John Smith and CoP implication

On a thread started by Hildy Gottlieb over at Com-Prac this week, John Smith returned something that’s both thought-provoking and powerfully put, quoting a very old text:

“[A man must reside in a town] thirty days to become liable for
contributing to the soup kitchen, three months for the charity box,
six months for the clothing fund, nine months for the burial fund, and
twelve months for contributing to the repair of the town walls’

(These categories have intuitive appeal but are at the same time are
somewhat mysterious, I think:
http://www.comeandhear.com/bababathra/bababathra_8.html )

So in community development terms, I think the thing we can do AFTER
welcoming people matters a lot. And that would be: help people to see
a path of successive and successful levels of connection — of taking
responsibility for the goodness they find in the collective life.”

Thoroughly agree. Indeed finding useful channels por the energy of members is probably the most difficult task of facilitators: so many of them want to go beyond building practice and conversations, and yet it’s so difficult to build something useful and motivating with the kind of commitment that most community volunteers can give. A perfect facilitator (or a perfect community) would find tailor-cut engagement opportunities for every member, optimizing growth for the member and the CoP, drawing on their energies without risking burnout…

… now try that with seventy thousand members. But you need to try.

(And one does wonder about John’s reading habits :-)).

Socialtext People - looking behind the text

I wish I could comment with a bit more depth, but these days are as awkward as usual of late (I’m down with a bit of a fever on top of the usual excess wordkload). Still I don’t want to miss commenting this: http://www.socialtext.com/products/features/Socialtext-People.php is a webcast explaining the latest beta of collaboration software maker (it’s already gone well beyond wikis) Socialtext. And yes, it’s a people directory, with many social networking trimmings (groups, subscriptions of the doings of friends), but in fact it’s actually just a very nice and efficient way of tracking the people behind the wikis (and blogs) and adding a “team” or “group” dimension to a large collaboration platform.

It’s not the only news they have (”Dashboard” is the other) on the way to Socialtext 3.0. It’s getting more and more interesting.

By the way, I suppose you know Socialtext is not the only one going “social” in this way. Alfresco’s new “social networking” layer is quite akin, but I don’t know if it’s able to track contributions from all the third-party software it integrates (blogs, forums, wikis), besides the document management part.

The point (if this post has one) is that people directories that enable users to see both ways (finding the author from the content, finding all the content by the author) are a great working tool that can actually be useful in sourcing expertise; indeed they should work much better than the usually current “official expert” directories present in most companies. If you throw in some nice team- and group-support features, so much the better.

Way to go. I’m lookimg forward to a more in-depth look… and maybe a customer demo.

Mikronet and Helen Martin on networks

It’s been a long while since I last posted about the old KnowledgeBoard (I should have a longer look one of these days if I can stick my head out long enough). But the fact is they’ve gone and published Helen’s translation of a very sensible document about setting up a working network, based on the Mikronet experience. Helen knows all about that, and has been a charter member of the H-SIG at KnowledgeBoard too, so I can attest she knows what she’s talking about.

Besides, the piece is short and to the point. Less “internet-enabled” than some would like, but down to earth and based on practice: just the way I like it. You can read it here.

Sunday tag surfing

Before I get down to serious work, here’s a look at the most interesting things caught in the morning’s browsing. WordPress’ tag surfing does add a bit of spice.

The wisdom of clouds: John Millner doing a panegyric of social-tagging folksonomies. Not bad for a sales pitch. And he’s right (Socialtext’s shared tagging got me to find his post, for instance). An interesting blog on learning, too.

The 3 stages of CMS: Boris Mann of Raincity Studios made a presentation on mid-February that just got posted on DigitalAssetManagementOrgUK (lots of nice educational links there, and some tools), and it does set out very clearly some principles and ideas, aimed at independent web developers, that are not just right but (for me) becoming articles of faith. It’s about the evolution of web sites into complex interconnected bits, and how best to make them. Sage, too.

Knowledge energies: Luke Naismith trying to get some sense out of a recent Act-KM mailing list discussion about complexity and chaos. It was way beyond my depth. Luke’s perspective is more understandable and original (he says “eccentric”). Also nice, the couple of links reflected here remembering the link between any technology and some business model.

Explaining KM: Michelle Laurie (first featured here for her on-the-job pictures of African life while doing soft-edged asessments of KM programmes for a big institution) ploughs on as an independent KM consultant up on the mountains. She keeps using simple terms instead of the usual fodder, or so it seems. Inspirational :-).

Make and sell: OK, so it’s not a blog, but after reading about it in Wired I came across it again today… and it’s worth having a look at the operating model. Ponoko builds things to specification (which is innovative), but has also harnessed crowdsourcing to get itself more orders: it acts as a hub for product designs and specifications, so people can either hire or share bits of each other’s designs… and then get them built.

On hiring and attrition. Paul Ritchie’s ongoing series of comments gets especially practical here, IMHO. As I’m right now in the process of renewing (nor just reinforcing) the collaborator team of Macuarium, which is hard to juggle as we need to find, recruit, train and slowly incorporate into the mix a lot of new personalities while balancing a growing work load; and also part of the building of a new business unit at my employer, which is proceeding in fits and starts, I can agree with both his comment: don’t delay, and don’t hope for magical tool solutions. You may not agree on everything but the blog’s a mine for project managers (and most likely a very effective management tool): the most recent favourite on getting bad news out of the way.

A relevant workshop: Luca Servo’s work with a recent “strategic” workshop with rural radio workers from old Congo looks (and reads) just like the good old ones we used to pull for G2E customers. His work for the knowledge management arm of FAO looks impressive (not least because he seems to be actually applying his masters’ dissertation), but - going practical - the blog’s chronicle of the workshop is relevant in itself as a portrait of methodology. Don’t miss previous episodes.

