Category: networks

Communities and Networks Connection Hotlists

spring buds by choconancy on FlickrNow that we are a couple of months into the “signal sharing” of the Communities and Networks Connection, I wanted to share the top posts people have clicked into on the site (courtesy of the magic of Tony Karrer).  I find that sometimes I am paying attention to the site, and other times it is off my radar. But when I look at the top hit list below, I recognize many of the posts as ones I have read, so for me, personally, there is resonance with what other people are finding interesting. And I find THAT interesting.

The following are the top posts in March from featured sources based on social signals, with a few annotations from posts that I found useful.  Notice how many are about Twitter!

  1. Twitter Compared to IM, Email and Forums– Collaborative Thinking, March 2, 2009
  2. Social Media ROI: Measuring the unmeasurable?– FreshNetworks, March 22, 2009
  3. How to use Twitter for PR– FreshNetworks, March 15, 2009
  4. Tom Vander Wall Nails My Sharepoint Experience– Full Circle, March 23, 2009
  5. Circling Around To Enterprise 2.0 Again– Collaborative Thinking, March 12, 2009
  6. Understanding Communities of Practice– Collaborative Thinking, March 6, 2009
  7. Crowdsource as a way to create a community– Library Clips, March 15, 2009
  8. Team-based CoPs compared to cross-functional CoPs– Library Clips, March 11, 2009  (John and I have been having fun in the comments and writing on many related things lately. I like this kind of “juice!”)
  9. CoP Series #6: Community Leadership in Learning– Full Circle, March 10, 2009
  10. Twitter as Search Engine or Community Seed– Full Circle, March 6, 2009
  11. Twitter 3 years on, and why it’s the killer app!– Library Clips, March 4, 2009
  12. Twitter: Measuring clickthrus Social Media Metrics– Laurel Papworth- Social Network Strategy, March 16, 2009
  13. CoP Series #5: Is my community a community of practice?– Full Circle, March 5, 2009
  14. CoP Series #4: Practice Makes Perfect– Full Circle, March 3, 2009
  15. Examples of online communities in the financial services industry– FreshNetworks, March 17, 2009 (I deeply appreciate examples and cases)
  16. Why do people write reviews?– FreshNetworks, March 12, 2009
  17. Enterprise 2.0 for an Enterprise of One – Part Two – Content Monitoring– Portals and KM, March 10, 2009
  18. The ten commandments of managing online communities– FreshNetworks, March 7, 2009
  19. Future of Social Networks by Charlene Li– Elsua, March 20, 2009
  20. CoP Series #9: Community Heartbeats– Full Circle, March 19, 2009
  21. CoP Series #8: Content and Community– Full Circle, March 17, 2009
  22. Social media ROI – a calculator for not for profit campaigns– FreshNetworks, March 25, 2009
  23. Response to “SharePoint 2007: Gateway Drug to Enterprise Social Tools”– Michael Sampson – Currents, March 15, 2009
  24. Red-Tails in Love: Birdwatchers as a community of practice– Digital Habitats, March 28, 2009 (interesting that my post on our book blog did better than the same post on my blog!)
  25. Best Buy & Enterprise Social Networking– Collaborative Thinking, March 19, 2009 (This post also showed up as a shared link a lot in my Twitter stream.)
  26. McKinsey on Making Enterprise 2.0 Work is Reminder of Process Centric KM in Early 90s. – Portals and KM, March 18, 2009
  27. Enterprise 2.0 for an Enterprise of One – Part Four – Content Collecting, Assembling, and Creation – Potential New Approaches – Portals and KM, March 12, 2009
  28. Enterprise 2.0 for an Enterprise of One – Introduction– Portals and KM, March 9, 2009
  29. Team-based communities are about change, commitment and tasks– Library Clips, March 8, 2009
  30. Tinkering and Playing with Knowledge– Full Circle, March 8, 2009
  31. Turning Instant Messaging and Presence Upside-Down & Inside-Out– Collaborative Thinking, March 7, 2009 (I had not seen this one, but the title is so intriguing, I’m going to look at it next!)
  32. Twitter: Skittles does a twitter bomb– Laurel Papworth- Social Network Strategy, March 2, 2009
  33. The lies behind online ratings and reviews– FreshNetworks, March 27, 2009
  34. Examples of online communities in the not-for-profit sector– FreshNetworks, March 5, 2009
  35. Twitter for Business and Government and number of Australians– Laurel Papworth- Social Network Strategy, March 30, 2009
  36. How to tell a story about yourself without sounding like an ego-maniac– Anecdote, March 26, 2009
  37. Red-Tails in Love: Birdwatchers as a community of practice– Full Circle, March 26, 2009
  38. CoP Series #10: Stewarding Technology for Community– Full Circle, March 24, 2009
  39. Workflow 2.0– Library Clips, March 23, 2009
  40. Burton Group Field Research Study: Social Networking Within the Enterprise– Collaborative Thinking, March 18, 2009
  41. Enterprise 2.0 for an Enterprise of One – Part Five – Content Publishing and Archiving– Portals and KM, March 13, 2009 (OK, you guys, look at how many times “Enterprise 2.0” shows up.  And also see how multipart blog series – mine and others – are showing up on this list. Coincidence?)
  42. CoP Series #7: Roles and Scalability– Full Circle, March 12, 2009
  43. Does your story have impact?– Anecdote, March 11, 2009
  44. Enterprise 2.0 for an Enterprise of One – Part Three – Content Collecting, Assembling, and Creation – Current Approach– Portals and KM, March 11, 2009
  45. Impact of Social Software Within the Enterprise by Jon Iwata– Elsua, March 9, 2009
  46. Twitter in the Workplace– Collaborative Thinking, March 6, 2009
  47. Business Blogs Trump Social Networking Sites as New Business Drivers – Portals and KM, March 4, 2009

