

categories: Friends & Extended Family, Personal Stuff, Entertainment

FACING FEAR - FACADES AND GLIMPSES OF REALITY

I love the line in this post about how Kevin's mother might find out exactly who he really is....

This is fear!

Who else would I not really want to know this?  Most everyone that you want some sort of facade or some sort of personal privacy? 

On the one hand, Mothers (and wives, kids, ex-lovers, friends, co-workers, etc) have some level of intimate relationship with you.  They know a lot about you and a lot about your quirks and talents.

On the other hand, they know too much.  And now they can find out more and connect pieces together.

For anyone who is not living a life of total integrity and alignment within and without, this is a problem - in other words IT'S A PROBLEM FOR ALL OF US.

Until we face our fears and realize that most people are more concerned about themselves and the way they come across than about you.  So maybe it is just your mother... Or your wife... or your kids...

HMMM no solution -

mom finds out about blog. I've always ranted about how there are two people that no one wants to have access to their digital presentation of self: mom and boss. Apparently, The Onion concurs.... [zephoria]

comment [] 175 8:24:26 AM G!.

categories: Personal Stuff, Entertainment

Abstract Ideas provoke response rather than representational ideas

Great cartoon: Girl Dancing - Audience watching - everyone with a thought bubble thinking different thoughts about the meaning...

perception and abstract representation. One of my professors presented this New Yorker cartoon in his lecture. It's *brilliant*. What does it mean to present an abstract representation of an idea and have others "read" that idea? When does conveying something work and when does it not? What are the implications of such?... [zephoria]

comment [] 174 8:07:49 AM G!.

categories: Professional Stuff, Weblog Technology Stuff

The hidden cost of going virtual | CNET News.com

From e-mail to groupware and the wireless Web, advances in information technology make it easier to disseminate information within an enterprise and make it possible for far-flung employees to work together efficiently.

Organizations now can form teams with little regard for the physical location of the members and even take advantage of time differences to extend service hours and push jobs to completion sooner.

And a number of studies indicate that virtual teams (teams in which most members cannot regularly meet face to face) embrace technology quickly and use it to disseminate information more efficiently than traditional teams.

But a recently published research paper by scholars at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and two other universities suggests that virtual teams may extract an unexpected price: People who add their hard-won knowledge to a common pool may become alienated from the organization and even fear that they are sowing the seeds for their own replacement.

After all, says Stanford's Margaret Neale, if your knowledge--not to mention the tricks and tips it has taken years to learn--is deposited in a database for all to access, does the organization still need you? "It's a real fear," Neale said. "Technology has the potential to destabilize the relationship between organizations and employees."

Also a serious concern: Employees working in virtual teams are, to a certain extent, isolated from their colleagues. Although they may have contact with other employees of their organizations, they don't spend much time with them. In this situation, the virtual worker loses opportunities to learn from his or her closest colleagues. In effect, there's a double penalty. The virtual worker perceives herself as giving away her knowledge but not having the chance to "replenish her own reservoir of knowledge" and thus feels even more vulnerable, Neale said.

Employees working in virtual teams are, to a certain extent, isolated from their colleagues.

Neale, the Business School's John G. McCoy-Banc One Corporation Professor of Organizations and Dispute Resolution, collaborated with Terri L. Griffith of the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University and John E. Sawyer of the Alfred Lerner College of Business & Economics at the University of Delaware. Their paper, "Virtualness and Knowledge in Teams: Managing the Love Triangle of Organizations, Individuals, and Information Technology," was published in the MIS Quarterly in June 2003.

Unlike much of their earlier work, the Love Triangle paper is not based directly on experimental work. Instead, it is based on years of study (sometimes separately, sometimes together) of virtual teams, including fieldwork, by the authors.

To better understand the researchers' argument, it's important to realize that there is more than one kind of team and more than one kind of knowledge. A purely virtual team is one whose members never (or almost never) meet. A traditional team works in the same office or building and often meets face to face. And a hybrid team might consist of a few remote employees and a majority of employees based in the home office, or a team that works separately some of the time and together the rest. Since the lines separating each type of team are somewhat blurry, the researchers often speak of teams as being "more virtual" or "less virtual"; and their research shows that hybrid teams now make up the majority of organizational teams.