A perspective of KM: Lee Gaddis is getting to grips with KM in his marketing firm. What I like about his view is that he clearly separates the means (technologies) and the skills (education and training) from the will (mindset and motivation). You can put any tools in place, you can design processes and write them down and train people… but unless it makes sense to them (it’s practical, efficient and worth their while), you will get nothing lasting or practical out of the effort. IMHO, while it’s a very superficial view yet, he’s got that part right. Which is more than most do: so many KM efforst prefer to navigate around incentives and recognition and then fail to reap real change.

Action learning and water management: S. McIntosh, N. Leotaud and D. Macqueen published on the KM4Dev journal a piece on an “action learning” project to examine the ways water is used and managed in several Caribbean islands: through hands-on reasearch and the participation of the stakeholders at every level. The piece is interesting. The link with knowledge management, tenuous but still there. Seeing instances where sharing experience is literally vital helps clear the fog. Found it through the WASH Lessons Learned blog.

The book “We think”: Penny Edward’s recounts the experience of listening to the author of a book on the web’s effect on mass creativity, innovation and collaboration. Which is huge, and growing. Her site is more than interesting (mixing wikis, KM and project management). And since her takeaways are ideas I’m curious about (having close experience with them, I want to analyze them better) it seems I might have a new book on the shopping list.

On participation: Brad Hinton’s got a nice piece on the role of mass participation in business decision making. Based on a specific example, he goes on to elaborate how the involvement of workers will not just be requested, but actually inevitable. Not to be a spoilsport, but I think the kind of involvement people enjoy is not the kind that allows for long-term, thoughtful and differentiating management decisions… but it does form a very fertile ground for managers to make them.

The Facebook business model: as explained by themselves in their site (came in looking for something different; I don’t actually like the place). That is what they really, actually offer. A bit of food for thought, if not many news, in there.

Qué es una Comunidad de Práctica: Carlos Merino at the Departament de Justicia of the Generalitat posted this presentation for a meeting in December 2007, in Spanish. The nature and the keys of success. I find a sore lack of involvement and motivation aspects, but the rest of it is worth reading. Jordi Graells posted another interesting presentation (about collective intelligence and “wiki-administration” in government), in Catalan. The rest of the blog is also full of links to more news and presentations from one of the most active “knowledge administrations” I’m aware of (there’s hope for the rest).

More Spanish knowledge blogging at Comunisfera by Daniel Martí. No, there’s no recent pick to show (mostly links to outside resources: Morgan Stanley’s report on Internet trends, PDF here; Universal McCann’s report on social media use and impact here, PDF here; Cristobal Cobo’s presentation about the Knowledge Economy on Issuu, parts in Spanish, look out for the Issuu machinery also; and I think the link to Planeta 2.0 came from here also), but I’ve been enjoying the perusal. Very relevant selection of themes.

Tangentially, there is Foro de Internet 2008, acongress aimed at internet content entrepreneurs next week (on the 10th) in Madrid. I might attend, since there may be useful ideas about traffic monetization floating around. With the hope of a new member of the family, comes the responsibility of feeding it ;-). And even further away is Barcelona’s UrbanLabs, which sounds interesting.

Reasons to participate in social media. At Groundswell, and also commented at Furilo, there’s a nice useful list. Useful why? Useful because the ends pursued by people when participating in sharing environments are quite more complex (and sometimes much more banal) that some think. If you want participation, look into these. If you’re designing for it, you’d better be creative.

And now, to do some (paying) work.

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s paper on collaboration

34 pages of good sense, presumably: you know I’m a The Economist fan and I appreciate their sister company’s products. Nothing groundbreaking, but at least they like to be solidly grounded. So when I learn (thanks to TechRepublic) that Cisco’s paying for the free distribution of this paper, I can’t help passing the word.

You can find it here: “Collaboration: transforming the way business works“. If it’s not up to standards you’d like, tell me - I probably won’t find time to read it until the evening. It certainly looks biased, since it’s based on a poll of managers and C-level execs, which can give very curious ideas about the real practices of the wider organization. We’ll see.

Visions of KM 2: paper finished at last

Well, it had to happen :-). After many months of rewriting and peer-reviewing (and enough version shenanigans to discredit me as a document manager), the paper is done.

For quite a while now, I’ve felt that most business managers were not getting a clear message about knowledge management. There is a lot of academic debate that not even the academics can make practical sense of, a lot of discredited methods still trying to prove themselves, quite a lot of smoke about social software and enterprise 2.0… and a cart load of vendor-talk about all sorts of technology or services solutions. No wonder KM has a fame as a perplexing discipline.

And it shouldn’t. Managing knowledge is a practical part of business management, an essential good practice. Every organization does it, at least by default, and it can bring great benefits if done well.

“Visions of Knowledge Management 2 - Knowledge Wave” aims to deliver a business-friendly view of what KM is about, what it is good for, and (in very broad lines) how to go about it. It’s no rehash of literature: it reflects my opinions and experience, and while there is a basic theorethical layer, it’s as practical as it gets… but it’s not a complete manual, of course :-). 27 pages can only serve as a primer.

So - here it is. Click on the picture to download.

Special thanks to the patient peer reviewers, Rosanna Tarsiero, Ed Mitchell, Paul Ritchie and Patrick Lambe. All have brought hammer and chisel and a very particular point of view. The finished paper does not fit the vision of any of them - which is good: it aims to be a bridge between different ways of looking at knowledge management.

As always, comments will be more than welcome: even if it’s finished, it remains open to changes, just as every other paper published here.

[Added: if you don't get along with the download page, try a direct route].