Here are the top  from April so far:

  1. A simple explanation of the Cynefin Framework– Anecdote, April 2, 2009
  2. Social search, Help engines, and Sense-making– Library Clips, April 1, 2009
  3. Examples of online communities in healthcare– FreshNetworks, April 8, 2009
  4. 45 provocative propositions about using social technology– Social Reporter, April 6, 2009
  5. Is cassette culture to thank for web2.0?– FreshNetworks, April 4, 2009
  6. Helping councils learn to share with social media– Social Reporter, April 5, 2009
  7. Extending the customer experience – the Zappos story– FreshNetworks, April 10, 2009
  8. Using Twitter for the wrong reasons– FreshNetworks, April 9, 2009
  9. Big brands in social media: Ford and Southwest Airlines– FreshNetworks, April 2, 2009
  10. Sources for social technology propositions – please mix your own– Social Reporter, April 10, 2009
  11. The Semantic Web is Now AKA Web 3.0 But is It Really?– Portals and KM, April 8, 2009
  12. netWorked Learning:connecting formal learning to the world– Full Circle, April 3, 2009
  13. Social networks: acquisition or retention tools for marketers?– FreshNetworks, April 5, 2009
  14. Are online communities all a game?– FreshNetworks, April 3, 2009
  15. Blog networking study: choosing channels– Mathemagenic, April 9, 2009
  16. Can you shift your organisational culture by introducing social media?– Joitske Hulsebosch, April 5, 2009
  17. IBM Lotusphere 2009 Highlights – Social Softwre in the Enterprise by Chris Reckling & Sandra Kogan– Elsua, April 3, 2009
  18. Using experts to get real engagement in online communities– FreshNetworks, April 3, 2009
  19. Hybrid ecosystem of narratives– Taming the spaces, April 12, 2009
  20. The Company as Wiki by Best Buy– Elsua, April 11, 2009
  21. The cultures of collaboration – Inside Knowledge– Full Circle, April 11, 2009
  22. Technology Stewardship and Unexpected Uses– Digital Habitats, April 9, 2009
  23. Spidergram to visualise community orientation, adoption, and requests– Library Clips, April 8, 2009
  24. Behavior Guidelines: Unblocking Social Media at the Firewall– Laurel Papworth- Social Network Strategy, April 6, 2009 (I enjoyed this one a lot)
  25. The Social Media Experiment Is Over by Adam Christensen– Elsua, April 3, 2009
  26. Grass roots inspiration from graduating social entrepreneurs– Social Reporter, April 3, 2009
  27. Winemakers’ Communities of Practice– Full Circle, April 1, 2009
  28. Blog networking study: establishing and maintaining relations via blogging– Mathemagenic, April 9, 2009
  29. User Adoption Strategies for Lotus Connections– Michael Sampson – Currents, April 8, 2009
  30. Why is word-of-mouth for brands so important?– FreshNetworks, April 4, 2009
  31. The Net Promoter Score and the value of Promoters– FreshNetworks, April 1, 2009
  32. Challenge: SharePoint and NGOs/NonProfits -go or no go?– Full Circle, April 10, 2009
  33. Technology Stewardship and Unexpected Uses– Full Circle, April 9, 2009
  34. Communities, e-participation, crowdsourcing, innovation, selling content: variegated links– eme ka eme, April 7, 2009
  35. The Many Meanings of Our Words– Full Circle, April 7, 2009
  36. Monday Video: Share– Full Circle, April 6, 2009
  37. Comments on Jeff McKenna’s Agile Development Blog– Portals and KM, April 6, 2009
  38. UC And Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0– Collaborative Thinking, April 3, 2009
  39. Digital Habitats Community Orientation Spidergram Activity– Digital Habitats, April 2, 2009
  40. Travel Budget Slashes, Meeting Crunch and Going Virtual– Full Circle, April 2, 2009
  41. Successful Social Networking for Business Collaboration by Ed Brill– Elsua, April 1, 2009
  42. Nancy Dixon’s Conversations Matters Blog– Portals and KM, April 1, 2009
  43. The Ultimate Question: The Interview– Community Guy, April 8, 2009
  44. Our top five posts in March– FreshNetworks, April 7, 2009
  45. Slides from SharePoint Master Class in Europe– Michael Sampson – Currents, April 6, 2009
  46. Have a disagreement? Resolve it virtually– Endless Knots, April 2, 2009

