If someone says they have the answer to a complicated problem, but can’t or won’t admit that they might be wrong, then they almost certainly don’t and they almost certainly are.

November 28th 2005 | Comments(2) | Asides on arrogance ignorance

Tom Steinberg, of Pledgebank fame, and the team at MySociety are geniuses. Have a look at their new service at HearFromYourMP.com - I’ve signed up, but don’t let that put you off.

“So, the voting is over. The politicians vanish to Westminster, and everything carries on as before, right?”

Wrong. Between elections the internet is really starting to challenge politics as usual. As part of this change, we’d like to put you in touch with your new MP. Not for a specific purpose, but in order to hear what they’re working on, to debate their thoughts in a safe, friendly environment, and generally to build better, more useful relationships between constituents and their MPs.

If you enter your details, we’ll add you to a queue of other people in your constituency. When enough have signed up, your MP will get sent an email. It’ll say “20 of your constituents would like to hear what you’re up to – hit reply to let them know”. If they don’t reply, nothing will happen, until they get an email which says there are now 100 people; 200 people; 500 people – until it is nonsensical not to reply and start talking.

When your MP replies, it won’t be one-way spam, and it won’t be an inbox-filling free-for-all. Instead, each email will have a link at the bottom, which will take you straight to a forum where the first post will contain the MP’s email. There’ll be no tiresome login – you can just start talking about what they’ve said. Safe, easy and democratic.”

As you might expect from an architect who numbers paper and old beer crates among his preferred materials, the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban has some interesting things to say about buildings and maintenance. [via City of Sound]

“The lifespan of a building has nothing to do with the materials. It depends on what people do with it. If a building is loved, then it becomes permanent. When it is not loved, even a concrete building can be temporary. And the strength of the material has nothing to do with the strength of the building. It depends on the structural design. Buildings made of concrete are easily destroyed by earthquakes, but paper-tube buildings can survive without damage.”

Source: Guardian Profile

MIYAKE DESIGN STUDIO GALLERY
Shibuya, Tokyo

One of Shigeru Ban’s emphases seems to be maintenance, or sustainability to give it a more fashionable take. Stability and permanence of a building includes amongst other things the idea that it can be easily looked after and repaired. Damaged paper tubes can be easily replaced by a new one, for example. There’s are obvious tie-ins with the lessons social software enthusiasts can learn from architecture, e.g intimacy gradients or lesser thoughts, and even urban design, such as whether it’s crimogenic or not.

Perhaps more tantalising, though, are the lessons we can’t, (or at least shouldn’t) learn?
read on »

November 23rd 2005 | Comments(3) | Thoughts on architecture, business, process resilience

Missed this Shop Talk discussion in September.

Shop Talk discusses the anthropologists who no longer observe tribal people out in the jungle, but watch us instead.

These days we’re the tribal people, it’s us they’re observing as we go about our daily lives and over the past few years especially, what we do and why we do it is becoming of increasing interest to business.

Accountants, for instance, how they react to a mountain of emails; why middle class mobile phone users in China take their phone to the temple to be blessed; how we do the shopping.

Various, including Simon Roberts of Ideas Bazaar can be heard here (.ram file). Interesting stuff.

“I feel with some passion that what we truly are is private, and almost infinitely complex, and ambiguous, and both external and internaland double- or triple- or multiply natured, and largely mysterious, even to ourselves; and furthermore that what we are is only part of us, because identity, unlike “identity” must include what we do. And I think that to find oneself and every aspect of this complexity reduced in the public mind to one property that apparently subsumes all the rest (”gay”, “black”, “Muslim”, whatever) is to be the victim of a piece of extraordinary intellectual vulgarity. Literally vulgar: from vulgus. It’s crowd-thought”
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- Source: Philip Pullman in the Guardian

November 21st 2005 | Comments(3) | Notes on crowd, identity, individual Quotes

… am in the middle of updating my woefully inadequate categories with subject indexes. Didn’t finish it last night, so the tags at the bottom of some of the posts may not behave totally correctly …

Every now and then I find it helpful to look at how words came to be. And if it’s not helpful, then at least it’s interesting

One word whose history fits both, I think, is category.

Its basic roots are Greek: kata meaning generally “down to” and agoreuein or agora. The Greek agora was the market place (or any general assembly). Agoreuein is the verb from agora, and so means “to do something in the marketplace/assembly” - i.e. to speak in public. [An equivalent might be to soapbox: it was a boxy type of noun that people used to stand on (or do in speaker’s corner] The agora was a hub of Greek life and it was here that Socrates annoyed people with his questions, doing his agoreuein thing.