Gestión del conocimiento en España (VII)

Mira por dónde, gracias a las conversaciones que van surgiendo al hilo de la reunión informal sobre comunidades de práctica y KM en España (fecha tentativa: después de Semana Santa) me he tropezado con unas cuantas cosas, unas más conocidas que otras y todas desde Cataluña. Quedándome sólo con las que no había citado en listados anteriores:

El blog de la iniciativa de KM del Departament de Justicia de la Generalitat (programa Compartir): ideas y recursos prácticos, más orientados a las iniciativas cara a cara que a herramientas online, pero desde luego enfocados a mejorar el intercambio de experiencias mediante su uso. Recomendable.

El blog de Genís Roca (promotor de las herramientas y filosofías “web 2.0″, ponente frecuente y escritor articulado). No lo conocía,  y no le conocía, pero resulta interesante leerle (ayuda entender catalán). Especialmente si eres de los que crees que el cambio social es una consecuencia necesaria de los cambios que está haciendo posible esa tecnología. Pero si eres escéptico (como el que suscribe), también.

Goldmundus, el blog trilingüe de Roc Fagés. Ya le conocía pero he disfrutado leyendo cosas y noticias nuevas; no hay duda de que hay movimiento en el noreste. Opiniones políticas al márgen.

Los Apunts de Govern Electrónic de Borja Rius, un veterano de GEC (el spinoff de la UOC dedicado a vender gestión del conocimiento y elearning) ahora dedicado a la reforma de la administración local. Muchas cosas interesantes entre sus mensajes (empezando por los planes eModel 2008 del Ministerio de Administraciones Públicas). Tot en catalá, pero instructivo.

El blog de Xavier Marcet aporta otra perspectiva catalana, con apuntes interesantes sobre la innovación y las universidades.

Es curioso pero cierto: buena parte de la efervescencia tecnológica ligada a las administraciones públicas está en la “periferia”: comunidades autónomas, especialmente el País Vasco, Cataluña, Andalucía y la Comunidad de Madrid. No sólo es cuestión de número, también de calidad de las iniciativas. Y si es cierto lo que leemos en el blog de Borja Rius, pronto veremos muestras en las administraciones locales, visto hacia dónde apunta el presupuesto.

Windows into communities: conversations and the “dynamic community” concept

I’m up to the ears in work these days and posting a bit slowly, but I don’t want to forget about this piece. Eric Hoffer has come, from a semantic web perspective, to an interesting issue. Or two.

The first is technology. He outlines a vision where he can gather the threads of relevant conversations from different communities (board- or list-supported conversations) as well as those running at (and across) blogs. All filtered according to domain and person interests (i.e. just the issues and the people he chooses to follow).

This is in fact quite closer  than one might think. Most blogs are efficently tagged according to domain, and track links quite well; a better-built RSS reader with appropriate filters could enable the blog part of his vision. Tagging forum posts and threads is not as widespread but it’s already started (pushed by search engine optimization, to be fair) and most are already quite proficient at generating RSS feeds; again, filtering well-tagged feeds for interesting domains and authors should not be impossible (whenever tagging becomes widespread).

So his vision of a personal, “virtual”, tailored community is not impossible. Indeed, there may be a business model not far from the surface, there.

The second issue he raises is a social one, but he raises it only implicitly.

OK, let’s assume the reader works, and that it’s viable to participate in those conversations (registration issues, participation interfaces… at a basic level, there doesn’t need to be any integration). The user can sit in the middle of his virtual “dynamic community” and follow any conversation, and even dip into them at will.

The question is, is that really a community?

Yes, it’s a window into a “conversation space”. Yes, it’s a domain. It can be a community in a wide, lax sense (as in “the worldwide coal-mining community”). I’ve heard it called a “domain community”. But I don’t think it’s really any sort of community.

In as much as a community is a social construct, with some shared procedures, goals and culture, and some personal affinity stemming from all of those, and not just a set of streams of information, it’s not.

Participation is not everything it takes to belong to a community. Remember the “honourable lurker” concept? And there’s participation without belonging, both legitimate and parasitic.

Eric’s reader would give us a window into many communities, into many disparate societies and their conversations. But it would only gives us fragments (the bits and pieces that we state we’re interested in). We would get all the domain context, but we would miss most of the social contex. We could be universal lurkers (and sometime participants) but not members.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I want Eric’s viewer as soon as someone builds it :-). It’ll save me a lot of time for staying abreast of what’s going on.

I’m just stressing that a community is more than nodes and information streams. It just doesn’t fit in the reader.

An unexpected almost prize

I just learned that the project I’m leading for a Spanish public agency almost won a prize yesterday. In fact we came in first finalist for the Computing Magazine 2008 prize for the “best ECM project of the year” in Spain.

ECM is acronym for “Enterprise Content Management” for those of you who don’t do letter soups, it covers document management and web content management and many things in between. And the almost prize is rather sweet for a number of reasons:

• This is the first public acknowledgement (hey, we’re in print and all) for my work for Getronics; there have been several nice things said about my work for Macuarium (we even won ReD magazine’s “Best Spanish website” back in 2001) and I’m quite satisfied about the acknowledgement of my KM work (the eventual expert panel and the ear of people I respect)… but Getronics actually pays my salary, so it’s nice. Unusual, and nice.
• It’s a commendation for my boss’ decision to support me: that project started as a disaster until I tore the claws of an incompetent project director off it and took responsibility for everything myself. That was really hard to do and yet another career risk, but it now seems it was the right decision. Especially comparing with the results of the projects that remained in his hands (no comment).
• It’s such a small thing of a project. It runs on MS SQL Server, while the competitors are all big Oracle boys. It uses French-born Eversuite as the platform, instead of EMC Documentum or Vignette as the winner and second finalist do. It’s such a tiny team, when faced by the groups that did the other projects (most of the time, a single analyst coded - a real artist, Jose Luis- while I managed, dealt with the the customer and designed the app). A tenth of the budget. And yet its effect on customer processes is deep and wide enough to leave that mark.
• [I thought that] The project that came in third place is… from the company that just bought Getronics’ Spanish operations. So it looks like the people who will run the show here at least know about these things enough to do almost as well as us ;-). [Actually, I got it wrong, it's by a different competitor].

