Wikis as Mosaics - Social Capital - Clay Shirky - Here Comes Everybody - Ch 5

 

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger's Wikipedia morphed out of their original 2001 idea - Nupedia - which had an amazingly bureaucratic process of vetting & approvals before content could be published - if you ever been on a standards writing committee you will know what it feels like... it was overtaken by its offshoot Wikipedia .. "a hybrid of tool and community" p 136

However it actually followed the first user-editable Wiki developed by Ward Cunningham in 1996 predicated on the then radical assumption "groups of people who want to collaborate also tend to trust one another. If this was true, then a small group could work on a shared writing effort without needing formal management or process" p 111.

Interestingly Wikipedia was conceived as an open encyclopedia .. becoming "a general-purpose tool for gathering and distributing information quickly, a use that further cemented Wikipedia in people's mind as a useful reference work"  p 117

I find it intriguing when fellow techo professionals pronounce that one shouldn't use Wikipedia as a professional resource let alone cite it - personally I choose to do so - as a first pass - Dummy's entry point if I have to learn something new - like Non Tariff  - Technical Barriers to Trade at the World Trade Organization. It's easy to read - commonsense approach helped me enormously to get started as I tried to navigate the WTO & EU web sites - ultimately I created a wiki in Sharepoint - like a breadcrumb trail to find my way in and out of these seemingly impenetrable maze-like sites.

And my Teen finds the same works for her - she really likes Wikipedia but knows that she needs to cite other more acceptable & reputable sources !

The driver for me in creating wiki pages in Sharepoint was just as Shirky described for Wikipedia ...

"Someone decides that an article .... should exist and creates it. The article's creator doesn't need to know everything ... Once an article exists, it starts to get readers. Soon a self selecting group of those readers decide to become contributors. Some of them add new text, edit the existing article, some add references to other articles or external sources, and some fix typos.. No one person was responsible for doing or even managing the work "  p118-119 . Shirky describes the wiki format as a form of "publish-then filter". - p 135

And so the wiki and its wiki pages seem as though they are becoming a fascinating & evolving series of mosaics - where sometimes you can't see the whole immediately.

Pic 1 Athens - Pic 2 & 3 Delphi Mosaics - Pic 4 Istanbul Topkapi Palace - Pics 5 & 6 Istanbul Hagya Sophia

See the full gallery on Posterous

In fact I find with my org's Sharepoint pages that not everyone wants to edit online but they may tell you verbally or email you suggestions. It seems that many struggle with the concept of "publish-then filter" - preferring to edit repeatedly before publishing. I recall attending a Knowledge Management Round Table where attendees at my table felt too afraid to embrace the "publish-then filter" approach.

This seems to align with Shirky who describes participation in Wiki activities as following a power law distribution - others call it the 90-9-1 Law - ie 1% of folks will initiate content, 9% may comment or amend it and 90% (sometimes called the Lurkers) will only read it but not initiate nor amend. Similarly - this probably reflects public involvement in government consultation initiatives - how some government bureaucrats bewail the "self-selected".

And it explains why Twitter remains highly successful - even if most users don't tweet - they may still value reading the tweets of others they respect. Same effect showed up when my org's ICT surveyed users about one of our Communities of Practice - more folks liked to read, even if they didn't contribute themselves. I shared this with my Management Team yesterday when we began reviewing the state of our Knowledge Sharing programme

"you can't look for a representative contributor, because none exists. Instead, you have to change your focus, to concentrate not on the individual users but on the behaviour of the collective" p 128

Shirky also suggests that this power law effect is what lies behind Chris Anderson's Long Tail. Reflecting further he distinguishes between tightly connected small groups and those larger ones with weak ties drawing the wedding reception analogy where the bride and groom can only "talk to most of the guests for just a few minutes" - p 130.

So the tool is there with Wikipedia & other wikis  - but why do people bother - when there are no financial incentives ? But then why do some folks volunteer to coach kids sporting teams or in Australia deliver "Meals on Wheels " to older frail folks ?

Shirky suggests 3 reasons : to use some unused capabilities, vanity and to do a good thing. He also argues that "Wikipedia exists because enough people love it" p 141

And the nagging question - does anyone care about the wiki contributions anyway ? According to Shirky "Wikis reward those who invest in improving them. This explains why both experts and amateurs are willing to contribute" p 135

His final words in this chapter ...