Because they are the most geographically diverse, teams that are more virtual may be able to draw upon a wider variety of information sources. Team members from similar backgrounds or social networks tend to have redundant sources of knowledge, while virtual team members (who tend to be from different backgrounds or networks) tend to be more complementary.

Because virtual teams use technology well, they are likely to share explicit knowledge with the rest of the organization better than traditional teams.

Individual knowledge, the researchers say, lies on a continuum from explicit knowledge, which can be expressed very concretely; through implicit knowledge, which is known but hard to explain; to tacit knowledge, which is developed through experience and social contact. By its nature, tacit knowledge is very difficult to transfer.

Because virtual teams use technology well, they are likely to share explicit knowledge with the rest of the organization better than traditional teams. But tacit knowledge is difficult to share without direct contact, which means that virtual team members will have a harder time sharing their tacit knowledge with teammates and learning from their team members. And that leads to isolation and frustration.

Identifying a problem is easier than fixing it. But the researchers recommend a number of strategies to improve knowledge transfer with virtual teams, including:

• Verbalize rules, terminology and descriptions.

• Give team members access to tools that support highly interdependent work, such as advanced groupware or video conferencing.

• Make it easier for virtual team members to learn from colleagues on other teams and other organizations by, for example, setting up mentoring programs or encouraging team members to attend conferences.

• Develop cross-team groups focused on particular skills that will keep isolated team members exposed to knowledge from the rest of the organization.

Click here for the Stanford Graduate School of Business information portal.

© Copyright 2003 Stanford University--Graduate School of Business

comment [] 173 8:01:52 AM G!.

categories: Personal Stuff, News, Analysis, and Commentary

Concept of "Preference Maps" in ranking information sources for Knowledge Mapping...

Have not posted in a while - variety of computing and personal issues in the way.

Sitting here reading news on the aggregator, and I came across this blog entry - It reminded me of the way that I've started to use Goldmine software's Org chart function.  This function is an interesting one where you can assign people to groups but unlike straightforward group assignment, as you search through a few people, the groups they are members of accumulate in the org char list.

Implicit Preference Maps

Now what does this have to do with preference mapping?  My intuition linked them immediately as I read this, and I guess it depends on whether your groups/orgs are affiliation-based groupings connected to interests or to companies or schools, etc.  When you think consciously about how you receive your information and who you turn to for expert advice, these real-world connections in your personal social network help to shape your implicit preference map.

Meta-Preference Maps

In other words, we're back to the bow tie map of amazon books.  If you are deep in one side of the bow tie, then you're preference map will be biased very differently from the other side of the tie, or the connecting knot in the middle!  This suggests Meta-Preference Maps.

 

================

Whose personality do you want today?. l.m.orchard commented regarding the using Bayesian analysis on news. In fact, as soon as I saw it I remembered, I had read his piece already. It was probably his writing that triggered my initial interest in using a Bayesian classifier in K-Collector.

Re-reading that piece I got an interesting different angle since his approach was to blend a Bayesian classifier with his news aggregator to try and have it prioritize news he would find interesting and not to categorize it by topic. I think this is a much more scalable task, from a K-Collector perspective, than what Jon is experimenting with. I think the efforts of training a system-wide recognizer to differentiate between topics would be too much for most users of the product to bear.

Our product roadmap for K-Collector already includes allowing users to personalize the system. For example we think that people should be able to say which feeds they think are relevant on different topics. Notice that this is a much very granular relationship since it means that I can say "Matt Mower is a real expert on the topic sock puppets" but that this says nothing about how relevant I am on "dating." or any other topic. Indeed each user might rate the exact same sources differently over a wide range of topics.

What might be interesting is if people could "share" and "subscribe to" preference maps. As a new user of the system you might not really know who is relevant on any particular topic. But imagine you worked with David Weinberger, Phil Wolff, or Dan Gillmor. If you knew them and trusted their judgement you could pick one of their preference maps as a starting point and immediately gain a usseful insight into the data as it is structured by topic. You might even switch between personalities to get more perspective!

Thanks to l.m.'s piece I am now wondering also about whether a Bayesian classifier might be more use in helping users to establish their own preference maps about which content is most relevant to them.
[Curiouser and curiouser!]

comment [] 172 7:06:23 AM G!.