Besides all that, our marketing people say that if a tiny little project, without either a powerful technology partner or a powerful patron customer, ever wins this kinds of prizes… they’ll think the magazine’s editors are not doing their job well. A case of sour grapes surely :-), but still: the winner is a splashy, pushy regional government and the second finalist is the Spanish national bank, and you already know the platforms they’re using, so hmmm.

So, you know, today I’m rather surprised and rather happy. An almost prize for my real job. Go figure.

[Edited to correct a mistaken impression]

ActKM’s survey list

ActKM is a thriving KM community, heavily Pacific (Australia and Asia) but quite cosmopolitan. They run a list, an annual event, and some online resources. They have also just put up on their wiki a list of the surveys that have been done (or are being done) by members using the ActKM list, plus an interesting page on how to do the same. Plus, some of the surveys’ results are published.

All in all, something to look at if you’re into KM research. If you do, please consider posting the results too :-).

¿Y qué tal una reunión sobre Comunidades?

El próximo día 1 celebramos una reunión de usuarios de Macuarium. Los bloggers siguen reuniéndose cada mes en todas partes. Ayer leía con la habitual envidia la convocatoria de otra sesión del MeetUp que organiza Online Community Report en San Francisco. Y veo las estadísticas de lectores para artículos en español: no somos tan pocos :-), aunque no sé cuántos estamos en España.

La pregunta es: ¿habría gente interesada en organizar un pequeño encuentro informal de personas involucradas en comunidades, de práctica o no? ¿Algo que pudiera evolucionar hacia una reunión mensual más temática y menos social, donde pudiéramos comentar, debatir y aprender? Sé de un par de personas que se apuntarían, aparte del que suscribe. Incluso sé de un par de buenos sitios.

En fin, ahí queda la propuesta abierta :-). Si alguien cree que podría ser interesante, puede poner en contacto desde el link correspondiente, o respondiendo aquí, por ejemplo.

Stephen Collins’ “Power to the People” presentation

Another Joitske-found surprise. This presentation is neither new (mid 2007) nor groundbreaking, but it does convey -contundently- the social-tool part of effective knowledge management, from the worker’s perspective. Yes, it can be criticised on several counts, but whatever we say, it’s worth looking over.

You can find it here. Go. Now.

iSimulate and the golden rules for building CoPs

The World Bank’s latest online tool is looking great. More specifically, it looks like an impressive bait for the macroeconomist in the wild (or in business, or in academia). I’ve just taken it, hook and all, and look forward to the account activation.

But let’s stick to the topic. Thanks to a message by Gauresh Rajadhyaksha at Joitske Hulsebosch’s blog (in a very relevant post, too), I’ve been pottering around the place and registering for the “private beta service”. It’s interesting in more ways than one (this 2006 document highlights the origin and workings of the idea), but since it’s intrinsic value will be lost to non-dismal-scientists, let’s head to the part that will be useful to CoP managers and promoters.

Mr Rajadhyaksh’s presentation of the social side of iSimulate (the last link above) highlights an object lesson in community building, IMHO. On paper, they have hit all bases:

-  Offer a distinctive bait. They’re actually giving away access to the World Bank models and data in a convenient web interface. Not every CoP builder can do that, but every one should seek to find something relevant to would-be members, something useful, directly related to the domain, something that is a traffic real draw in itself. It can be articles, it can be services, it can be whatever as long as it’s significant.

In other words, a front-loaded CoP promotion initiative works better than one that expects would-be members to do all the work of building the initial content and usefulness.

- Engage users in building something together, and make it easy. I have yet to test it, but on paper they have done it too. By encouraging users to upload complementary datasets and models, as well as tinkering with the available ones to run their own simulations, they are opening the way to building significantly valuable resources through user contribution and sharing. Just as any CoP worth its salt will stress building their own sort of knowledge objects, be them link lists or papers or useful discussion threads.

In other words, users (CoP members) are not customers but collaborators. This perspective is key. At iSimulate it is stressed by building environments in which all those tinkerings and innovations can be commented and shared, but also by the proclaimed goal to build something greater that the original resource.

- Allow for particular perspectives. The ground covered by iSimulate users is large, and the uses of those simulations are very varied. In other words, there are many distinct subdomains with different possible conversations. The service caters to this by offering public and private work areas and “project blogs” incardinated in the platform.

In other words, they are giving elbow room to the emergence of an ecosystem of interest groups, that should ultimately allow the community to organise meaningfully around topics and projects. Their approach seems more hands-off than I’d reccomend (many found-your-own-group projects get tangled and abandoned) but then, the target group and their use of the resource are not conventional.

- Promote recognition. Another nail they seem to be hitting with definite intent is the reputation-building driver for participation. In most professional fields it will be harder, but academics (and freelance consultants) can often be goaded into very productive sharing by making sure that their contributions are visible to parties that can be interested in more of them (i.e. faculties or prospective customers). Not all CoP members care that much, but everyone likes at least a bit of recognition… and resents the lack of it.