"When people care enough, they can come together and accomplish things of a scope and longevity that were previously impossible; they can do big things for love .. " p 142 -  in this case for the concept of what Wikipedia means.

 

 

Posted via email from kerrieannesfridgemagnets's posterous

Zenjidoka and Ford intersecting Boston E2.0 Big Data - Unified Communications perhaps

Globalisation has been a force of disruptive change over the last 10 years or so. Just look at smart phones & iPhones. And there's never been more pressure on the automotive industry - global disruptive changes - a quick read of my local Sydney newspaper revealing an astonishing infographic  last Saturday (more here). heading for 60 million cars manufactured worldwide each year.
The previous year it was nudging over 50 million. And China, long the home of the Pigeon bicycle, now makes 25% of the global car total, ie  more than Japan & Korea combined. I recall holidaying in China in 2005 with the family, then there were only 2 million cars in Beijing but I noticed a lot of foreign car companies had set up factories there - playing for the future. And the USA in the global car manufacturing scene? Dropping below India with just under 5% of world total.
And then the pace of technology introduction into cars seems to be accelerating - a couple of years ago when my significant other bought his last car, the thought of USB, Bluetooth & mp3 in your standard car was not on the horizon. Recently when I bought a budget subcompact - they all there.
But with technology comes complexity & the risks of more headaches - just ask Toyota. I must admit to being astonished that they only set up their global quality initiative after the controversy over the suddent acceleration problems. Solutions perhaps from Norman Bodek's - few months I ago I posted on his Zenjidoka  concept of engaging front line service people in feeding back to design & manufacturing engineers about customer complaints.
So ASQ's Paul Borawski's interview on Ford with Bennie Fowler  is interesting,  as are the recent ASQ RSS news feed on Mark Field and more from Bennie Fowler on the GQRS, Global Quality Research System, on improving customer satisfaction by addressing things gone wrong.
Interestingly in the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference held in Boston in June 2011, Sameer Patel spoke of the change in putting the Big R into Customer Relationship Management & Market Dynamics. As Toyota found, with all the exploding social media technologies, like Facebook & Twitter it is no longer possible to isolate or ignore bad news. Just as Clay Shirky spoke of in his "Here Comes Everybody" - it's ridiculously easy to form groups - so we rapidly reach Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point.
However these technologies can provide the key to frontline research and can be utilised to rapidly address problems - however there's a deluge of data needing the ability to manage Unified Communications across the social media channels.  The computer geeks like David Carr have an answer to that too - they call it Big Data & Analytics - again a theme at the Boston E2.0 conference.
So like Crisis being Danger & Opportunity - perhaps there exists the same in the car manufacturing industry - Opportunities to use Social Media, Big Data & Unified Communications in listening to & acting upon emerging issues before they become the crisis.

Posted via email from kerrieannesfridgemagnets's posterous

Ebbinghaus or the Curves on why we just keep forgetting

Recently I came across the Ebbinghaus Curve aka the Forgetting Curve - interesting because my boss oftens laments  about how people can be trained in an improved SOP or new process, and then after a year or so they seem to have forgotten, and there is a risk of quality issues.

And to be honest, if someone catalogs a complex list of instructions on how to drive to a distant location, I find it often just doesn't gel with me. I much prefer simple written instructions, with the added visual component of a street directory. So far I haven't done much with GPS systems either to be honest.

So I've been intrigued by Nick Milton of Knoco Stories, who for years has been running a training program called the Bird Island Exercise, which is all about remembering & forgetting. Recently I re-discovered one of Nick's posts on his Bird Island Exercise from a year ago - where he shared the following insights :

"This result reinforces recognition of the frailty of human memory as a long term knowledge store, and therefore the need to support that memory through some sort of capturing and recording. Even 6 months is too long to leave knowledge in memory alone. We need to be capturing it as we go, even as an aide memoire, otherwise we lose it.


And when we come to use it again, we find we retain just enough to be dangerous."

Nick Milton also shared more on the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve in his The Gorilla Illusions post - by the way have you ever heard of the Invisible Gorilla Experiment ?

