Sharing knowledge - do we know enough?

What exactly is knowledge sharing all about?

Asking WIIIFM (what is in it for me) before you start to share defeats the objective, you are getting off on the wrong foot. In the same vein, asking you to enter a password protected space with the aim of sharing should send up warning signals. If your CEO comes back from a KM conference and sets up Lotus, LiveLink or eRoom with complex access privilege's, you should question if they have really got the message. Is giving in the knowledge economy just being naive?, How about the groupware vendor that sells tools, but sponsors no work on understanding collaboration, group processes or conducts no ethnographic research?, do you believe they have collaboration at heart or are they just selling more software?

If you share, do you really give knowledge away?

Sharing knowledge does not lessen your store, often it gets you more. Sharing plays a key role in relationships and bonding, happens in small steps and is assisted through community membership.

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Sharing expertise as patterns

Patterns focus on solutions to repetitive issues or combination of forces and store valuable experiences in a very compact representation. Writing patterns encourages negotiation of value and meaning, pattern names give fast access to useful knowledge and help to clarify communication in teams. The problem with re-invention is often not a lack of communication but the lack of an appropriate medium for transferring key knowledge. Patterns are artifacts, not theory laden constructs and are not tied to any particular discipline or methodology. Their value comes from social consensus and trial by reuse.

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Sharing meeting notes

This goes beyond taking and posting individual notes and sets forth the leverage from having shared  spaces.

• http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/384/landay.pdf

Sharing procedural & diagnostic steps - Launchpads

Beyond e-wizards are launchpads, e-memopads that allow dialog, store complex diagnostic sequences and pride solution steps. Helpdesk in a PDA?

• IBM's launch-pads

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Capturing rationale

Context, benefits, downsides and reasoning are important aspects of sharing and major components of meta data and a corporate memory

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Developing ontologies

Possessing a reduced, very focused terminology, where everyone understands the meaning and applies the right term, has profound advantages for companies when they come to apply search engines, construct navigation aids, use visualization tools, implement agent technologies or index their electronic documents. Benefits: faster and more relevant retrieval, more effective communication, meaning templates promote alignment, ease mentoring, reduce training costs. Reuse strategies applied to language.

Making deliberate distinctions to bring forth unique meaning.

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Crafting joint concept maps

Concept mapping provides a highly visual way to show relationships between core ideas. Combined with the AHP (Analytical Hierarchy Process)the maps may be used to build qualitative models, elicit gaps, test assumptions and check for consensus. The advantage is to invent best practices for interpreting and annealing concept graphs. The promise of electronic whiteboards is to offer us a new way to anneal pictures rather than text. A graphic introduces spatial reasoning, allowing qualitative visual clustering, distance metrics and intuitive affinity measures.

Although it is nothing more than a feeling right now, I believe there is much value in 'seeing' how we interpret graphics, looking for ways to elicit group consensus and including diversity. Developing a practice and a language for 'looking' at graphics is an important component of knowledge building in groups.

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The Blackboard: a shared information space

Consider the wall map in a busy 'war room' with its colored pins showing spatial patterns, remember the blackboard (now it's more likely to be white) with a to-do list, the current concerns and issues or useful contacts.

• The blackboard is an affordance self-organization, short term coordination and memory

People, documents, meetings and other activities often serve as blackboards:  interfaces and boundary objects.

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Sharing metaphors & stories

Sharing knowledge is comparable to sharing your lighted candle: you have the opportunity to share your flame with others who have unlit candles, increasing the visibility for everyone and losing nothing yourself or you may keep your candle to yourself and get by with a feeble flickering single candle which is eventually going to burn out anyway. By sharing the fire with others, we enable others to keep the fire going and grow it, benefiting everyone. Which scenario do you choose? Which scenario do you think most people choose? Why do you think people don't share knowledge more easily?

• Stories and meaning
  

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Inquiry and reflection as sharing

Sharing is more than access, it is helping others make meaning and obtain understanding. Deeper sharing is possible if the domain is partitioned, the core concepts are negotiated, the environment is scanned and the feedback is shared in community. There needs to be reflection around joint meaning and reciprocity to have quality sharing.

• Denham's article: http://www.smithweaversmith.com/Ksharing.htm

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Dialog & sharing

Role of idea generations (divergent ==> convergent rhythm, explicit time milestones) and the practice & place of summary, critique. Keeping identity in the background, creative abrasion, clash of ideas, building meaning around a prototype, making distinctions.

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Sharing and networking

A network is essential to extend the reach of your sharing.  