I can also sort out the top keywords, but I have to mess a bit with how they display, so I’ll save that for a separate time.

Social Media Marketing GSP: A Tweet-book

First Set of TweetsToby Bloomberg is not the type to let the dust gather. She is always looking at things, asking “what can we do with that” and, rather than just asking, she starts trying and doing. She is a force to be reckoned with!

She is at it again with her latest experiment, Social Media Marketing GSP: A Tweet-book. She asked me to be one of her guinea pigs… um… I mean interviewees… for chapter 6 on communities and networks. Of course, I had to say yes. Here is a bit of context. My tweets are embedded. Let’s see if this makes any sense!

So what’s a Twitter-book you may be asking? It’s a book written using Twitter as platform and distribution channel. Social Media Marketing GPS #smgps is the first business book to experiment with this format.

This Twitter-book is structured as a “real” business book and includes: a foreword, introduction and chapters. Each chapter will have a 1 question interview with people knowledgeable about the topic. All posts will be hash-tagged #smgps.

Chapters and interviews will be tweeted Monday – Friday through the end of April. I invite you to join me in this experiment in a new way to write a business book. Please add your insights and learnings to the stream; they’ll be incorporated into the book. My ultimate goal is that this Twitter-book will serve as a resource about social media written by and for marketers. So explore .. have fun .. discover and don’t be afraid to try it out.

second set of tweets Now that Toby is on chapter six, she has sussed out the process a bit and suggested earlier in the week that preparation is worth it, and that trying to not get carried away with too many tweets is also useful. That asks the writer to be both succinct per post (140 characters) and overall. With the size of the question Toby asked me, that was challenging. How to be brief but substantive, eh? It is harder than it looks.

It is also interesting to try and express something that both works read forwards and backwards. Readers reading back on Twitter, get it from tail to head. Those reading the recap on the blog and eventually the “book” (whatever form that might take) get it in order. Tricky. Interesting.

As I tweeted out my 12 140 character or less contributions, a few people wondered if I a) should be writing a blog post instead (they missed the context and Toby’s intro, I suppose) b) had too much nervous energy and c) how they might contribute. I think the burst of volume might not have been appreciated by all those people following me.

Hmmmm… what do you think? final set of tweetsAre we pushing a medium too far or is this a useful, creative application? Or something all together different?

Here are a few other creative writing experiments with Twitter:

The interview for Chapter 6 is also now up here.

Tinkering and Playing with Knowledge

cc flickr image by System One GangThe word “tinkering” keeps coming up to my radar screen, and it makes me happy. I love the idea of tinkering and find it central to the practice of stewarding technology for ourselves, our communities and networks. Imagine. Create. Reflect. Share. Adjust and go at it again. Experiment. Mash-up and recreate. Build upon the work of others.  It is for me a deeply ingrained practice of learning both by myself and with others, particularly in my communities of practice.

Last week, on one of our many, many, many calls in creating the Digital Habitats book, Etienne Wenger noted something about a blog post I had here and on the book blog about experimenting with the community orientations we write about in the book. it was about using the orientations via a spidergraph to explore and understand one’s community. I wrote about how Shawn Callahan had taken the idea in one direction, and I in another. Etienne mentioned on the call that he had been doing this for a long time. I stopped short, feeling embarassed that I had not recognized that I had tinkered upon HIS work, and our work, and then Shawn tinkered upon it in his own way. It made me more aware of recognizing the substrate upon which we tinker. The shoulders upon which we stand.  Etienne said something to the effect that despite the hours we spend working on the book together (along with John Smith), we often don’t know what each other is working on. We are tinkering more alone than together.