I also liked Nick's post on The Self Aware Organisation - it seems to resonate with many of the concepts in Professor James Reason's High Performance Organizations.

And around the same time of Nick's Remembering & Forgetting post, Harold Jarche also shared his thoughts on Ebbinghaus & the Forgetting Curve - Learning & Forgetting - on how much we remember after training & memorisation - and how quickly we can lose it.

Professor James Reason has also had some interesting thoughts on Human Errors - which seem to accord with the Forgetting Curve as shared in my organization's OHS awareness sessions. 

Some of these ideas are also echoed in a preso by ACTKM's David Williams "How do you get people to read and understand stuff?" - it's on Slideshare - which holds some very interesting preso's on Knowledge Management which are freely  available for download. David's thoughts are salient when one considers the increasing volume, length & complexity of SOP's - Standards Operating Procedures - as they try to cover every possible scenario. 


Then Benedict Carey (NYT) reviewed ideas that turn traditional thought on studying, learning & retention on its head.


I have to review my organization's procedure for writing standard procedures - so there could be some good inspiration in there, for what is arguably quite a dry subject, but nonetheless very crucial. 


I've always liked the Gunning Fog approach to understandability of one's writing - some find it too geeky with its equation for simplicity/complexity of writing.

I find it interesting because of the strong focus on Corporate "Storytelling" in Knowledge Management circles in Australia in recent years as opposed to CMS - Content Management Systems.  In fact CMS can really support SME's (Subject Matter Experts) to effectively manage their  PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) systems - for more effective recall & Knowledge Sharing, and so to share via tools such as Corporate "Storytelling". My organization's SSO's (Significant Safety Occurrence shared stories & learnings) are in fact a good example of embedded Corporate Storytelling in my opinion.

See my Diigo Shared Bookmarks & Google Reader RSS feed items for more Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve links.

Posted via email from kerrieannesfridgemagnets's posterous

70-20-10 Learning - an Aussie ASQ Global Influential Voice for Quality Shares on Making a Difference

Lifelong Learning & 70:20:10 rule of learning = Informal on the Job:Coaching:Formal Classroom Llessons  ? Making a Difference Globally ?

I am a great fan of Harold Jarche & John Tropea with their strong focus on informal learning including the 70-20-10 rule of learning. Likewise I am a strong proponent of Quality in our daily lives, and so was intrigued by ASQ's head Paul Borawski's recent post "Quality Tools and Education : Making a Difference on a Global Scale."

Of course, learning & knowledge management are key components of continual improvement in Resource Management in Quality - as reflected in even the previous edition of ISO 9004. In our world Education is not just what you do at school, college or university - we have to keep re-learning in such a rapidly changing world. And we need confidence in the quality of the resources we use, as we continually learn & re-learn.

Nearly 10 years ago I encountered the Learning Cities & Communities movement - centred around Lifelong Learning - a key to resilience of communities in change and adversity. The initiative was largely appropriated by the Community College movement aka Adult Education Associations in Australia. Yet I always believed that it couldn't be monopolised by this sector alone - not everyone is in a position to attend formal face to face classroom lessons.

In Sydney, Australia we had an insightful article by Louise Williams in this weekend's edition of our local Sydney Morning Herald "The Slow Collapse of the Ivory Tower". Ms Williams wrote of how learning is changing from face to face classrooms in an internet world and how this threatens the traditional university or college monopoly on higher learning. She also spoke of how increasing numbers of students are not attending lectures, choosing to source their required information in alternative ways. Curious as I had observed lecturers at my local uni lamenting the same when I attended a prize giving event last November.

And yet it's not new - when I served for 12 years on the Governing Council of the University of Wollongong (located south of Sydney), I found that UOW was already moving into on-line blended E-learning years ago. However there are advantages of face to face learning - the serendipity & synergy of bouncing ideas off each other.

Likewise there are emerging challenges to the traditional "peer reviewed paper" in an academic journal on which academics' ranking is based - enabling them to compete for research funding & attract students. I recall attending a conference across the other side of Australia about 5 years ago, where attendees were denied timely access to copies of the conference papers because the organisers wanted to publish them to increase the rankings of academics who had presented at the conference. It was "all driven by the rankings cycle" as I subsequently found out - and I finally received the conference papers 9 months after the conference! The freshness and impact of the presenters' work in my mind was lost - I'd wanted to share new insights with my professional colleagues - but all I had were my scribbled handwritten notes.