In their case, this means a very serious focus on attribution to the author of the perspective or the originator of the dataset. Balancing attribution and co-creation is a difficult act, since the originator need not be the person ultimately making the most relevant contribution (indeed it may be the work of many), but it needs to be got right to fend off the risk of a diaspora toward independent blogs or closed working groups.

- Reach out. Last but not least, using the grapevine (blogs, personal networks) as they seem to be doing is a good start. When founding a CoP, you don’t need massive attention, but you do need to get the eye of as many of the people that you want to either form the core, or to start directing others your way. Bloggers in your domain are a good start. Related communities or networks are another. People with a close interest in the bait material (in this case, World Bank economists themselves, who seem to be using it and to have used its predecessor). All the usual mass promotion channels come later.

The practice that seems to make the difference is making it direct, and making it personal. Interesting people in a project is better done by giving it a face and a voice, someone who can answer questions and ask for help, a person (or a team) who can convey the goals and the motivations and get other involved. At the early stage, it works much better than any number of press comuniqués.

Let’s see what happens

On paper, iSimulate can become a very interesting resource and the core of a very relevant community of practice (or more). I’ll be following it… and I hope to participate as a member, as far as time and abilities allow. One sometimes wishes not to have gone to work so far from traditional economics as I have.

One sometimes wishes not to have turned down a contract to act as “knowledge analyst” at a similar World Bank project last year, too. Not least because (as the iSimulate social design shows, and I had the chance to find out during the interviews) they actually seem to know what they’re doing.

But transplanting the family was not in the book. More’s the pity, and here’s wishing them the best of luck :-).

Living rules for a Community of Practice

Not long ago I commented here that a user-driven effort to suggest improvements at the Macuarium forums was producing some great ideas. One of them was to design a very simplified, very straightforward version of the rules or terms of use, something that would avoid most of the moderation friction due to ignorance (following the 80%-20% rule, so much of moderator work -and user inconvenience- is due to so few behaviours). Indeed, the essential rules were pared down to eight by the users themselves:

1. This is, mainly, a technical forum. 
2. Talking politics or religion is not allowed.
3. In Macuarium we don’t support piracy.
4. Don’t use the forums to buy or sell.
5. Don’t repeat threads. Use the searches.
6. Write correctly. Calm and common sense.
7. For moderation issues, use the messaging system.
8. When you have a moment, read the complete FAQs. 

Many more suggestions were made, some IMHO very relevant. But the community chose these as the key to efficient collaboration… and so they will stay, at least until next year.

This being a Mac-based system of communities of practice, they are dubbed “the nano-FAQs”. And following another user advice, they have now been turned into a cartoon that will be published shortly at the site, and then used as a permanent reminder on some pages (and teeshirts and banners) by our in-house comic-strip genius, Mago. The goal is to make them as visible as possible and reach even those users that would rather actively dodge them… By some coincidence, the starring role is given to one our comic strip’s pet characters ;-), and the religious parody toned slightly down.

In short, here’s an exclusive preview of the cartoon. I think they say a lot about what users think is important, and about the way to spread this kind of information… in other words, I think it’s anything but a joke.

Thanks for all the advice, ideas and suggestions that were made here, on com-prac and directly.

Visions of KM 2: another draft of the paper

Yet another draft, indeed :-), of the second paper in this series, aiming to explain the usefulness of knowledge management and its implementation, from a management perspective.

This draft incorporates several changes made since last year, including the latest comments from one of the peer reviewers (I look forward to more). Hopefully the last will be in before the end of next week… because that’s the final deadline. Promise. There’s another paper in the pipeline and it should be advanced by now.

Such long drafting is a bad idea. Version confusion creeps in, eventually (or so it seems). And points of view shift, thus forcing in-depth reworking.

Whether those changes are worth the wait… you will judge better than I :-). Here’s the latest draft if you care for a look.

Visions of KM 2

Comments, as always, are welcome, either here or directly.

Márketing y estrategias de promoción de comunidades

Este artículo es un borrador del que le he prometido a Ed Mitchell… la versión final en inglés saldrá cuando él cumpla su parte del trato :-). Pero el tema es demasiado interesante para seguir esperando.

A mediados de Enero, Ed publicó un excelente artículo, ya mencionado aquí, en el que trata de diferentes tipos de promoción y moderación (”facilitation”) que pueden coexistir o sucederse. Lo bueno es que el artículo da una perspectiva de lo que realmente hay ahí fuera, y lo malo es que no estoy completamente de acuerdo con las conclusiones. Digo “completamente” porque estoy seguro de que en cuanto lo debatamos, lo estaré, pero hay unos cuantos puntos que me faltan.

Y es que Ed ha entrado directamente en uno de mis terrenos favoritos: la dinámica entre diferentes iniciativas (”resources”) dentro de un mismo “espacio conversacional”. Este último palabro es algo que tuve que inventar hace unos años para referirme al conjunto de conversaciones sobre aproximadamente el mismo tema que recorren todos los canales posibles entre todos los interlocutores interesados. Ed no hace mención explícita a iniciativas ni a espacio conversacional, pero usa la perspectiva de un eventual promotor de comunidades, una persona o grupo que podría asimilarse a una iniciativa… y como veremos, casi todo lo que dice tiene que ver con ése espacio.

Pero entremos en harina. Sugiero empezar por leer su artículo, y seguir leyendo ésto luego.

Moderación centralizada

El primer “estilo” de moderación o facilitación que identifica Ed se corresponde con la de un recurso aislado, una comunidad online basada en un sólo conjunto de foros/listas/etc cuyos usuarios no cuentan con alternativas o complementos a la “comunidad” central; por decirlo de algún modo, no hay nada que compita por la atención de la gente. Es un modelo teórico bien conocido, sobre el que hace unas cuantas reflexiones muy oportunas.

