Incredibly Dull

Silence

2012-01-06T11:02:00.002-05:00

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

2011-07-29T10:49:00.000-04:00

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

2011-07-18T11:49:00.000-04:00

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

2011-05-06T20:48:00.000-04:00

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

2011-05-03T21:21:00.000-04:00

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

2011-04-01T00:43:00.000-04:00

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?

2011-02-21T13:33:00.000-05:00

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Mechanics of Handling Two Screens

2011-02-21T10:29:00.000-05:00

I once read a review that commented on the discontinuity created by the space between the two screens on a Nintendo DS game. The blank space was treated as part of the play area and there was a noticeable delay as the player's avatar passed from one screen to another.

This got me thinking about the other games I'd played and how they handled the two screens, because in many cases I simply had not noticed. But in a few cases, the mechanism stands out as both innovative and a complement or enhancement to the game play.

There are, so far (there's always room for innovation), essentially three or four generic mechanics for handling the two screens that I have seen:

Separate worlds, separate screens
Ignore the gap
The invisible game space: the DMZ
The invisible game space: playing in the dark

Separate Screens, Separate Worlds

In this mode the two screens are handled as separate entities. This is the most common technique for racing games, where the top screen is used for the racer's view and the bottom screen shows a map, statistics, current standings, etc.

Separate screens is also very common for platformers and "educational" titles (such as Brain Training). The advantage of this method is that the gap becomes a non issue. The disadvantage is that if you don't have much additional content, the second screen is essentially wasted. This is very noticeable in some of the early titles such as Ridge Racer and Rayman, where the bottom screen is primarily a very bad replacement for an analog stick.

Ignore the Gap

In this mode the game ignores the physical gap and acts as if the two screens are two adjoining segments of a seamless view. This avoids any issues of what happens "in the gap", but does create a bit of a discontinuity as objects "jump" across the physical gap between the screens.

As a side note, I can't think of any games that are designed this way. It is possible and even likely that some game has created a partitioned game field ignoring the gap. But in most cases where a game uses both screens for the same "environment", they use one of the following modes to handle the gap.

The Invisible Game Space: The DMZ

In this mode the two screens form a single playing field and the gap between them is treated as part of the field -- an invisible space. However, the game ensures that the player either never enters that space or is "safe" while passing through.

Note that both the player and enemies may pass through this space, but not together since that would risk a collision or attack in the invisible space. Examples of this are Yoshi Touch n Go where the enemies pass through the gap but Yoshi doesn't. Except in the first scene where baby Mario is falling and only after the enemies have cleared the area (as Baby Mario makes the final fall to be caught be Yoshi).

The Invisible Game Space: Playing in the Dark

The last possibility is where the gap is an invisible part of a single playing field, but the games lets interactions occur in the gap! If this were accidental it would be a serious flaw in the game mechanics because the player could get, literally, blindsided. However, done well it adds a new wrinkle to the games.

One of the best examples I have seen of this technique is in Bomberman where "tunnels" lead through the gap from the top screen to the bottom and the player (or enemies) can use the tunnels to hide bombs or to trap opponents with blasts from one screen to the next.

"Someone Speaks"

2011-02-11T20:27:00.000-05:00

Someone recently posted a few lines from one of my poems over on Tumblr. The lines came from a poem called "Someone Speaks", which was originally published in the Chicago Review.

I am pleased to know people enjoyed what they saw. But the poem in its entirety is hard to find so I thought I would post it here if anyone is looking for it.

Someone Speaks

Someone speaks
and the room fills with words.

I am surprised by the whiteness
of sheets folded in cupboards and drawers.

Because the leaves have fallen
footsteps can be heard much farther away.

When I entered the room
I could see what had passed between them.

These and other things
mean nothing at twenty below zero.

If we were ghosts, he said,
we could pass through each other without causing harm.

If we were ghosts, she said,
we would not see each other coming.

This poem is part of a larger manuscript called A Life of Feasting that can be found, with more of my work, here. Enjoy.

Nintendo 3DS Pricing

2011-01-23T00:18:00.000-05:00

OK. So Nintendo has finally announced the release date and pricing for the upcoming Nintendo 3DS handheld (March 27th for $249 US). Let the wailing and lamentation begin.

I shouldn't joke. I have complained about overpriced hardware myself in the past (eg. Dreamcast, PSP, PS3...). But quite frankly, I am over it. There is clearly a price at which electronics overreach their audience. This was true of the 3DO ($699 in 1993), the PS3 (originally priced at $499-$599 in 2006), and certainly true of the PSP Go ($249 in 2009), which is perhaps the poster child of over eager pricing.

So, how can you justify the 3DS at $249 when the PSP Go was "overpriced" at the same price? Because when it comes to price, "too much" is relative.

It is now 2011. The last Nintendo handheld, DS, started around $149 and rose to $189 for the DSiXL — which is an interesting, but ultimately minor, upgrade on the base unit. So another $60 jump for a major new platform is not unreasonable. Especially when you compare it to the PSP Go which had a new form factor, but no really new functionality.

The real question is what is happening to console prices? All three consoles are now priced starting around $200-$300. So the 3DS will come in pretty much even with a home game console. 3-5 years ago this would have been inconceivable. But the fact is, the age of console gaming is over.

I don't mean consoles are going away; I expect video game consoles and console games to continue. There will always be a place for "serious" gaming. But the era where consoles dominate the industry is over. Smart phones play a part in this. Casual gaming is also involved. But perhaps more importantly, video game consoles have evolved to a point of diminishing returns. The expense of producing the hardware and of developing games to exercise that hardware is barely sustainable.

Nintendo avoided this cycle by moving (no pun intended) in a new direction with the Wii, to great success. But in the five years since Wii debuted, much of the technology involved is now possible in handheld form. Besides its eponymous 3D gaming, the 3DS has cameras, a microphone, accelerometer, wifi, and touch control (as do many smart phones). So as the amount of additional graphic power that can be eked out of consoles shrinks, we get closer to the day where the only thing that separates consoles from handheld gaming is the big screen. (And I expect someone will soon figure out how to link that to a handheld as well...)

But I digress. Is the 3DS worth $249? For a portable "console" that is is backwards compatible (with DS), upgrades the processor significantly, and delivers an entirely new form of play? Sounds like it to me.

Of course, the real question is what will Sony do when it announces its rumored successor to the PSP. They have traditionally been at the high end of both features and pricing. Their new device may make the 3DS look like a toy. But it is unclear (as it was with the original PS3) whether people will be willing to pay the premium for a... toy?

Top Ten Games of 2010

2011-01-20T21:48:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine told me that, as a holiday activity, he and his college-age sons were discussing their choices for top music of the year. A sort of top ten for 2010. Knowing that we play a lot, he suggested that I do the same with my sons with regards to video games. It sounded like a good idea, so we tried it.

The first thing we agreed upon was that we didn't have ten top games. In fact, we could only name three. There are several reasons for this:

I personally don't get a lot of time to play, so when I do play we tend to play games we can play together. Fewer and fewer modern console games support split-screen multi-player. So we tend to play older games.
A lot of the "big" games this year were sequels (Uncharted 2, Assassin's Creed 2, Call of Duty I-lost-count, etc.). As good as these games are, they tend to be more of the same. Not really top ten material.
Most of our time is spent playing games that we've been playing for a year or more. When we think of our favorite games, they are often two or more years old. They may be top ten for our year of gaming, but not valid candidates as recent releases.

So we quickly realized we had not one, but three lists: a short list of top games for 2010, our actual favorite games for playing, and those games we are looking forward to for 2011. So let's start with...

Top Games for 2010

Red Dead Redemption (PS3/Xbox360)
Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker (PSP)
Monster Hunter Tri (Wii)

Red Dead Redemption is clearly one of the best games of 2010. Massive, graphically beautiful, and engrossing game play/story line. No, it is not "art" or an interactive novel (despite side quests, the missions are relatively linear). If there are any negatives to the game it would be that once you are through the missions, there isn't much else to do.

I didn't play Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. But my sons did. Obsessively. For two weeks straight. It seems to be the best and most complete example of a 3D action/strategy game on a handheld device. Mind you, probably best played co-op with a friend. (Rumor has it some levels are almost too tough in single-playermode.)

Best and most complete example of a 3D action/strategy game on a handheld device except for Monster Hunter Freedom 2 on the PSP, which we have been playing continuously for over a year now. But this is an example of the games we play and the best of the year not being in sync. Monster Hunter came out more than two years ago. It is probably still the best 3D action/strategy on a handheld device. But for 2010, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker outshines anything else.

Finally, Monster Hunter Tri. Perhaps not quite as good as Freedom 2, but that's splitting hairs. Tri is definitely better as a single player experience and no other game even comes close to it in style of play or game experience on the Wii.

So those are the top three. There were two others we considered adding to the list:

Little Big Planet (PSP)
Picross 3D (DS)

We originally thought we had four top games for 2010, because LittleBigPlanet on the PSP is an amazing game. Sure, it is a "downsizing" of Little Big Planet on the PS3. But LBP on the PS3 is such a good game (close to Super Mario 64 and Shadow of the Colossus in terms of best video game ever and reason enough, by itself, to recommend buying a PS3) that a portable version, even without co-op play, is an amazing game. Problem is, it actually came out at the end of 2009, not the beginning of 2010 as we thought. Sigh.

I also wanted to add Picross 3D. It doesn't have amazing graphics. It doesn't have terribly innovative game play. And, yes, it too is a sequel. But as puzzle games go, it is about as complete an example as you can find; where the music, the game play, the meaningless-though-entertaining animations add up to an addictive experience. But my sons wouldn't agree to adding it to the list. So let's call it a runner up. (While they're not looking!)

That's it for top games of the year. But what are we actually playing?

Favorite Games (What We Actually Play)

Hands down, the games we play the most are LittleBigPlanet on the PS3 and Monster Hunter Freedom 2 on the PSP. As mentioned before, I believe LBP is a candidate for one of the best video games ever. And Monster Hunter is an enthralling, addictive, immersive experience, once you get into it. Mind you, it takes some doing (several hours) before you get hooked. Which might explain why it hasn't caught on in the US yet.

The fact that both games came out more than two years ago (three for Monster Hunter) and we are still playing them gives you some indication of how good we think they are.

After that, comes a slew of games we played and enjoyed: Scribblenauts, Hammerin' Hero, Assassin's Creed, Uncharted 1 and 2, Super Mario Bros. Wii... The list gets longer every time we think about it. But quite frankly, it tends to be an amorphous bundle of fond memories. Each game with its pros and cons, but few that stand out against the few I've already mentioned -- or other spectacular games from the past we haven't played recently (such as Katamari Damacy).

Cheating

2011-01-16T16:07:00.000-05:00

I was talking to a friend about video games when he said — by way of explaining why he hacked his son's game to add a few more powerful Pokemon — "everyone cheats".

That could well be true. it certainly seems like there is a lot of cheating going on. But I suspect the world can be divided into two camps: those who believe everyone cheats and those who believe most people cheat.

What's the point? I am not interested in discussing the repercussions on society (which there are plenty of). I am really only thinking of the narrower scope of games.

The distinction is that if everyone cheats, the only way to participate is to cheat as well. Or else you are a chump. If most, but not all, people cheat, there is still a moral question to be answered. And a question of purpose.

What is the purpose of gaming? If it is purely to win, then cheating has no negatives since it more quickly achieves the goal. If, on the other hand, gaming is about playing — about facing a challenge and overcoming it in the safe confines of a virtual world — then cheating defeats the purpose because it eliminates the challenge rather than overcoming it.

This is easy enough to understand when playing single player games. Take solitaire for example. There is no benefit to peeking at the cards that are face down or rearranging the deck — you are only cheating yourself and will quickly tire of the game. Since if you cheat you can always win and then the game has no point.

But the question of cheating becomes more complex when you are playing with or against other players. The incentives become more involved. When playing with others, there are additional incentives: wanting to do better than the other players; wanting not to look stupid or ineffectual; wanting to demonstrate mastery over the game... All of these can play a part, but with differing levels of importance for each player.

Online gaming is replete with its own language of competition and "pwnage", making the challenge of doing well for your own sake a much lesser force than the desire for bragging rights. Even single player games now come with "trophies", "badges", and other awards so you can compare your skills against other players.

Which brings up a special category of cheating: not losing. A number of games have had to modify their leader boards to account for players who "turn off" before a competition is over because they don't want a loss to negatively impact their total score.

This whole discussion sounds very self-righteous. I tend not to play many online multiplayer games, so it is easy for me to be holier-than-thou to those who prefer competitive play. But the fact is, I cheat as well.

Since I don't tend to play multi-player games (except face-to-face with friends) my cheating is of a different nature. That is, I cheat to continue. Or, in other words, the strategy guide cheat.

Games can be hard — they're meant to be challenging. Sometimes the solutions are just too hard or too obscure to figure out alone. For platformers, which tend to be linear in nature, this can be critical: if you can't solve the puzzle or beat the boss, you can't proceed. So your choice is either solve the problem or give up the game.

I don't like cheating. (I'm the kind of person who refuses to look at the box lid when doing a jigsaw puzzle because working off the picture would be "cheating".) But I will cheat for a game I am enjoying if I get stuck. It is a tradeoff I am willing to make under two conditions:

The game is enjoyable enough that I really want to proceed.
I have tried enough times to work it out, without success, that I know (or think I know) that I can't figure it out without assistance.

There is a third condition, which is that I only need to "cheat" a few times in a game. Once I have to look up the answer two, three, or more times in a row, I start to feel the game is too hard to be fun any more. (E.g. the original Kingdom Hearts on PS2 felt this way.) When this happens, then you are no longer playing, you are simply working your way through the strategy guide.

No, thank you. I'd rather be playing.

What Knowledge Management Can Learn from Small Groups

2011-01-09T20:27:00.001-05:00

I used to work for a large multinational corporation. I now work for a small startup consisting of 12 people who work in one room together. There is not much "knowledge management" needed with a group that size. That doesn't mean knowledge management doesn't happen, just that it happens more instinctively and with less stress around the edges.

In fact it would seem reasonable to assume that there is little if any relationship between the two situations. But in fact there are some interesting lessons when observing small groups that can be applied to larger corporations:

Everyone is different

Even though my current company consists of only 12 people, there are 12 different personalities and approaches to work, communication, technology, etc. When you work in large organizations, there is a tendency to talk about how people will respond to new programs as if it were a unary decision, where all (or at least most) people respond in one way. We are then surprised by the number of people who fall outside of the defined norm.

Every project or process has a target behavior — how you want people to use the process. But that behavior is only a target. The overall response, when all individual behaviors are taken as an average — may fall within the target range. But any single person is likely to have their own particular usage model that may well be unexpected.

Multiple, overlapping technologies are not a problem

Within my small sampling, we have 12 unique sets of technologies, including different operating systems; different hardware (some laptops, some desktops, often both); different software tools; and countless communication devices. Everyone has email, everyone has an instant messaging client of some kind (or two or three), we also have wikis, blogs, forums, and an IRC channel. Not to mention smart phones, blackberries, iPads, etc.

We occasionally have a discussion about the appropriate place to post information — especially material under review or in draft form. But I have yet to hear any complaints that there are too many choices.

In large organizations, one of the basic requirements for any project is keeping the toolset small. If there is to be a knowledge management "system", it has to be a single system accessible by anyone in the target audience. Better yet, a single system covering multiple disciplines (KM, project management, resource management, etc.)

The rationale for keeping the toolset small sounds good in theory:

Universal accessibility
Reduced learning curve/training costs
Only one place to look for information
Reduced IT/support costs & complexity

But this rationale is based on 1980's computing constraints:

Universal accessibility — what technology, especially collaboration technology, isn't available through a web browser or across platforms (e.g. IM clients)? Selecting one tool does not make the information more or less accessible.
Reduced learning curve/training costs — at the same time corporations are trying to restrict the number of applications to "reduce the learning curve", their employees are busy trying out Facebook, Twitter, Skype... The main reason learning curve is a problem is because you are trying to teach people something they don't want to learn. Perhaps the issue is with the content, not a limitation of the audience's ability to multi-task.
One place to look for information — I have heard this argument for years, but I have yet to see a single instance where a company has successfully integrated all information into a single application. In fact, corporations seem determined to segment their knowledge into individual repositories. The closest they come to "one place for all information" is intranet search. However, they determinedly resist efforts to use generalized search engines (such as Google) and often limit what information is indexed by search under the auspices of "qualifying" content. (What happened to "one place"?)
Reduced IT/support costs — I used to believe this argument, because it was true. But over time, just as the locked door computer room has shrunk and more and more technology (and computing power) has migrated from a secure, air-conditioned environment.... onto the desk... out of the office... into the pocket... the role of IT in controlling — or even choosing — technology has changed significantly. But IT as an organization and as a profession seems unwilling to accept or accede to that change.

However, individual technologies can run foul of individual preferences

The fact that people have multiple technologies, doesn't mean they use them the same way (cf. everyone is different). Years ago, I was shocked when I answered my office phone to discover that the caller was in an office no more than thirty feet away. But I thought nothing of sending email to the person in the cube next to me.

More recently, I was bemused the first time I received an instant message from a fellow worker two cubes down. (They didn't want to disturb the others by talking, since we work in such close proximity.)

How and when individuals use different technologies seems like an almost limitless set of permutations. Of the 11 people I currently work with:

At least one answers email before IM
One seems to respond to both equally (and instantaneously)
Several answer either IMs or email, but with no clear pattern or preference
One will respond to IMs more often than email, but will answer the IM via email.
One never responds to IMs.

Is this good or bad use of the technology? It is neither. It is how individuals work. Part of "knowledge management" is managing your sources of knowledge, your technology, and your contacts. It is not enough to know how to use the technology; you must also know how it is used by your community.

I know this concept — the preeminence of personal choice — is an anathema to many KM practitioners. It is like trying to establish order without disturbing the chaos. How can you promote a company-wide program if each individual gets to choose for themselves?

Well, it is not quite that bad. It is not that each individual gets to decide for themselves. You can dictate, require, or recommend specific technologies and approaches. But you need to recognize that your audience will perform those actions in the way they think is best.

Finally...

Have faith in people

It is easy to see other people's behavior — when it runs counter to expectations — as stubborn or willful when it is nothing of the sort. People will be altruistic, especially when it involves assisting other individuals. However...

KM is not their job!

As well intentioned as they may, people have a job to do, deadlines to meet, and responsibilities to uphold. If they think of it, they are willing to share with others. But more often than not, it does not occur to them that the information they hold is valuable to others — especially if that value will not be realized until some indeterminate time in the future.

Discussions held in hallways or decisions made over lunch are sometimes the most important events within a project. But no one thinks to capture them in a wiki or email the rest of the team. This is not knowledge hoarding, it is simply an inability to recognize that anyone else cares.

Ultimately, perhaps the most powerful KM tool any company has is nagging repetition. When someone writes something down, remind them to post it to a forum or wiki. When they say something interesting suggest others they should tell via email. Suggest alternate ways to search for solutions to project problems.

This sort of gentle persuasion on an individual basis can be tedious, since the scope is limited to specific situations with one or two people at a time. And I am not suggesting it alone is sufficient to make KM work on a large scale. However, it is surprising how soon you see others (who you have prodded) acting without instigation or suggesting it to others. And from such small efforts, large effects can accrue.

Well, that is OK for a small office, but how does this apply to large corporations? The most successful KM programs I have seen, even in very large corporations, have always had one or two advocates who were tireless in not only promoting "the program", but jumping in and helping individuals with their specific problems and demonstrating KM-ish techniques along the way. Their influence went far beyond just the person they helped, but to anyone that person then spoke to, their friends, etc... Not only their reputation preceded them, but the behavior they modeled went with it to corners of the company they might never have visited personally.

How We Perceive Games and Toys (Redux)

2010-12-31T15:12:00.002-05:00

Two years ago I wrote an entry (Welcome to Gameland) bemoaning the way society is portrayed in the marketing of toys and games. My complaint (if you want to call it that) was that in marketing, the target audience for toys and games are portrayed -- to an overwhelming extent -- as children playing by themselves, almost never with adults.

Well, the next holiday season came and went. So I thought it might be interesting to see if the previous year's advertising was an anomaly or not. So I took five catalogs we received over the last Christmas holiday (2009) and repeated the experiment. Four of the catalogs were dedicated solely to toys for children and one, Sears, had a significant toy section. I counted the number of images of people using the advertised products, determining how many were:

Children pictured alone
Children in a group of two or more
Groups of children and adults together

The catalogs I analyzed were ImagineToys, Met Kids, Sears Wishbook, Target Toys, and Toys R Us. I was surprised -- pleasantly so -- to see a significant change. The number of pictures depicting children playing together increased from 12% to 21%. The number of pictures of children playing with adults went from zero to 4%.

Not only are there more images of children playing together and with parents, the increase applies almost across the board. Of the catalogs I surveyed, only MetKids predominantly depicted children playing by themselves.

Obviously, showing children by themselves does not necessarily mean you don't think they play with others. Hiring two models is more expensive than hiring one. But it is interesting that there seems to be a shift to re-emphasizing the utility of toys for group interaction.

Of particular note, (although I didn't capture the numbers to prove it, it is just an interesting side note) many of the pictures of groups of children with adults involved outdoor play structures such as swing sets, sand boxes, and outdoor sports equipment.

Where is the etree for Poetry?

2010-12-31T14:31:00.000-05:00

Where is the etree, trader's den, or dimeadozen for poetry? Where is the poetry channel for YouTube or the Internet Archive?

The latter question is a bit facetious. There are poetry videos on YouTube and there is a poetry channel in the Internet Archive. And the groups that have contributed to them (in particular, UCal Berkeley on YouTube and the Naropa University in the Internet Archive) deserve a lot of credit for their efforts.

However, finding the actual poetry readings on YouTube requires sifting through pages and pages of "experimental" video interpretations and def jam promos. The Naropa Institute has done much more to bring at least one branch of America poetry to the Internet. However, the Internet Archive's poetry channel is starting to fill up not with readings by authors but ordinary citizens providing their interpretation of famous poems.

I'm not talking about poetry "slams" and def jam -- poetry as a competitive sport -- or my next door neighbor reading poetry. There is plenty of that to go around. I am talking about a more comprehensive view of the growing history and record of modern poetry (both American poetry and poetry from other countries and cultures).

When I was in school (granted, too many years ago to count), the discussion often turned to how poetry is an oral tradition, both in its composition and its presentation. Poetry readings were special events -- giving us the opportunity to hear familiar poems the way they were intended by the poet or to experience new work and new forms.

Now, granted, not all poets are good readers. But the poetry reading does provide a unique bond between author and reader that is not possible through the printed word alone. There are hundreds of poetry readings a year in colleges, libraries, and book stores around the country. Some of these readings are being recorded either as audio or video. But access to almost all of these recordings is currently closed or hidden.

Organizations such as the Lannan Foundation, University of Pennsylvania, and Naropa School of Poetics have done an amazing job to bring at least some of this material to the public. And there may be others I haven't discovered yet. But with these notable exceptions, much of the oral history of American poetry since the latter half of the 20th century has been lost.

For example, when I was growing up, there was an extraordinary series on public television called Poetry USA, including interviews and readings from Frank O'Hara, Anne Sexton, and Robert Creeley among others. Try as I might, I haven't been able to find any of these either online or as videos or DVDs. I know they were made available, because I saw them again when I was in college. But this piece of history seems to have been lost from neglect.

The organizations I mention above are doing what they can and should be commended for their efforts. But what about the other groups who sponsor readings? There is a reading at a college campus, a library, or a bookstore at least once a week across America. (Probably much more. Once a day? Or more?) Are any of these being recorded and if so, what happens to those recordings?

It is not just the responsibility of large organizations. We as audience and participants can just as easily take the initiative. In music, there is a very strong community of aficionados who are sharing live recordings through sites such as etree and dimeadozen. It would be nice to think the same could be established for poetry.

