Silence

It is hard to believe it has been almost 6 months since I last posted anything to my blog. I was aware time was slipping away, as each week I didn't publish anything. But 6 months goes by very quickly.

Not that I have abandoned the blog, as it might appear. I just found it difficult to finish anything. I have the usual excuse: not enough time. But who doesn't suffer that? What was more crippling was an inability to feel satisfied that any post was "done".

I have more than 30 posts in draft form and I tinker with them on a weekly basis. But nothing ever gets completed.

So if I had a resolution for the new year, it would be to be more "sloppy" — be satisfied with things the way they are. The rough, the incomplete. I can always add more later.

But the truth is I go though this dilemma cyclically. A rush of euphoric publishing, feeling confident, but it soon slows to a crawl as I start to second guess myself, comparing the present to the past. (Preferring what I did last week to what I am writing this.)

So, no promises. I may publish more — I want to publish more — and clear my "drafts" folder! But having seen this movie before, I cannot realistically guarantee that the ending won't be similar to one you have seen  before.

Going Around in Circles

I, like several million other people, have recently been trying out Google+. G+ has received plenty of press in the past few weeks and I don't want to add to the noise. But when I started I noticed two things that I didn't see mentioned until recently:

• All my G+ friends are KM types, or otherwise involved professionally in communication and social interaction. Few if  any of my "normal" friends are using G+ (or see why they should).
• I don't like making circles. They require too much thinking.

The first observation were confirmed this week when the unofficial Google Plus Directory (http://findpeopleonplus.com/) posted demographic information on G+ users based on their ascribed professions. Most of the top twenty are technology or information-focused professions. And many of those that are not explicitly "in the business" are questionably tied to technology (such as writers and designers).

My second issue is around circles. I understand they sound like a good idea. My personal (and professional) relationships are more complex than Facebook's simplistic friends / non-friends model.So being able to define your relationships in more detail sounds like a positive step.

The problem is, it's far more difficult than it sounds. I have friend friends and I have professional friends. I have professional friends and professional acquaintances. Some work for my old employer; some used to; some never did. Some know I am interested in poetry and video games (among other things); some don't. A few have met my wife; some may not even know I am married.

When I start to break it down, it is not only not binary, it is more complex than even I can describe. Which is what makes Google+'s circles so frustrating. They require too much thinking. This is not a technical issue, per se, but a failure to be able to turn an implicit organic process into an explicit concrete categorization.

In other words, my friends are analog and circles are digital.

Andrew McAfee confirmed my suspicions in a blog post. He goes into far more depth and argues that it is an issue of a priori vs. a posteriori decisions.I am sure he is right from a process perspective, but I am not even sure deciding after I find an item to share is going to help that much.

Part of the joy of Twitter is that there is no decision. You post or you don't. You open yourself to anyone who chooses to listen (essentially). Oh, it has its limitations as well (starting with the length of the messages). But the freedom from thinking about who a message is intended for can be quite liberating.

However, that freedom doesn't have much to do with friends; it has more to do with publishing (or proclaiming). But it can be a useful and easier process in the digital world than trying to sort out your friends.

Holy Crap, Batman! The Social Business Stack

I just read D. Hinchcliffe's (@dhinchcliffe) Social Business Stack at the Dachis Group and all I can say is [explicative deleted]. Dang! That's one impressive and imposing architectural diagram!

I'm not saying the diagram is architecturally incorrect. In fact, I suspect it is accurate from a corporate IT perspective. It looks like so many other all-inclusive architectures.

The trouble is no normal human being in their right mind could look at it and do anything but shake in their boots. This is the sort of diagram that justifies five years of intense IT investment. It also presupposes (or pre-justifies) failure since there are so many moving parts.

The stack is accurate in that it captures all of the possible interactions and interdependencies from a KM and IT perspective. (That is, the old people/processes/technology triumvirate.) But the fact is no one really cares about anything but the top layer. (The Social/People layer.)

So why is this so complex and social networking "in the wild" so simple? Well, it isn't that simple in real life. But:

• On the public web people are more than willing to do things manually to "make it work", such as putting in links to blogs, etc by hand.
• If it does become difficult, there's an app for that. People are happy to juggle 5, 10, even 20 separate apps such as bit.ly, twitpic, intagr.am, last.fm etc to achieve their goals. What's more, it is cumulative: people learn new tricks from watching their friends' posts.
• Ultimately, the public internet is an almost limitless (since it is always growing) source of additional material, support, inspiration, or target for discussion.