La palabra clave es teórico. Ese modelo no se corresponde (nunca se ha correspondido) con ningún caso real, salvo como simplificación.

Moderación descentralizada

En un tiempo en que los recursos con los que construir iniciativas (comunidades, blogs, redes) se multiplican y abaratan, es imposible que los potenciales usuarios de una comunidad dediquen toda su atención a un sólo recurso: hay demasiadas opciones para que nadie la monopolice. “La moderación descentralizada es un reconocimiento de que en este entorno los usuarios no pueden dar el 100% de su atención a ninguna comunidad centralizada, e ir a buscarlos donde residen”, dice Ed.

En resumen, supone asignar o reclutar facilitadores para supervisar, promover y asesorar en cada uno de esos recursos externos (grupos de Facebook, páginas de MySpace, o de Lastfm, o de …), y usar el núcleo central como el único sitio donde se pueden proporcionar servicios formalizados de los que se responsabilice la “organización”.

La experiencia de Ed usando estos entornos como banderín de enganche para promover otras iniciativas es seria. Sin embargo y como veremos, hay muchas variaciones sobre ésta política y las diferencias son serias. Finalmente, me encanta su representación de la “moderación dentro y fuera del login”:

Moderación distribuída

En tercer lugar, Ed analiza un modelo de comunidades muy distinto. En lugar de un recurso, los facilitadores promueven un flujo: definen una “comunidad por keyword”, un tema de conversación, no un núcleo de servicio. Promueven que blogs, sites, foros, etc dentro del espacio conversacional usen esa etiqueta (keyword) para designar lo que quieren compartir, y el núcleo permite agregar todas esas cosas para que cualquier interesado pueda participar en sus propios términos. Es decir, el núcleo se reduce a un sistema de administración de ese flujo de información entre recursos separados e independientes, dependiente de la voluntad de los terceros. Un agregador, no un generador.

Una vez más, pero con ecosistema

Lo malo es que cada una de las fotos es incompleta, en mi opinión, y especialmente en el caso de una comunidad de práctica. Para explicarlo, veamos tres cosas:

- Fragmentación. Siempre, por definición, existen varias fuentes de información alternativas y modos de intercambio de experiencia, o de difusión de opinión (aunque sea offline). Tanto la moderación como la promoción de cualquier iniciativa tendrá que partir de ello; el primer modelo no es realista ni siquiera dentro de la intranet de una empresa.

- Complejidad. La relación entre esas iniciativas no es neutral. Influyen unas en otras. La razón puede ser de dos tipos: funcional, o económica. La primera se refiere al impacto que otras iniciativas puedan tener en los objetivos de cada una; la segunda, al impacto específico en sus resultados económicos (algo más que serio en caso de iniciativas con fines comerciales).

Es un ecosistema, con relaciones de colaboración y de competencia, de simbiosis y de parasitismo. Y lo es a varios niveles, porque cada uno de esos recursos es diferente y tiene fines y procesos distintos. Hay relaciones en la generación de contenidos, en el flujo de conversaciones, en la creación de objetos y el desarrollo de proyectos, en los resultados económicos, en la propia marca e imagen de cada uno.

- Volumen crítico y práctica. Algo que puede no ser relevante en otros tipos de comunidades, quizá, pero que es muy importante en las comunidades de práctica: el objetivo no es el intercambio de opiniones o el flujo de fotos o eventos sociales, ni siquiera la promoción de unas ideas o una marca, sino la identificación de soluciones a problemas comunes: la creación de una “práctica” compartida. La calidad de las soluciones es directamente proporcional al número de personas que acceden a las conversaciones en las que se buscan esas soluciones, y a la concentración y coherencia de esas conversaciones (diez grupos desconectados de cinco personas debatiendo sobre la resolución de algo no aprenden lo mismo que un grupo de cincuenta perspectivas diferentes). Y la eficacia de la comunidad aumenta con la capacidad de conservar y evolucionar las conversaciones y soluciones pasadas.

Dicho de otro modo, para una comunidad de práctica el “núcleo” es algo más que opcional: es el eje de la acumulación de conocimiento y el foco de las conversaciones.

Eso significa que la segunda modalidad de moderación (creación de subfocos de conversación o servicio, aunque el centro esté claro) nunca podrá ser más que un banderín de enganche para el núcleo o un añadido social, porque fragmentar las conversaciones sería contraproducente. Y la tercera modalidad (agregación de contenidos y conversaciones temáticas de terceros) evidentemente no puede ser más que un complemento para un epicentro con masa crítica propia suficiente… y no es nada fácil mantener esa masa crítica cuando se está dirigiendo tráfico y atención hacia otros recursos con los que no existe un acuerdo estable y claro de colaboración productiva.

Una cosa es márketing y otra cosa es…

Una vez dicho ésto, hay que señalar que el artículo de Ed es para no perdérselo desde otro punto de vista: modos de promocionar un recurso, sea una comunidad o un site o cualquier otra “propiedad web”, usando los medios de la web social.

En el caso de la “moderación descentralizada”, estamos hablando del uso de redes sociales establecidas (MySpace, Facebook), servicios online (Flickr, YouTube, Lastfm), canales de publicación (WordPress, comunidad de blogs de algún periódico) y otros medios masivos puestos por terceros, con el objetivo de suplementar los servicios propios o (más importante en este modelo) promover el tráfico y la marca de nuestro propio producto. Se trata de una maniobra compleja y cara (el tiempo de los encargados de conseguirlo no sale gratis) pero de efectividad contrastada, especialmente para la promoción de una marca o una campaña.