So what am I suggesting? Three things:

Start Sharing

Poets and poetry readers tend to think of themselves as a small community. Which is true, within one's own limited geographic area. But cumulatively, the poetry community in America and around the world is huge. Rather than concentrating on how unique we are, perhaps we should start realizing the breadth and scope of the world of poetry as a whole.

Those who have recordings of poetry readings, either as audio or video recordings, should start sharing them openly. The monetary cost of publishing media on the web is approaching zero. Sites such as Archive.org and YouTube provide free storage -- as well as the necessary search and browse interface to make the content findable -- for free. The only remaining cost for college English departments, libraries, and individuals who may have existing recordings is the time needed to digitize them.

Make Sharing Easier

Although free storage is available, it is not always the easiest to find information in. The Internet Archive provides a basic structure based on media type and categories. But you often spend a fair amount of time sifting through miss-sorted lists of recordings. YouTube is perhaps worse because of its sheer volume. (YouTube is excellent for serendipitous discovery. Not so good at finding specific types of content.)

On the other hand, sites such as Pennsound provide a well-moderated, easily searched collection of recordings. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be any way for others to contribute to the existing archive.

What would be ideal is if there were commonly recognized tools and processes for sharing live poetry recordings.

In the world of music, sites such as etree and dimeadozen provide both a service for user contributions (through bittorrent) and a set of best practices and guidelines for sharing live recordings. These sites, although operating in a gray area of copyright law, do a remarkable job of self-regulation concerning what is allowed, what is required, and how to distribute live recordings that are both findable and usable.

Many of the specific rules (such as the use of lossless audio formats) used by music sites are not necessary for spoken word recordings. But the overall process, approach, and philosophy of sharing would be a good model for the poetry community to follow.

One alternative, since there will inevitably be both sponsored sites (such as Lannan and Pennsound) as well as community sites (such as YouTube and Archive.org) is to develop tools and sites to solve the finding problem separate from the storage problem. A live poetry specific search engine or directory (similar to Captain Crawl, livesoccertv, or other community-specific sites) could help tie together the multiple technologies in use.

Encourage Sharing

Finally, since the current lack of sharing is not really a question of either technology or capacity, the most important goal would be to encourage everyone involved in recording live poetry to start sharing, both from the recorder and the performer's perspective. What is needed is a common agreement that the poet agrees to the recording and the recorder agrees to distribute the recording for free.

Often when readings are recorded, if there is any agreement with the poet, it is simply a verbal request to record the reading. There is either agreement or refusal, with little discussion of either the intent or planned use of the recording. This is problematic both for the poet and the recorder; the poet has little or no control on what is done with the recording and the recorder has no explicit agreement that they can distribute what they record. The recording becomes a legal "displaced person".

To both encourage non-commercial sharing of recordings and protect the people involved, it would be very helpful to have a commonly accepted legal document setting out the limits and accepted uses of the recording.

What I am thinking of is something simple, similar to the GNU Public license or the Creative Commons license, stating that the poet agrees to be recorded and the recorder agrees to make the recording available for non-commercial use. It would both explicitly exclude commercial release (for which the performer ought to be compensated if that is the goal) and require sharing rather than simply recording and storing. (Of course, this in no way precludes the poet from making deals for commercial recordings if they wish. The agreement would only be for personal-use or non-commercial recordings.)

Going a step further, it would be good to have the agreement specify exactly what license the recording will be distributed under (such as Creative Commons), to ensure that those who later receive the recording also understand their rights and responsibilities concerning use and redistribution of the recording.

Epilogue

Is what I describe possible? Absolutely. Likely to happen? I'm not sure. There are very few technical hurdles, but it would require some minor effort (such as developing the recording agreement) and significant promotion by interested individuals. I would love to be involved, but I am a little too far outside the mainstream of the poetry community to promulgate such a scheme myself. But I do hope something like this comes to pass before we lose any more of a very precious resource.

Can Fish See Colors?

2010-11-26T11:29:00.000-05:00

It never occurred to me to ask the question, until last night. We have a fish in an aquarium in the corner of our dining room. I think he is a char — we caught him in a pond as a minnow so I have never been sure.

He doesn't get upset easily; I can move around the room without disturbing him and we went all the way through Thanksgiving — setting up the table, eating and cleaning up — without his showing any sign of stress.

He can clearly see what is going on. When I come down in the morning, he swims to the corner (closest to the kitchen) and wags his tail, waiting for me to feed him as is the daily ritual.

But last night, after clearing the table, I figured we would switch directly from Thanksgiving to Christmas, but as I moved towards the table to put on the new tablecloth, our fish (Sam) suddenly started splashing and darting back and forth in alarm. Something had set him off.

What was it? I occasionally take him by surprise and he splashes and hides behind his rock. But this time he was more alarmed than usual. And I wasn't even that close to his aquarium. But there was one difference: I was carrying a bright red tablecloth.

The bright color red had triggered something in him. He was very agitated until I had the tablecloth on the table. Once it stopped moving, he calmed down. I hadn't seen behavior like this since he was a very young fish (and not accustomed to his environment).

So, do fish react to the color red like the proverbial bull? Or would it be anything bright and moving that triggers a defensive response? He hasn't reacted to colored shirts or other materials that I noticed. Whatever the cause, the result was dramatic.

Thinking About Tabs

2010-11-09T15:34:00.000-05:00

OK. I am back to designing interfaces. Well, interaction design more than UI design since I am concentrating on the larger scale sets of content and interaction rather than the detailed UI artifacts on the page.

One thing I am learning this time around is that I have a proclivity for tabs. But tabs are dangerous. Let me explain.

Tabs are an easy way out. They let you create multiple "views" or "panels" at an equal level and tie them together with the tabs. For example, Facebook (with Home / Profile / Find Friends), Yahoo Shopping, or — most famously — Amazon. Of course, Amazon has dropped their tabs. But the intent is still present in their lefthand pull-right menus.

The key to a tabbed interface is that it lets the user decide between multiple functions or views. The advantage is that the tabs stay present so the user can navigate easily between functions. The disadvantage is that it is up to the user to decide; the interface does not promote a specific priority or process.

Which is what makes tabs dangerous. It is too easy for the designer to accede responsibility for guiding the user and say disingenuously "the user gets to decide".

Tabs make sense when dealing with a large inventory of heterogeneous objects. In this situation the tabs act as a classification mechanism. But what if the content is not evenly distributed or readily partitioned? Then the tabs are simply a way to "chunk" a large set of functions with little regard for their natural affinities (c.f. the facebook tabs).

While working on my current design project, I discovered that I often fall back on tabs as a default technique for organizing disparate information and controls. The consequence is that I tend to get lazy and not think through the other possible options.

Even if done well, tabs tend to reinforce ingrained ways of viewing the content, without thinking too deeply about the alternatives. Using tabs feels safe, but it can unnecessarily fragment the workspace, separating functions the user may want to compare or contrast. (Jakob Nielsen has an excellent essay on this topic.)

So, if tabs are not the answer, what are the alternatives? Perhaps it might serve us well to think about why tabs so readily come to mind. I suspect it is historical. The web started as a hypertext delivery system, where the text was largely static. There were forms, but little other interactivity. Much of the "early days" of the web were focused on determining best how to:

Structure the content
Represent the structure as navigation

Menu bars, navigation menus, and ultimately tabs became essential components of the web experience and designer's toolkit. However, as we move into Web 2.0 and the predominance of scripting languages, flash, and HTML v5, the web is not only interactive, it becomes an application of it own.

Although there is still a lot of text and pictures where navigation plays a role, there is a lot more interaction involved and the design must help direct users through processes, not just content. It is unclear that what has been learned from years of application interface design has yet to be effectively integrated in web interface design.

The Work of Technical Documentation

2010-10-05T19:30:00.000-04:00

Contrary to the assumptions of many, the job of technical writing doesn't involve that much writing. The actual act of writing is at most 30% of the work.

In fact, the more writing you do, often the worse the end product becomes. Writing is a test of understanding. As you write, you come to realize what it is you understand and what you don't.

But if your job is to write, you not only need to write to understand, you need to write to be understood. Two distinct and at times opposite goals.

The danger is that, when writing instructions for something you don't completely understand, you write more. You try to write around the parts you don't understand; you describe it two or three times in the hope one of the descriptions sparks understanding in the reader; or you simply transliterate what you are told, because you can't figure out what parts are important and what parts aren't.

The result is lengthy documentation that does more to obfuscate that elucidate.

So if technical writers don't write, what what is it that they do? Well, primarily we investigate. We learn so we can explain. This is particularly true of new products where often the developers themselves don't know exactly how the features will be used by the customers.

I lay no claim to scientific accuracy, but my estimate is that more than half of the time technical writers spend is used in investigating. Of the remaining time, about half is used for actually writing. The remainder is used for testing (to see that what we wrote is true) and "production" (proofreading, editing, and the tedious and finicky work of tweaking the content into the appropriate output).

Are there exceptions to this "rule"? Yes.

New Projects: When you are starting a new project from scratch, excessive amounts of time are dedicated to production, since you need to get your processes and tools right. Then the split is more like 40% investigation, 20% writing, 10% testing, and 30% production.
Wrong Tools: If you aren't using structured tools (for example. using Word instead of xml or other structured tagging system), you spend far more time on production but don't know it because it is indistinguishable from the writing. At least 30% is production and/or rework spread out across the project at all times.
Updating Existing Documentation: If you are doing an "update", less time is spent on investigation but it is usually made up for by more time in testing as you need to make sure existing descriptions are still accurate. Something like 40% investigation, 25% writing, 25% testing, 10% production.

Moderation (or Lack Thereof)

2010-08-10T08:17:00.001-04:00

For the past month or so I have been struggling with an ethical dilemma. My original intent in writing this blog was as a vehicle for me to think through some of the issues and ideas that concern me most. A second goal is to share those ideas with people -- friends and the occasional stranger -- who find their way here. A happy coincidence of the blog is the opportunity to converse with people who share my interests and concerns.

Since my blog is open to the world, I feel it only fair that if I get to have my say, the favor should be returned and others should be able to comment on what I post. I really enjoy seeing what others have to say, even if they don't agree with me.

Given the limited audience I expect, I figured spam would not be to much of an issue. But I chose to require registration before you could comment as a deterrent, just in case. And that worked... until recently.

Over the past few months I have been getting more and more spam -- particularly in Chinese -- posted as comments. I just put it down to the inevitable random internet annoyance, but made sure to delete them as soon as I could. I figured I could live with this downside of a public site, even at one or two spam comments a week.

But the volume has increased to a bogus comment every day or two and although I don't mind the work, I am annoyed that they are there even for the few hours before I get a chance to delete them. I don't want to create more barriers than necessary, but I finally broke down and added moderation to comments on this blog. This means I have to "approve" comments before they become visible on the blog.

To those of you who do come here to read or comment on my blog, I apologize. I am distressed that I have to add this extra layer of indirection. But the use of moderated comments is not intended in any way to limit or censor your responses.

And, of course, thanks for reading... and responding!

Twitterfish Revisited (the Language of Tweets)

2010-07-31T15:38:00.001-04:00

Last year I built Twitterfish to translate Twitter messages as a demonstration related to consulting I was doing. I haven't done much with the prototype since, until recently.

It turns out that the new company I work for is stirring up interest in both the US and overseas -- particularly in Japan. But it is tedious to translate the Japanese tweets one at a time.

When I wrote Twitterfish, I thought of handling search results... But it was a prototype and I didn't have a lot of incentive to finish it off. Suddenly I had both the interest and the need.

So Twitterfish now supports search. (See the tabs below the banner.) It also paginates the search results.

Next on my list is displaying the date/time of each tweet, because I may need to count the number of tweets per week...

Lurking or Lost?

2010-05-05T20:00:00.003-04:00

Stan Garfield made an interesting comment in response to my post on lurking. Stan said:

I assume that most people who stay subscribed to a community discussion board are usually paying attention to what is being discussed. They can benefit from doing so, even if they post infrequently (or never).

Part of what Stan is positing is true. People who are not actively participating can -- and often do -- benefit from the discussions within the community. That is the aspect of lurking that makes it a constructive activity.

But it is dangerous to generalize this belief, particularly if you are managing communities. Which I suspect is why Stan qualified his statement with "most". The distinction is whether people are actually lurking or have turned off completely.

Membership, or subscriptions, are often used to measure the size of a community, using the premise that, if they are still members, they are at least "actively lurking".

However, going back to my own experience, I currently belong to at least ten online communities where I receive email:

Two I actively follow, reading each email as it comes in and -- occasionally -- responding.
One I read thoroughly but never respond to. I consider it "keeping up" with a specific technology area.
One I read if I have time, but at least half the time I skip.
Two I browse the subjects lines but almost never actually open the email before deleting.
Of the remaining four, at least two I delete without even considering the subject line. One I delete angrily after seeing that their infrequent messages are wasting my time, and the last falls somewhere in between those last two categories.

So which communities am I actively "lurking" in? If you asked me, I'd claim to be a "member" of three of the ten. Four at most. Less than 50%.

In truth the situation is much worse than what I describe, since I am a registered user of 10 or 20 more communities which I do not receive email subscription notices from. Of these I actively visit the forums of, perhaps, 5; occasionally visit another 2; and probably can't remember my password for at least half of what remains.

If that's the case, why don't I unsubscribe? Laziness, probably. About once a year I go through and remove myself from the most egregiously bad lists. But over the next 12 months I probably sign up for more new ones than I jettison. Some communities I signed up with for a specific purpose, which has since been satisfied. Some I joined as an experiment. And for many, there is a sense of not wanting to miss something that I might otherwise not hear about. (Although time proves that supposition wrong.)

Whatever the cause, I am technically a member of far more communities than I am actually "involved" with, whether active or lurking. Which brings us back to the dilemma for community leaders: how do you measure the size of an online community?

You can say for certain that people actively participating (posting, responding, or otherwise contributing) are members. But as has been said time and again, this is usually a very small percentage of the actual community size.

On the high end (assuming your community supports or requires some form of registration) you can count all registered users. However, as I have just explained, that number is unlikely to have any true meaning. So reality falls somewhere in between.

Second Life was roundly criticized four years ago for not being clear how they counted their "residents". (To be fair, the company improved both their methods of counting and reporting membership in response to the complaints.) But part of the confusion is not just how they were counting, but disagreements about what methods are appropriate.

The situation is no better for internal communities within corporations. Ultimately, there is no true answer. The interest level of individual members of the community will ebb and flow constantly, often with no external indications. So there is no way to provide an precise measurement of "engagement", even as a snapshot.

If you have subscriptions, you can report a combination of senders (unique posters) and receivers (subscribers) to give a range of possible activity. However, this leaves out anyone who reads the message online or (as is increasingly common) through an RSS feed. If you have access to web logs, you can report the number of unique visitors to the site/forum. But merging this data with email subscriptions can be difficult.

But no matter how you count, there are a variety of actions community facilitators can take to "take the pulse" of the community, beyond just numbers.

Talk to your members. Contact people directly to ask if the community is meeting their needs or not. and if not, how it could be improved. Ask them how its going.
When questions are asked, forward the question to people you know are knowledgeable on the subject and suggest they post an answer. This not only keeps the conversation going, it helps gets more experienced members involved and can spur interaction between members who do not know each other yet.
If there aren't any questions, ask some. Not trivial questions, but questions that will get the community thinking -- and talking.
Thank people, either publicly or privately through email, when they contribute significantly to the community. Make them feel appreciated for their efforts.

If this sounds more like hosting a high society soiree than facilitating a community, there's a good reason for that. They are very similar tasks. It is not enough to schedule a party, hire a caterer, and send out invitations. Once the event begins, you must play host: introduce people so no one feels left out, make sure they circulate, suggest activities... even plan party games! The exact same sort of activities that are needed to keep a community going once it has begun. What's more, being actively involved yourself gives you an intimate and immediate sense of the health and well-being of the community.

Measurements are fine and often necessary to convince management that positive momentum is occurring. But more important is knowing for yourself, as community leader, that your members are involved and benefiting from their participation. And this is not a number, it is a state of being you can contribute to yourself.

P.S. Stan himself has articulated many of these and other good ideas for how to actively facilitate communities in his own writing. Most recently, in his community manifesto. Recommended reading for anyone interested in the topic.

"You are being redeployed...."

2010-05-04T08:00:00.001-04:00

The English language is a funny thing; words have meanings. They may have multiple meanings and -- despite the fact that people publish dictionaries claiming to be the authoritative definition of words -- those meanings are fluid and can change over time. But it takes time. Words have meaning because people collectively agree to them.

Another funny thing about the English language is that people are always trying to change the meanings of words. And if they can't change the meaning, they change the words. These are called "euphemisms" and we are all party to it. When an event or subject is painful, we use alternate words to lessen the blow. People don't die, they "pass on" or "go to a better place" (not that we know that for sure, but it sounds better). The goal is to soften the blow.

Problems occur when rather than softening the words, the euphemism is so extreme it twists the original intent and tries to actually deny the reality of the situation.

Two years ago I was laid off. That itself is a euphemism. I was fired. The original intent of the term layoff (which is defined as "a period of inactivity or idleness") was to imply that -- once things got better -- you would be rehired. Now it has become a blanket term for any time you are summarily fired for reasons unrelated to your performance.

But layoff has a negative connotation and so had to be softened even more. (Just as downsizing was replaced by rightsizing -- right for what?) And so I was not laid off or even WFRed (work force reduced), I was "redeployed".

Excuse me? I was not redeployed, I was undeployed. Yes, they pretended that there was a period of time where I could look for work elsewhere in the company before I was terminated. But I was not redeployed; I was not "transferred from one area or activity to another" as the definition implies. (Unless you consider looking for a job a business activity.)

At least, once my "redeployment" ended, they did stay true to the language and "terminated" me.

I can laugh about it now. The bitterness of being laid off is temporal and easily erased by the adventure of doing new (and far more interesting) things. However, the distaste for how it was done and loss of respect for my former employer's business practices when they misuse language that way lingers. It is only a word, a symbol. But the symbols we use define how we see -- or want to be seen -- by society. And the more we mask our intentions with euphemistic phrases, although no one will outwardly call your bluff, trust and respect ultimately pay the toll.

A Month of Poems (part 4)

2010-05-01T23:59:00.026-04:00

[This is part 4 of a sporadic series of a month of poems as described in the preface]

"I Remember the Room Was Filled with Light" by Judith Hemschemeyer
from I Remember the Room Was Filled with Light, Wesleyan University Press 1973
[Saturday, May. 1st]

I originally encountered Judith Hemschemeyer when I was just starting to read modern poetry. I read her first book, Very Close and Very Slow, and I didn't get it. A little while later, I went back and read it again. The second time I loved it. It made me wonder: what had I missed the first time around?

But what really got me thinking was when I went back to read it again about a year later, and didn't like it again. What was going on here?

It turns out the title of that first book is more than just a catchy phrase. It is an apt description of how you need to read her poems; very close and very slow. The first and third time I read them, I was reading too quickly and the images didn't "catch".

Her poems are actually quite flat, almost like a monotone, and her imagery is sparse. This was the first time I had encountered a poetry that required me to read them a certain way. Unless you slow down and read very deliberately, the language seems dull and the metaphors forced.

She was making supper. I stood on the rim
Of a wound just healing; so when he looked up
And asked me when we were going to eat
I ran to her, though she could hear. She smiled
And said 'Tell him...' Then 'Tell her...' On winged feet
I danced between them, forgiveness in my cup,
Wise messenger of the gods, their child.

Writing poems this way is hard, because if you miss the mark, even by a little, the failure is total. And reading poems this way can be equally hard. But in Hemschemeyer's case, it is usually worth the effort.

This poem is one of the rare cases where the poem neither succeeds or fails. It is on the edge. And whether you believe the child as messenger may depend more on the poem you read next than anything this poem can convince you of. Because you have to believe in the narrator... and the poet... to believe in the poem.

"Lumberjack" by Zbigniew Herbert
from Collected Poems 1956-1998, Ecco Press 2007
(trans. by Alissa Valles et. al.)
[Sunday, May. 2nd]

"In the morning the lumberjack goes into the forest and slams the great oak door behind him." The opening sentence of this poem is so like Herbert's poems: filled with images that take us by surprise, stopping us in our tracks. (Is the oak door the door to the house he is leaving or, as it seems, the door to the forest he is entering?)

What separates Herbert from surrealists and other overtly "sensational" poets is that, although his poems are full of surprising turns, by the time you reach the image at the end of the sentence, it is both a surprise and totally inevitable. Required by the story the poet is telling.

That sense of authority and control (or at least awareness) of the psychological landscape is a trait common to the best Eastern European writers. Herbert has it in spades. His poems seem like parables of a life we are only just escaping by chance.

Two notes:

I first encountered Herbert's poems thanks to the Penguin Modern European Poets series in the Seventies. Those original translations, not surprisingly due to their origin, made Herbert sound very "British"; somewhat stiff and self-satisfied to American ears. Despite that disconcerting overtone, it was still possible to feel the power of his poems, if not fully appreciate them. This new edition of his work alleviates much of that problem. The translations are more direct and the sheer volume of work gives you a better sense of Herbert's overarching themes. (Note that many of the earlier translations are also included in the Collected Poems.)
The Collected Poems is a beautiful book. The production quality, the printing, the cover, and most importantly the content are beautiful and do justice to a truly great poet.

"Headlights" by Conrad Hilberry
from Man in the Attic, Bits Press 1980
[Monday, May. 3rd]

Conrad Hilberry is very talented. As you encounter his poems line by line, you can't help but be impressed by the finely honed and striking imagery.

[The headlights] are antennae, quivering ahead
of her, naming whatever is to come...

[she] walks a few yards into the spongy woods,
where dark clings like cobwebs..."

He is a master of figurative description, of landscapes. The problem comes when you get to the end of the poem and realize that it just doesn't add up to much. What did all this imposing imagery get us? The protagonist is compared to the car she just stepped out of with some unspoken urge and the trees "sing themselves into fact."

The conclusions of Hilberry's poems tend to be less than the sum of their parts. Which is terrible to say, because he is so much better than many poets in setting the scene. But as impressive as his writing is, it is easy to read one of his books in its entirety and not be able to recall any single poem clearly.

Which presents two problems for me as a reader.

Is it me? Am I not giving him the benefit of the doubt? Am I missing some deeper meaning?
Or perhaps I am expecting too much. Is description enough? Not every poem has to have some deeper meaning every time, does it?

No, it doesn't. But it has to have something. That ineffable that makes poetry worth living -- and dying -- for. Too much to ask? Perhaps. But why else read poetry?

"Recycling Center" by Brenda Hillman
from Bright Existence,Wesleyan University Press 1993
[Tuesday, May. 4th]

Brenda Hillman is also very talented, but in a very different mold than Hilberry. Her poems are also full of well-crafted images, but for a different reason. Her descriptions are bursting with meaning -- explicit or not -- often overwhelming the physical description itself.

Bye, bottle! She shouts,
tossing it in; and the bottle lies there
in the two o'clock position, temporarily itself,
before being swept into the destiny of mixture...

Hillman is not a poet of the physical landscape, although her descriptions are beautiful in and of themselves. She is instead a poet of the psychological lives that inhabit a place.

In her earlier books, it was almost as if the psyche and the real were in combat. Each struggling for primacy of place, neither giving in. In her later books there is more harmony, more acceptance of physical items as a stage, if not actors themselves, in the narrator's emotional life.

"May All Earth Be Clothed in Light" by George Hitchcock
from One-Man Boat, Story Line Press 2003
[Wednesday, May. 5th]

It's impossible to say anything negative about George Hitchcock. He's not a very good poet, really. But his single-handed contributions to modern poetry over the years make him almost immune to criticism.

Morning spreads over
the beaches like lava;
the waves lie still, they
glitter with pieces of light.