This made me realize I had been focusing on tinkering as an individual…

John Seely Brown was recently interviewed about education and he focused on this role of tinkering. He says in the video linked below, “Let me take my imagination and build something from it. Does it work? If not, why not. If it does work, can it work better?” Be open to criticism.  Brown talks about a networked world as an open source world that facilitates this tinkering. And about how our identities are now bound up in what we have created alone and with others. And how others have built upon what I have built. New social capital.

 Take a peek.

www.johnseelybrown.com “I am what I create” says John Seely Brown addressing the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching – Stanford, CA, Oct. 23-25, 2008

So we have the idea of tinkering as a way of creating our identity in the world. Tinkering as a way of learning and creating with and for others.

cc Flickr image by kafkanAlex Soojung-Kim Pang looks at the origins of tinkering and why it feels on the rise again. (Go see the whole post – it is fabulous.)

Think of the historically contingent forces shaping tinkering first. I see several things influencing it:

  • The counterculture. Around here, countercultural attitudes towards technology– explored by John Markoff in What the Dormouse Said (here’s my review of it), Theodore Roszak (his Satori to Silicon Valley is still one of the best essays on the historical relationship between the counterculture and personal computing) are still very strong, and the assumption that technologies should be used by people for personal empowerment. Tinkering bears a family resemblance to the activities embodied in the Whole Earth Catalog.
  • Agile software. Mike sees some similarities between agile software development and tinkering; in particular, both are attempts to break out of traditional, hard-to-scale ways of creating things.
  • The EULA rebellion. The fact that you’re forbidden from opening a box, that some software companies insist that you’re just renting their products, and that hardware makers intentionally cripple their devices, is a challenge to hackers and tinkerers. Tinkering is defined in part in terms of a resistance to consumer culture and the restrictive policies of corporations.
  • Users as Innovators. The fundamental assumption that users can do cool, worthwhile, inspiring, innovative things is a huge driver. Tinkering is partly an answer to the traditional assumption that people who buy things are “consumers”– passive, thoughtless, and reactive, people whose needs are not only served by companies, but are defined by them as well. When you tinker, you don’t just take control of your stuff; you begin to take control of yourself. (John Thackara talks about user innovation wonderfully in his book In the Bubble. As C. K. Prahalad argues, this isn’t a phenomenon restricted to users who are high-tech geeks: companies serving the base of the pyramid see the poor as innovators.)
  • Open source. Pretty obvious. This is an ideological inspiration, and a social one: open source software development is a highly collective process that has created some interesting mechanisms for incorporating individual work into a larger system, while still providing credit and social capital for developers.
  • The shift from means to meaning. This is a term that my Innovation Lab friends came up with a few years ago. Tinkering is a way of investing new meanings in things, or creating objects that mean something: by putting yourself into a device, or customizing it to better suit your needs, you’re making that thing more meaningful. (Daniel Pink also talks about it in his book A Whole New Mind, on the shift from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. The geodesic dome is a great example of a technology whose meaning was defined– and redefined– by users.)
  • From manual labor to manual leisure. Finally, I wouldn’t discount the fact that you can see breaking open devices as a leisure activity, rather than something you do out of economic necessity, as influencing the movement. Two hundred years ago, tinkering as a social activity– as something that you did as an act of resistance, curiosity, participation in a social movement, expression of a desire to invest things with meaning– just didn’t exist: it’s what you did with stuff in order to survive the winter. Even fifty years ago, there was an assumption that “working with your hands” defined you as lower class: “My son won’t work with his hands” was an aspiration declaration. Today, though, when many of us work in offices or stores, and lift things or run for leisure, manual labor can become a form of entertainment.

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Anne Balsamo, who has written quite a bit on tinkering,
reflects…

1) Why is tinkering and “hand-making” important at this historical juncture?
2) What are the key sensibilities of a tinkerer?
3) How is an interest in tinkering stimulated or provoked?
4) What new tinkering practices are emerging in contemporary culture, especially in light of the rise of makers’ culture?
5) What is the relationship between tinkering and knowledge formation?
6) What research has already been done on tinkering as a mode of learning?  What research might be needed to understand it better?
7) How should we rethink the notion of tinkering in light of digital media?

Anne’s post has more video’s of people talking about Tinkering that were created with the Seely-Brown video shown above. Again, if you are interested in tinkering, it is worth clicking into Anne’s piece. (As a side note, Anne is also interested in the “corporeal (body-based) dimension of digitally mediated learning ” which pings on my recent note on the kinesthetic!)

So are we in the age of tinkering? Should we be paying more attention to our tinkering practices and patterns? How are YOU tinkering these days?