 In other words, all the other layers of Dion's stack exist in the public instance but no one cares about them. Not that they aren't necessary. The next four layers (Data, Delivery, Aggregation, and Discovery) are just assumed to be there. And the critical vertical integration "glue" is heavily biased towards manual effort and simple HTTP links, rather than some complicated automation.

The last two layers (Security and Business Model) also exist. But people are amazingly carefree about security on the public web and the Business Model is the responsibility of the technology/service providers and people simply give a yea or nay vote on the instantiation by staying with the service or moving on.

So, what does this mean? I think the first meaning is that, as usual, corporations are taking something simple (or deeply complex but with a simple surface layer) and getting caught up in the morass that underlies it. Secondly, what the stack doesn't show is the often terribly anaemic state of the lower stacks behind corporate firewalls. The oft-repeated aphorism "If only we knew what we know" can usually be expanded to its various corellaries:

• "If only we knew who knew what we know"
• "If only we knew where we stored what we know"
• "If only we could find what we know"
• "If only I had permission to know what we know"
  
• etc.

So, I think the social business stack as represented is correct. But I am terribly concerned about what such a diagram would be used for. Because, ultimately, it is people — not technology or processes — that are the deciding factor. And people have astonishing resilience and patience for "making things work" when they have an interest in the outcome.

What I'm Playing: 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors

I am currently playing three puzzle games on the Nintendo DS. They are all different, but playing them together helps clarify what works — and what doesn't work — in each.

The first game I started was 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors (affectionately referred to as 999). This is a puzzle/story game, where to progress through the story you need to solve puzzles. It is a pretty well-established genre, similar in nature to the Nancy Drew games, Professor Layton, Myst, etc.

999 is what might be described as a survival-horror puzzler, because the story involves your character, Junpei, being kidnapped and trapped on a sinking ship with eight other people. They must work together to escape before time runs out (the eponymous 9 hours).

Let me just say I expected to like this game. It sounded unusual and got quite good reviews for both its puzzles and its ambiance. But I was seriously disappointed.

The puzzles are fine. In fact, the game starts off well with a locked room puzzle of moderate difficulty. No wasting half an hour on simplistic "training" levels. Unfortunately, the game takes a turn for the worst, in several respects, when story elements are introduced.

For a story-driven puzzler, the story line is grisly and unnecessarily so. Death and mutilation is intended to give you as the player a sense of suspense and tension. But since you have so little control over the action of the game (except tapping the screen to advance the story) the gruesome events are only uncomfortable.

And the discomfort is extenuated by the unrealistic story line. You are trapped with eight other people who look like they just came from a circus (literally) or a Village People tribute concert. Each a unique and comically stereotyped representation of.... something. A belly dancer, a heavy-set laborer, an effete aristocrat... you get the idea.

To make matters worse, the story is presented in a crude 2D pantomime. Static images, with flat images of the cartoony cast (literally, drawn as cartoons) floating in and out of view like shadow puppets. This is suspense? Even viewed as a retro "edgy" presentation style, the clumsy graphics become tedious.

Worse yet, the awkwardness of the presentation carries over to the game play. At one point, you are required to turn a ship's wheel. A relatively simple puzzle device, given you are shifted to a direct front view. And with touch control, you would think it a simple thing to allow the user to touch and drag the wheel to turn it, no?

No. The UI puts up arrows pointing left and right above the wheel which you are forced to click on to make the wheel turn. They almost had to go out of their way to make the interaction so... unnatural.

And finally, the game fails at its own goal of making you feel like it is something more than just a handful of meaningless puzzles. For all of the portents, unnecessary curse words, and grisliness, the game is constantly forcing you to respond to relatively meaningless or obtuse statements and suggestions from the other members of the party. But when it matters, when something is seriously wrong and you — even if you believed the story and wanted to "play" — you are given no control except clicking and clicking and clicking while line after line of text inches past until your bizarrely frozen in place persona is killed...

Yes, I played all the way through to one of the "bad" endings. I was then given the option of replaying the game, with the advantage that I could jump through text and scenes I was already familiar with. No thank you. Once was more than enough.

[To be continued....]

A Small Piece of Gaming History: CHASE-N-COUNTER

While sorting through some boxes I had stored on a shelf in the basement, I came across a box labeled "small games". Inside I found many familiar items I had put away, but I also encountered one I had completely forgotten.

For many years my mother-in-law worked for the game company, Milton Bradley. She knew I liked games and puzzles and so she often gave me the latest games as Christmas and birthday presents. At one point Milton Bradley bought the small electronics firm GCE in an effort to get a foothold in the burgeoning video game market. GCE was developing a gaming machine called the Vectrex. Vectrex was unique in many ways: it used vector graphics rather than a raster display, it was black and white, it was an all-in-one design including a tiny 9" screen, etc.