For years Hitchcock was the editor of Kayak magazine, being the first to publish many of the best poets of the time (Charles Simic, James Tate, etc) and offering encouragement to many, many others. A rejection note from Kayak (always with a personal signature from George, and occasionally a word or two of comment) was almost like a badge of membership in the secret society of aspiring poets.

Does that excuse his writing? No. But it doesn't have to. Because even as amateurish his own writing was, Hitchcock was trying -- and trying something new -- in each poem. Different typography, different approaches to the image, different images, different approaches to writing (found poems, etc.). These do not necessarily make the poems better. But they make them all serious efforts at creating poetry.

And every once in awhile, despite the odds, he succeeds. The following is one of my favorite poems from the book:

Records

Another
Russian
has returned
after
2,000,000
miles
in orbit.

Today I sat
motionless
for
28
minutes
while a
butterfly
folded its
trembling
wings
and rested
on my knee.

"A Color of the Sky" by Tony Hoagland
from What Narcissism Means to Me,Graywolf Press 2003
[Thursday, May. 6th]

Tony Hoagland's poems make me cringe. Not the poems themselves, but the topics he chooses.

Some poets write as if every moment is some crucial defining moment in one's life. (No insult intended, because she writes great poems, but Brenda Hillman for one fits into this category.)
In reality, our lives are filled with thousands of lesser moments that we often choose to ignore but that define us, cumulatively, as much as any single event.

And it is these smaller moments that Hoagland chooses to write about. The problem is that these are dangerous poems to write. It is easy to fall back on pastiche or stereotypes, making the narrator appear either self-righteous or condescending. Which is why I cringe when I see a poem attempting such a topic. But it is exactly this tightrope that Hoagland's poems walk, even dance, across.

Make no mistake about it, Hoagland writes beautiful poems; inspiring poems carved out of the minutia of everyday life. And once you get involved in one of his books, rather than cringing, you start to look forward to experiencing these moments from the inside.

And that is how Hoagland makes it work where so many other poets fail. He takes these lesser moments completely seriously (even though his narrator may joke) and describes the reaction, the internal dialog, in beautiful detail.

To the point where, when he describes a blossoming dogwood as "losing its mind.. like a bride ripping off her clothes," you're right there with him celebrating a life composed of a thousand trivial moments viewed in bright relief.

"Manifest Destiny" by John Hodgen
from Grace, University of Pittsburgh Press 2006
[Friday, May. 7th]

There's a tendency for many poets, once they've established their voice (usually in their second or third book) to turn to their own personal history as subject matter. All poems are driven by the poet's experience to a greater or lesser degree. But poets seem to have a particular urge to take on their past -- and particularly their childhood -- head on.

Len Roberts did it in Sweet Ones. Other poets have gone that route as well. And John Hodgen follows suit in Grace, as in this excerpt from the poem about his mother:

never knowing for over thirty years her sweet secret,
that it was because she was out of food for the week,
that it was all she had left to give us.

And certainly not now, not when I hold the slim reed
of your arm, your withered, feathery hand,
and you shudder telling me you will not live to see your daughters
graduate, get married, have children of their own.

There are a lot of adjectives here, like sponges that bear far more meaning than can fit on the page. And rather than dealing with this extra meaning, it is left like a ominous curtain of portent over the entire scene.

For the poet, these poems are very meaningful, because they are real. However, for the reader, fairly or unfairly, they are just a story like any other. And all the unexplained foreboding acts more like a blurry cloud of unexplained intent than like the clarifying lens the poet sees.

Which is a shame because, as I've said before, Hodgen is a very good, understated poet. The good news is most poets do seem to exorcise this need to explore the past and return in later books to the clarity and precision they showed to start.

"ROCK'N'ROLL MYTHOLOGY" by Bob Holman
from The Collect Call of the Wild, Henry Holt 1995
[Saturday, May. 8th]

I want to like this book. I really do. But it is so hard.

First, Holman is into poetry as a performance art. (He is the co-author of Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.) But I am reading the poems on the page. Even if I read them aloud, I doubt I am doing them justice. They seem like they would benefit from a smoke filled room, flashing lights, a loud P.A. system, and several drinks.

But even then, it is hard to see anything but a thin veneer of surrealism with the hipster volume set to eleven:

got the heavy-duty political intent
got the worm farm free-form diamond noodle content
I got breezy ways & boppin' rays
when the word explodes the mother lode is where I'm at

I want to like these poems for the sheer passion and energy they give off. But when the smoke clears there is nothing there but noise and the poems end up being little more than the cheap joke the title of the book implies.

"Two Morning Poems" by Yevgeni Yevtushenko
Translated by Anselm Hollo
from Red Cats, City Lights Books 1962
[Sunday, May. 9th]

This little book of translations by Anselm Hollo is not "original" work as usually defined. But the poems are as much a result of Hollo's efforts as that of the three Russian poets he interprets. It is the product of its age (the 1960's), from its bold red and white cover, to its Cold War title (Red Cats) and its hip colloquial language:

They accuse me
of many things.
There are many around
who don't love me at all.

[...]

I tell you,
I get a big charge out of this --
their raging just goes to show
that they
can't make it!

Despite bearing the marks of its generation (or perhaps even because of it) the poems end up being far more successful than any other translations I seen of Yevtushenko, Voznesensky, and Kirsanov. Hollo's "Beat" interpretation seems to be a perfect match for the brash, assertive personality of the Russian originals. In other translations, Yevtushenko comes off as pompous, self-righteous, and thoroughly unpleasant. Hollo manages to bring out a lively, self-confident, and emotionally alert narrator far more recognizable and interesting to modern audiences.

"Dinner" by Miroslav Holub
Trans. by Jarmila & Ian Milner
from Notes of a Clay Pigeon, Secker & Warburg 1977
[Monday, May. 10th]

Miroslav Holub isn't the best Eastern European poet of the past fifty years. But that's kind of like saying Rimsky-Kosakov isn't the best Russian composer. We in the west have been blessed with a slim but constant flow of translations of Eastern European poets over the past 40 years, starting with the Penguin series back in the 60's. Holub is one of those poets, with clear roots in the semi-surrealist, parable-like style that makes poetry from that region stand out.

I accuse the small towns of not becoming cities
All the worse for them.
I accuse the small nations of not becoming powerful.
All the worse for them.

And Holub is very good at it. His poems inspire reflection, surprise, and private smiles of recognition. But they never quite reach the sort of revelation or emotional climax you find in Herbert, Popa, or Szymborska. But then, Rimsky-Kosakov didn't write the 1812 Overture either. He's still worth listening to...

"Just Plain Beauty" by Paul Hoover
from Somebody Talks Alot, Yellow Press (undated)
[Tuesday, May. 11th]

Paul Hoover is a surrealist poet, in the tradition of the French surrealists. Which is unusual for an American poet.

French surrealism has had a strong influence on American poetry, but mainly in its imagery. Modern American poetry is still tightly bound to recognizable human situations as the basic theme and plot. (Think American neo-surrealists like James Tate, Edson, etc.). The Americans are interested in adopting the wildness of the vision but not willing to give up control of the poem itself as the French encouraged with their automatism and devotion to the subconscious.

Hoover holds closer to his French predecessors than his American peers. Even when the poem starts with a fairly ordinary topic ("a model in a painting class") he is willing to let the poem lead him rather than vice versa:

The students are studious.
He says, "On the fourth floor in a broom closet
a bulb has been burning for several days.
Find the man responsible."
Sir, we have found his green uniform,
for the ideal does exist, like grammar,
and the possible happens every minute.

It is refreshing to see surrealism used with an American idiom. However, because of the nature of the writing, there are no "great" poems here (too much jumping from idea to idea). But still plenty to enjoy.

[Tuesday, June.29th]

It was probably a mistake to attempt a month of poems while the company I work for was launching V1 of the product. But then it would have been equally problematic while I was looking for job, starting a new job, on vacation, etc. etc... I apologize of the lapse in entries. I kept up with the reading, but couldn't find the time to write the entries.

But there never is a good time. So rather than spend another year waiting for the right opportunity, I'll just pick up where I left off, continue into the next month, and accept the gaps when they occur. I appreciate your patience and hope my ramblings are of interest.

"In the Valley of the Elwy" by Gerard Manley Hopkins
from The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oxford University Press 1967
[Saturday, July 3rd]

It would be silly of me to talk about Hopkins. Not that I don't like him, I do! But I have a hard time explaining why.

I don't like rhymed verse. And Hopkins is, if anything, excessively rhymy. He rhymes at the end of the line; in the middle of the line; he stuffs rhyme and alliteration throughout his poems. It's as if he is trying to overwhelm you with sound.

And that is perhaps the sensation I like about his work. Hopkins is, aurally, a very sensual poet. Ascetic in his personal life, his poems can barely contain the ecstatic abundance of language, in a way no other poet is willing to do.

"Late Disturbance" by Joan Houlihan
from Hand-Held Executions, Del Sol Press 2004
[Sunday, September 5th]

I know nothing about Joan Houlihan except what is in this book. I confess that I bought it, at least partially, because of the blurbs on the back. (If poets you like have nice things to say about a book, there is at least a chance of there being something worthwhile inside.)

And indeed there is. There is an urgency about these poems that is very attractive. Not a hurried stream of consciousness, but a frankness where the poem is stripped of its literary "skin" and left to fend for itself.

Quite frankly I find many of the images in Houlihan's poems to be tantalizingly beyond the reach comprehension. They slip out of my grasp at the last minute leaving me with the sense of empathy, but nothing I could clearly articulate:

Treated with chalk and medical salt,
feigning misgiving, tears -- is this complaint

or welcome? I am not easily taught.
What bound us now deforms.

This sort of cat-and-mouse with comprehension is a dangerous game for a poet to play. If it works, the poem has a depth like the water in a quarry: deep, dark and mysterious. But let the image run a little too far into the ungraspable, and the poem is exposed (at least to the frustrated reader) as a shallow con game: tricking the reader into believing there is depth where there is simply confusion.

But Houlihan manages to play the game to perfection. Each image has sufficient visual lucidity and emotional weight to keep me thinking, keep me wondering, keep me reading.

Collaboration at the Edges

2010-03-31T10:00:00.001-04:00

Last month there was a discussion going on in a KM group I participate in regarding rewards. The question being asked was "what incentives are in place for knowledge sharing within your organization?"

Now, those involved in KM will recognize this discussion. It is a recurring theme, sort of like abortion, with no clear answer but lots of heated debate on both sides.

To summarize quickly, there are those who feel that incentives (ranging from simple acknowledgments to actual physical or financial awards) applied strategically can encourage participation and knowledge sharing. While others feel any form of reward system distorts normal behavior, resulting in "false positives" as individuals game the system to collect the rewards, without any real engagement in KM practices per se.

There seem to be valid arguments on both sides, and I have no expectations that I can sort out the issue where so many others have failed. But I do have a different perspective that may have some value. You see, over the past year I went from working for a large corporation (over 50,000 employees) to working for a company barely in the double digits (10 employees, to be exact).

Now you might not think that the activities of ten people working together have much bearing on a large geographically distributed corporation. And, at first blush, you would be right.

We have no trouble with knowledge sharing. We work in close proximity. Conversations break out throughout the day and anyone can and does join in. Questions are asked, frustrations expressed, solutions proposed, and problems solved with almost no conscious effort whatsoever.

It seems almost ludicrous to ask "why don't we have issues with KM?" Isn't it obvious? We all know each other. We are working closely together on a common project.

But we aren't all the same. I'm a writer. Most of the team are engineers. There's a manager. And regardless of our roles, we all have quite distinct personalities, which might or might not be compatible in other situations. But none of that gets in the way.

So is it the distance, the lack of knowing each other, or the loss of a common goal that stand in the way of sharing in larger environments? The answer is probably "yes" to all three -- plus a few other characteristics of working in distributed corporations.

But I have another experience that influences my view of this problem. Years ago (many years ago) I worked for another large corporation. However, at that time, there didn't seem to be any of the difficulties with knowledge sharing I have seen since. The company was large, distributed, and working on many different, often unrelated, products at one time. In other words, no obvious common goal.

In many ways, the employees (particularly the engineers) of that earlier company operated as if they were a team of ten rather than an organization of 100,000. People I had never met responded to my questions openly, offered suggestions, even took time out to assist if necessary.

Most importantly, there were no explicit incentives to encourage this behavior. It just kind of "happened".

Of course, that's not true. It didn't just "happen". The ethos of the company, the culture of the organizations within it, and the personal dedication of the individuals the company chose to hire conspired to create that environment.* But, three things stand out about these examples in my mind:

If size and distance are detrimental to knowledge sharing -- as they clearly are -- what is it about incentives that would counteract that?
More importantly, what is it about size and distance that causes the problem?
And why is it the earlier company was able to overcome those obstacles without incentives?

As I said earlier, I have no expectation that I can actually solve this dilemma. But I have a suspicion. And my suspicion is this:

People share openly when they feel they are part of a community

Not a member of the community, a part of the community. They share because they are assisting the community, even if the sharing is one-to-one with another member.

Clearly in the case of small groups, it is easy for everyone to understand the common goal. The individuals cannot succeed unless the group (i.e. community) succeeds. As a consequence, they are eager to contribute where they can. Even, paradoxically, when those contributions are quite tangential to the shared goal (such as recommending good restaurants or which GPS system is best).

Note that lurking -- a behavior specific to members of a community rather than participants -- is difficult in small physical groups. Since the group is so small, people see when you hold back and may even challenge you to open up. Such interaction is much harder in large, distributed groups.

So getting back to the initial question: what can incentives do to counteract the negative impact of size and distance? Incentives can encourage lurkers to speak up (thereby improving whatever quantitative metrics are in place). However, incentives cannot alter the psychological affinity an individual feels towards to community. At best, the incentive may spur an initial (and temporary) jump from lurker to participant, which the individual then finds satisfying. This success may spur them to try again, and over time start to develop a sense of ownership in the group. (In other words, become part of the community.)

This, I believe, is what advocates of incentives are aiming for.

* For a more complete assessment of this earlier company, see Patti Anklam's excellent article The Camelot of Collaboration.

Lurking, a Personal Story

2010-02-26T14:36:00.001-05:00

I belong to several professional communities, mostly online email discussion lists. I sometimes participate in the conversations. But mostly, I lurk.

It is not that I am a novice (I've been at my profession -- or professions -- for a number of years). It's not that I don't have anything to say. In fact, quite the opposite.

I was reminded of this recently when a discussion came up about communities and incentives. I've worked in KM for ten years or more. I've also witnessed a number of incentive programs, both successful and not so. So I have no lack of opinions and experiential knowledge I could share.

But I haven't said much. Why? Because these topics, communities and incentives, are areas of contention in the field of KM. What are they? How are they best employed? Do incentives help or hurt? There has already been plenty of space and time spent arguing both sides.

So I try to pick my words carefully. I even started a blog post on the topic to try and organize my thoughts. However, while I picked and edited, others chimed in with their opinions, advice, and war stories and the conversation quickly moved on, diverging into several related threads.

Each time someone else adds to the discussion, there is something new I feel I need to refute, promote, analyze or otherwise respond to.

In the end I don't respond at all.

That, in and of itself, is not interesting. But what may be interesting is what was going on in the background.

I am not just lurking, I am also implicitly deferring to the others who are responding. Note, I don't agree with them all. And there is a certain level of angst at not responding to the comments I disagree with. Because I am emotionally involved in the topic of the conversation. But either because of the number of interrelated concepts being bandied about or the speed of the conversation, I do not feel comfortable joining in.

As a consequence, at least to some small degree, I feel distanced from the community as a whole. And therefore lurk some more.

This is a cyclic event. I've noticed myself do this time and again in more than one environment. I lurk, I sometimes feel better about the community, sometimes worse. Then something will spur me to respond. I'll actively participate for awhile, then go back to lurking.

There are a number of different reasons I don't chime in:

I agree with what's being said and don't feel like piling on (or distracting from the points already made)
I disagree with what is being said but don't want to get into a pissing contest about it.
I disagree with what is being said but can't get my thoughts in order enough to make a cogent argument before the conversation moves on.
I disagree with what is being said, but it is such a minor aspect of the overall conversation that I feel arguing it would be an unnecessary quibble.

There are probably others, but those are just some that come to mind. But more importantly, there are times I do chime in. And those times seem to fall into three categories:

Someone is asking for assistance and -- before anyone else responds -- I feel I have something unique or clear to offer.
Someone is asking for assistance and -- although I may not feel uniquely qualified -- no one else responds in a reasonable time frame (anywhere from a few hours to a day or so), so I feel my response will be of use.
Something is said I disgree with so much, my eagerness to correct it overcomes any of my inhibitions about going off-topic or raising an argument.

What really struck me was the last cause. It really goes against the common beliefs about communities.

We (KM consultants and practitioners) tend to discuss lurking as a static state. We talk about communities being made up of 10% core contributors and 90% lurkers, as if these are permanent labels you can apply to individuals. And one of the key goals of incentives is to convince members to "cross over", stop lurking and become active contributors.

To be fair, incentives can help. Just as taking new arrivals at a party around and introducing them to those already there can help get them to join in. Incentives done properly can help new members "break the ice".

However, this concept of lurking as a static state is so widespread, community members themselves often adopt it and feel compelled to confess their status. At least once a month I read a post starting something like "Hi. I'm normally a lurker in this forum, but..."

The fact is, lurking is not a static state, it is highly dynamic. The cast of active participants changes over time as people flip between lurking and leading. At the same time, lurkers are often paying close attention to what is going on, are emotionally responding to events and -- moment to moment -- adjusting their attitude towards the community based on what is said. They agree, they disagree, they get angry, insulted, surprised, or even flattered (when they feel they or their subgroup have been mentioned positively) all without breaking out of their silence.

And, in opposition to common belief, it is not an improved attitude toward the community that is needed to get them to join in. Often it can be displeasure or disagreement that instigates a need to speak. Of course, how their contributions are received (they don't have to be agreed with, but at least considered and respected) impacts their likelihood to contribute again.

The real difficulty for community facilitators is that this dynamic, changeable, but silent lurking makes it hard to measure the actual "health" of the community as a whole. The volume of discourse may remain high. But as with any voluntary endeavour, people can "vote with their feet". But for online communities, you can't "see" lurkers who choose to tune out. And it isn't until the conversation starts to dwindle (because there are no lurkers left to chime in or pinch hit when an active participant drops out) that you realize there is a problem.

I can't say I have much to offer in terms of positive techniques for counteracting this situation. But I believe that having a more realistic understanding of the dynamics of lurking may help us address the needs of communities we watch over in a less back and white fashion.

To start with, it is important not to stigmatize lurking. Everyone does it sometimes and lurking doesn't mean you aren't emotionally involved. Accepting lurking as a normal stage in a cycle may help make the distinction between active and passive particition less daunting to new members.

And, of course, finding a way to gauge the involvement or commitment of lurkers could go a long way to understanding the actual health of the community as a whole. How to do this is still a challenge that has no clear answer...

Twenty-Five Years of Poetry

2010-02-17T20:10:00.001-05:00

It is hard to believe, but I've been writing poetry for over thirty years now. During that time, I have been fortunate enough to have a number of poems published in magazines (for which I am very grateful).

I have also assembled several book-length manuscripts. Unfortunately, my efforts to get a book published have not met with success.

I continue to write and, I expect, will continue to submit manuscripts for publication. However, at this point it is unlikely that my earlier manuscripts will ever be published through traditional channels. So I decided to make them available online.

I am posting five manuscripts, written over a period of about 25 years. They include the following works:

Three collections of original poems: The Light Deformed by Monstrous Signs (1986), A Life of Feasting (1991), and Primer (2008)
A selection of work from the previous volumes: Toppling Mountains (1997)
A collaboration with friend and fellow poet, Bill Evans: Rilke's Elegies (1985)

There is no definition that can encompass all that poetry is or can be. But if my work can instill in you, as reader, even a fraction of what poetry has meant to me over the years, I will feel that I have succeeded.

Enjoy.

What Happened to Postcards?

2010-02-07T23:22:00.001-05:00

I spent much of yesterday at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. It was a singularly exhausting experience -- as most museum visits are. (Being a combination of exhilaration and stultification at the same time.)

But what particularly struck me was when we visited the gift store before leaving (I can't resist tacky souvenirs) and there were no postcards for sale.

Yes, they had one small rack of postcards of Egyptian paraphernalia, capitalizing on their current special exhibit of an Egyptian tomb and children's fascination with mummies. (Egypt is to art museums what dinosaurs are to science museums.) There was also a book of postcards depicting paintings by Monet. But there were no small mementos for sale of the individual works that may have struck a chord during your visit.

At first I was confused. But then it occurred to me that there may be a very practical reason why postcards are missing: no one sends physical mail anymore.

Now, this is just supposition. There are a number of different reasons why they may no longer sell postcards: too expensive to produce, take up too much space, need to constantly change stock to keep up with what is on display at any given time... But these conditions are either identical to what they were 20 years ago or easily offset by inflating prices (as they do with the trivets, posters, T-shirts, and other items that are on display).

So I can only assume the market for postcards has itself diminished because people do not send physical mail anymore. Statistics from the US postal service verify this, indicating that personal correspondence via USPS decreased 14% between 2002 and 2008. And the drop off is expected to continue.

The unfortunate part of this situation is that postcards play a role beyond just souvenirs and something to write "wish you were here" on. Postcards, especially postcards from places like museums and zoos that have many different exhibits, serve as mnemonic devices. These mnemonics remind us of the strong emotional experience of seeing the painting, sculpture or whatever. They also act as a surrogate of that experience that we share with those we send the postcards to.

People do not send as much mail because email and other electronic media have replaced the need for physical letters and cards. (As well as being easier, cheaper, and more convenient.) In place of postcards, I could have taken pictures of the paintings I wanted to remember -- which I did in a few instances. But the lighting in museums is hardly conducive to photography. (In some cases, it doesn't even seem very conducive to viewing!)

So what should be done? As much as I enjoy postcards, I recognize it is not practical to argue a return to a form of gifting that never was very practical and is now downright archaic. But it would be a loss to the patrons -- and to the museum -- if there were no form of mnemonic to help visitors retain and relive the pleasure of seeing the art in first person.

If it is not financially viable to stock physical postcards, perhaps they can make it possible to send electronic postcards or custom "picture books" of one's favorite works, whether to yourself or to your friends?

But, surprise surprise. They almost do...

The museum has an searchable online catalog of many of its holdings. The catalog has an expansive advanced search capability. It even lets you send e-cards once you find a specific item. (Yes!)

However, the catalog is only available if you are on the internet, not in the museum itself. (No!) Add to that, the catalog is really designed for those who understand how the catalog works, not the casual user. (For example, the search interface has 12 fields. Enter "Egypt" under culture and search for items on display and nothing shows up. Search for "Egypt" as a keyword and 58 pages of results are returned.)

What would be great would be if there were monitors in each room that let you browse the items available in that room. (No painful searching.) You could select an item and send an e-card in seconds when it strikes you, rather than spending minutes (or more) searching for it later.

Better still, for those with smart phones you could provide a simplified interface that only asks for the asset or accession number. (The accession number appears on the bottom of the placard describing each work of art.)

(Example placard with the accession # 72.2617)

The visitor could quickly call up an item they liked and send e-cards to others or a reminder to themselves on the spot. They could even create an e-book of their favorite works as they proceed through the collection.

In an ideal world, the MFA could put 2D barcodes on the placards so the information could be scanned and retrieved automatically by cellphone. This would be the easiest method technically. However, it would require changes to museum itself (the placards) and a common interface on cell phones -- something available in Japan but still not standard in the US yet.

So sticking with the first two suggestions -- and especially the suggestion for a simplified search available on smart phones -- it would be possible for the MFA to provide a thoroughly innovative and satisfying way for visitors to remember and share their experience with very little change to the existing infrastructure.

Why should the MFA bother? Although this sort of addition would have a cost associated with it, much of the technology already exists in the electronic catalog. Simply by creating a targeted interface -- and promoting the new capability - the museum can deepen the experience for the patron as well as advertise its best qualities through the messages the patrons send.