No wonder that with this time delay paradigm, the proliferation and the increasing cost of academic journals, that the peer reviewed paper model is now being seriously challenged by the immediacy of online collaboration. And yet we need to ensure that there is confidence in the quality of online E-learning & web posts. It is also important that "Digital Native" students can discriminate between accurate & erroneous information in a web based & increasingly social media dominated world.

Not to mention the tipping point as we see the rapidly disappearing print book market and the exploding E-book market - with its flow-on impact on Public & Academic Librarians. Librarians are recognising that they must participate in the debate around these changes rather than take the high moral ground and shun it. At a Library Conference in Brisbane Australia last year, one presenter spoke of the advantages of E-Readers for students in the Pacific Islands where high humidity can destroy the traditional printed book based library collections.

Unfortunately some Baby Boomer Managers are still dismissive of Web 2.0 and Social Media tools in Technology & Quality worlds. Yet ISO, the OECD & WTO, for instance, have embraced social media approaches (eg Youtube, Facebook & Twitter)  in trying to reach a wider global audience. Admittedly, it can seem haphazard sometimes especially with social media tools like Paper.li Dailies (eg mine-KerrieAnne paper.li).

However as a Baby Boomer techo manager, I've had to reinvent myself several times over the last 5 years - 1st as a Quality Manager and then during the GFC with a zero training budget, to become an International Trade backroom boffin -  specialising in how standards & conformity apply in Technical (Non Tariff) Barriers to Trade (TBT's). I've used tools like Sharepoint's Wiki to capture my evolving WTO TBT knowledge, sharing it both locally and globally across my organization - to avoid re-inventing the wheel.

So it is great to see how organizations like ASQ are embracing online E-learning & social media tools to address the 70:20:10 approaches to learning. ASQ is bringing a quality approach to these new technologies - setting a standard on how they can be applied for younger and older "students" alike - regardless of whether they are formally enrolled in courses or learning informally. As an Australian based member of ASQ, and one of its International Global Influential Voices for Quality, I am sharing & learning from my fellow Global Influential Voices - a fantastic initiative.

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 (Please note I do receive a variety of quality resources as an honorarium in exchange for my commitment to the ASQ Global Influential Voices for Quality program. However the thoughts & opinions that I express here in my blog are my own!).

Posted via email from kerrieannesfridgemagnets's posterous

Serendipity - Storytelling of Wine and War - Le Maitre de Maison de Sa Cave a Sa Table

It was @Reemski who triggered it - not the Wine and War - but finally got me underway to list my family's library collections on LibraryThing. 

 And inevitably revealed, the books that I always meant to read, continually bobbing up and down in the overladen bookcases around our home.

Thus in the early weeks of 2010, and 70 years after the Axis invasion of France, I finally began to read "Wine & War" (E-Reader excerpt) an alternate view of WWII through the eyes of winelovers, Don & Petie Kladstrup. As described by The Wine Doctor, their book is a series of stories of survival under Occupation as told by many of the wine making families of France. It is these stories that predominate over the often awful military details described elsewhere. And also because of these unusual circumstances one man was able to gather the stories of wine and food of regional France.

The story starts in Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps and just across the river from Salzburg, where I had first heard of its Eagles Nest during a trip to Austria in late 1981. We had peered up at it - barely visible so high was it - as our Guide told us of its history as Hitler's fortress. Really ...  just an interesting aside from our skiing holiday in the area near St Johann's am Pillersee in the Austrian Alps. WWII seemed so long ago to us back then, in our twenties, and yet in1981 these events at Berchtesgaden had occurred less than 40 years earlier.

The Kladstrups tell of the vast quantities of French Champagne and wine plundered & railed to Berchtesgaden, despite the efforts of many French to secret as much as possible away behind fake walls in their cellars.

In the opening page the Kladstrups describe the uncovering of half a million bottles of Chateau Lafite Rothschild, Chateau Mouton Rothschild & many other vintages recovered from Berchtesgaden in 1944 by Sergeant Bernard de Nonancourt & others in the French Army. And there were many, many other items stashed there - thus in reading "Wine & War", I began to appreciate Berchtesgaden's significance.

