Thursday, April 4, 2002

Wiki/weblog integration points Nice tidbit of discussion of Wiki versus weblog by Jon Udell. More interesting to me was the link at the bottom to Jon's Byte column where he discusses Wiki in more depth Tony Bowden writes: Having a wiki output OPML won't work, as it requires creating structure that isn't there. Having a wiki input OPML, on the other hand, might produce much more useful results. Going the other way, RSS is a great connector. I just introduced myself to Sunir Shah the other day. I was going to suggest that MeatballWiki offer an RSS feed of its RecentChanges when I looked again and lo, it already does. Even nicer would be to include the first diff in that feed, so that somebody scanning a lot of feeds can make better choices about what to read. Heads, decks, and leads. The Wiki naming style makes for nice heads, and some items in the feed have nice decks (short descriptive tags) as well. The first diff would make a nice optional lead. The model according to which Wikis federate is, by the way, something that the blogging community could profitably study. Peter Thoeny explained it all to me once. Now I want to look into all that again. Here's a column from two years ago that compares Wiki and newsgroup collaboration. It ties together several of these themes. [Jon's Radio] (BTW: "Heads, Decks and Leads" refers to the way newspapers use progressive disclosure in their stories - headlines, sub headlines and leads into the story) 8:37:01 PM     THE SCIENCE OF LEGO SERIOUS PLAY This Lego Whitepaper discusses the background of Serious Play and why it's applicable to modern business LEGO SERIOUS PLAY is an ongoing collaboration of scientists, researchers, business consultants and practicing managers, dedicated to improving business performance. SERIOUS PLAY is a concept developed over several years by Executive Discovery, a member of the LEGO Group. It emerged out of the research and experience of a number of academics and practitioners searching for more effective ways to meet the increasingly complex and challenging demands of the business world. The article explores the way adults play and how that can be used to enhance communication about work. Yet, adult play is not precisely the same as a child's play. When adults play, they play with their sense of identity. Their play is often, though not always, competitive. Adult play is often undertaken with a specific goal in mind, whereas in children the purposes of their play are less conscious. We have identified four purposes of adult play that are especially relevant to our discussion of LEGO SERIOUS PLAY: 1) social bonding, 2) emotional expression, 3) cognitive development and 4) constructive competition. I think there could be real use of this, particularly when trying to reinvent or innovate out of a business rut. 8:09:05 AM     Serious Play We used to use Legos to demonstrate Lean Manufacturing principles. This is more interesting. I think I want to take a set with me when I do Business Process Reengineering again. "Did you see where Lego has developed a 'set' to help businesses and consultants visualize, plan and test business functions and processes? It's called Serious Play. I think I saw this one in the March 18th Fortune." [Steve Pilgrim's Radio Weblog] This would be way more fun than many of the meetings I go to! I'd do this just for the "megaboxes of LEGO bricks and elements." [The Shifted Librarian] 7:38:09 AM     Lenses on Knowledge Management "The first is to examine what KM means in the context of our own status as knowledge workers. If we are expected to create new knowledge, or better apply existing knowledge, or do a better job of sharing knowledge; what new skills and practices does that demand from us? It's too tempting and too easy to fall into the trap of thinking about KM as another one of those topics that affects somebody else in the organization, but I don't need to change. To borrow from the late Walt Kelly, "we have met the enemy, and he is us." I believe this is a fertile and, largely, unexplored dimension of the KM problem.... There will be KM issues that are better addressed at the organizational level than the individual knowledge worker level. Suppose, for example, that you concluded that it would be desirable to reduce an organization's use of email in favor of more KM friendly tools like threaded discussion (or weblogs for that matter). As an individual knowledge worker, you might come to that conclusion, but would make little progress organizationally implementing that decision for yourself. Someone needs to help the organization come to that conclusion and develop a plan for leading the way." [Jim McGee: TEC924] These two paragraphs represent two of the major issues I'm facing right now. I want to incorporate k-logging into the intranet we're building, but until then (if I can even pull it off) I'm using Radio as my personal KM system. Not for projects mind you, although that might be next. Theoretically I can password protect those directories if need be, and then I'd have a proof of concept. But it would be individual, not organizational.  Most of the folks in my organization wouldn't consider themselves "knowledge workers." If I'm going to scale it beyond myself and a few others I've gotten to buy into it, I'll have to provide training, documentation, and compelling reasons why folks should do this. How do I identify the skills and practices I'll need to convey to them to make this successful? Sorry... just worrying out loud here. Hey Jim - can you get me a pair of rose-colored lenses on KM? ;-) [The Shifted Librarian] 7:36:31 AM

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