Within a year, Milton Bradley decided to get out of the video game market and sold off its inventory of Vectrex to its employees at a steep discount. (I still have a complete working Vectrex system, which we bring out every couple of years.)

In addition to Vectrex, GCE created a series of handheld games. I had forgotten that she gave me one of these systems as well and that is what I rediscovered.

The GCE handhelds, such as CHASE-N-COUNTER, were also unique. Not because they used vector graphics (they use very crude LED displays instead), but because they doubled as a calculator. ("N-COUNTER", get it?) A sliding plastic cover switched the handheld from game machine to calculator instantly, hiding its other function. The ultimate "boss screen" in a way.

When I found it, the batteries were dead. But after replacing the batteries it works like new. Well... new, 15 years ago. No one would mistake CHASE-N-COUNTER for a modern video game. The rudimentary shapes (a single dot for your "character" if you could call it that) and the sparse plink-plink of the sound effects, and lurching movement take you back to — let's be truthful — a much more difficult time.

These games are not easy. Timing is everything. It is really you against the computer as you try to time your moves to the precise moment your dot jumps to the next LED and before the crushing "game over" sound indicates you missed it.

So, although the games are simpler, the play is much harder. It takes a lot of practice just to get the basics of the game down. But once you have them down, then it is simply a matter of increasing difficulty, with the same mechanics over and over.

This was true of arcade games at the time as well. Pac-Man is a good example. On your first try you lasted about 30 seconds. But if you kept at it, you could manage to clear several screens without losing a life.

That said, I don't know that I'm going to be playing CHASE-N-COUNTER again any time soon. It was a fun experience at the time, but it is hard to resurrect the interest (or the free time) that kept me at it originally.

But it is nice to see it still works. And just hearing those tinny sounds reminds me of the simple pleasures of concentrating on something entirely meaningless, but mesmerizing.

P.S. After finding CHASE-N-COUNTER, I also found an article written by the game's programmer. A great read if you are interested in the story of how such a game was developed.

The Ultimate Architecture Diagram

I carry a small notebook with me at all times to jot down ideas, reminders, fragments of thoughts, or just doodle in my spare moments. Over the years I have filled up quite a few such notebooks.

Many of the items in them I can identify, some I cannot. They include drafts of messages to coworkers, a phrase or word I thought critical at the time, or notes for business presentations long since given and forgotten.

I was leafing through one of my notebooks the other day when I came across a curious diagram. I don't remember where or when I drew it, but looking at it now I am struck by its simplicity, its utter honesty and completeness.

Yes, there is stuff. And there is other stuff. Beyond that, very little matters.

The issue, from a business, technical, and/or personal perspective, is being able to separate the right "stuff" from everything else. There lies the rub. Maybe I captured that in another diagram, but I can't find that one at the moment...

Whose Knowledge Is It Anyway?

In previous posts I have discussed the shifting relationship between employer and employee in terms of the ownership and responsibility for knowledge. Many people are taking advantage of the web 2.0 revolution — through blogs, wikis, etc. — to assert the individuality of what they know and their hard-won professional experience.

Employment always combines a certain amount of both the carrot and the stick. As much as you might enjoy what you do professionally, there are always a few things that are necessary for the company that you would choose not to do if given the option. So, the employer/employee relationship is always a collaboration, a compromise of activities that meet the needs of each.

Salary, bonuses, and promotions are obviously "carrots". Performance reviews, management dictates, and the threat of a pink slip are part of the "stick". In balance, these two components benefit both the employer and the employee. However, when they fall out of balance, negative things start to happen.

In the early twentieth century, when industry used the unrestrained threat of firing, low wages, and even physical violence to control the workers, the result was the labor movement and emergence of unions in the United States. As the twentieth century came to a close, the rise of the global economy and multinational corporations gave employers a new out. Not only could work be moved out of state, it could now be moved to another country entirely — leading to 10-15 years of aggressive business tactics euphemistically called downsizing, rightsizing, outsourcing, and offshoring, among other things.

There would seem to be little the employee could do to counter this trend. Except, we are no longer in an age dominated by physical manufacturing. We are in what is referred to as the "information age". Business magazines have been touting the power and transformative capabilities of information for years now.