En el caso de la “moderación distribuída”, hablamos de sustituir (o complementar sustancialmente) la creación de contenidos propios usando la agregación de aquello creado por terceros que es relevante para nuestro target, ya sea logrando la difusión y utilización por terceros de una etiqueta (keyword, tag) propia, o sencillamente utilizando las más relevantes para dicho target. Esta estrategia puede convertir nuestro producto efectivamente en un eje para los que buscan comunidad o actividad, a un coste mucho menor que el equivalente para construir y defender una posición de referencia. De hecho, hay un cierto site de Mac (competencia de Macuarium) que aspira a utilizarla.

En resumen

Aunque su aplicación a las comunidades de práctica, específicamente, sea peliaguda, el artículo de Ed señala dos de las estrategias de promoción en la web que más auge están empezando a tener, y algunos de los factores que influyen en ellas. Para cualquiera que trabaje en la creación o promoción de comunidades, y de hecho para cualquiera que promueva algo en la red, ofrece lecciones importantes.

Véase a la empresa que The Economist ha contratado para promover sus debates web. Pero ésa es otra historia ;-).

Nice paper: Google evidence on prediction markets

In an extremely roundabout way I just came across this: a paper written by Google’s Bo Cowgill and academics Justin Wolfers and Eric Zitzewitz and published on January 6th, studying the evidence from Google’s dabbling in prediction markets, described as means to “efficiently aggregate many employees’ information and augment existing forecasting methods”. Not everyone’s definition maybe (there’s prediction markets a bit wider) but a real practical example.

The study tracks the accuracy and biases of different internal prediction markets, following on quite a number of variables (from the professional relevance of the question posed to its dependence on the company’s execution, but also every other you can think of and some more). The results are intuitive in parts (physical proximity between employees correlates with their answers since they tend to share lots of information, extreme options are underestimated), less intuitive in others (the presumed role of optimism, an insight into some Google management principles, and the flow of information in closely “packed-in” groups of people).

It’s not exactly an easy or a fast chew, but my particular prediction is that it will be worth poring over. There are not too many detailes analyses on real prediction markets, so even such a narrow example should be relevant. And it is narrow, as the market participants appear to have been a very definite segment of employees. So narrow indeed that the dominant factor seems to have been physical proximity in the workplace (Google really tracked all sorts of data during the study).

Narrowness being a main driver in increasing clustering of opinions (reducing the variety of the sample decreases the differences in valuation since the variety of factors considered and data handled decreases too), the results of the study are hardly representative of multi-company or open prediction markets. But it does give rise to the question of the relative importance of some information flows that were apparently being underestimated in these “2.0″ days of electronic communications.

And it does seem that those markets don’t do too bad a job at evaluating mainstream options (I’m guessing less clustering would improve the evaluation of the less mainstream ones). This is not enough to abandon scenario planning and other prediction tools, but can help to gauge lots of opinions in a fast and efficient way.

And it’s not all statistics. The talent management practices of Google peek out of the study in several ways.

Chewing on…

Author vs community (II): Hostage taking and reaction

Some of you may have read a previous post about a user who was erasing messages on the Macuarium boards, and the debate that arose among facilitators. Indeed, some of the comments were prescient. Here is the story of what happened afterwards. Long, twisty and debatable, as it is a raw account and not a use case.

To show a more complete picture, let’s add that the user was in the list of candidates of our yearly prize to the user with the most valued contributions. He was appreciated mostly by patrons of the social (off-topic) forum, where he spent most of his time in the last few years, and many votes were popularity-based rather than contribution-based, but you can hardly help that in an online poll. Also, he was a recognized active and long-time user, with several thousand messages to his name (about 6000 in total, some 3000 in technical forums).

To cap it all, this time last year we were considering asking him to step up to be a facilitator. We didn’t, because at the yearly gathering all of us had the same impression: face to face, he didn’t have it. He was not the right material for such a job, the way we do it. Too happy to have met himself, to put it mildly.

And when I repeatedly say “we”, I mean the consensus of facilitators and admins.

About the time when you and I were discussing here what could be learnt and done, another Macuarium admin, and a facilitator that was a friend of the mentioned user, sent separare private (backchannel) messages to the deleter, asking about the matter. We were aware of some disconfort on his part, which we though due to his perception that we were not enforcing political correctness in the forums (and we aren’t) whereas we enforced rules that he didn’t like (like avoiding duplicate messages and offtopics in technical forums). As I said, he was known to be a bit on the narcissistic side, although we appreciated his contributions. We didn’t think there was any serious problem with him.

He answered his friend with a vague and angry letter (apparently she had expressed her displeasure at having a particular thread mutilated) and the administrator with a vague and polite one (she’d been kind, as usual) in which he gave no specific quarrel. While we were commenting both answers, we found that he’d started a thread in the social forums to express his “protest and disagreement”… in a completely vague way (i.e. not mentioning the specific actions or people that had caused his protest, or the actions he wanted implemented).

We were quite surprised. In Macuarium, it is customary to avoid those public threads because they become unseemly brawls, with a dozen people championing different issues and everyone playing to the gallery instead of finding common ground. We stress the use of backchannel conversations to solve whatever issue, with the admins acting as “last resort” when there is a disagreement with a facilitator that can’t be solved.

This thread promply went the way of others. We initially let it proceed and asked for specific issues that were a problem and could be corrected, but didn’t get any (meaningful) answer. At the same time, we found out that the user had edited the last of his messages, which sort of rattled a bit (we were trying to understand the problem and he kept raising the stakes with his other hand while answering messages as if nothing happened). After getting no answers in the thread, and reading a particularly painful message from a user with a different axe to grind, the thread was closed and frozen (we have a “frozen storage” area for threads that are deemed “records”, and took it there).

The facilitator team was a bit confused, to put it mildly. What we all agreed is that the user needed to be prevented from destroying further threads, and thus removed that right from him.