When you run these two words - kata and agoreuein- together in Greek you get kategorein. And by mixing this “down” bit with the “do something in public like speaking” you get the a word meaning “to accuse”. The noun kategoria means something that was said against someone (normally in a public assembly like a court of law).

Aristotle used the word kategoria in his Categories for his ten classes of things that can be named. And (I’d guess but may be wrong) it is here that we begin to get the classification sense of the word.

I like this accusation bit. It underlines the idea that categorisation is inherently social and negotiated. And that puts a slightly different spin on tagging, for example. When you tag an item, in del.icio.us or whatever, what if you’re accusing it of something?

Various things might be said:
- We need to assume that our accusation/tag may be wrong.
- We need to accept that there might be hung juries/ambiguity
- We might be more careful hurling around our accusations/tags
- We accept that things might be unjustly tagged and that their “names need to be cleared”.
- We need to accept that other peoples accusations/tags may be right
- We need to understand that different cultures have different norms and so will accuse/tag accordingly
- Del.icio.us is a “cases-pending” clearing house?
- and probably more …

Of course, times have changed since 300BC, so you might tag this post: idiocy, waste of time, or etymology.

If you want to know what a philosophy degree’s really like, then Johnnie’s probably the man to tell you.

I was particularly hopeless at the jargon. To win a philosophical argument with me, all you had to do was to suggest that I was being solipsistic (or pretty much any such term). I’d stare at you blankly, because I had no idea what it meant but didn’t want to admit to such professional ignorance. Secretly, I’d sneer at your pretentious use of language, but you’d never know that.

Certainly rang some bells

But it also made me wonder what the jargon words were that should be forbidden at all possible when talking to people about KM initiatives.

Knowledge sharing is obviously one. As is knowledge capture. In fact “knowledge” probably should go full stop. “Creative abrasion”, “deep dialogue”, “identity management”, “paradigm shifts”, “out of the box”, “emergence”, “power laws”, perhaps the whole top-down/bottom-up thing, “blogs” (but only because it’s such an ugly word), “knowledge harvesting”, “thought leaders”. Definitely “knowledge workers”.

I suppose, in short, anything that would find its way into a “bluff your way in KM” book. Any others? Not to say that these words don’t mean anything, just that they smack of jargon.

Anyway, Johnnie’s solipsism example made me think of a student in my seminar group when I was getting my degree. We’d been having a particularly fruitless term discussing whether we could prove we exist, and in pretty much the last seminar the tutor said, slightly huffily, “Well presumably none of you think you don’t exist?” At which point the bloke, whose name was a mystery and who hadn;t spoke a word until then said, “I’m not sure. I’m really not sure.” And we never saw him again. Sensible feller.

November 15th 2005 | Comments(5) | Asides on ignorance, jargon, KM philosophy

Does anyone know of a wiki platform other than the open guides one that supports geo-location bells and whistles?

… you know, where people used to physically travel to talk to someone else, face to face, and so they could see them smile, or spill food down their shirt, or hang out doing not very much but still there in the same space … shucks … seems like only yesterday.

Interesting article on CPRs which I missed from Howard Rheingold. [Hat tip to Ross]. As Wikipedia has it,

a common-pool resource is a natural or human made resource system the size or characteristics of which makes it costly, but not impossible, to exclude potential beneficiaries from obtaining benefits from its use.

Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist wrote a book a while ago called Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. It sounds fascinating.

According to Rheingold,

Ostrom claims that “all efforts to organize collective action, whether by an external ruler, an entrepreneur, or a set of principals who wish to gain collective benefits, must address a common set of problems.” These problems are “coping with free-riding, solving commitment problems, arranging for the supply of new institutions, and monitoring individual compliance with sets of rules.” Ostrom found that groups that are able to organize and govern their behavior successfully are marked by the following design principles:

1. Group boundaries are clearly defined.
2. Rules governing the use of collective goods are well matched to local needs and conditions.
3. Most individuals affected by these rules can participate in modifying the rules.
4. The rights of community members to devise their own rules is respected by external authorities.
5. A system for monitoring member’s behavior exists; the community members themselves undertake this monitoring.
6. A graduated system of sanctions is used.
7. Community members have access to low-cost conflict resolution mechanisms.
8. For CPRs that are parts of larger systems: appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.”

A brief bit more looking around found Scott London’s review of Ostrom’s book:

“The three dominant models — the tragedy of the commons, the prisoners’s dilemma, and the logic of collective action — are all inadequate, she says, for they are based on the free-rider problem where individual, rational, resource users act against the best interest of the users collectively. These models are not necessarily wrong, Ostrom states, rather the conditions under which they hold are very particular. They apply only when the many, independently acting individuals involved have high discount rates and little mutual trust, no capacity to communicate or to enter into binding agreements, and when they do not arrange for monitoring and enforcing mechanisms to avoid overinvestment and overuse.”