And if information is the currency, ownership of information is power. So, who owns the information? Corporations would like to think they own the creative output of their employees. And it seems true enough that they rightfully own the direct output and artifacts of work done under their employ. This output may be physical products (such as tables and chairs for a furniture manufacturer), electronic products (such as software), services (such as installation, repair, or management services), processes (such as standard operating procedures or decisions trees) and any source code, documentation, or preliminary designs that led to that output.

But do they own the knowledge and intellect used to create that output?

They would like to think so and often lay claim to the knowledge, putting restrictions on what their employees can do with that information during — and in some cases after — their employment. But unlike the industrial age where the means of production were tangible objects (such as looms, kilns, and presses), today the means of production is knowledge.

And knowledge, unlike a physical device such as a loom or a lathe, is not tied to a specific task. Knowledge is also not separate from the employee who possesses it. Part of the power of the web 2.0 revolution is the synergy between frictionless global communication and the realization by individuals of the importance of the knowledge they possess. And make no mistake, they possess the knowledge, not their employers.

You cannot separate knowledge from the knower. And although you can argue that part of what they know may be a trade secret or other company-specific information, the abstract understanding of how things work and the experience of doing it, belong to the employee.

If this sounds a little like Karl Marx revisited, it is not a surprise. The pressures being applied on employees in the late 20th/early 21st century are not unlike those of the late 19th/early 20th. The difference is that — unlike in the late 1800's —the ability to code is more important than the computer you write the code on. And as the technology itself becomes commoditized, the ability to code becomes more expensive as well.

So what are the repercussions on employees, employers, and how you manage the knowledge between them?

• Heavy-handed attempts to assert ownership or control over how employees use knowledge will produce resentment and resistance. This was true even before the internet age or the knowledge economy came into full bloom. But now it is brought into higher relief, especially when the employee can choose to limit use of that knowledge, either consciously or subconsciously, if they feel it is being undervalued.
• In response, rather than unionizing, which was the approach chosen in the early 20th century, information workers in the 21st century are choosing to "socialize".

By "socializing" I mean establishing a vibrant, dynamic community of peers where knowledge and experience is traded freely outside corporate boundaries. How is this beneficial to the employees? In several ways. Most importantly, it creates a reciprocal arrangement bartering knowledge for reputation, which works like this:

• Individuals in need of information search the internet — including blogs and technical forums — in search of answers. If they cannot find what they need, they may ask in a forum, discussion list, or openly through services such as Quora or Twitter. By looking outside the corporate, these individuals are likely to find more unique, complete, and specific answers faster than if they stay within the firewall. In addition, they often get credit for the solution.
• At the same time, their peers post information about their experiences — either in response to questions or as knowledge in blogs, wikis, etc. — both to help other people and to establish a reputation for themselves as knowledgeable about their field of expertise.

Since the individual bits of knowledge being traded have minimal commercial value in and of themselves, there is no loss to the individual sharing what they know. At the same time, those knowledge tidbits can have great value to peers who are trying to solve a specific problem. As a result, a collective market of sharing and reputation building is created among practitioners completely outside of corporate boundaries.

This knowledge sharing ecosystem is extremely loose; there are no formal definitions or boundaries. The community is composed of like-minded individuals communicating through blogs, forums, websites, and social media with no official connection beyond a commonality found in search results, comment threads, blog rolls, retweets, and the like.

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Beyond just the basic exchange of information, the blogosphere provides knowledge workers with additional benefits:

• An outlet for ideas that are overlooked, under appreciated, or simply out of scope of their current work environment.
• A far greater, sometimes critical but often more enthusiastic, audience for their thoughts

Finally, the relationships established through interactions within one's profession and the reputation garnered in the open, critical eye of peers can be indispensable in the not-so-distant future. For example, peer connections made now can be indispensible when when looking for a job some time down the road.

And smart companies are taking advantage of this change, often using blogs and forums to actively promote openings, search for good candidates, or to qualify those who apply for positions.

The hyperbolic claims often found in resumes can be hard to verify. But an openly published and proven knowledge of the subject at hand goes a long way to convincing a potential employer that someone has what it takes.

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Of course, there are downsides. Just as participation in these extracurricular activities can help establish your reputation as a leader in the field, individuals with an aggressive, dismissive, or over-assertive personality can establish a reputation of a very different kind. When you participate in public discussion for any length of time, both the good and bad aspects of your personality will come to light.

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Ultimately, it the the individual's knowledge that counts. And the world of web 2.0 provides a vehicle for that individual to share knowledge with their employer, their fellow employees, and peers around the world to the ends he or she sees fit. Whether their employer approves or not. And, quite frankly, in many ways the world, and the individual, are better off for it.