• KM Mag 2001, Sharing needs a foundation: http://www.destinationcrm.com/km/dcrm_km_article.asp?id=683

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Sharing as commentary

Blogging where you add commentary to links, point & link to insightful remarks, or ideas of other bloggers and highlight views that interest you is an emergent form of sharing. When this is combined with RSS feeds, categorization, specialist search engines and blog-rings it becomes a powerful genre for sharing.

• Are you blogging yet?
• Cafe conversations

Clearly KM folk talk a lot about knowledge sharing, but we have done little to explore the patterns, gather solutions, understand the role of context, and explicate the real meaning of this complex practice.

 

Comments

[David Locke]

With your mentions of specialist search engines, and backgrounding of identity in conjunction with making distinctions, I'm wondering if you are busting the silo or reinforcing it. Which is it? Both?

[David Locke]

"A network is essential to extend the reach of your sharing." Well, ever representation has its own network, so you need more than one network. In most of your own knowledge discussions, you mention the social network as well as the technical network. But, there are many more networks than that.

[David Locke]

Yes, building meaning around a prototype is possible. What might not be possible is explicating that meaning. The point of a prototype is to let implicit/tacit knowledge to determine what impicit/tacit knowledge gets embedded in the artifact.

We can see that the prototype changed, but we won't necessarily know what the change means, nor do we always know what drove the change. The change could be an experiment, so the meaning is yet to be decided.

[David Locke]

"... the wall map in a busy 'war room'" was never self organizing.

A blackboard is a representation that allows agents to communicate. This claim of self organization comes from the inherent emergence of agents, but that isn't real world.

A blackboard or war room map requires models, views, and controllers. They require an organizational overhead, which is usually missing.

[David Locke]

In a code is free environment you do not need to elicit group consensus. Eliciting group consesnus is where requirement elicitation goes wrong.

Concept maps would reveal the cultural boundaries of those participating in the annealing. Those boundaries need to be respected and coded to. Those boundaries do not have to be erased by the poltics of consensus and the target destination of those politicians.

[David Locke]

Sorry Denham, but when you create a controlled vocabulary to communicat with generalists you are not "Making deliberate distinctions to bring forth unique meaning."

You are in fact destroying deliberate distinctions.

[David Locke]

Developing ontologies is a wrong headed exercise. Silos exist for cultural reasons. Giving up the definitions within the silos for a thin vocabulary of politically constructed generality reduces options for the organization and ultimately kills it. The death will come from the narrowed bandwidth and the communications failures inherent in a language that no longer says what it means.

Efficency in IT has given rise to functionality that doesn't quiet do the job. This is because the requirements elicitors ignore culture. But, this efficency should not be the goal any longer, particularly in an environment where code is free, aka OpenSource, Offshoring, Outsourcing. This efficency created problems with the mappings of UIs to conceptual models even as developers think that is what UML does. No, IT ignores culture.

And, by extention controlled vocabularies and other web techniques continue that tradition. So we end up with effiecent looking controlled vocabularies that help us fail to communicate, because culture is ignored again.

Culture creates its own issue as well, because corporate culture is selected from amoung the many that comprise the organization. The corporate culture is inherently line and predisposed against the functional unit, against the silos, against the generation upon generation of expertise that consitutes silo culture, cultures that travel with the employee because that culture is tied to the employee's identity from the moment they decide to separate themselves from the line people, the "on" discipline generalist, and become the "in" discipline practitioners.

We reengineered to kill our companies. Now we will but the silos to kill our companies.

[David Locke]

The model-view-controller pattern works for clowns and magicians.

They may look like distillations of practice, but they are really metaphors. Everything I ever learned about computer science turned out to be a metaphor for other applications of the patterns.

I'd almost go as far as saying that the metaphors were constraining practice even before the pattern was recognized. Practice mearly explicates the tacit knowledge that was there the whole time. Patterns are explicit, so pattern writing is explication.

But, how do patterns escape probablistic assertions? How do patterns escape being theories?

[David Locke]

Why would a groupware vendor know anything or care anything about collaboration? Did they hire the collaboration vendors, so they could pick their brains.

Nothing a software vendor creates is done with the end markets in mind. Desktop publishing software was built without asking typographers anything. That's why you could position things by centimeters and tenths of an inch, easily programmed stuff that really wasn't real world.

Software vendors don't hire product managers until after version 1.0 is sold. Only then does a market identify itself.

And, the collaboration vendors/preachers are not going to site down and write software. They've got too much preaching to do. Geeks do this stuff off the top of their heads even if they know almost nothing about it.