Ton's Interdependent Thoughts: November 2005

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Knowledge Work Needs Social Software

Knowledge work needs social software to deal with information overload, or at least that is the title of the proposal I sent to the General Online Research 2006 conference. Originally Jan Schmidt asked me and Gabriela Avram, Michael Schuster, and Marco Kalz to jointly propose a whole panel session for this conference. Our session proposal got turned down, but surprisingly, me being the non-academic in the group, my proposal is now scheduled to be presented at the conference. Probably because Jan Schmidt kindly helped edit my proposal to fit the academic atmosphere. The conference is in Bielefeld, Germany, under two hours driving from here (which is actually closer than most of my clients offices in the Netherlands), so an easy commute.

Also in the past months I have spent a lot of time on this subject, here in this blog, but also writing a book with my colleagues of Proven Partners. If this works out ok, it might even be a good base for further work to be presented at BlogTalk Reloaded. Anyway now I have to seriously start working on how to deliver on the promise I put in as a proposal:

Knowledge is the ability to act (Sveiby, 1997), and consists of the interaction of Information, Experience, Skills and Attitude (K = f(I*ESA), Weggeman, 1997).

With the ascend of the internet and the spreading of easy and cheap tools to produce and publish information, we have come to live in a world of information abundance, where much larger groups have access to much larger bodies of information. Our skill sets and information strategies to gather, filter, judge, and use information however are still largely rooted in the concept of information scarceness. The notion of information overload is the expression of that mismatch between information abundance and skills based on information scarceness, and the effect that mismatch has on our ability to act (=knowledge). (Zijlstra, 2004)

Social software are tools aimed at communicating information through the internet, but with social interaction and personal relationships as their channel of communication. They allow us to convey expressions of experience, skills and attitude in our exchanges of information. Therefore they are very well suited for supporting new information strategies that are geared to information abundance by leveraging the social context of that information. Different social software tools support different parts of those strategies as well as different types of relationships, and an understanding of these differences is needed. I will explore the place of different social software tools in supporting the required new information strategies by presenting and comparing different examples of the use of social software tools, and the type of situation and behaviour they are suited for. Through a qualitative analysis of these examples I will discuss how social software is key for knowledge work in complex situations (Snowden 2003), such as by helping to detect and create emergent information patterns (Johnson , 2002).

Bibliography
Johnson, Steven B., Emergence:The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software, Scribner 2002
Snowden, David J. and Kurtz, C.F. The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world. IBM Systems Journal, Vol 42, No 3, 2003
Sveiby, Karl Erik, The New Organizational Wealth, Berrett-Koehler Publischers Inc., 1997
Weggeman, Mathieu P., Kennismanagement: Inrichting en besturing van kennisintensieve organisaties , Scriptum, Schiedam,1997
Zijlstra, Ton, Every Signal Starts Out As Noise , weblog article March 27th 2004.

I certainly look forward to this, although slightly worried ;).

gor06, informationstrategies, informationoverload, blogtalkreloaded, blogtalk

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Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (2) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at November 22, 2005 12:56 PM)

BlogTalk Reloaded

Thomas Burg and Jan Schmidt just announced that BlogTalk Reloaded, the ~~third~~ fourth edition of BlogTalk, will take place on Oct. 2nd and 3rd 2006 in Vienna.

Okidoki. Added to calendar.

This time around it will be about social software in general, and how to take that a number of steps further.
The conference will address researchers, developers, the community of users, and everyone interested in the phenomenon and tools of social software.

Previous editions of BlogTalk were held in Vienna in 2003 and 2004, both times initiated by Thomas Burg, as well as in Australia in 2005, organized by Anne Bartlett-Bragg, James Farmer, and others.

(via Martin Roell)

blogtalk janschmidt thomasburg

Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at November 17, 2005 10:14 AM)

Not like this AOL!

Today when I started up my instant messaging services (I use Trillian to access Yahoo, AIM, MSN, GoogleTalk, and ICQ) a message screen popped up.

AOL had added two Bots to my buddy-list, MovieFone and ShoppingBuddy. So I could IM them for great holiday flicks and gift ideas.

AOL, I use IM to connect to people I know, it is a personal medium. I am not at all interested in asking robots for shopping ideas through IM. Worse, you provide this 'service' by adding stuff to my contact list without asking me and tell me to right click and delete if I don't want it there. Opt-out is not the route to go AOL. You violated my personal sphere and so have diminished my trust in you as a company. It also seems like I'm not the only one having issues with this behaviour by AOL.

aol aim moviefone shoppingbuddy

Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at November 17, 2005 09:36 AM)

Read.io: Podcasting service (closed beta)

From Felix Petersen (one of the originators of Plazes) I got the announcement of a new service he'd like to have beta tested. It's called Read.io and it takes a RSS feed with text items, and converts them into podcasts. It can do that in different languages. They are working together with the Swedish firm Readspeaker to convert the texts to audio.

