Blogs, Wikis and Blokis

On KnowledgeBoard, editor Helen Baxter starts a thread on blogs, wikis and blokis (and also a thread on K-logs). Blokis being a hybrid of both weblogs and wikis.

Denham, others and I have discussed the pros and cons of blogging in relation to wikis before, and I feel the need to respond to this thread as well. The comment I posted on KnowledgeBoard was:

Wiki's seem to need a centralized point of access and thus, by implication, control. Especially the control part, and the resulting questions of (group)-ownership are an issue to me. Basically this is a question of trust. Is the group contributing to a Wiki a community or not?

So I can see localized teamwikis, but no real collaborative structures of a larger size. I think the Wikis on the internet now, in part feel way to anonymous to me (no community feel --> no collaborative feel) or seem dominated or maintained by only one or two people, usually the ones that started the wiki. For example I think of KmWiki as "Denhams Wiki", not because Denham is too dominating, but because he's the only visible exponent of the Wiki I know of.

Trust is also an issue in using the information contained in a Wiki. I do not know who contributed what, nor what the group of contributors looks like. How am I to judge/place trust in the information in the Wiki. And how do I judge then that there is reason enough for me to edit that information. Again this is due to lack of community feel.

That this trust issue (who is part of the 'team'?) is very important to me, maybe because of a Dutch cultural trait: compromise. Basically everything in the Netherlands is arrived at through compromise. This due to population density, no one group ever to be able to set the political agenda alone for even a very limited period of time, and because of the history of watermanagement. However big the rewards of compromise (one would be a consistent and stable foreign policy no matter who's in the government) it also often means, especially in matters of less significance, that no-one recognizes themselves anymore in the outcome. And as a result no-one feels responsible anymore either.

The distinction between watering down to a situation of compromise with no-one feeling attached to the outcome, and reaching a collaborative result of shared understanding, all contributors feel attached to, is the community factor and the trust within it. Visibility of the originators of contributions might help along this way.

As to blogs. To me the main value of my blog is a) charting my own learning process, along with the sources and voices that contributed to it b) the new social networks and structures that result from the conversations around blogposts and c) thinking out loud in front of a public. So blogs conform to a very personal agenda, even though it sparks collaborative spin-offs. Wikis on the other hand seem to imply that none of the contributors holds such a personal agenda, but only a collaborative agenda. I think that is never the case. Blogs showcase 'unfinished products', the threshold for me to contribute to a Wiki would be having some sort of 'finished product', at least from my personal viewpoint. And then have the other participants in a Wiki augment, change, alter or delete that. Then again that would probably be more like discussion then like collaboration.

So a blog/wiki hybrid seems like an interesting idea to me. On the one hand I get to keep my own learning history and get to keep my on-line identity, on the other hand I get to contribute to collaborative projects. My visibility and those of others would be a step to seeing me as a part of community with enough trust build up to view the results as something we all have a stake in. And it also recognizes that everybody still holds a personal agenda. One on which collaboratory work is one of the items. That would to me reflect how collaboration goes on in the 'real world' more as well.

A perfect example of the latter would be the CEN-Workshop to write the Guide to Good Practice in KM. There I feel part of a community and therefore have no reservations in contributing to the collaborative process. My own personal agenda is that this guide will help me with getting clients to understand what KM could do for them, and what it takes and does not take to get there. Also I am sure that all other participants have their own personal agendas on this as well. That they have such a personal agenda also reassures me that they will contribute to the whole: I can see that they have a stake in the end-result.