The word "souvenir" comes from the French for the act of remembering. Postcards are both a souvenir in the sense of a mnemonic device and a vehicle of communication. Their loss may seem minor from a commercial perspective, but they served as a valuable thread connecting the museum experience (quiet, austere, contemplative) with the visitor's regular life (loud, jumbled, exciting and excitable). A thread by which we carry the experience of art from previous generations back into our lives.

Without it, the day at the museum is just that: a day at the museum. But museums have the opportunity to create an even stronger link, electronically. It will be interesting to see if they pick up the challenge.

The World's Smallest Instruction Manual

2010-01-16T13:24:00.002-05:00

3.5 X 4.25 inches
Single sheet of paper, printed on one side.
(Instructions for a pocket calculator.)

The Work We Do

2010-01-10T23:45:00.000-05:00

I recently changed jobs. As a consequence I am no longer "doing" Knowledge Management. I am reminded of this fact by friends who ask me how much KM is involved in my new job. The simple answer is none. But to be honest, that's not entirely true.

My new role brings me back to my roots in Technical Writing, Information Architecture, and what is currently known as "Content Strategy". (Although "Content Strategy" appears to be having the same sort of identity crisis KM and IA go through on a regular basis.)

Which may also explain why my new role doesn't feel so different. In my previous profession, people would ask me how Information Architecture relates to Knowledge Management. My pat answer was that KM is the architectural design of potential -- rather than existing -- information.

My response was flippant, but also quite accurate. Whether you are defining the structure of a website for well-understood content or designing an interface for some as-yet-undefined content that will be chosen by people in the future... the tools, the methods, and the experience you use are much the same.

Ditto technical writing, which is very much like information architecture except on a much smaller scale. (What goes in this document vs. another? Where do we put the introductory information so the user can't help tripping over it? etc.)

Now, I know there are technical writers that do nothing but write and are affronted if you suggest they "design" things. Just as there are Information Architects that design taxonomies and not much else. But the fields themselves are much bigger than that. Which is where the confusion and bickering comes in.

I seem to be constantly in the middle of one battle or another no matter which of my various "professions" I am practicing. The reason for that is because the boundaries are very fuzzy. And ambiguity makes people uncomfortable.

So they try to delineate their roles. On the one hand, practitioners try to define the field by how they currently practice it: the tools they use or the methodology they have adopted. While others with a more philosophical bent try to expand the scope, often treading on the toes of their neighboring professions.

Currently, information architects are arguing whether IA even exists or if it (and several other forms of design) are all just different flavors of a new profession, user experience design. Or is it interaction design? Or is it...

Similarly, KM practitioners (and pundits from other fields) are trying to decide if there is a battle going on between KM and social media. Excuse me? There is no battle unless you assume KM as a field of study has to be practiced in a specific way or within a predefined, limited field of vision.

I feel like channeling a famous ex-wrestler and shouting "It doesn't matter what your profession is!"

The names we make up for our jobs help avoid conflicts when working with others by divvying up the territory. They also give us a ready answer to social situations when someone asks "what is it you do?"

Unfortunately, these names also create unnecessary barriers to getting work done. If you define your role by specific tools or tasks, you are also defining the boundaries for the solutions you can provide. You doom yourself to repeating the same work over and over... even when the environment around you changes, as it inevitably will.

The fact is that all of my professions are variations on addressing the traditional dilemma of communications theory. Whether it is communication between management and employees, among the employees themselves, between the company and customers, or among the current and potential customers the company seeks, the professions I travel with are all trying to resolve the problem of getting information into the right hands at the right time.

In knowledge management it is creating channels for the ambient knowledge within whatever community you support. In this case, your audience is often both content providers and consumers at different times. You don't control the content, you try to maximize the channel.

In information architecture it is sorting, defining, and providing a clear logical structure to at least that part of the information space you have control over (whether that be a web site, marketing, promotion, community facilitation, or whatever). You manage the content, somewhat like an orchestra conductor. But you are not the composer.

In user experience and usability design it is tuning the communication channel to be as effective as possible. You don't control the content or the structure, but you control how the audience interacts with it. (Of course, this is untrue in actuality because the interface becomes part of the message. Wasn't it McLuhan who said the medium is the message? But this is just another example of how the professions overlap...)

And in technical writing it is creating the perfect communication, including content and structure, but within the limited scope of the channel you have available to you (whether that be books, online help, training modules, or a web site). You have complete control over the content, but less over the channel and still less over the audience.

They all address the issue of communication from different angles. And taken together, provide an endless array of solutions and approaches when faced with any problem related to information.

That's why I like it.

And that's what I do.

Approaches to Sustainability: Design to Zero

2009-11-14T10:58:00.004-05:00

[Continued from Approaches to Sustainable KM: Embedded KM]

Another approach to sustainable KM is "design to zero".

It's impossible to start a business initiative with no resources. Even if it is only your own time and attention, there is some expenditure required. And usually there is a lot more than just that.

Any new project requires a "bump" to get it started. This might include training, hardware and software expenditures, project management, etc. Any number of capital or resource costs are needed to get things going.

The problem is that budget planning often only accounts for the short term (2, 3 or perhaps 5 years at most). For projects with a defined endpoint, this is OK. However, almost all KM projects are intended to run indefinitely. (It doesn't make sense to stop sharing knowledge after 3 years, does it?)

This means that, although it may not show up on the plan of record, the KM program must account for the ongoing maintenance of long-term projects. If you load up your KM program with management of ongoing initiatives, there are two negative consequences:

If budgets and headcount are cut (or worse, eliminated), you have no choice but to abandon one or more of the initiatives, usually bringing the program to a screeching halt. Without the expected leadership and constant "push", non-sustainable programs fail when the budget stops.
Even if budgets stay the same, after a while, you have no spare resources to start new programs. Even if a good idea comes along (such as Enterprise 2.0) your KM team is fully booked and you do not have sufficient resources to start anything new without impacting existing programs.

How do you avoid this dilemma? The key is to design each project -- from the beginning -- to reach zero cost.

That doesn't mean management goes to zero or that residual effort goes to zero, but that the program is designed to become self-supporting at a set point in time.

So rather than planning for the the first year "bump" and letting maintenance trail on indefinitely, plan from the beginning that management of the program and responsibility for its ongoing success will be transferred to the appropriate people within the organization. Sometimes this means the project may need a bigger expense up front (as soon in the graph below). But the benefit is that the project then becomes self-sustaining and the KM team can move on to tackle other tasks.

Going back to our example of embedded KM, it is not sufficient to have the idea to invite architects from other disciplines to the project reviews. You need to make sure that the organization running the reviews understands that their success depends on this outside participation and, therefore, they are responsible for making sure it continues once the program is off the ground.

As with any sustainability practice, not all projects are suited for design to zero. But far more projects are than you might expect. The trick is to look for the part of the organization (usually lines of business) that will benefit most from the effort. Engage them early in the planning, so they feel responsible for its success. Then get them to commit to ongoing management as part of their regular business cycle.

[To be continued]

What I'm Playing: Professor Layton and the Curious Village

2009-11-03T23:30:00.002-05:00

Last night I finished Professor Layton and the Curious Village, the puzzle/mystery game for the Nintendo DS. I know I'm a little late -- the game's been out for more than a year now and there is a new Professor Layton game that's already been released. But I will not be playing the second game.

Why not? Because the Curious Village is surprisingly boring. You'd think it was right up my alley. It has puzzles (I like puzzles). It has a mystery (I like mysteries). You can save at any time (I have limited free time so being able to play in short bursts -- which this game is ideally suited for -- is essential for me). And when I saw the original trailer, I loved the art style and the animation.

But I didn't enjoy it. To start with... Hey! Where'd the animation go? Except for the opening cinematics (and the final scene) there is almost no animation. The story -- what there is of one -- is told in a slide show of static images and printed text. And there aren't very many of these either, since the village is pretty small. Get ready to see the same places over and over again.

Then there is the mystery, which is really no mystery at all. About a quarter of the way through the game, the primary "mystery" of the village becomes self-evident. At that point, the game becomes an exercise in slogging through the puzzles and waiting for new areas to open up.

Which brings us to the puzzles. I like puzzles, I really do. But the worst problem with Professor Layton is I don't find its puzzles satisfying. These puzzles are not mental exercises, they are more what I would call "trick" puzzles, similar to the "move two match sticks to form a different picture" variety. (In fact, that specific type of puzzle shows up several times.)

Now you might say that these types of puzzles teach out-of-the-box thinking, where you need to look at the question in a new way to recognize the answer. However, in many cases, you either see the trick of your don't. If you don't, then the puzzle is simply a frustration. If you do, you quickly answer it and move on, without learning much or feeling any great sense of achievement. This is especially true the third or fourth time you have to answer the same type of puzzle.

Quite frankly I find the puzzles in the "educational" titles Brain Age and Big Brain Academy far more animated, enlightening, and ultimately more fun than dealing with the professor and his mysterious village.

So why, you might ask, did I finish it? Well, to tell the truth, I wanted to prove that my guess as to the answer to mystery was true (which it was). And, in fact, the last few puzzles in the game really ramped up the difficulty and required some serious brain power to solve -- and they were subsequently more satisfying to master.

But it was far too little too late to make up for the general tedium of the game. It's a shame. I really like puzzle games and was hoping this one would live up to the hype. But I guess I'll have to keep looking...

(Silence)

2009-09-25T10:28:00.002-04:00

Ah! Silence, a blessing... or a curse?

I realize Incredibly Dull has been quiescent for the last two months. No, I was not hit by a bus, run over by a train, nor did I run out of things to say. What did happen was I started a new job which has been occupying my time and attention (in a good way).

However, now that I am in the groove, I expect to get back to posting blog entries, particularly on sustainable knowledge management, games, and poetry & the other arts. You can consider that a promise (or a threat, depending upon your point of view). But for now, back to our regularly scheduled program...

Approaches to Sustainability: Embedded KM

2009-07-10T13:04:00.002-04:00

[Continued from Sustainable KM: Principles & Approaches]

The first approach to sustainable KM is fairly obvious: embedded KM. This is where you embed knowledge management practices into the existing business processes. Some of the benefits to embedded KM are:

Rapid adoption
Tied to business metrics

An added advantage is that -- if done properly -- there is little or no need for training since there is little or no change to behavior. If you place the knowledge management procedures in the existing operational processes, they will be completed by people as they perform their day-to-day work.

This is best explained by example:

Say your business process already includes reviews at key milestones. It is likely that certain documents are required for the review: project overview, costs, schedule, etc. There may already be a template for these documents.
If one of your KM goals is to make employees more aware of other projects to increase shared resources and reduce overlap, an easy way to do this would be to simply collect the project overviews from each review to create a project catalog.

First, let's look at an embedded KM solution with little or no change to the process. Since the documents are already being created and the review is an existing milestone in the process, the only work needed to implement the KM catalog is creating the repository (a one-time event) and influencing the review managers to post the appropriate documents in it. Working with the managers responsible for the reviews, it should not be a major hurdle to get this slight modification to the standard process in place.

However, collecting information is only part of the solution. To have any impact at all, the information has to be used. And, quite frankly, a directory full of unsorted documents is neither particularly useful nor appealing to anyone. So to complete the circle there are at least two additional steps:

Adding steps to the project lifecycle to remind team members to use the repository. (Again, this is best done by tweeking existing process steps or milestones, such as the steps for starting the requirements gathering, design, and/or implementation stages.)
Making the repository easy to use.

The latter step sounds deceptively simple, but is really the crux of where KM projects go astray from a sustainability perspective. For the repository to be useful, it needs to be searchable/sortable in some meaningful way. The primary way to do this is to provide metadata about the documents; classifications such as industry, country, client name, etc.

Rarely is the interesting information clearly or consistently labeled in business documents. So the only way to effectively add the metadata is to:

Require those contributing to the repository to fill out the metadata for each item
Modify the templates used to include specific fields for the metadata (and get the authors to use them correctly)

Suddenly our simple update to an existing process has become far more complex. Getting people to fill out input forms including metadata is extremely hard; they are either put off by the form and so resist contributing or they fill out the form with incomplete or misleading information. The same problem occurs when templates contain embedded fields. Making sure everyone uses the new templates and uses them correctly is a significant training and communication task, besides the effort required to maintain and periodically update the templates. Finally, the only way to make sure the forms or templates are being filled out correctly is to monitor the submissions to make sure they are complete and meaningful.

As you can see, a simple "improvement" to the system quickly burgeons into extended activities required to maintain and support the process. Conceptually, you can view a "capture & reuse" program such as described as being positioned somewhere on a curve from no modification to optimized for reuse.

When there is little or no modification to the content, very little management needs to be applied and the process is highly sustainable. Unfortunately, this also leaves the work of providing relevance up to the users of the content, which is often too much to make the effort worthwhile. (In other words, the system may go unused and have little value.)

To make the information usable, it needs to be modified to provide relevance. However, doing this requires changes to the process by which it is captured, adding new challenges in communicating the new process, training the users, and encouraging submissions. The content becomes more usable, but significant, ongoing effort is required to enforce and monitor the submissions, since the effort is now put on the contributors rather than the end users. In other words, an unsustainable process.

The trick is to find the middle ground (indicated by the blue box in the following diagram), where the content is usable enough and the contribution process simple enough that people can and will manage their own use of the system. Experience teaches us that this "sweet spot" can be an extremely narrow segment of the curve and very hard to hit.

Now, I must confess. I cheated in my previous example. Creating a project catalog from existing documents is often the first instinct. But as I point out, processes managing this sort of explicit knowledge quickly evolve into complex, unsustainable programs from only minor "improvements".

So let's consider an alternative. Rather than trying to make all project knowledge available to anyone, what if we simply try to expand the current knowledge base incrementally over time? Rather than collecting the review documents, why not include at least one reviewer from an unrelated project to each review? This could be an architect, implementer, or project manager as long as that person can provide an objective, outside view of the project progress.

This approach has numerous benefits, but two in particular are related to our example:

First, from a project management perspective, the outside reviewer helps to keep the project team "honest". It is easy for internal reviews to become formulaic rubber stamp events if those involved are all working on the project.They do not have enough distance to see hidden pitfalls and will resist calling foul on people they have to work with on a daily basis.
Second, from a KM perspective, including outsiders gives at least one person a much more indepth and personal knowledge than could ever be gained by reading a set of historical documents with no one to explain them. Another value from a KM perspective is the opportunity the reviewer and the project team have to exchange knowledge, hints, and tips on the fly and in context of the discussion.

The outside reviewer will take this knowledge back to their own project where it may or may not be used immediately. But it will stick with that person for a long, long time due to their intimate interaction with the other team.

What is required to make this program work? Initiating the program may be difficult because it requires diplomacy. On the other hand, it involves only a limited number of people. What is needed is to convince management (either of the project teams or of the review process itself) of the efficacy of including outside reviewers. Although there are KM benefits, the real advantage is that the proposed process has management benefits, as described, and will make the reviews more meaningful.

Once you succeed at convincing them to make the modification to the review process, the program then becomes essentially self-managing from a KM perspective. The project management teams are responsible for ensuring outside reviewers are included and with each review, little by little, knowledge is shared across the organization.

Again, there are a number of details I have left out that will impact the efficacy of such a program. How outside reviewers are selected and/or rewarded for their efforts can significantly impact the extent to which knowledge spreads as well as the reviewers' willingness to participate. But all of these factors can be addressed either up front or at a periodic (annual?) review of the program, with little impact to the individuals who carry out the plan. The program will continue to expand the knowledge base over time with little or no input from the KM team. The KM team can move on to addressing other issues without being tied up in maintaining the review process, in the best sense of sustainable KM.

[Continued in Approaches to Sustainability: Design to Zero]

The Art of Managing Knowledge Management Programs

2009-06-18T11:45:00.003-04:00

I recently gave a presentation on adaptive knowledge architectures (slides and audio). The presentation was more a case study than anything else. I ended with two slides of lessons learned -- what I would do differently in hindsight to avoid the difficulties we encountered.

The original slides (and afterthought) are more conceptual than practical. For example, my primary insight was "beware of success". What I meant by that was that, if you succeed, others will not only want to jump on the bandwagon, they will try to take control and alter both the goals and practices to match their needs rather than the original principles.

There were two things I left out of my slides. One I intentionally left out because it is a more generalized issue about strategy, KM or otherwise. The other I simply forgot until people started asking me questions. They are both practical considerations when managing knowledge management programs.

The general rule is: communicate continually and repeatedly.

I must have presented the original architecture (the 3-tier model) 50-60 times when we started. And my boss at the time did as well. It even appeared in a case study written by Microsoft.

I would then include the 3-tier architecture diagram at the beginning of every KM presentation I gave -- explaining how the new features or changes fit into the architecture. Inevitably someone would ask about the diagram as if they had never seen it. Even people I know I had presented it to within the previous year.

Richard Saul Wurman makes the point in one of his books that you only learn what you are ready to learn. This is particularly true of strategies and architectures. You have to repeat it over and over again -- until you are bored with it! Because there will be people who haven't absorbed it yet.

I think this applies particularly when you move into Enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0 where there is a seismic shift of intent and responsibilities. Managers just don't get it. They say they do, but they don't. They are hearing part of it (the rapid adoption part) but not the self-managed part. They think they can pick and choose the attributes without damaging the system. Sorry, it doesn't work that way. In the case study I used for my adaptive architecture presentation, that is exactly what they did to our communities.

Which brings me to my second point (the one I had forgotten). The reason they took over our communities was not so much that we had succeeded at KM, but that we had succeeded at content management. At the beginning of my presentation I mentioned that the 3-tier diagram includes the top tier (the intranet) so I could dismiss it and say it is not part of the KM environment.

What I didn't count on was the fact that we built an infrastructure (based on SharePoint) that was so much easier to use and and manage than what was being used for the intranet, management would want it for their "portals".

Essentially, they were responsible for the last branch of the intranet hierarchy and it took weeks (and several employees) to get content posted. Ironically, I had worked with the organization's IT team trying to sell them on using SharePoint to manage their intranet sites (separate from our KM infrastructure), but it was rejected. (I won't go into that here, but that was an entertaining episode in its own right.)

But what happened was management saw that our "communities" had all the attributes of their portals but little of the pain. So they jumped on it.

So what would I do differently? I wouldn't ignore the top layer. I would set aside part of the infrastructure just for them. Even though it isn't really KM, I would do it to create a manageable buffer zone between their activities and our KM processes.

How does this apply to Enterprise 2.0? I think the same thing will happen to people trying to implement web 2.0 internally. Part of the attraction of social software is its ease of use. And if the technology catches on, people will jump on it for purposes not intended by the software vendors or the sponsors. And once they do, they will try to apply their traditional "management" thinking to it.

Two small examples I saw at a large corporation:

The internal corporate "wikipedia" included pages describing, among other things, each of the organizations: what they did, who ran them, their relationships. Someone discovered this and complained that the entries did not match the description on the managed intranet pages. It was not a suggestion or a demand. It was simply stated as what they saw as a fact; that the wiki pages should be made to match the intranet pages. In other words, selected content should be controlled.
On our social networking site we got management to promote the site to our organization. It was then pointed out that the managers themselves should create profiles. Several did. But upper management insisted that their executive assistants draft the content and that we should have a way to post these "ghosted" profiles (completely in opposition to the basic model and implementation of the application). We did change the software to permit this, but as innocuous as this sounds it does create a philosophical schism in the application: who gets to have "ghosted" profiles? How can people tell real from edited profiles? etc.

These may seem trivial, but our apps were still in birth mode, without widespread adoption. So these were just the first signs of the problem.

The question is: what would I do about it? Like I said in the presentation, I don't think there is a generic answer. It depends on the corporate culture and, I'm afraid, the individuals involved. You can try to second guess the culture. So, for example, in hindsight I would have created spaces for the HQ intranet sites to try to alleviate the pressure on the communities. Would that have worked? Possibly. But it is just as likely that they would then argue that the communities are unnecessary since their portals provide all the information consultants need. (Which, in fact they did when they argued that we should dissolve all of the communities that they didn't control. But we managed to stop that effort...)

In the case of Enterprise 2.0, I would have suggested creating one or more executive wikis, secured for use by managers of the individual organizations. This may have satisfied their need for secrecy, ease of use, and taught them a little bit about the operating principles of web 2.0. Would that have sufficiently distracted them from messing with the employee wiki (which was the real goal)? Perhaps, perhaps not. But it would be worth a try.

Another recommendation would be to have a very clear business objective for E2.0. For example, internal development blogs for each project/product. You can allow other uses of blogs, but by having a clear, measurable, but not ROI-based, objective and repeatedly stating it (i.e. constant communication as stated above) you may be able to deflect people trying to commandeer the program.

I could go on, but I better stop before I end up writing War & Peace...

[Many thanks to Steve Ardire for inspiring this post and Stan Garfield for teaching me much of what I know about managing KM programs.]

Bing Bang Boom

2009-06-07T11:30:00.004-04:00

I've seen it. I've tried it. I'm bored.

OK. That's not entirely fair. All the hoopla around the emergence of Microsoft's new search engine Bing has made me testy.

Bing isn't all that bad as a search engine. There's nothing particularly new here (except the name) and lots of copy cat behavior. Overall it is an improvement over its predecessor, Live Search. But why all the ruckus?

Why? Because Microsoft is out to "win". All their business strategies focus on displacing the current industry leader and taking command of the market so they can then use that position to promote (or as they like to say "integrate") all their other products. Oh yes, there's the usual nod to improving the user experience and enhancing productivity. But the ultimate goal is market dominance.

And they are willing to spend the money to do it. Ten million dollars, purportedly. One might say "what's so wrong with that? This is a free market economy isn't it?" Yes it is. On the other hand, I don't know if Seth Godin was thinking about Microsoft as he was writing it, but his blog entry strikes me as very apropos when he says "you're boring." As Seth put it, the "half-price sale on attention is now over."

I'm not as sanguine as Seth. I think there is still a lot of attention that can be bought. And Microsoft has done it over and over again. Internet Explorer, Office, even Windows itself. Why do you think they redesign the logos of their products for every version? And the user interface? To make them look new. To give the consumer (particularly the corporate consumer) a reason for upgrading.

I am tired of Microsoft buying their way into the market with mediocre, me-too products. What's annoying is that their products aren't that bad. Windows has grown up into quite a reasonable OS. And Office has most of the features any normal human being could want. Unfortunately, it also has bucket loads of features that 90% of humanity will never need and that get in the way of finding the useful ones, simply as part of the one upmanship of product sequels.

And now we have Bing. What is really annoying about Bing is that it might be a good search engine. I'm not sure. A competitor to Google? Unlikely, but possible. But I am so sick of Microsoft's aggressive business practices (usually at the expense of the user), that I am soured to everything it does and Bing suffers for it.

But I did try Bing. And it's OK.

The top horizontal function menu is borrowed wholesale from Google, as is the stripped down functional layout.
The design does has a nice, clean visual feel.
There's been a lot of touting of the popup excerpts for search results. But haven't we had abstracts since AltaVista 14 years ago?
The Related Searches sidebar is nice. But not nice enough to make me replace my current favorite search engine.

And that is where Microsoft has a problem. They sell plenty of software in the corporate world. But internet search is a personal choice. And a fickle one at that. They will be able to buy a certain amount of attention with advertising, but ultimately they need a significant change in functionality to make people change their ways. And I don't see it in Bing.

So, failing to win technically, they now want to win by subterfuge. Bing touts itself as something new, a "decision engine". Excuse me? What decisions is it making? Even if I liked Bing enough to try it, this hyperbolic nonsense is enough to make me want it to fail simply to spite Microsoft's incessant marketing machine.

Which is a shame. Bing is a decent search engine. I feel sorry for the engineers who have put their time into it because, ultimately, its success or failure will have little to do with their efforts compared to the animosity and confusion Microsoft's business practices generate in the market.