Definitely off to the library for this one. And will be interested to see what a pro has to say on things like Swiss governance models for wikis.

Every now and then I witter on about communities and the like. But what do I do about the community where I actually, physically live?

Sod all, apart from vote every now and then. Used to do cricket coaching for under 13s when I lived up in Stoke Newington, but now? Hmm. Yup - nothing recently. Time to change that I think.

November 11th 2005 | Comments(2) | Life on community

From China Daily, Society must not shun philosophers

A friend of mine once told me a joke: A job hunter, a philosophy major, went here, there and everywhere in his search for employment, but in vain. Having run out of options, he swallowed his pride and took up the offer of playing a bear in a costume at a zoo. He was locked up in a cage, where he was supposed to imitate various bear-like movements to entertain visitors.

To his horror, another bear appeared in the cage and started approaching him. He panicked and was on the brink of collapse when the bear said: “Don’t be afraid. I’m also a philosophy major.”

Funny and somewhat ridiculous, the joke does reveal an essential truth. In a society geared towards immediate gains, philosophy seems unable to produce tangible benefits. For the majority, philosophy seems virtually useless.

The author goes on to lay claim to an interesting historical precedent.

“Germany, which lagged far behind Britain and France, rose quickly in the late 18th and 19th centuries because philosophy flourished during that period, among other things. Philosophy was so popular at the time that Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” could be found in young ladies’ boudoirs. It is from this fertile soil that a galaxy of great names emerged, which still have a profound influence on our world today - Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hegel and Marx.

The great ancient Chinese civilization was created because our ancestors attached great importance to rational thinking. Ancient philosophical ideas were at the core of the governance of ancient kingdoms and dynasties.”

Tend to agree.

November 11th 2005 | Comments(2) | Notes on education, philosophy value

Off tomorrow to Amsterdam to the KCC Europe. I’m running one of the Fringe workshops with John Curran on effective knowledge work. The roots of the idea are to do with how you might train teams so that managers can trust them to innovate. Details are here, and if you’re there do come and say hi

[Update: Had a great time, and met some great people (old and new). There’s a report on the Fringe here if you want to get an idea of what was going on. And I loved the idea of using buddhist bells in an office to make people more productive. Can just see my boss going for that Anyway, John and my session went OK. Slightly disappointed the focus ended up on “what is a knowledge worker” - think there’s more traction to be had avoiding that particular issue - but was interested to see that while most people thought they could be more effective, most also thought there’ line managers etc thought the opposite, and were content with effectiveness levels.

Anyway, lots of thanks to Ron, Ed and everyone else who helped organise it]

November 06th 2005 | Comments(1) | Notes, Life on events, KM, Learning seminar

Love this, from Jeremy Aarons [via Jack]

“Ponder this question: Are robots knowledge workers or not?”

I’d say yes. They do knowledge work, albeit at a slightly process-oriented level.

November 04th 2005 | Comments(1) | Asides on definition, KM, knowledge worker question

Stumbled across a talk Peter Drucker gave to the Harvard John F Kennedy School of Government (the 1994 Edwin L. Godkin Lecture to be precise). He talks about the various shifts coming for society, but two caught my eye. First, he decides that knowledge now (or if not now soon) will only be useful in application.

“The knowledge of the German Allgemeine Bildung or of the Anglo-American liberal arts had little to do with one’s life work. It focused on the person and the person’s development, rather than on any application. Both nineteenth-century Allgemeine Bildung and liberal arts prided themselves on having no utility whatsoever. In the knowledge society, knowledge basically exists only in application.”

The second snippet was this:

“Knowledge workers, whether their knowledge be primitive or advanced, whether there be a little of it or a great deal, will, by definition, be specialized. Knowledge in application is effective only when it is specialized. Indeed, it is more effective the more highly specialized it is.”

This vision of Big Peter’s is all sounding a little bleak, isn’t it? Knowledge workers, it appears, are no different to factory workers in the mandates they need to follow. “Don’t do it unless it helps you in your role” and “specialise, specialise, specialise”.

I’m not sure there really was a point of pride at the lack of utility. As far as I understand it (certainly the Anglo-American liberal arts tradition), rather than becoming better at a specifically and immediately useful subject, you gained generally useful knowledge. The approach, as opposed to Drucker’s, assumes life outside the role, which is no bad thing. Any utility this generalist approach had may not be easily measurable, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.

[UPDATE: I should probably add as a disclaimer that I did Greek & Philosophy as a first degree :)]

November 03rd 2005 | Comments(1) | Notes on education, generalism, PeterDrucker, specialism value