I think it might work for lazy guys like me who can't be bothered setting up their own equipment. But I wonder about whether it would still feel authentic enough to the listener?
For now I added my usual RSS feed to the service. I might consider writing seperate items though, to have them podcasted. I'll see if I find some time to really play with it at the end of the week.

It is a closed beta, so I can't point you anywhere, but let's see how the scripts in this posting work out so that you could listen to the result.

Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at November 14, 2005 09:02 AM)

Knowledge Board Fringe Event

Monday and part of Tuesday I will spend at the KnowledgeBoard Fringe Event. It is the community part of the KCC conference, that used to be known as KM Europe.

In the past I have been critical about KM Europe's model, even though the events themselves were always worthwile to me for the meeting place it was for the KM community. This year they have changed their format extensively, though in my view not for the better. So I am at least a little hesitant about the Fringe Event taking place alongside KCC Europe. Maybe next time KnowledgeBoard should try and strike out on their own, which I think we could.

But the Fringe Event itself I look forward to a lot. I have not heard much about who will be there, so that will be a surprise, but the programme we all put together certainly has potential. On Tuesday morning I will facilitate a session, called the Market for Ideas. Not sure yet what I'll do, but tomorrow there will be ample time to sample expectations and act accordingly.

Hope to see you in Amsterdam tomorrow!

Technorati Tags : knowledgeboard, arkgroup, kcceurope, fringe

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Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at November 6, 2005 05:24 PM)

New Lay Out

Last year December, and in January of this year I started working on a new lay out for this blog. I finished the design, created the first few templates for it, and then ..... nothing happened for months.

In order to make myself finish the new templates I had set my 3 years of blogging milestone of last Friday as a deadline. So now it is done, the new design is implemented.

It is a full CSS based design, no tables anymore. Also I have started using the fancier urls Movable Type provides for entry-archives, where the title is part of the url. But don't worry, all the old urls still work. I did not replace the old templates, I added new ones that exist in parallel. Permalinks should be just that: permanent.

I have removed a lot of stuff that cluttered the site, and went from 3 columns to 2. Biggest addition is the box with presence indicators up in the right hand column. Blogging is about connecting, so I have increased the amount of information that lets you connect to me.

Now let's hope you all like it, and it works as it's supposed to. In IE there is a little problem with the presence indicators (and the presence server isn't up at this point, something I'll be able to fix Monday night.), but it seems that is about it. Let me know what you think, and whether everything works. (Oh, and I will fix the fact that you are now redirected from the index page to the new one with the .shtml extension as soon as I have access to the server at home again.)

Ad experiment:

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Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at November 6, 2005 04:00 PM)

Three years ago today...

...I acted on David Gurteen's and Lilia Efimova's suggestion that opening a weblog might be a good idea.

In those three years,
I learned an awful lot, and am still learning daily from everything you bring to our interaction
I found myself immersed in literally hundreds of new relationships with great and bright people around the globe
I had the good fortune to meet up with scores of those new people in my blogging vicinity, at workshops, conferences, at our home when they visited, as well as at their homes across the continent.
I changed jobs, where my blog helped establish my professional credentials
I now work with 10 fun, bright and exciting colleagues at Proven Partners, where I can follow my passion about knowledge work so much more closely than before
I found in my blog my voice in expressing my passion as well as a critical and likewise passionate audience
I find myself giving presentations, trainings and workshops on social software and knowledge management on a growing number of occasions
I found 7 fun and exciting people with whom me and my partner Elmine established a brand new Institute devoted to the things that I also find in my blogging: creativity, culture and above all collaboration.
I radically changed the way I gather and view information, and the daily routines surrounding that

And almost every day I feel more strongly that it is all only just beginning.

I don't think blogs as such will change the world. I don't think my blog does.
It's people that change the world. And all of you certainly changed mine.

With the simple step of opening up a place at blogspot in 2002 I did not set out to change my life. It was just a new tool to play and experiment with, that Lilia and David pointed me to. And it wasn't blogspot or Movable Type that changed my life in a myriad of little and bigger ways. It was you and me when we started building our relations and conversations that did that, and when we started building on the patterns that emerged.

Tools never change anything. It is people seeing opportunities and grabbing them with those tools that change things. Thank you all, who have read, commented, debated, reflected, worked and connected with me. Thank you for seeing those opportunities for change, grabbing them, and sharing it with me. Thank you.

Here's to the next three years!

Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (1) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at November 4, 2005 11:39 PM)