I am Tired of Killing Things

2009-06-01T11:34:00.005-04:00

I love playing video games. I like the technology, I like the imaginative environments, I like the gameplay, the challenges, the characters, and the music. I particularly enjoy the childish glee I get as I conquer some meaningless virtual hurdle, clear a level, earn a star, or whatnot. But I am getting tired of killing things.

This is not a polemic against violence in video games, per se. I enjoy fighting games as much as the next person. From the realistic (Call of Duty) to the cartoonish (Smash Brothers), from the horrifying (Resident Evil) to the hilarious (Ape Escape), from the fantastic (Star Wars) to the funny (Lego Star Wars). But at some point there have to be other modes of play.

What brought on this fit was hearing all the pre-show hype and rumor around this week's E3 exhibition. Oh, there will be plenty of non-violent news and entertainment (the usual passel of racing games and mini game collections aimed at "families") but the big bucks go to the third or fourth iteration of numerable kill-everything-and-save-the-world games. I'm talking about Nier, Assassin's Creed 2, God of War 3, Tekken 6, and Final Fantasy I've Lost Count. At some point I don't need the blood any more realistic or the hits any more spectacular. The game play is the same.

Now, I know half of the people reading this (the gamers) are going to dismiss it as the whining complaints of an ignorant old crank. The other half (non-gamers or ex-gamers) are likely to latch on to it as a global invective against fighting games. It is neither of those. It is simply an expression of frustration at the lack of innovation in game play at the highest levels.

Each fighting game has its nuance, its (hopefully) unique take on the genre. There are the stealth games, the strategy games, the collaborative games, the gruesome and the garish games. But there are ultimately only so many flavors of kill and games become boring when they are repetitive -- no matter how flashy or colorful the explosions.

But, of course, there is hope. And, no, it is not just adding motion detection or making me wear a telekinetic headset. It comes from invention. Titles like last year's Little Big Planet demonstrate that there is plenty of room left to create enthralling games without more killing. This year, Mini Ninjas, even while continuing the fighting model, seems to inject enough humor, story, and imaginative objects into the game to create a uniquely enjoyable experience.

At least from the trailers. And that's all we have to go on so far.

Sustainable KM: Principles & Approaches

2009-04-30T23:26:00.001-04:00

[Continued from The Challenges, Part 4]

The Principles of Sustainable KM

So to summarize, the basic principles of sustainable KM are:

Do not make KM extra work. Embed it in existing business processes.
Avoid "Change Management". Let change will manage itself.
Design for humans, not data.
Pay attention to the people, not the policies.
Eliminate the opposition.

The Approaches to Sustainable KM

Now that we have characterized some of the basic principles of sustainable KM, we can look at ways of achieving those goals. The following are four practical approaches to achieving sustainable KM. This is not an exhaustive list in any way, but is intended as a starting point. Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages, which I will go into when I describe each approach in detail.

The approaches to sustainable KM are:

Embedded KM
Design to Zero
(Re)Use What Exists
DYI KM

[Continued in Approaches to Sustainability: Embedded KM]

Sustainable KM: The Challenges (Part 4)

2009-04-21T08:40:00.001-04:00

[Continued from Part 3]

There is one more principle of sustainable KM that I personally have struggled with, but ultimately been forced to accept. That principle is the need to eliminate the competition.

At first, it seems to contradict the second principle: let change manage itself. In fact, it does. It also goes against my own natural style and approach, which tends towards inclusiveness. But the fact is, within corporations, competition is not productive, it is divisive.

Knowledge management programs tend to be additive -- new systems and processes are added on top of the existing infrastructure. If distribution lists aren't working, add forums. If forums aren't working, add blogs and wikis.

On the internet, this isn't a problem; the audience is large enough to sustain all of these interactions, and people will over time migrate from one to another. But within corporations where the audience is much smaller and resources are limited, continually adding new processes and technology has several very negative impacts:

You confuse the users. People are always asking which system are they supposed to use: the old ones or the new ones? Even if a strategic direction has been chosen and announced, the more systems there are, the more likely people will either A.) use the wrong one out of ignorance or B.) not even know the right one exists.
You invite resistance. People don't like to change how they do things, even if the new method is better in the long run. If the old system exists, some percentage of the audience will insist on still using it, often bad-mouthing the new system as they do so.
You more than double the expense. Within corporations, all programs cost money, even when they are not in use. Systems cost money for IT to maintain them. They cost money for the sponsoring organization to advertise and teach them. And it is not just twice the cost. Because there are two, there are additional expenses needed to explain when and why to use each and to migrate people and content from one to the other.

These rules are not specific to KM. They apply to any technology. But in the absence of overwhelming management support, KM tends to suffer them more than other line-of-business programs do.

Ultimately, unless you are implementing something totally new and so innovative it does not replace or overlap existing processes, there is going to be competition between the old and the new.

However, eliminating the competition right away can have an equally negative impact. If you change the process, people need to be made aware of the change. Unless your organization is preternaturally well organized, this is nearly impossible to achieve in one fell swoop. So there will be some crossover period. Even if you switch over technology "under the covers" leaving the interfaces and processes the same, there are likely to be glitches and unforeseen differences that will be noticed by the users.

So the key questions are when do you make the switch over and what do you do in the interim to mitigate the negative impact?

The answer to the first question is as soon as possible and plan it from the beginning. It is usually best, even if you must keep pre-existing processes and/or systems for some interim period, to schedule their removal from the beginning so everyone is aware they are going away. A swift changeover can be painful, but a long drawn out battle (with users) is worse.

What you do in the interim depends on the nature of the change and the influence you have. If you cannot shut off an existing process or system because you don't "own" it (a common problem in hierarchical organizations), the best approach is to integrate with the other process and make the new process demonstrably better.

By integrating, you do not penalize people who adopt the new system (they can still interoperate with others who have not). By being demonstrably better, you are able to sway the target audience and encourage adoption -- to the point where the old processes can be shut down. In other words, you win.

Even if you do control both the old and the new processes, it is important to provide a clear migration path: convert old data, map old processes to new, integrate with other processes, etc. Theses steps all help smooth the path for the users and reduce pain for both them and yourself.

[Continued in Sustainable KM: Principles & Approaches]

Have We Missed the Boat?

2009-04-15T12:15:00.001-04:00

I have been following with interest the enthusiasm with which practitioners are adopting and promoting web 2.0 as the next big thing for knowledge management. (Myself included.) It is not hard to see why. The explosive growth of social media and social networking sites such as FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter is enough to make any old school KMer turn green with envy. Why can't we induce that sort of participation in our knowledge sharing programs?

However, even when corporations try implementing web 2.0 solutions inside the firewall, the results are often underwhelming. That is the Enterprise 2.0 dilemma.

People have offered a number of explanations for the difference: limited audience, cultural constraints, lack of incentives, generation gap, etc. All of these have an impact. But I am beginning to think we (i.e. corporations and those who are trying to move them forward) may be missing the bigger picture.

Why did social computing succeed in the first place? Granted, a significant portion of it was originally personal in nature, but it was very quickly adopted by engineers, white collar workers, and other professionals as a way to discuss both their private and their work life, including their professional experiences. Many professions have established formal and/or informal communities where they collaborate and share information through blogs, forums, twitter, etc. outside of the companies they work for.

Why is it that they are so willing to share information on the internet that is so hard to get out of them inside the firewall? We can nitpick the details of how and why, but at some point we have to face the fact that they do it because they get more satisfaction from sharing information outside than inside.

People share information on the internet because they feel a sense of connectedness to others with similar interests and tastes. They also feel that their ideas and opinions matter.

Even when web 2.0 technologies and methods are used inside a corporation, the sense of satisfaction is greatly diminished. The audience is smaller -- immeasurably smaller -- so finding like minds is far less likely. There may be others within the company with similar roles or professions, but having the same job doesn't automatically make you friends. If, on the other hand, you take all of the people with similar jobs from all companies around the world who may be on the internet... the chances of compatibility increases.

More importantly, people -- peers -- on the internet may not be able to act on your ideas, but they can admire them, praise them, and commiserate with your inability to get them implemented. Because of the smaller audience, contributions to an intranet often elicit fewer if any comment. That doesn't mean they are not seen. But at least subconsciously, the contributor often feels like their offerings are falling on deaf ears.

What's more, the corporation's specific business focus dramatically cuts down the scope of what is "appropriate" or "noteworthy" within the smaller environment. Even without explicit guidelines, there is an implicit constraint within the firewall that does not exist externally. And if web 2.0 is about anything, it is about the individual's freedom to contribute as they see fit.

So, yes, the smaller audience does play a role. But it is the individual's sense of actively participating, connecting, and freedom of expression that drives continued use of social software on the internet and not within the firewall. Are they really free? No. They are constrained by their own personal code of civility and moral appropriateness -- especially when dealing with information concerning their employment. But the sense of freedom is key to their willingness to participate.

What's worse is that by implementing web 2.0 technologies inside the firewall without any commensurate modifications or integration, knowledge management programs once again look like stodgy organizations that see a fad but doesn't quite "get it".

So, is all hope lost? No. But there are several lessons that can be learned here:

Don't expect too much. No matter what you do, adoption of social software will not be as viral internally as it is externally for all the reasons described above.
You may need to "feed the pump". Interaction is critical to the success of social software. (That's why it's called "social".) Since feedback is going to be diminished inside the firewall, you may want to solicit the assistance of a group of early adopters to amp up the initial set of responses to get the feedback loop going.
If you can't beat them, join them. Before you even start planning new internal services, think whether you need them. Why compete with active, healthy services that already exist?

Perhaps it would be cheaper and far more successful to use those existing external services through the firewall as is, instead of setting up competing internal services. For example, rather than setting up blogs internally, think about the alternatives:

Providing a list of the best internet blogs pertaining to your company's business (including those of your employees)
Encouraging employees to blog externally and join external professional communities to both further their career and enhance their skills
Aggregating internal news with feeds from external sources to provide more dynamic, objective information to your employees

Corporations are hesitant to "open up" the firewalls and blur the distinction between internal/proprietary and external/public information. But when you are talking about social computing, that blurring of distinctions is one of its key strengths and defining attributes. Why is Twitter popular? Not because I can talk about my private life; because I can talk about whatever parts of my life, private or professional, I choose to.

Smart companies will recognize that the floodgates between internal and external information were breached long ago, without their having any control over it. They also recognize that they can benefit more from encouraging their employees to use this new powerful medium effectively -- and appropriately -- than trying to constrain it within the artificial boundaries of the corporate firewall.

Social Architecture

2009-04-09T08:19:00.001-04:00

Patti Anklam recently asked whether we need to define social architecture and if so, how should we do it? I never shy away from defining new terms, as long as:

The term identifies some meaningful thing or quality
The thing being defined is new and/or unlabeled (and therefore difficult to discuss without some shared terminology)
The term is not completely ambiguous*

My gut feeling is that social architecture would be a good thing to define. That said, let's start with what it is we are defining.

The Definition

Social architecture is the conscious design of an environment that encourages certain social behavior leading towards some goal or set of goals.

By environment I mean a bounded set of physical or virtual structures, functions, or events where people interact.

I say "certain social behavior" because you are designing for specific interactions with the aim of achieving some goal. You are not designing a generic space where people congregate and interact in whatever way they please. (Unless, of course, that will achieve your goal.) You are designing towards some purpose, such as encouraging conservation (wiserEarth) or grassroots sharing of ideas and innovation (barcamps).

On the other hand, I am intentionally vague about what constitutes an "environment". If we are just speaking of digital spaces, then there is very little difference between "social architecture" and "information architecture" or "interaction design". Designers of social software might very well call themselves "social media architects". But that is not inclusive of everything that is needed to instigate and drive social behavior. Barcamp is an example that requires digital spaces to organize, but also a physical space and event logistics to pull off.

There is an ongoing debate within the Enterprise 2.0 community that E2.0 is not just social software inside the firewall. It is a change of culture. Well, that change of culture cannot occur without establishing the appropriate environment to foster it, including a coordinated set of capabilities, recommendations, influences, and incentives. The design of such an environment is social architecture.

Is a Definition Necessary?

Why even bother with a definition? Well, the argument within the Enterprise 2.0 community is a good example of why a new term is needed. I won't go into the details of why discussing changing culture is unproductive -- Venkatesh Rao has done a far better job explaining it than I could do -- suffice it to say that rather than complaining about a resistant culture, designing a system that utilizes inherent social behavior to recognize and reward a different approach is more likely to result in change.

Unfortunately, social media is being applied within corporations as if it were a large hammer, cutting a wide swath through traditional, stovepiped corporate approaches to knowledge. Even when the new applications are well received (which isn't always the case), one of the side effects of this approach is an "us vs. them" mentality. The old approaches are not removed; the new social applications are set up in opposition to them, creating an unnecessary barrier between the traditonalists and new agers. This friction is often amplified by a lack of integration of the social software into the existing corporate infrastructure.

What is needed is a more systematic approach to integrating social applications -- and the activities and interactions they incite -- into the corporate environment. From a technical perspective, this means integrating the content into intranet search and actively feeding social content streams into traditional environments, such as intranet web sites (e.g. the latest Yammer messages on the team site, the employee's blog and Twitter ID becoming part of the corporate whitepages, liveblogging status meetings, etc.) From a operational perspective, structuring the social interactions around meaningful topics and goals helps avoid competing approaches.

This type of coordination does not require extensive resources or a major overhaul of existing systems,. But it does require planning and often a complex set of small, coordinated adjustments to systems and processes. And the best way to describe this approach is social architecture.

As a side note, despite my examples, corporate environments are not the only possible target for social architecture. However, I mention them here because intranets are an area with perhaps the greatest potential use of coordinated architectural approaches because of the need to address deep rooted hierarchical processes.

Ambiguity

We also need to check to see if the new term we are defining is so ambiguous it will be misinterpreted or quickly misused. In other words, is there a better term?

I happen to like social architecture for several reasons:

It fits well into the lingua franca of social computing, where terms such as social media and social software are already established.
It is distinct from the existing terminology which tends to focus on either the technology or the content, but not the overall strategy.
It is relatively intuitive as a term and does not require a significant amount of explanation.

On the negative side, there is ambiguity with previous uses of the term within the realm of physical architecture and sociology. (There is at least one reference as far back as 1876.) In physical architecture, the term social architecture tends to refer to the application of architecture towards humantarian aims. Housing for the poor, sustainable architecture practices, and designing for larger social goals all seem to fall within this category. The Wikipedia entry on social architecture is a stub referring to social structures, a sociological concept not too far from the environments and goals discussed in my definition.

Although there is ambiguity here, it does not seriously invalidate the use of the term in reference to web-based systems. More importantly, there is sufficient crossover between the definitions to to avoid direct conflict.

Existing Usage

Finally, I make no claim of originality in defining social architecture. Besides the use of the term in other fields, there are already a number of references to it as applied directly to social software and the internet:

Stowe Boyd defined it in 2005. Although he appears to define it as an existant state ("the foundation of the blogosphere") rather than as a specific activity.
Sam Huweatt describes it in his blog. His definition is very similar to what I outline above. He also makes a distinction between social architecture and social media architects.
Christina Wodtke lists the elements of social architecture in her book Blueprints for the Web (summarized in A List Apart).
In his slide presentation on Social Architecture: Modeling the Next Generation, Sean Madden makes the point that "social networks have limitless potential but we need to work towards designing them that way."
Amy Jo Kim, in her bio, defines herself as designing "social games and social architecture[s]". Her book Community Building on the Web pre-dates much of what we now consider social software, but is still the pre-eminent text on designing for social interaction. She also calls her blog "Musings of a Social Architect".

I take these all as good signs that the term is both useful and sufficiently clear in its meaning. On the other hand, there are at least two other uses that do conflict.

There are a number of people (in particular, Ryan Turner) who use the alternate term "web information architecture" to define much the same thing as I defined as social architecture. My preference for the shorter term comes from the fact that "web", by this point in time, is pretty much redundant. Almost all information and interaction in modern life now involves the web to at least some extent. But at the same time, as I mentioned in the definition, not all activity involving social architecture is web based (for example meetups, Big Urban Games, and barcamps).

There is also at least one case where social architecture is equated to an existing term (Information Architecture = Social Architecture). Although this is well-intentioned, I believe it is inherently wrong. Not all information is social (in the social media sense) and at least some aspects of information architecture -- such as navigation and metadata definition -- that are determinative, not social. And not all social interaction design can be considered a part of information architecture. They are definitely related fields, but not identical.

*I'm sure others would go for more precision, such as "not ambiguous". But if that were the criteria we would define almost nothing.

Sustainable KM: The Challenges (Part 3)

2009-04-08T12:39:00.004-04:00

[Continued from Part 2]

The same rules that apply to information apply to processes as well.

Knowledge management practices should be embedded in the work processes. And many KM initiatives attempt to do this. However, beware of designing KM programs around the officially defined processes of a corporation. Because, as many who has worked in business can tell you, the official policies and the actual practice can often vary -- dramatically.

To give a couple of examples from my own experience:

When working on a project catalog, the project management office told me all projects had a project ID that could be used as a unique identifier. However, when talking to individual projects, it turned out that different IDs were used in each region, they weren't unique, and that most people working on the project did not know what the project ID was -- only the project manager did. So any process assuming a known, unique ID was bound to fail.
The official process for creating project proposals was to use a web-based proposal generator that filled in all of the legal boilerplate materials etc. However, in actuality, most project leads used their last proposal to cut and paste or asked around for examples from similar projects.

Needless to say, if you design your KM programs around the officially documented processes rather than what people actually do, your program will be no more successful than the policies themselves. So, another principle of sustainable KM is: Pay attention to the people, not the policies.

As easy as it this is to say, achieving it can be far more difficult than one would expect. Official policies exist for a reason. Management wants the policies to be obeyed. In most cases the policies are intended to create consistency and reliability within the system. Unfortunately, the policies also often result in extra work with no perceived benefit to the individuals who are asked to comply. (Does this sound familiar? Oh yes! "Do not make [fill in the blank] extra work." The same rules that apply to sustainable KM apply to sustainable business processes as well...)

Unfortunately, business processes and policies tend to have far more management attention and leverage than KM programs. (This gets back to the age-old issue of perceived ROI for long-term vs. short-term objectives.) So in a battle between reality and official policy, strangely enough, reality usually loses out.

Going back to my second example above, the KM team was frequently asked by the consultants to provide a library of past proposals that they could borrow from when it came time to write a new proposal. Of course, as soon as the team responsible for the proposal generator caught wind of this, they objected. The consequence was that the proposal library project was canceled.

There is no generic answer to this problem. In the case I described, the outcome was that the several regions created and maintained their own libraries of proposals for reuse. This was not optimal but it was a pragmatic solution to the situation they found themselves in.

Another solution is to generalize the problem to avoid specific cases. For example, by creating a global project document library, it was possible for teams to share proposals (and other project documents) between regions. Because it was not specifically a proposal library, it successfully flew under the radar of those maintaining the official project proposal policies.

I am not recommending this approach. It depends on the specifics of each individual case as to how best to identify the true processes being used, encourage effective knowledge habits, and meet commitments to management. This is one of the many fine lines knowledge management professionals find themselves having to address.

[Continued in Part 4]

There Are Only Three Corporate Strategy Diagrams in the World

2009-04-01T13:30:00.001-04:00

I have come to the conclusion that there are only three strategy diagrams in the entire world. Oh, the labels change and someone may use five or six boxes instead of four or five, but the basic diagrams are the same.

The Cloud

This is perhaps the oldest corporate strategy diagram around, dating back to at least the early 1980's. It depicts a set of known entities (usually shown on top as inputs), a whirling cloud of activity, and a set of one or more desired outputs. (Usually fewer outputs than inputs.)

This diagram is very good when trying to explain how to get from chaos to sanity. Strangely enough, the cloud is not the chaos, the plethora of unintegrated inputs at the top is the chaos. The cloud is the magic black box which boils the chaos down to a smaller, manageable set of outputs.

I have seen this diagram used to describe datatype conversions, programming interfaces, repurposing of content, and several other things.

As a side note, in the 1990's this diagram morphed sightly. As the multitude of disconnected systems diminished, the cloud was replaced with a solid object: a box, pipes, or a two-headed arrow. But the basic intent of communicating the integration of disparate systems into a manageable system remained.

The Pyramid

The pyramid is the preferred strategy diagram of non-management types. Non-techies use it in its 2-D form; techies prefer it in 3-D.

The pyramid represents a hierarchy of importance. Its origins as a diagram are as ancient as its inspiration, the pyramids of Egypt. We all know the recently dethroned food pyramid. Also Maslow's hierarchy of needs utilized this diagrammatic shape. However, its application in corporations is primarily to categorize – and prioritize – whatever the business is doing or producing.

As I mentioned, non-techies use the 2-D pyramid, usually accompanied with an arrow indicating the goal of moving from the lowest state of being to the most refined at the top. In KM, the pyramid is data -> information -> knowledge -> wisdom. (How you achieve this is never clearly defined.)

Engineers and other technical professions prefer the 3-D pyramid because it provides more surface to divvy up, classify, and subclassify into its component parts. The obvious problem with this is that no one but an engineer can understand or appreciate the level of detail provided, and the pyramid is lost for the trees (to mix a bad metaphor).

I actually had a software architect try to replace the pyramid with a cube – he wanted to show the products as the intersection of three different architectural perspectives, each suitably cut and divided into even further refinement. Once I explained that he could not show the back side of the cube on paper, he abandoned the plan (and, I might add, much of his respect for my abilities as a graphic artist. Oh well....)

The Arrow

Finally, there is the arrow -- the quickest, shortest path to any target. As a strategy diagram, the arrow is usually segmented to show the linear steps needed to reach the goal. Managers like the arrow because it not only identifies the necessary tasks but a sequence as well, making management (and the assignment of blame) much easier.

One important variant of the arrow is the circular arrow. The circular arrow is not as popular with management types since it does not have a clear start or end point. However, this variant is extremely popular with program teams

Intersecting Circles

Finally, there is a fourth diagram that is frequently seen in corporate presentations, but it is not a strategy diagram. This is the intersecting circles.

The circles can be labeled with anything you like: people , processes, technology... customers, managers, employees... music, video, telephony... etc.

This diagram is often mistaken for a strategy diagram because the center of the intersection is viewed as an end goal. However, the diagram is actually an illustration of the current state. Add an arrow and another stage where all three circles overlap and you might have a strategy diagram!

Sustainable KM: The Challenges (Part 2)

2009-03-31T10:07:00.002-04:00

[Continued from Part 1]

The previous example of a skills database brings up another principle of sustainable KM: design for the people, not for the data. We often get so caught up in what we are trying to capture, that we forget who we are capturing it from and who will use it.

I was recently filling out a form online that asked where I got my college education. What's more, it insisted on trying to guess my answer. I couldn't simply enter the name of the university; it insisted it had a complete list of all possible answers. As you might suspect, it was neither complete nor easy.

Why did it do this? Because whoever wrote the program wanted to make sure the data was valid -- that there was no ambiguity between University of New Hampshire and University of NH, for example. People have no problem understanding this sort of variation. Unfortunately, computers do.

As a result, the designer decided I, the user, was the one who would have to solve the problem. I was forced to scroll half way through an extraordinarily long list of names to discover that -- for the sake of the computer -- my alma mater was classified as NH - University of, Durham.

This is a case of simple annoyance. But this type of thinking, when dealing with large volumes of data and more complicated concepts, becomes debilitating.

Going back to our example of a skills database, these applications often assume a preset list of skills, organized hierarchically into job categories (such as administration, information technology, management, marketing, communications, etc.) More often than not, the UI reproduces the computer's way of seeing the information, forcing the user (the person whose information it seeks to elicit) to click blindly through hierarchies looking for something that resembles their skills. What's worse, the preset list is often defined by management, so it not only is incomplete, it lists only what management wants to see, rather than skills the person entering might choose to identify.