In fact it was the stories in "Wine & War", that made understanding life under the Occupation a closer reality. In movies we often see occcupied Paris, but less of the countryside, such as the Great Wine Regions of France. In "Wine & War" the family stories tell of yet another war after so many ... of taking the longer term view ...  of preserving the family's wine heritage & economy to be ready in the years after the  conflict ended. And also to comprehend the creation of a "borderless" Europe -  what would be later called the European Union - to avoid such wars in the future.

Memorable  stories for me were those of members of French wine families in POW camps - such as Gaston Huet of the Loire who organized the great wine tasting party on January 24 1943, the feast day of St Vincent - patron saint French winemakers - but in the end had to be spread over several days to accommodate 4000 prisoners.The plan was for 700 bottles of wine to "be obtained to enable each prisoner just one glass of wine. The organising committee was composed of representatives from each of France's wine regions "- an indication of the geographic spread of the POW population. Many of the prisoners did not come from wine backgrounds, and so Huet generously shared his knowledge of wine regions, wines & their characteristics, so that the rare experience could fully savoured.

Huet recalled years later "I don't know what we would have done without that party. It gave us something to hold on to. It gave us a reason to get up in the morning to get through each day. Talking about wine and sharing it  made all of us feel closer to home, and more alive."

In fact it was years later when the Kladstrups went to interview Gaston Huet about his opposition to the French Government bringing the TGV railroad through the vineyards, that the whole story of wine in France during the war began to unfold.

Equally evocative - Roger Ribaud also in a POW camp - 'Christmas 1940 "On this Noel of 1940, I have begun to write a little book in an effort to dispel some of the sadness that we are living with and share some of the hopes we cling to in our captivity, of returning to our homes and loved ones and the values we hold most dear" ... Ribaud began to make a list of French wines, every wine he could think of: some he had tasted, others he hoped to taste. He sorted them by region : Burgundy, Bordeaux, Champagne, Alsace, the Loire. He classified them according to their finesse, body and bouquet. '

It would become a book entitled Le Maitre de Maison de Sa Cave a Sa Table - The Head of the Household from His Cellar to His Table  - this is a memoir of great food and wine and how they can brought into perfect harmony" - google it and you will still find reference to this great work -with copies sometimes still available.

Writing on whatever scraps of paper he could scavenge made "long cold lonely days seem shorter"... and Ribaud "asked other POW's about their favourite wine and food combinations , what grapes grow best in their regions  and how they prepared certain foods  ... over time he compiled a huge core of information and knowledge, not only about the famous wines but about small country ones barely known outside their villages...... 

"After the war, his book was published to great acclaim and hailed as one of the first books that paid serious attention to regional wines and food .... Roger Ribaud sent a copy to each of his fellow prisoners of war 'I hope this will ease the pain of imprisonment and yet be a souvenir of our friendship and the years we shared together'."

Roger Ribaud stressed that one did not have to be an expert to know about these things, that most of this could be learned by reading, tasting and talking to others ..."

True knowledge sharing ! And in the most unexpected situations ...

 

Posted via web from KerrieAnne's Kitchen

Foodies and Knowledge Sharing

Is it something to do with MasterChef ? A whole lot of Knowledge Management gurus are suddenly "fessing up" with their fav foodie blogs & sites ...

@michellelamb shared "The Informal Foodie"
@unorder shared The 50 Best Things to Eat in the World
@Reemski has a great blog I am obsessed with food - shared by @hollingsworth & @neridahart
@hollingsworth shared blogs on cooking and where to eat

• Raspberri Cupcakes
• FoodZeitgeist
• Thoughts from Becca - >20,000 followers ???
• Not Quite Nigella
• Grab Your Fork
• Fooderati
• Sameer Patel blogs on Technology & Asian Fusion Cooking
• @Jenius : Top 50 Australian Food Blogs - from JENIUS.COM.AU - the Spectacular Culinary Adventures of a Sydney Gen Y

my own favourite foodie items at GoogleReader & of course at Oz web site Taste - not to mention The Gong : La Marina Tapas, Cheap Eats & Sweet Treats of the Illawarra