As far as I could see the issue then, we had a case of a user who was exercising his control on his messages to force the community managers to change policies (the fact that we could not understand what he wanted changed was a different issue). It was worse than blackmail. He had deleted his messages, which in my mind was a direct assault on hundreds of threads. So while we kept asking him for a clear explanation of his problem, I decided to cut him out of the above-mentioned poll to select the most appreciated contributor.

Of course, I explained the decision in the poll’s thread. That led to a public debate of whether that was right or not. Most people approved heartily, but we got sharp rebukes from three sides: two friends of the deleter, two people with different axes to grind (their appearance was constructive, since they were writing under new nicks, pretending to be different users… unveiling them and their private quarrels destroyed their credibility and helped ours), and several nicks registered by the deleter (pretending to be different people: unfortunately for him, forum management does give some useful tracking tools).

The friends subsided, the interlopers slunk away (having earned a new e-speak name, “zombies”), and the false nicks were banned. Indeed by that time the issue was preposterous: 24 hours later, no coherent complaint or proposal had emerged, either in public (where the deleter was given a channel to write through a “neutral” user) or in private.

We were quite fed up by then. I said so and stated that we would not continue listening by noon that day. At 14,04 I received a private message where the deleter showed very constructive engagement and rejected every interpretation of his behaviour that was other than positive. At 14,15, while writing a constructive answer, I was made aware that he had not, in fact, erased his messages.

He had substituted the texts with a link to a transparent image, hosted on his server. We found out when he changed the image to a different, protesting one.

I felt that he had been playing (again) with us, and let free rein to the facilitator team. Every single “showpiece” of the deleter was made invisible, over 6000 messages, by hand, in some 12 hours of coordinated, night-shift-including work by several people (by which time, the deleter had changed the image into a “manifesto” that stated that the original texts were “not deleted, but safely kept, and would have been soon restored to the community” had we not reacted so badly to his “constructive complaint”.

That incensed the whole team. First, we did not believe it for a minute. Second, it changed the situation from an angry user taking his content with him by deleting it (something bad, but arguably legitimate in the end) into a hostage situation. He was saying he had withdrawn them as part of the protest, to reinforce the message.

To cut a long story short, we were not having that. We are proud to hold no favouritism: rules are the same for all, appreciated contributor or newbie. Trying to push us through that content was like adding insult to injury.

We refused to play ball, completely. Now, he’s been banned thoroughly, his messages invisible and to remain so, even his PDF guides to be deleted. He roams out there badmouthing us :-).

We have to thank him for a lot of lessons learned, though, about user content management and even early conflict management. We have also to thank him for the inmensely satisfactory experience of feeling the backing of the community along all this issue.

In these nine years, there have been clashes with users and groups of users, but few where we could so clearly pinpoint so few people trying to coerce so many to do as they wanted… and where we could prove that they were actually that few, and that contrary to the shared ethos of the community.

I dare say that without the content mutilation, he’d have got some backing: he was popular, he was appreciated, he might have had some real grievance (I still can’t say) and there’s other people with bruised toes. But by proving that he didn’t care about the damage wrought to all, he confirmed what we concluded in the previous post of this story.

Community content is sacred to the community. Even if it is still property of the author.

Normas vivas para una comunidad de práctica

En un tema en el que se están debatiendo propuestas de mejora para el sistema de comunidades de Macuarium, los usuarios están trabajando en una versión sintetizada de las normas (algo que tiene mérito porque tenemos decenas de páginas al respecto). Es algo no solamente fundamental, sino también muy interesante porque resalta tanto los puntos “críticos” (aquellos en los que con más frecuencia es necesaria una orientación) como los objetivos de la comunidad. Vamos a incorporar y utilizar la sugerencia.

Un usuario, Fer76, ha sacado tiempo también para poner esas nuevas FAQs (reglas) en tono de humor. No será el que figure en la versión definitiva, pero estoy seguro de que transmite muy bien las ideas esenciales de la filosofía de la casa:

1. Hablarás de asuntos técnicos sobre todas las cosas.
2. No hablarás de política o religión.
3. No darás soporte a la piratería.
4. No comprarás ni venderás fuera de ‘El Zoco’.
5. No repetirás temas en vano, y usarás las búsquedas previamente.
6. Escribirás correctamente, con tranquilidad y sentido común.
7. No dejarás de leer las FAQs completas.

Y como él dice, aún faltan tres ;-).

[Actualizado para añadir las aportaciones de los lectores de emekaeme y colisteros de com-prac]

8. De vez en cuando contribuirás un resumen corto de lo que has entendido (John D Smith, CPSquare).

9. Buscarás y participarás en proyectos que beneficien a la comunidad (Shawn Callaghan, Anecdote).

10. Siempre asumirás buena intención por parte de los demás, y no te tomarás a tí mismo demasiado en serio. (Nancy White, Full Circle Associate)

Estas FAQs se resumen en dos:

Compartirás el chocolate con los otros niños, (Nancy White, Full Circle Associate) y…

Reporting: facilitation types according to Ed

OK, I confess I wasn’t writing so as to leave breathing space to the piece about author rights vs community rights :-). But I just can’t let this go by.

Here is a very interesting and relevant post by Ed Mitchell (of KB fame, even if he’s now doing better things). He’s observed some very relevant things about the evolving nature of facilitation and the flows and links between the “wider community” and a specific resource. He proposes a decentralised facilitation model based on his experience. And (while I disagree with his interpretation of the facts in the specific context of CoPs :-D) all in all he regals us with a very serious bit of learning.

This is real-world. Primum vivere, deinde filosofare, to be pedantic. Ed’s been there.