The results are predictable. Entering information in such a system is frustrating and annoying. People will avoid it or enter as little as possible to get done quickly. Where presets do not match actual skills (or can't be found easily within the hierarchies), people will deliberately choose incorrect or approximate answers.

This is before we get to any of the psychological issues of what information (true or false) people will enter based on the implicit messages the preset items and hierarchies are telling them about the importance of specific skills.

The consequence is that those responsible now have to budget time and money for training on how to fill out the form as well as prompting people to maintain their data!

A disconnect between the interface and the users' perspective results in frustration, misuse, mistakes, invalid entries, and avoidance. This concept is well understood in the field of usability and UI design. Unfortunately, it is not applied frequently enough to internal systems design and KM. The result is (unsustainable) systems that often cost more to maintain than to create.

[Continued in Part 3]

TwitterFish: Bridging the Language Gap

2009-03-30T19:21:00.002-04:00

A common problem for knowledge management programs -- especially those that span multiple countries or continents -- is bridging the gap between languages. People obviously feel more comfortable communicating in their native language and in many cases cannot communicate well -- if at all -- in other languages.

For formal documents such as white papers or reports, there is no easy solution to this problem. Automated translation services exist but the results are often rudimentary, at times amusing, and at worst they can actually be misleading or just plain wrong. There is very little choice but to do manual translations for important documents, insist that everyone communicate using one common language, and/or live with a Babel-like ignorance of the knowledge and expertise of other countries.

Because of their limited usefulness for published documents, automated translation services have been shunned by most KM programs. But are they really so bad? Or are there cases where automated translation is not only "good enough" but provides a vital missing link for multilingual teams?

I was recently working with an organization that operates in four different locations around the world, in four separate languages. Clearly, the language barrier is a significant obstacle for them. It turns out, however, that within each geographic region team members communicate frequently among themselves through IM and mobile texting.

The good news is that communication is happening. The bad news, from a knowledge management perspective, is that the language barrier has become a permanent wall separating groups of employees and the insights they hold.

The usual KM solution to this problem is to try and get each group to capture their learnings in whitepapers, reports, and other written documents. The problem of translating those documents is then addressed as a separate task. The language problem is exchanged for a translation problem and significant extra work for everyone. This is in addition to the many bright ideas and offhand stories that are lost in the move from conversation to written documents (i.e. implicit vs. explicit).

But if you take a step back, translating everything (or even a select portion identified as "important") before determining if it is actually going to be useful, is inefficient and almost guaranteed to be prohibitively expensive. What is really needed is to get a rough sense if something is of interest before making the effort to establish connections across the language boundary.

Which is exactly what automated translation is good at. Trying to follow a procedural document written in a foreign language -- or translated badly -- without other assistance can be both difficult and dangerous (depending on how risky mistakes are). But knowing that such knowledge exists, even if you can't read it all, can save hours or days trying to recreate the learnings that have already been captured.

What would we give for a way to "listen in" to conversations -- no matter what the language -- to see if there was either a discussion we could contribute to or knowledge we could use.

Well, we have ways to listen in through social computing. Forums, blogs, and microblogging move the one-to-one conversation to a broader social platform. Micro-blogging services in particular, such as Twitter, provide almost all of the immediacy and interaction of IM but to a much larger audience. All that is missing is the ability to read the different languages.

Which is where TwitterFish comes in. TwitterFish is a prototype to demonstrate the effectiveness of automated translation services for identifying potential points of useful information.

Twitter already provides a translation feature for its search interface. But the public timeline and the stream of your friends' updates do not. TwitterFish lets you select a language and translate all updates into that language on the fly. You can also click on a specific individual to see just their status updates, if you find something interesting.

The translations are still rough. You cannot use them alone. But the point is they give you window into what people are discussing in other languages that is not available in any other form. What's more, each message is associated with a person. So if you do find a piece of information you want to follow up on, you can start a conversation directly with those involved. Unlike translated documents, where the text is all you have, in social applications such as Twitter you have both the words and the people.

TwitterFish is just a prototype. Viewing the public timeline (the default) is interesting but not necessarily useful. However it does demonstrate the potential of automated translation services for dynamic data. The techniques used to create TwitterFish would be far more effective to groups bounded by a common interest. For example:

Apply TwitterFish to Yammer, the business version of Twitter, where only messages from within a single company are visible.

Create a Twitter account that "friends" a specific, global community of users, such as a professional organization. The accounts' stream can then be recast-- or displayed on the organization's web site -- translated into the viewer's language of choice.
Apply the same technique to other dynamic community content, such as forum posts, blog comments, etc.

As a final note, TwitterFish is a fairly simple application. It would not be possible without the generous availibility of a number of foundation services. Specifically:

Messaging services from Twitter
Translation services from Google
Interface functions from the Dojo Toolkit
JSON functions from Jason Levitt

The Business of Casual Games

2009-03-29T00:15:00.000-04:00

I recently received mail from a game publisher offering me free access to one of their PC games. The invitation was very nice; they were offering it to me since I talk about video games, obviously looking for a review but not insisting. I was, actually, pleased that they asked.

Yes, of course it is a marketing ploy. They would like me to write a review. But they managed to walk a very delicate balance between gifting and requiring reciprocation. It was an offer, and nothing more. And I appreciated that.

However, I was still left in a bit of a quandary. I am not a professional reviewer. I talk about games I am playing when I think I have something interesting to say about them (either good or bad). I don't review everything I play and I certainly don't have time to review lots of games sent to me out of the blue. (I do have another career, etc.)

But even that wasn't what bothered me. And then it struck me: my problem is that I don't play PC games. It is kind of funny because I work with computers all day (and frequently at night) so have plenty of opportunity. And it is not like I've never played games on computers. (I was very fond of Tetris and various Breakout clones years ago. I even wrote a few games -- toys really -- as programming practice while with one of my previous employers.)

But with a few exceptions (Myst, Riven, The Journeyman Project, and Microsoft Flight Simulator) once we got into game consoles -- and especially handhelds starting with the Gameboy SP -- I have not done any PC gaming.

Why not? Well, there are several reasons:

Usability: Quite frankly, the keyboard and mouse are seriously under par as a control set for real-time games. They are OK for strategy/board games with a lot of pointing or typing, but otherwise the controls are awkward. Game systems on the other hand are designed specifically for that purpose. (I'll save my comments about bad game console design for another time.)
Compatibility: why do I need a $3,000 computer to play a $50 game? Or why does a $20 game insist on resetting the color scheme and resolution of my monitor (and not setting it back)? Or why can I play games on one version of an OS and not on another?
Lack of time for "real" PC games: Quite frankly, I no longer have hours to devote to the larger PC games like Myst, Age of Empires, etc.
Lack of patience with "casual" PC games: I just can't get involved in the multitude of what might be called "semi-professional" downloadable games that litter the casual games market for the PC.

It is this last item that got me thinking. I know I don't have time for longer games - whether on the PC or a game console. But casual games would seem to fit right into my vector of needs, interests, and limitations. Quick, fun, no heavy investments...

But they don't attract me. Why? Because I've been burnt before. As, I suspect, have many of you.

Its very simple: there are lots of amateur and semi-pro casual games out there (most with free downloadable demos) and the majority of them stink.

Now, I am not saying there aren't console games that are deplorable (and I've been unfortunate enough to play several). I also don't feel quite comfortable with my previous remark about "the majority" of semi-pro PC games. Despite the high cost of entry for publishing console games, if I were being frank it is unclear whether the ratio of gold to dross is any higher for consoles than for PC games.

However, when you encounter a loser on a console, you simply remove the cartridge and throw it away with no side effects. No uninstall, no danger of virus contamination. No leftover hidden bits and pieces you might not know about. With PC games, there is always the lingering doubt (and plenty of quirky behavior on the part of PC's from whatever source) about its long-term impact.

So, as kind as the offer was, I declined. It is unfortunate, because I would like to give independent artists and developers their due. But ultimately, time and the technology is not on their side. This may be why the market for independent games on smart phones (such as the iPhone) is taking off. It provides both the marketplace -- and a relatively secure hardware platform -- that gives users the confidence to try out less familiar or well-financed options.

Sustainable KM: The Challenges

2009-03-27T09:29:00.002-04:00

[Continued from Notes Towards a Theory of Sustainable Knowledge Management]

Budget is not the only factor affecting the sustainability of knowledge management. In fact, it is only a minor obstacle that tends to impact all larger business initiatives equally. By far the most important factor is the people involved in the program and their willingness to participate.

When people talk about the "sustainability" of a KM program, they are usually referring to the level of engagement of the target audience and their willingness and enthusiasm to keep participating. No effort is sustainable if its audience is resistant. However, this is unfortunately the case for many KM programs.

Some of the common complaints I've heard about KM programs over the years include:

I don't know where to put things.
How do I use it?
Why do I have to enter this information again?
I don't have time to participate.
And (one of my favorites) how do I charge the time I spend on knowledge management?

This last is particularly confounding, because no one asks how do I charge the time I spend drinking coffee or the time I spend using the xerox machine?

Each of these complaints is often handled separately, by developing training on the benefits of the KM program or how to charge time (further increasing the size and complexity of the initiative). But they are really just symptoms of a larger problem, which is that KM is seen as separate and distinct, an "extra" activity from the normal work of the employees.

Trying to convince someone that an activity is good for them is always an uphill battle. So one of the first principles of sustainable KM should be do not to make KM additional work. Knowledge Management practices should be embedded in the existing business processes.

Note that I say "existing business processes". A second reason that KM initiatives are often so top heavy is that they attempt to alter business processes to make the processes more amenable to managing the knowledge. By attempting to change the process -- no matter how well-intentioned -- you are seriously adding to the "weight" (in terms of cost, both in resources and money) of the program and the likelihood of failure. Changing people's behavior is extremely hard to do from the outside.

Programs that are trying to externally influence behavior are easy to recognize. They inevitably include activities labeled as "change management", which can consume up to 50% of the project.

To put it crassly, change management means you are trying to get people to do something they don't want to do. This is both expensive and usually only partially successful, if that.

That doesn't mean change can't happen. Often change is necessary. But trying to dictate change leads right back to the need for an executive champion -- someone willing to enforce the change -- and all of the deficits and difficulties such sponsorship presents.

So how does change happen if you don't enforce it? It happens because it benefits the people who need to enact the change. In other words, people change when they see value for themselves in the change.

It may seem like a contradiction, but changing processes is extremely difficult, whereas getting people to change the processes themselves (if they see fit) is much easier. An example might help:

Say you were building a skills database. (I am not promoting this activity, just using it as an example.) You will require all employees to fill out a form identifying their individual skills and level of ability. Managers will use the database to find resources with the appropriate skills and employees will need to keep their entries updated.

Now, even assuming this is a good idea, why would employees participate? They get no benefit from the results of the activity (only managers get to see the results) and it repeats work they are already doing (they already have to maintain an up-to-date curriculum vitae). The effort requires training for all employees and a significant management push to get them to comply with the initial loading of the database. Worse yet, once loaded, there are no triggers in their regular work that would initiate an update. So there will have to be an equivalent effort put into getting updates every six months. This is anything but sustainable.

Before you argue that this is a nonsensical example, i would point out that I know of at least two companies using a system like this. An alternative approach would be the following:

Build the skills database so that everyone has access to the results. Use the content provided by the users to generate intranet profiles. (E.g. employees immediately see the results of their effort and get feedback from their peers as to its usefulness.) Also, collect enough information to autogenerate the CV they need to maintain under current policies.

Which system do you think employees are more likely to contribute to? By extending the initial purpose and putting in the effort to provide extra functionality, you not only fit the new system into the existing process (i.e. employees maintaining their CVs), you significantly reduce the overhead required to enforce compliance.

So another principle of sustainability is avoid change management, help change manage itself.

[Continued in Part 2]

Notes Towards a Theory of Sustainable Knowledge Management

2009-03-22T19:14:00.010-04:00

This is the first in a series of posts.

For a number of years there has been a growing interest within the field of physical design for "sustainable architecture". Definitions may vary, but the general theme is to design buildings that do not drain the pool of natural resources: buildings that generate their own energy through solar power; that minimize the need for mechanical heating and cooling; even buildings that can be recycled without harmful bi-products when their usefulness is over. In other words, buildings that have a positive impact on the environment.

For some time now, I have thought that knowledge management as a discipline could do with a similar initiative.

Now, there are certainly things that can be done to make knowledge management systems and the computers they run on "green" or greener. However, these ecologically sound IT practices are not specific to knowledge management. They apply equally to all computerized business applications: supply chain, document management, accounting, etc.

What interests me is looking at knowledge management in a new way to see if we can reduce the impact and cost it has in terms of human resources. Can we design knowledge management initiatives with a smaller "footprint" in terms of cost in dedicated headcount, learning curve, and unique time away from people's "real" work? This is the concept I am calling Sustainable Knowledge Management.

Why Sustainable?

Knowledge Management has a reputation for requiring large, expensive initiatives with questionable results. That reputation is not entirely unwarranted. Many of the early KM programs were overly ambitious and software vendors have often sold large, all-inclusive systems (e-mail, document management, CRM, etc) as KM solutions.

Even smaller KM initiatives often require a significant upfront "push" in terms of cost, headcount, and executive attention to get them started.

Is all this effort necessary? More importantly, once the effort is underway, how much does it cost to maintain the initiative? Knowledge management is not unique in this respect. The same could be said of quality initiatives, change management, business process reengineering, etc. But my focus is KM.

Although I have no objection to having a career for life, there is a serious danger that knowledge management programs are pricing themselves out of the market. This is particularly true when there is no reliable or believable way to calculate Return On Investment (ROI) for most KM programs. This is because KM is focused on the longer-term improvement of business and employee performance and expertise, not bottom-line financials.

So without the direct-to-the-bottom-line connection between KM initiatives and improvement, it is important that KM programs reduce their disruptive impact and avoid becoming a ready target for cuts.

One common approach is to find a sponsor or a champion within upper management. Within KM circles, the need for "senior level" support is often discussed as a key component of a KM program. This means a VP or other high level manager who can influence budget and ensure the program is not axed. However, proponents of this approach are not so quick to explain what to do if you can't get that support.

Even if you do find a champion, relying on one person for your existence is risky. Management, particularly in western corporations, have a habit or restructuring and repositioning themselves frequently. It's called climbing the corporate ladder. What happens when you champion changes jobs? Can they still support your program?

Over the past 5-8 years, I've spent a nontrivial amount of time creating presentations explaining and justifying various KM programs to new managers. Having senior management support -- short of the CEO, and not even reliably in that case -- does not ensure that a KM program can be seen though to completion.

What we need is a more systematic approach to designing KM initiatives that are sustainable over the long-term.

What I'm Playing: Persona 4

2009-02-22T11:21:00.002-05:00

It seems unlikely, but I am playing Atlus's Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4. Why so improbable? Because, as I've mentioned before:

I don't like RPGs,
I don't have time to play long games or games that need extended play between saves,
And I mostly play portable, not console games

Well, Persona 4 is a straight up RPG on the Playstation 2, complete with points system, level ups, turn-based attacks, etc. Game play consists of long story episodes with few saves spots and intermittent battles. Not exactly my usual type of game.

But I am addicted.

It is not the game play; I have hardly got far enough to have even the barest minimum control of the game. Mostly it is an extended animation interspersed with my pressing X to move mechanically forward in the story. Oh, and every once in a while I get to choose my response in discussions with other characters in the story. Only every once in a while.

And there are battles. But what has me itching to keep playing is the story, the environment, and the presentation.

Story-wise, playing Persona 4 is like reliving high school, complete with the plodding pace, the often inane conversations, and seemingly menial activities. The game captures this perfectly -- including the verbal banter that often masks an intricate social dance of half truths, dares, flaunts, and feints. I don't need to relive high school (I am way past that) and there are many movies and TV shows that, sadly, pretend to. But few actually capture the meaningless intrusion of random external events quite like Persona 4.
This is made all the more interesting because the story is acted out in modern Japan. This is not a ploy to create a feeling of alienation. It is an artifact of the game's origin; it was developed in Japan and Atlus unapologetically makes no attempt to Westernize it. The result is a fascinating immersion in the smallest details of Japanese culture: the houses, the streets, the furniture and clothing, even the advertising in the trains, all share a distinctly non-western look.
Finally, the game is presented in a curious mix of 2D animation, 3D animated game sequences, audio, and printed text overlaid on top of two colored text boxes set at different angles on the bottom of the screen. The text, besides giving an edge to the presentation, also gives a "staged" appearance to the 3D segments (staged as in presented on a proscenium stage, as opposed to contrived) that helps to fit with the distinctly 2D animation. It is not a big deal, but just enough of a quirky -- partially formal, partially "hip" -- presentation to keep the player going through the story segments leading up to game play.

I know what is coming: a whole lot more fighting, dying and restarting, trial and error as I try to find the right combination of attacks and special powers, etc. Will the story be able to retain its interest through this?

Can't tell yet. But for the time being, I'm thoroughly enjoying the change of pace.

A Small Piece of Gaming History: Welcome to Gameland

2009-02-19T08:54:00.001-05:00

I was digging through some old board games we have stored in the attic last weekend. In one box I came across an advertising flier that was a common insert in games during the sixties.

What caught my eye (besides the astonishing fact that whoever originally owned the game had not discarded it and that we had not discarded it either) was the image on the cover. The stereotypical 1950's family -- Mom, Dad, and three smartly dressed children (is the son wearing a bow tie?!) -- walking through gates made from giant board game boxes. The image itself is surreal enough. But when you consider that this was not some post-war hallucinogenic vision but a 1960's retro marketing view of what American families wanted to believe they looked like, it is also weirdly delusional.

Did we really think we looked (and acted) like that? Based on my childhood in Ohio, I would say no. But I think many parents wished their families looked like that and I can only assume the flier was intended for those parents not their children.

And today? I haven't looked inside any modern major board games recently. (I mostly play old ones, several that are listed in the flier pictured above!) But based on advertising fliers in the paper, most games are being sold to be played by children either alone or with their friends, not their parents. I don't remember seeing a lot of adults in the advertising for games and toys recently. (With one exception. More on that later.)

The advertising in the Sunday papers tend to contain product images, not entire scenes, so they are not totally representative. But over the holidays we received a special toy catalog from Target. Of the 57 pictures showing people with the products, 50 depicted children alone, 7 depicted two children playing together, and none contained any adults. Stranger still, the one picture of a child playing a board game (what one might imagine most requires multiple players) she is playing alone!

So have we reached a point where society no longer expects parents to participate in their children's play and games? The predominance of video games (which are often single-player or only multiplayer online) and "licensed" toys and games makes families playing together difficult. It can be hard for an adult to acclimatize themselves to game characters based on pre-teen TV shows such as Hannah Montana or Bakugon. (Although the game play itself is usually very traditional or simplistic.)

I mentioned before that there is an exception. If it wasn't obvious, the exception is Nintendo. The entire design and marketing campaign of the Wii video game console is that games are to be played together, often as a family. The 2008 holiday catalog for Nintendo has 17 pictures of people playing, 8 are pictures of groups playing, and half of those are multi-generational groups.

Nintendo not only defied the accepted wisdom of video game marketing (16-24 year old males playing by themselves), they defied the accepted wisdom of the game and toy industry as a whole. Neither segment has completely recovered from the result, nor learned to accept that they may have been wrong.

We are beginning to see signs that Sony and Microsoft acknowledge this previously "silent majority" market -- the new Xbox 360 avatars are an example. But the toy and game industry still does not seem ready to believe their audience contains anyone over the age of, say, 14...

The Downside of Twitter

2009-02-18T21:23:00.002-05:00

I've written about my experiences with Twitter before. But I am considering whether I need to stop using it. The problem is too much Twitter -- I'm becoming depressed.

I only follow a small number of people (17 at this point) and most of them are interested in knowledge management. So there is a high signal-to-noise ratio -- most of the tweets are interesting and/or intriguing. But I am finding my mind is turning off. There are so many opinions about communities of practice, so many top ten lists, articles about what you need to know, etc. Either all the world's knowledge problems have been solved and I just need to read about it (if I had the time) or there are so many "answers" I am loathe to add to the pile.

I hate to say this because most of the people I follow (and those they retweet) are friends of mine -- or where I don't know them personally, they are people I like to think of as friends. They aren't pretentious know-it-all types. And individually their tweets don't give that impression either. But taken together, they are simply overwhelming.

Now, it seems I have three options:

I can stop using Twitter. I would feel no guilt about this and it would stop the influx, but it would also negate all the benefits of the service as well.
I can rethink my choice of who to follow. Perhaps I shouldn't be following knowledge management devotees. Perhaps, rather than feeding (and overloading) my primary interests, I should follow alternate topics where I would be less concerned about missing things and happy to learn whatever comes my way.
I could follow more people. Although this sounds illogical, it is possible I am following too few people too closely. If I increase the volume (and the variety) my Twitter stream would become more of a river that I occasionally step into, rather than a stream I attempt to follow diligently.

However, the real problem may be that I have nothing to say right now. This is not uncommon. I go through spurts of writing emails, blog entries, phone calls when I get excited about things. But then will often fall silent for weeks at a time as I get down to the hard work of getting things done. The problem is that the Twitter stream doesn't stop when I shift modality to get-things-done mode, at which point the stream -- no matter how interesting -- becomes an annoyance.

To test this theory (and as part of my ongoing education in what makes Twitter users tick) I did some analysis of the tweets of those I follow. My feeling was that I was receiving an unduly large number of references to outside content -- links to blogs, websites etc -- that significantly increased the "weight" of the stream because many of the 140 character messages actually pointed to 2-3 pages of serious content. Far more than I could possibly keep track of.

And sure enough, there were a significant number of outbound links (43%). However, not as many as I suspected. 55% of the tweets were still what could be called "new content" in the stream (no linking or retweeting). However, when compared to the stream of another user who uses Twitter primarily for personal exchanges, the difference is visible.

So, what to do? For now I think I have to accept that I am a "binge" user of Twitter. This may not be a terribly good social behavior for a system that is "always on" (unlike other technologies that are "as needed" point-to-point, such as email or traditional collaboration tools like bulletin boards). But I may not be so unique among the many different usage patterns that is developing around Twitter.

Is SharePoint the Lotus Notes of the 21st Century?

2009-02-13T14:13:00.001-05:00

Or at least of the first decade of the 21st?

Lotus Notes was a revolutionary entrant into the computing landscape and dominated the software market segment it created. What made Notes so unique and powerful was the combination of three things:

A complete set of business-focused capabilities
Integrated into a secure, distributed, extensible framework
The ability to customize or extend the system through programming

The first two made the system attractive to enterprises, because it had the necessary security, manageability, and scalability to meet corporate needs; the third made it attractive to the users and created an entire market for third-party add-ons to address specific industry-focused needs once the platform was in place. Notes was poised to take over the world.

So, what happened? Well, I'm sure everyone has their own answer to that question: competition (especially in the email market from Exchange), too many 3rd party extensions, upgrade issues, etc. My personal belief is that they suffered from feature creep -- where each version of the product became more and more convoluted, threatening the basic premise of a simple framework -- to the point where companies are known to have backed off major new versions there were so many problems.

That is not to say Notes has disappeared. It is still a very strong competitor in the enterprise unified communication market. But now they have the additional issues of trying to keep up with technological advances (primarily internet-related) that further cut into their market share.

So why compare SharePoint to Notes?

There have been document management systems before (e.g. Documentum). There have been team collaboration tools before (e.g. eRoom). There have been customizable portals before (e.g. Plumtree and Vignette). The unique thing Microsoft did was put all three components into a single package integrated around Microsoft authentication (NTLM) and Microsoft Office.

The result is a very powerful collaboration, simple document management, and web space management system. It didn't hurt that V2 of the team collaboration portion of the product (known at the time as Windows SharePoint Services) was "free" for most enterprise Office customers. SharePoint essentially invented a market segment which until that point had been occupied by "integrated" combinations of large and/or complex product sets. Just as Lotus Notes did 20 years ago.