More recent posts on Tinkering, many inspired by the John Seely Brown video.

Dave Snowden on Rendering Knowledge

Dave Snowden has updated his principles on “Rendering Knowledge” on Cognitive Edge  These are worth reblogging. I encourage you to go in and read the full post for all the context. I have added a few comments of my own in italics. I can’t resist the meanings of the word “rendering.” At the farmer’s market last week, I could by leaf suet (rendered pig fat), candles made from rendered fat, and all sorts of things that have been transformed through heat. What is the heat of knowledge sharing?

  • Knowledge can only be volunteered it cannot be conscripted. You can’t make someone share their knowledge, because you can never measure if they have. You can measure information transfer or process compliance, but you can’t determine if a senior partner has truly passed on all their experience or knowledge of a case.  So for me in practice, this means creating conditions where people are more apt to volunteer. Or perhaps better said, recognizing those condtions. I don’t think we can always “create” them!
  • We only know what we know when we need to know it. Human knowledge is deeply contextual and requires stimulus for recall. Unlike computers we do not have a list-all function. Small verbal or nonverbal clues can provide those ah-ha moments when a memory or series of memories are suddenly recalled, in context to enable us to act. When we sleep on things we are engaged in a complex organic form of knowledge recall and creation; in contrast a computer would need to be rebooted. In practice, I’ve found the introduction of multiple modalities, especially visual and kinesthetic practices, allow us to stimulate recall better than just words – written or verbal.  This is not about flashing a slide, but using visuals in the charting of our knowledge.  I’m not sure how to describe this, but I am experiencing it a lot lately. 
  • In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge. A genuine request for help is not often refused unless there is literally no time or a previous history of distrust. On the other hand ask people to codify all that they know in advance of a contextual enquiry and it will be refused (in practice its impossible anyway). Linking and connecting people is more important than storing their artifacts. I suspect there are layers of cultural implications when we look at this one. Any readers with a deep knowledge of the cultural implications of knowledge sharing? 
  • Everything is fragmented. We evolved to handle unstructured fragmented fine granularity information objects, not highly structured documents. People will spend hours on the internet, or in casual conversation without any incentive or pressure. However creating and using structured documents requires considerably more effort and time. Our brains evolved to handle fragmented patterns not information.  Some people are better at fragments than others. Does the current online environment favor global vs linear thinkers?
  • Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success. When my young son burnt his finger on a match he learnt more about the dangers of fire than any amount of parental instruction cold provide. All human cultures have developed forms that allow stories of failure to spread without attribution of blame. Avoidance of failure has greater evolutionary advantage than imitation of success. It follows that attempting to impose best practice systems is flying in the face of over a hundred thousand years of evolution that says it is a bad thing. So we had better get more compassionate about failure if we really are going to learn, and not hide from it.
  • The way we know things is not the way we report we know things. There is an increasing body of research data which indicates that in the practice of knowledge people use heuristics, past pattern matching and extrapolation to make decisions, coupled with complex blending of ideas and experiences that takes place in nanoseconds. Asked to describe how they made a decision after the event they will tend to provide a more structured process oriented approach which does not match reality. This has major consequences for knowledge management practice. All I can do is nod vigorously in agreement. 
  • We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down. This is probably the most important. The process of taking things from our heads, to our mouths (speaking it) to our hands (writing it down) involves loss of content and context. It is always less than it could have been as it is increasingly codified.

The next interesting thing would be to explore these items and see how they show up in individuals, groups and networks. The same, or variations?

just to be in the presence of others who understand

image by 2-dog-farm on Flickr ccA few weeks ago I had the great pleasure to jam in an impromptu telecon with Jessica Lipnak, Luis Suarez, Jenny Ambrozek, Lilly Evans, and June Holley about all things online. It was a sort of a net-worker’s jam. Thursday Feb. 26th, at 10am PST we are doing it again. Leave a comment if you want to join us.

Today at 3pm PST, we are doing something similar with a handful of visual practitioners and those interested in the role of visuals in our work.  You can find the details here.

These ad hoc gatherings came out of connections on Twitter. Wondering out loud, finding each other and then moving to action. Pretty cool.

More importantly, they fill a hole that Jessica articulated beautifully with this comment “just to be in the presence of others who understand.” This may mean with people who know us deeply. Or with people who care about something we care about – deeply. These are two kinds of “knowing” – one relational and one domain related. But there is a deep pleasure in basking in conversation with people you “know.”  A joy. A happy dance. 😉

So if you want to join us, let me know. Find your way and connect!

Photo credit:

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by 2-Dog-Farm