Another similarity is the limitations of the basic architectural design of the product. All products have what could be called a "design center" -- a focal point -- an ideal business problem that the product tries to solve. The design center defines the core architectural goals of the product. SharePoint's design center is flexible collaborative functionality centered around light-weight document management and customizable portals.

And the fact is SharePoint's design center hit a bull's eye. The need for easy-to-use collaboration spaces and web sites that don't require web programming -- that work well with Microsoft Office and the Microsoft security model -- has been a big hit inside corporations. As a salesman for a competing product once told me, his job is not so much selling their own product, but explaining why customers shouldn't use SharePoint.

Saying easy-to-use collaboration and web sites is SharePoint's design center is not to say the product cannot do other things. Part of the architectural model includes flexible lists and libraries so the data can be structured by normal human beings (not just data architects or librarians). Programmable web parts go the next step, allowing additional functionality beyond just search, sort, and display. Web parts also provide a business opportunity for 3rd parties to build on SharePoint, much as Lotus Notes' programmability created a new market before.

So SharePoint has flexibility built in. However, beyond certain boundaries -- the extent to which Microsoft expected or designed customization into the product -- using SharePoint becomes much, much harder than any user expects or can imagine.

As SharePoint's market domination increases, customers think of more and more ways to use SharePoint. In many cases, these are not uses for which SharePoint is really suited. This problem is amplified by Microsoft's marketing SharePoint as a one-size-fits-all enterprise solution.

SharePoint is designed with flexibility at the space or site level. It allows individuals to take responsibility for managing their own sites and collections of sites. But if -- from a corporate or even a divisional level -- you want to manage the larger collection, SharePoint becomes resistant -- almost belligerent -- to control.

The inability to create even simple relationships between lists in different spaces (beyond simple filtered aggregation) without programming is the first sign of strain in SharePoint's design. Then there are site columns. Site columns let you -- ostensibly -- define common metadata for multiple lists or libraries. However, you cannot enforce the use of site columns and site columns only work within a single site collection. There is no metadata control across multiple site collections. In other words, simplified control within the sites leads to lack of control at the macro level.

These are all just symptoms of a larger systemic issue: SharePoint is designed around the site. In Version 3 (also know as MOSS 2007) site collections have been introduced to provide some limited amount of cross-site control. But the underlying design principles of SharePoint (ie. user control and customization) work against control at the higher level.

Another Achilles's heel for SharePoint is search. I have yet to find anyone who is happy with SharePoint search. Oversimplified syntax, bad default search behavior, too many results, bad relevance, poor presentation... The list of problems goes on. Again, search is customizable -- if you have the programming expertise and access to build your own search interface. But few if any users do. Besides, why shouldn't search work out of the box?

There are other issues with SharePoint: large files (multimedia), support for browsers other than IE, and reporting, among others.

But the real issue is SharePoint's success. SharePoint has been so successful (and Microsoft has been so successful at selling SharePoint as a global solution for any corporate information problem), its use has far outstripped its design constraints and no one has told the customer yet.

There is likely to be a backlash against SharePoint as more and more customers unwittingly bump up against the boundaries of its intended use. And Microsoft will continue to extend the product with each new version -- further blurring the boundaries. Which is a shame. As I said, SharePoint is an excellent solution for what it was designed for. As Microsoft tries to stretch those boundaries -- just as Lotus and IBM did with Notes -- it is possible that the original design center of easy-to-use collaboration spaces may get lost, while never fully satisfying customers who are pushing at the edges, It is a dilemma that has no easy answer -- for Microsoft as a vendor or its customers.

Twitter Revisited

2009-01-17T15:48:00.000-05:00

A while back I discussed why I don't use Twitter. But despite my disclaimers, my curiosity about the service was unabated. Finally, after yet another friend asked for my Twitter ID, I decided to give it another try.

This time I made a concerted effort to use Twitter. By that I mean there is no driving need to use it, but it might provide benefits to my life and/or work. And there was no way to know without giving it a try.

I conscientiously used Twitter for two months. This took more effort than I would have liked. I had to remind myself to tweet. Occasionally it seemed like I was making things up to post (usually trivia about what I was doing -- cleaning the basement, making dinner, etc). But more often than not, there was something on my mind that seemed it might be remotely interesting to others. And at times I became quite voluble, as thinking and twittering became almost one and the same activity.

Let me just say Twitter is useless without friends -- and I have to thank a number of people, in particular Brian Halligan and John Tropea, for making my Twitter experience successful and enjoyable. In many ways, the two months flew by. They taught me a tremendous amount about what is interesting and what is not on Twitter.

For example, I discovered (as I had expected) that I do not like hearing the minutiae of people's personal lives: what pastry they are eating, how long they had to wait in line at the bank, what they are drinking, where they are drinking, how drunk they are, or who they are making out with while doing it.

On the other hand, it is quite exhilarating to see the breadth and depth of ideas people are pursuing within my fields of interest. A number of times I became engaged in conversations with fellow practitioners around the world re: the pros and cons of various KM concepts or methodologies, poetry, etc.

Finally, the open conversations in Twitter have introduced me to some surprising new members of a constantly expanding circle of friends and associates in the topics that interest me (and some I had not expected to pursue).

The world doesn't need yet another "why/how to use Twitter" blog entry. So I will refrain from that activity. (I think Mr. Tweet's 5 Stages of Twitter Acceptance is perhaps the best and most succinct of that species.) But I have noticed a few commonalities that I find interesting.

The most obvious is the personal/professional tweets dichotomy. There have been many posts arguing against flooding your twitter feed with too much personal trivia (even Tim O'Reilly mentions it as a cause for early pessimism about Twitter). However, this is not a black and white issue. For some people that is exactly what Twitter is for: a personal stage in an ever-expanding virtual social gathering. So it is a matter of personal opinion whether overtly private information is objectionable in tweets or not.

Also, it is not necessarily just a question of personal vs. professional. There were a number of times I found someone's professional tweets trite and almost intrusive. Too many "I'm at the office", "In a meeting with an important client", or "my PC is rebooting" type of tweets can be as uninteresting as what someone is having for lunch. So the personal/professional dichotomy might actually be more accurately a temporal/ideological split.

It is also not black and white because not all temporal tweets are annoying. In fact, I find that the people I am most interested in following tend to tweet a mix of ideas, actions, and questions. There are multiple layers: personal vs. professional, ideas vs. actions, statements vs. questions, theory vs. practice, proposal vs. proclamation... The twitterverse begins to look like one of those medical anatomy diagrams covered in transparencies -- each with its own brightly colored orgains, veins, muscles etc -- you uncover one at a time to understand the different ways in which the body works.

The twitter interface asks "What are you doing?" (It is the naive simplicity and flexibility of that question that imparts much of Twitter's power, allure, and mystery.) But that's not really the question. Just like someone asking "what's up?" at a party, the question is more of an opening for you to use as you see fit than a specific request. A party where everyone is listening and the conversations go on 24 hours a day.

When Memes become Meaningless

2009-01-12T13:40:00.001-05:00

I was reading the magazine InformationWeek the other day when I came across the following statement:

"Microsoft's SharePoint is the T. rex of collaboration products: big, fiercely competitive, and standing atop the social computing food chain..."
--Andrew Conry-Murray Startups Use SaaS To Take On SharePoint

SharePoint certainly shows signs of being the 800 pound gorilla. And Microsoft is definitely big and fiercely competitive. But what struck me most is the assertion that SharePoint is "sitting atop the social computing food chain".

The problem is that if SharePoint is considered "social computing", then the term no longer has any meaning. Sure, SharePoint wants to be seen as web 2.0-ish. It even mimics wiki and blog functionality (within its own secured, highly structured environment). It may even be top of the heap of the content management/collaboration/intranet/you-name-it-latest-corporate-fad thingies. But SharePoint is anything but social computing.

It's not SharePoint's fault. SharePoint has significant value for corporate customers and serves its specific audience quite well. The problem is that the term "social computing" is being used so broadly it, in effect, has no meaning.

The Wikipedia entry for social computing acknowledges this situation and defines the term in both a "weaker sense " and a "stronger sense". But in its weaker sense, the term encompasses many technologies -- such as email -- that few of the advocates of web 2.0 would recognize as part of the recent social computing phenomenon.

As they spread, memes such as "social computing" and "web 2.0" take on a life of their own. That's what makes them memes. However, on their viral journey from person to person they are often reinterpreted or distorted to make them match each individual's idea of what they want them to mean, rather than what they were originally intended for. A sort of global game of telephone.

The consequence is that as a meme becomes more popular, its meaning tends to be diluted. Of course, if that were the only effect, all memes would eventually blur beyond recognition, which is not what happens. Why not? I believe a large part of the resilience of memes is dependent on the effort put in on their behalf by their advocates, authors, and enthusiasts.

When there is an obvious and recognized author of a meme -- such as Tim O'Reilly and "web 2.0" -- there is a clear source for authoritative definition. Tim's company started it, he defined it, he continues to maintain it. People try redefining it or stretching it, but the meaning can be traced back to an authoritative source which others can reference.

Other memes are not so lucky and do not have a specific moment of conception. Agile software development methodologies are an example. Although there is an agile manifesto, the term itself has no single author and has been used to identify a number of different methodologies. Advocates of one or another of these methodologies argue for or against others being more or less faithful to the tenets of agility, causing some amount of confusion to those outside the fray.

Other memes fall in the middle ground; not having a single starting point, but having well-known advocates who continue to promote the refinement and correct usage of the term. A case in point is folksonomy, which came into being in the course of an online discussion. Many people misappropriate the term to describe things they are doing, but Thomas Vander Wal continues to argue for a more precise definition in his blog, writings, and on Wikipedia. This effort has an effect: the term tends to remain true to its original roots.

However, the effort is somewhat of a thankless task. People like Thomas, for all their valiant efforts, are sometimes seen as pushy or just plain cranky for their adamant stance. However, without it, the term (and possibility the activity itself) would suffer a significant drain on its effectiveness.

So all is not lost for "social computing". Although there is no single advocate that supports it, many in the web 2.0 world and burgeoning social software industry continue to push of a "stricter" interpretation. And fortunately the success of sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Songza etc help maintain a focus on that stricter definition.

Internetless

2009-01-06T14:40:00.001-05:00

The week before Christmas, the New England area suffered severe ice storms. Many regions, including my own, lost power. Our neighborhood was blacked out for approximately a day and a half.

Unfortunately, although power was restored to our neighbors, falling branches had ripped the service lines off the side of our house, including power, cable, and phone. Because of the severity of the storm and the amount of damage, services were not restored to our house for eight days.

I am not complaining. In fact, we were amazed to wake up eight days later and find the line crew working on our house during a raging snow storm at 4:30 in the morning. Besides, since we had experienced two extended outages previously, we had bought a generator. So we had enough power to maintain heat, hot water, and lights in a few rooms. We were better off than many.

What was new was the loss of cable, which took with it our phone, TV, and internet connectivity. In previous outages we had lost power, but the phone and internet were available as long as the modem was up.

But even with a generator, no line to the house meant no cable. So I was without phone or internet for eight days.

I had plenty to keep me busy during the blackout. But I expected -- since I have been working with computers for almost 30 years and on the web for the last 10 almost 24 hours a day-- that I would miss the internet. Funny thing was, I didn't.

In fact, since power and cable have been restored, I have only returned occasionally to some blogs and web sites I read religiously pre-blackout. I didn't miss the news, I didn't miss the email and IM's from friends. Well, perhaps a little bit, but not nearly as much as I thought I would.

What I did find myself wanting back was my PC. Each time I walked into the office, I instinctively moved the mouse or pressed the shift key to switch off the power saver and bring the screen back to life. For the first day or two, I was surprised and disappointed when it didn't light up. By the third day, I instinctively reached for them, but stopped myself, realizing the power was off.

It wasn't the content I was missing. I could easily catch up with that later if I wanted to. (I didn't, in many cases.) What I missed was the physical companionship that my computer provides me.

It turns out my computer and keyboard have become a physical manifestation of the many virtual relationships I have with friends and colleagues. Some who I have never met; some who live only a few miles away from me; some who I only know through what they post to their blogs or websites but who I still consider compatriots in a common endeavor.

I would have happily sat in front of a blank screen in the dark. No browser, not email. Just a desktop. Why? What I was nostalgic for was the being connected. The people I knew and the ability to interact, whether I did or not. I didn't miss what they said or posted, because in almost all cases, the relationships are serendipitous. There is no telling in advance what will be said, shared, discussed. But it is the ability to share that my computer represents.

It is the sharing, not the having shared. It is the responding, not the accumulation of responses. It turns out the immediacy you experience in face-to-face interactions also happens online, but in an asynchronous fashion. Blog entries from a year ago are not old -- they are brand new when you encounter them. So your experience of the social network is a constant state of discovery, with each user's experience being unique based on the path they choose, links friends recommend, interests they pursue, etc.

Yes, it is the internet that enables these interactions. But what took me by surprise is that the visceral response is to the PC, the physical endpoint I speak through, the window I see through.

So I didn't miss the internet or the content the internet provides, I missed what the internet enabled and the people I have come to experience it with and who have become my friends.

KM Starts at Home

2008-11-14T09:41:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, while discussing a project with a friend and colleague, I made the statement "KM starts at home." I didn't mean that literally, but figuratively.

In other words, don't go designing new knowledge management programs without first seeing what people are already doing. The fact is, we all practice KM to a certain extent without any outward influence. We talk to friends, we call people we know, we join groups, follow blogs, read magazines, etc.

There is always an existing knowledge ecosystem within any environment. And the informal ecosystem is often larger and more diverse than the official one. It is important to understand that ecology before introducing new elements for several reasons:

If the existing ecosystem is successful, you don't want to accidentally break it.
Even if it is not tremendously efficient, people are using it and so if you introduce a competing system you will have a serious uphill battle for adoption.
If it is not effective, it is a good first target for your initial KM efforts.

This is particularly true for collaboration and communities of practice. If people within the company have established informal communities either locally or outside the company, they may be a good target for pilot communities since they already know the benefits and have a defined group. But it needs to be done with their cooperation to avoid bad blood. On the other hand, if they are running efficiently, you might simply want to "ordain" them as a CoP and move on to less effective parts of the organization.

One of the most overlooked aspects of the knowledge ecosystem in many companies is the outside connections employees establish. This is even more true in the era of social computing, blogs and wikis, etc. There is tremendous potential for bringing in new ideas through these interpersonal, inter-company networks. You don't want to damage these connections where they are effective, but they are often not sufficient by themselves to fully leverage this knowledge to the company's advantage. (This may seem like a terribly selfish corporate point of view. But the fact is an employee who follows lots of blogs but never shares this information internally is often doing neither themselves nor the company much good.)

Identifying these networks and helping connect like-minded individuals internally is often more effective and far less expensive (in terms of time and energy) than trying to stimulate a CoP from scratch.

A Month of Poems (Part 3)

2008-11-03T18:34:00.019-05:00

[This is part 3 of a month of poems as described in the preface]

"There's no Place to Sleep in this Bed, Tanguy" by Charles Henri Ford
from Out of the Labyrinth, City Lights 1991
[Saturday, Nov. 1st]

Ford is one of the few (only two?) American surrealists in the true French tradition. (It is odd to speak of Surrealism and tradition in the same breath. There are so many variants, but the French progenitors form a unique aesthetic around which others invent and improvise.)

Anyway, Ford follows the French style of Breton, Peret and others, resulting in the same thrill of inventiveness for the reader. However, his poems also contain a persistent undercurrent of anger and cruelty. It shows through in the language and the images ("lasso of love... wires are cut... menacing... the painted trigger... torture-machines... whose quarry is fear... set new traps..."). And this is one of the less violent poems.

Where at first this sense of anger is part of the excitement of the poems, over time you realize the anger is undirected and unmitigated, poisoning the poems and leaving the reader uncomfortable -- not at the "newness" of the style but at the lack of control or self-awareness of the persona behind them.

"3:59" by Ruth Forman
from We Are the Young Magicians, Beacon Press 1993
[Sunday, Nov. 2nd]

I like this book. I like these poems. I know I shouldn't. I can name the reasons why I shouldn't: the story lines are heavy-handed, over-simplistic, the self-conscious writing in dialect -- a pet peeve of mine -- ("n i could sure use some a them lil white pills"), the unnecessary use of lowercase, the predictable and sometimes trite endings... But despite all that, I still like them. There is a driving beat to the lines that keeps them moving to the end and as predictable and hammy as they are, Forman carries them off with style and you kind of like her for the audacity of it all.

"Promesse" by André Fenaud
from Poètes d'Aujourd'hui 37 André Fenaud, Pierre Seghers [year unknown]
[Monday, Nov. 3rd]

"When you give me your hand it is your entire being" (translated). Only a French poet can get away with a line like that. In the hands of an American writer, it would seem like pretension. We know it's not true, as much as we may wish it were. And because of that knowledge, we refrain from saying it. We work towards the truth, we dance around it in elaborate and -- in their own right -- moving ways. (See John Ashbury's "Some Trees", W.C.Williams' "Dance Russe", or Roethke's "I Knew a Woman")

But the French defy all logic and, despite all proof to the contrary, make such grand statements with pure, unadulterated conviction. And get away with it besides.

"Some Comfort" by Martha Fritz
from If the River's This High All Summer, Pym-Randall 1974
[Tuesday, Nov. 4th]

This is a beautiful book. It is one of only two or three I own where you wonder what happened? Why the poet published one book and disappeared? Because Fritz is an exquisite writer with a gorgeous sense of language. The images suspend you in air as you soak them in ("Blossoms are words in the long-winded streets"). There are few first books as beautiful or as fully formed as this. There are the occasional poems where her images get caught up in themselves and leave the reader stranded. (Thinking, what exactly does that mean?) But in general there is nothing here but the joy of language and intense emotional discovery.

"The Wood-Pile" by Robert Frost
from The Poetry of Robert Frost (Collected Poems), Holt, Rinehart & Winston 1969
[Wednesday, Nov. 5th]

I was never a big fan of Robert Frost. I thought of him as too artfully rustic, too grade school English class. But then my son asked me to read him some of Frost's poems, so I was forced to find poems that I would be willing to read. It was far less difficult than I expected.

Frost is intentionally rustic. He is also overtly philosophical, openly sentimental, while at the same time grumpily misanthropic. But he also has a tremendous sense of native speech (which I may understand better now having lived in New England for a number of years) which makes the rhythm and rhyme of his poems integral to their narrator's sensibility.

I like Robert Frost now. Not everything, but many poems that were ruined by grade school teachers have now been reclaimed and many "lesser" poems (lesser only because they are more complex, less "ta da!" like or easy to stereotype) newly discovered.

"Everyone Knows the World is Ending" by Alice Fulton
from Palladium, University of Illinois Press 1986
[Thursday, Nov. 6th]

Fulton is a master of her craft. She writes finely-honed poems filled with incredible language, an expansive vocabulary of images. ("Each thought a focused mote in the apocalypse's iridescent fizz.") The only danger is that her writing is so inventive, it can overpower the poem itself. The intense focus on the language can distract the reader, making the subject of the poem into more of a pantomime rather the driving force, to the poem's detriment.

"Haunted Importantly" by Jack Gilbert
from The Great Fires, Knopf 1994
[Friday, Nov. 7th]

Jack Gilbert is a serious poet. A very serious poet. Too serious for some... He takes his poems seriously and he takes his subjects seriously.

What's surprising is that his subject comes first. He crafts his poems and his language with precision. And the reward is lines that are close to perfect. For example: "The music that thinking is". For almost any other poet, arriving at this line would be sufficient, it would be an appropriate close to the poem. But Gilbert wasn't done with his subject and so he needed more: "He wanted to know what he heard, not to get closer." It takes the reader by surprise. It isn't as pure or as perfect a line as the previous one. But he needed to say it. It is this private sense of direction that gives his poems a unique kind of atonality you don't find in other American poets.

"America" by Allen Ginsberg
from Howl and Other Poems, City Lights 1969
[Saturday, Nov. 8th]

Rereading "Howl" and "America" I'm reminded of how talented Ginsberg really was. Yes, there's a lot of broggadocio and chest thumping, but there's a lot of talent too. So why don't I read him more often?

It's related to why I don't listen to the Beatles more often as well. It's not that it's old or out-dated, it's not. But it is kind of like driving a car that is stuck in one gear. It's not all the same; you can drive it fast or you can drive it slow. But its still only got one gear. Ginsberg's got his points, and he makes them one way. Loud (like "Howl") or quiet (like "In back of the real"), the point comes out the same.

"Killing My Pen-Pal" by Loren Goodman
from Famous Americans, Yale University Press 2003
[Sunday, Nov 9th]

This is an interesting collection of poems, ranging from single line poems to poems that look like they were copied directly out of TV Guide. More importantly, Goodman plays with what we think poems are about. Many of these poems are like overheard dialogs -- fragmented, partial, still under construction. ("I plan an escape as I would plan / to take off my clothes. / That is, there isn't much planning / I just undress...")

It is exciting to see art being stretched like this, testing the edges of what makes a poem a poem. Of course, the fear is that you are just being conned. (e.g. Is this Andy Warhol the artist, or Andy Warhol the commercial shill?) The fact is it is hard to tell.

Even time can't differentiate in all cases. The artists themselves sometimes get caught in their own inventions. I am thinking here of people like e.e. cummings and Jackson Pollack. Fame and invention are not necessarily friends

"Somewhere a garage door goes down..." by Noah Eli Gordon
from Novel Pictorial Noise, Harper Perennial 2007
[Monday, Nov 10th]

It's not surprising that Gordon's book was picked for the National Poetry Series by John Ashbery, because in many ways it reads like Ashbery's writing in prose. The linguistic gymnastics, the element of surprise, the circling, feints, and verbal shadowboxing. ("Clouds gather, disperse. Let this suffice as a working formula for working a formula...")

I haven't read the whole book, and it is hard to tell whether it is more of a book of individual poems or a single poem that is divided into chunks. But reading it as individual poems demonstrates the flaws in Ashbery's and Gordon's style. For all the amazing verbal play, there is a lack of substance, a resolute avoidance of subject matter.

I could be wrong. Read as a book rather than as a separate poems, a subject may emerge (as in Ashbery's best book, the Double Dream of Spring). As individual poems you can enjoy the playfulness. But it begins to wear thin after a while without something to hold it together. And based on current reading, I don't see a meaningful thread evolving yet.

"If I Could Wear the Pain" by Janet Grey
from Flaming Tail Out of the Ground Near Your Farm, Illuminati 1987
[Tuesday, Nov 11th]

A friend recommended this book to me a number of years ago. I have read it through a couple of times and I pick it up every now and then. It is a strong piece of work. Gray's poems pack a punch and her writing is close, personal, and direct. ("If I could wear the pain / like perfume, for example [...] if the source of it / could become unimportant, / or simply interesting -- the stories I could tell...")

This is a good book to read whenever you've read too much mediocre poetry or when your head gets clouded by the murky stuff you find in literary mags. When you begin to doubt the effectiveness of poetry or its social relevance, her poems will ground you quickly in what poetry is capable of.

"Of" by Deborah Greger
from And, Princeton University Press 1985
[Wednesday, Nov 12th]

Boy, I must spend a lot of time in the "G" section of the local book store because I just noticed a pretty impressive lineup of poets coming up: Debora Greger, Linda Gregerson, Linda Gregg... These three are all excellent poets. Not the same in any way, but all what you might call masters of their craft: finely honed poems of imagery and emotion.

Of the three Greger is perhaps the most overt with her craft, her manipulation of language. She is also my favorite of the three. Which is somewhat strange since she is also the most overtly "poetic". You always feel the hand of the poet in her writing. ("a glossy centerfold dissolves into / modesty -- black, cyan sequestered / under magenta's blush, and yellow / unmixing the muddied glow...")

Normally, this would disturb me. But in Greger's case, she not only shows off her control of language, she uses it deftly and with surprising variety. She writes personal poems, historical poems, dream poems, reimaginings of fairy tales... Each with the same deft touch.

"Ship" by Linda Gregerson
from Fire in the Conservatory, Dragon Gate 1982
[Thursday, Nov 13th]

Gregerson may be the most emotional of the three poets, also the least controlled. Her poems ooze feeling. Unfortunately, sometimes that sensation is hard to nail down and therefore hard for the reader to share. ("Our hope's a kind of geography: each place it lands, a city like ours springs up. Your daughter's dowry hangs by a bolt of silk in the hull. Another bolt shortened to stitch up the corpse.") This sort of hop, skip, and jump of imagery is emblematic of her work. At its best, it's a fascinating and intriguing collage of images and emotions. At lesser moments, it is a murky jumble of pictures as if the poem slipped out of the poet's grasp at a critical moment.

"Singing Enough to Feel the Rain" by Linda Gregg
from The Sacraments of Desire, Graywolf 1991
[Friday, Nov 14th]

Gregg is also emotional. But in her case, the emotion is as finely honed as the poems themselves. She is also perhaps the most personal poet of the three. Her poems slip seamlessly between the eternal and the immediate, the global and the intimate. ("I am alone writing as quickly as I can, dulled by being awake at four in the morning. Between the past and the future, without a life, writing on the line I walk between death and youth, between having and loss.")

The poems here never escape her grasp. They do, at times, cleave so closely to her personal life (or that of her persona) that they are hard to decipher for an outsider. But they are always under control. And even if the details are confusing (e.g. "I am far from there in a hurry not to miss the joining" There where? Joining what?) the poems' momentum usually carries you over these gaps.

"Painkillers" by Thom Gunn
from Collected Poems, Farrar Straus & Giroux 1994
[Saturday, Nov 15th]

For those who don't know, I was born in England. When I was six my family moved to the US, which is where I grew up. As is often the case in situations like this, I had a fascination with my "homeland" and when I got interested in poetry in college, I read both American poets and contemporary English poets. This was unfortunate because I didn't like most of the English writers I encountered, including Thom Gunn. (I won't go into it here, but in general I find modern English poets are -- for all their rebelliousness -- still slaves to their literary past far more than American writers.)

So why do I have this book? I suspect I thought I'd give Gunn another try. But I haven't got very far with it. The fact is, I don't think these poems are written for me. There is too much tell and not enough show. This might be a peculiarly American aesthetic. If so, so be it. Besides, for all the talking, I find the ideas in these poems trite. ("What was the pain / he needed to kill / if not the ultimate pain / of feeling no pain?") Just not my kind of thing.

"Nervous Collapse" by Paul Hannigan
from Holland and the Netherlands, Pym-Randall 1970
[Sunday, Nov 16th]

Hannigan is perhaps the most underrated, unread American poet of the past 50 years. His poems are a perfect mix of reality, absurdity, and wonder. I have been meaning to write about him at more length, but find it hard to be objective -- I am that fond of his work.

I was sorry to hear recently that Hannigan died in 2006. He left a relatively small body of work: a handful of books and a smattering of poems in magazines. I can only hope someone puts the effort into organizing a volume of collected poems. It would be one of the best books you've ever read.

Currently, his books are all out of print. But they are well worth the effort and cost needed to find them. Holland and the Netherlands is my favorite. A small, almost perfect volume. I'll close by quoting the poem of the day, just to give a taste for those who have never encountered Hannigan's work before:

Nervous Collapse

All the nerves collapse
All the body does a little

Nerveless dance. This is not so bad.
This is not bad at all.

In comparison to the Eiffel Tower
This is wonderful

"#20 (The mushrooms helped again...)" by Jim Harrison
from Letters to Yesenin, Sumac Press 1973
[Monday, Nov 18th]

Harrison is a great antidote to too many "literary" poems. Unfortunately, he is well aware of this and sometimes plays it to the hilt. He is not as anti-literary as he puts on. Still, his writing is refreshingly brash and straightforward.

"The star king makes cut after cut..." by Bob Heman
from 12 Prose Poems, Clown War Press 1976
[Tuesday, Nov 17th]

These prose poems are in the late American surrealist mode, in the style of James Tate, Russell Edson, etc. And Heman has studied his form. These poems are well structured and each comes to a tidy conclusion. But ultimately, there is no real meaning here and far too much imagery used simply for the shock value (homosexuality, incest, cutting flesh, etc.) That, plus the fact that the language used is just not interesting, makes this a pretty dismal book.

[Personal business interrupted my reading this month, so I will finish the post here. --Andrew]

I've Been Tagged

2008-10-31T12:57:00.000-04:00

John Tropea was kind enough to mention me in his blog, tagging me with the question: what does blogging do for me? (Previously, How do I decide what to blog about?)

The latter is an easy question for me: I write about only five things. Or rather, I tag only five subjects -- knowledge management, information architecture, technology, video games and poetry. That is a fairly strict taxonomy, but until further notice those are the only subjects I feel compelled and knowledgeable enough about to blog. Anything else I discuss either goes untagged or is tangentially related to one of those five topics (like this entry is to KM).

The other question -- what does blogging do for me -- is slightly more complex. When I started, my first blog entry described what I expected to get out of it. I blog -- like many other people, I suspect -- as a way of clarifying my own ideas. The physical activity of writing things down forces me to verify those thoughts. Some ideas that sound good bouncing loosely around in my head can seem perfectly stupid or unsupportable when written down.

There were other incentives as well:

Establish a reputation as a reasonably well-informed thinker about the topics in question
Connect with fellow professionals (like John) and share ideas
Establish a web presence for myself that is more personal and informative than a LinkedIn/MySpace/Facebook profile

However, these are all secondary goals, since there are quicker and more effective methods for achieving each of these. But the question was what does blogging do for me, not what do I think it will do for me. It turns out that my original concept has proven true. The blog has been very beneficial in helping me flesh out ideas and theories that I have had floating around for quite some time. It also spawns new ideas -- and hence new entries -- as I follow a train of thought and compare it to my fellow bloggers.

One consequence is that my blog is somewhat different than others. While others write quickly to jot their ideas down before they escape, my entries take on average a month or more to finish. I would like them to be faster, but I either don't have sufficient time or the ideas themselves take longer to foment.

Another consequence is that I have had the opportunity to "meet" several new people who I would not have met any other way. (Insert a shout out to everyone who has commented on my entries or referenced them in their own blogs. I am very grateful and in several cases they have led me to discover new ideas, theories, methodologies, or products I was not aware of. Thank you, everyone.)

The one thing I had not expected is that the blog helps me see the connectedness of my own ideas. At work, ideas are generated and applied as needed by the situation. Setting up SharePoint? you think about use cases, security policies, information lifecycle, archiving, etc. Participation in a KM program lower than expected? You think about community creation and facilitation, incentives, alignment to business processes, etc. The pragmatic need to address an issue keeps you focused and you inherently apply certain design principles. But you often do not have the time to examine the connection between the decisions. Taking the time to reflect on the ideas and decisions -- abstracted from the specific event -- allows you to understand your own motivations and how they interrelate.

This is reflected rather abstractly in the broad spectrum of subjects I have covered under the guise of KM and IA. But I expect it will become more explicit in the near future, as I outline some of the guiding principles that I have discovered myself pursuing. More on that later.

The Intranet is not a Thing

2008-10-21T14:08:00.001-04:00

Patrick C. Walsh recently asked for input on a concept he is calling lean intranets, based at least in part on the concept of lean manufacturing. The basic concept he is promoting is very attractive: make the intranet more productive by significantly reducing the content down to only that which actually helps employees "create value".

Certainly many if not all intranets could do with some dramatic reduction in either outdated or superfluous content. However, as attractive as the concept of a "lean intranet" is, it is based on a false assumption: that the intranet is a "thing" that can be managed or controlled as a single entity.

The problem is that the intranet serves more than one purpose and more than one master. Unlike manufacturing, where there is one linear process that can be optimized to reduce "waste", the intranet is more like a city, with hundreds or thousands of diverse members each with their own goals and objectives.

The reason this caught my eye is not because Walsh's theory is fatally flawed -- in fact it is not. His prescription for creating a lean intranet may make a few spurious assumptions, but the goal and many of his suggestions are still valid. (More on than later.) The reason the assumption is important to recognize is because the same assumption is endemic to corporate managers and intranet teams everywhere.

The Intranet as a Thing and its Postulates

For any company larger than, say, 200 or 300 people, you cannot ask "what is the purpose of the intranet" as if it was a singular thing. However, this is exactly how it is treated by many, many companies, resulting in some rather spectacularly dysfunctional behavior.

Most of the time when people -- especially managers -- talk about "the intranet" they are talking about the corporate intranet portal; the internal "home page" for the company. The problem is that the portal is -- quite literally -- just the tip of the iceberg in terms of content and uses of the intranet.

This "intranet as a thing" thinking results in a number of fallacious assumptions:

The corporate portal is everyone's home page
Only pages linked to by the portal are part of the intranet -- everything else is noise
You can control the intranet by dictate

Many companies enforce the first assumption by setting the intranet portal as the browser home page as part of their standard PC configuration. But, is the corporate home page the most useful page for employees? Shouldn't they start at their division or their department's home page? And, let's face it, most experienced users navigate through bookmarks/favorites, significantly diminishing the importance of the home page...

Some companies also enforce the second postulate -- "the intranet is what I say it is" -- by limiting the corporate search engine to crawling only "official" pages. The argument is that by restricting the scope of search, you increase the value of the results that are returned. The actual consequence is that you put up castle walls around a portion of your intranet, leaving many employees (and their content!) outside the walls. This form of electronic feudalism creates significant barriers to sharing information across organizational boundaries within the corporation.

Finally, many companies try to control their intranets by dictate: they define requirements and standards for the appearance, structure, and even content of web pages within the intranet. These rules start out as well intentioned, attempting to define a common look & feel for the intranet browsing experience (usually through a common intranet banner, colors, and fonts). But it soon extends to guidelines for the layout and even the content of pages.

Again, this mandated layout is done under the auspices of standardizing the browsing experience and simplifying maintenance, but the result is that lower level groups are handcuffed into following a structure that may have no relation to the information they need to present. A prime example is intranet guidelines that require each organizational home page start with a mission statement and "news". I cannot tell you how many times I have watched groups struggle to come up with news items simply to fulfill this stylistic requirement.

Creating a Lean Intranet

As I said earlier, Walsh's assumption that it is possible to define a single set of criteria for identifying and eliminating wasteful content on the intranet from the top is flawed because the intranet does not have a single purpose, as a manufacturing process has. However, at each of the lower levels at which intranet content is owned and maintained it ought to be possible to define and apply such criteria. Because that is the level at which the goal of the content is defined and understood.

So although I am quibbling that a process for lean intranets cannot be applied at the top level, there is real opportunities for applying it at lower levels, assuming the corporate style police allow it.

Nintendo DSi

2008-10-03T18:22:00.002-04:00

Yesterday Nintendo announced a new version of the dual screen DS, called the DSi.

There are a number of minor enhancements: slightly larger screen area, slimmer case, a (toy) camera, improved audio.... But the change that appears to be the primary reason for the upgrade is replacing the GBA slot with a standard SD memory slot.

By using a flash card, DSi owners will be able to download and store games on their DS. (Currently downloaded games are only available as long as the system is on and the game is in memory.) This allows for downloadable content ala WiiWare for the DS.

The SD card can also be used to transfer pictures taken on the DS to the Wii. But the DSi camera is such low resolution, this is essentially a waste. (My phone takes better pictures.)

The use of flash memory for downloadable games is so obvious it is a wonder it was not built into the original DS or the DS Lite. But thinking back to when the DS was first introduced, the concept of the dual screen itself was so revolutionary, the use of a GBA slot to provide a level of backwards compatibility was clearly more important to help consumers make the transition. But now the GameBoy market is quiescent; to the point where removing the GBA slot will cause little to no concern in the market.

So, is it worth upgrading your DS when the DSi becomes available? I think that depends on two things:

How robust the "DSiWare" market is at launch. If Nintendo provides compelling downloadable content, the upgrade will pay for itself. Unfortunately, Nintendo has a checkered history for supporting its own hardware upgrades and add-ons (think: VirtualBoy, Gamecube Bongos, GameBoy Camera...) this is a new system, not an add-on. But it will require games and content to make it useful.
What other forms of "flash" downloadable content will be supported.

Clearly the enhanced audio capabilities would suggest downloadable mp3 music files are a target. But the real question, for me personally, is will Nintendo support other user-generated content, in particular home-brew games?

Nintendo has a great opportunity here to open up an entirely new market in the video game industry. Only Xbox, thus far, has embraced the hobbyist game developer with its XNA toolkit. But creating a game and being able to share it are two different things and Microsoft has not created a viable marketplace for small developers yet. Providing the ability to load homebrew games onto standard SD cards could dramatically change the indy game marketplace.

Is this a big market? Compared to the casual market the Wii created, no. But compared to the market for listening to MP3s on a DSi which is three times the size (with a fraction of the memory) of an iPod, this could be a real game changer, similar to the Wii.

Clearly there are issues around licensing and security -- there would need to be distinctions between commercial titles that need to protect themselves against copy piracy and simpler downloadables. But compared to the potential for leapfrogging Microsoft and XNA (and the fact that they need to address the piracy issue with rewritable media anyway) I would think this would be almost too good an opportunity to miss.

The only thing standing in the way is Nintendo's past stance against anything unlicensed, which goes back all the way to the original NES. It is unclear whether they have the vision to set a new path. WiiWare is a beginning, but the qualifications to get signed up for that program excludes all but the biggest indy developers.

One possible alternate route is if Nintendo collaborates with the likes of DigiPen or Carnegie-Mellon to develop simplified game development "systems" (essentially a game-making game). This has been tried in the past. But without a distribution mechanism, the results were little more than private fiddling. Using a combination of a "casual" game development system, writable media, an online community, and friend codes (I know everyone hates them, but they do offer protection), Nintendo could once again revolutionize the game industry by creating the equivalent of Flickr or YouTube for games.

A Month of Poems (Continued)

2008-10-01T13:00:00.032-04:00

[This is part 2 of a month of poems as described in the preface]

"Poets Hitchhiking on the Highway" by Gregory Corso
From The Happy Birthday of Death, New Directions 1960
[Wednesday, October 1st]

Corso always strikes me as one of those "friends of the famous" -- famous, but for no identifiable reason. Friend of Kerouac. Friend of Ginsberg. Author of Gasoline. And also The Happy Birthday of Death.

I remember being excited by Gasoline -- what? say, 35 years ago? -- but for quite some time I have been unable to reproduce or to explain that feeling. Happy Birthday always seemed to be the proof that his fame was misplaced. The stilted rhymes, the clumsy archaic speech, antiquated references, nonsense as meaning... The quintessential post flash in the pan.

Corso is perhaps the one Beat poet most bound by time. Outside the era that bore him, he feels alien and outdated. Even Kerouac, even Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti as "contemporary" as their writing was, manage to transcend that moment. But Corso doesn't.

Is that a failing? For modern readers yes. But perhaps they were only meant as momentary expressions. The trouble is it is hard to assess "value" or "beauty" of something that doesn't last.

Which is all the more strange that I found a poem I liked in Happy Birthday. "Poets Hitchhiking" shows Corso's humor, directed at himself as much as anyone else, mocking his own writing and its tenuousness ("we ended by melting away, hating the air!"). Perhaps he did know how fragile it was after all.

"A Form of Woman" by Robert Creeley
From for Love, Charles Scribner's Sons 1962
[Thursday, October 2nd]

Creeley's poems are almost devoid of imagery. What images are there are a form of monologue (or in some cases, like the famous poem "I Know a Man", dialog).

As a consequence, his poems for all their simplicity are very hard to read for a modern reader. Unlike most 20th century verse, his poems are written from the outside in rather than the inside out, in an abrupt documentary style. What emotion is there is only that which might be expressed -- and visible-- outwardly. "I could not touch you. / I wanted very much to / touch you / but could not." Add to this staccato, objective style his idiosyncratic line breaks and you have a tough read ahead of you. But when they work, his poems form a unique experience that comes into focus so slowly, you don't realize it until the poem has you.

"Self-Portrait in a Stainless Steel Mirror" by James Crenner
From My Hat Flies On Again, L'Epervier Press 1981
[Friday, October 3rd]

I don't remember where I first heard of James Crenner. Perhaps I found his work in a magazine. Maybe he was recommended by a friend of a friend. Whichever, the memory of his work stuck with me and I spent several years trying to find more of it, until last year when I finally found a copy of My Hat Flies On Again. Now I see why I was so persistent.

Crenner's poems don't seem special -- the subjects are interesting but not unique, his style of writing is familiar... But each poem has at least one line, an image, or an idea that stays with you for days. In "Application Blank" he describes himself as "curator of the part of my life that is over" -- a killer line. In "Self-Portrait" he turns an objective description of his own face into a landscape "with the trace of a bird, the trace of some weeds" where the entire poem lingers with you long after you put the book down. No particular line, but the poem as a whole.

There are flashy writers who surprise you and there are "serious" poets you try to make you think long and hard on things. Crenner isn't either of these, but he can do both. He is that talented. But it is a quiet, understated talent, which is what makes it all the more unusual and gratifying.

"VII (since feeling is first)" by E.E. Cummings
from is 5, in Complete Poems 1913-1962, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1972
[Saturday. October 4th]

I wonder if anyone reads E.E. Cummings anymore. He is easy to discount as all style and no substance. The uniqueness of his poems and their total reliance on surface -- the use of lower case, the staccato diction of speech and thought -- make the poems seem almost like parodies of themselves. And it's true: Cummings' poems either succeed or fail. And when they fail, they fail spectacularly. But when they succeed, the success is equally exuberant.

Cummings uses words like painters use brushes -- he "paints" his poems. I don't mean in the superficial sense of concrete poems or Apollinaire's poème-objet. Cummings is not interested in constructing sentences, he constructs scenes where dialog runs together and thoughts intersect and bounce off each other. His poems are more like screenplays without scenery or physical players. As he says himself "Since feeling is first / who pays attention / to the syntax of things / will never wholly kiss you."

The tragedy is that in his later poems Cummings retains the style, but attempts to apply it to physical scenes rather than human interaction, and the result is an exceedingly dull imitation of his earlier work. But until then, his work can be a wild ride.

"Baseball Cards #2" by Jim Daniels
from The Long Ball, Pig in a Poke Press 1988
[Sunday, October 5th]

There have been some great baseball poems. W.C. Williams' paean to baseball "At the Ball Game" in Spring and All, for example. And I recently found a stunning baseball poem by Tom Clark. So I have no objection to the subject itself. Unfortunately, Jim Daniels' poems in The Long Ball have little more than the subject and that is not enough.

These are poems because Daniels says they are, but he doesn't use any of the power of poetry. The language is flat. There is no under current, no secondary meaning. There is only what is described and what is described is, well, dull. Am I being harsh? Probably. But this stuff isn't for me.

"What the Rocks Say" by Robert Desnos
Translated by Anne Waldman, source unknown
[Monday. October 6th]

Robert Desnos was one of the first surrealist poets I read in the original French and, although my French is sketchy at best, I learned enough to be disappointed by most translations. This is unfortunate, because modern translations of Desnos are actually quite good for those unable to read the French. But I also learned that Desnos is very hard to translate because it is almost as if he had no voice of his own. His poems are friendly but stark, as if he were channeling surrealism itself. There is little of the personal style or linguistic quirks you find in his fellow surrealists, such as Eluard, Soupault, or Peret. So it is hard to determine what style or voice to use in English.

I originally intended to read a poem from Michael Benedikt's translation (22 Poems, Kayak Books 1971), but while leafing through it I found a xerox I made many years ago and had slipped in at the point in the book with the matching translation by Benedikt. I obviously put it there because I thought Waldman did a better job of translating the poem (and still do). But it also shows that the differences are subtle. Here are three translations of the first line of the poem (the third being from Selected Poems of Robert Desnos translated by Carolyn Forche and William Kulik, Ecco 1991):

The queen of the azure and the fool of the void go past you in a taxicab (Benedikt)

The Queen of the Blue & the Fool of Space pass by in a taxi (Waldman)

The azure queen and the madman of the void go by in a cab (Forche and Kulik)

"In the Pocket" by James Dickey
from The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy, Doubleday 1970
[Tuesday. October 7th]

I am not a big fan of poems that meander all over the page -- poems with large gaps between words or lines that start in different places. There is plenty of power in language, in the rhythms, the sounds of the words, and the line breaks. These exaggerated placements seem heavy-handed and, in most cases, unrewarding. In bad poems, I find this sort of extravagance annoying and a crude attempt to hide the weakness of the poem itself. In good poems I simply try to ignore the spaces.

Dickey is one writer where I try to ignore the gaps. However, in Dickey's poems, that is difficult. He uses spaces as punctuation: breaking up and intermixing chunks of thought -- different threads of a story -- as a videographer splices together film.

Here we have another sports poem (football this time) and another poem ostensibly about the surface of things. Dickey is trying to reproduce the tension and rush of the football experience from the player's point of view by piling image upon image, piece by fragmented piece. It is a tall order to reproduce it in words. And when he gets to the end of the poem with its rush of all upper case words, like a drill sergeant shouting out orders, my initial impulse is to resist it. Too demanding, unjustified, manipulative. But frankly, the poem works. And as unsettling as it is, Dickey effectively achieves his goal.

"A Row of Identical Cottages" by Mark Doty
from Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, David R. Godine 1991
[Wednesday, October 8th]

Mark Doty is a very talented writer. His poems are mesmerizing in their use of language. The lines stretch out like a lush tropical garden with its heady odors, colors, and cacaphony of images. In a way, the verbiage is so lush it is almost overwhelming. Unfortunately he is also one of several very talented writers who I simply don't "get".

I can admire these poems, but I can't enjoy them. As rich as they are in images and language, the poem never really connects with me as a reader. In a way, it is the richness, the lushness of the writing that stands in the way. "The flag flapped like a towel hung out to dry ... the single breathing undulance that sea and sky made ... the water that was hurrying with the idea of storm ..." The images are so thick and fraught with meaning, they end up being a sort of a blur. The language doesn't allow for enough variation to be realistic. It is like looking at an exhibit of Faberge eggs: beautiful, intricate, well crafted, but ultimately meant for a different time or place.

Now, I am more than happy to admit this as a flaw in myself, not in the poems. I can see why some people would love this work, if they feel connected to it. But unless you feel involved, the rich language and intricate craft ultimately becomes a barrier -- an invisible wall of glass -- that separates you from the emotion of the poem.

Consequently, when he tries to pull the scene and the emotions together with lines like "I saw the shoreline break / above your heart..." it fails. Because by that time I am already on the other side of the glass. And that is disappointing. Disappointing because I would like to like these poems. I can see them, I can admire them, but the rarity of the language gets in the way.

Note: There was a lapse in new entries to this blog entry for two reasons. First, I made a mistake (more on this below) which caused me to rethink. Second, I was busy preparing for a birthday party which consumed all my free time. But now I will catch up...

"529 (I'm sorry for the dead...)" by Emily Dickinson
from Final Harvest, Little Brown & Co. 1961
[Saturday, Oct. 18th]

I made a mistake. I overlooked a book on my shelf on Wednesday. When I discovered the mistake, I had two simultaneous, competing thoughts: "oh, I can just skip that" and "I should take it out of sequence, because the point of the exercise is to get me to read different writers". The trouble is the book I skipped was Emily Dickinson.

I don't like Emily Dickinson's poetry. Never have. Thing is, I am not fond of rhymed poetry. It tends to be too sing-songy, more interested in getting the rhyme that following the reason. Frost may have complained about free verse being like playing tennis without a net, but rhymed verse sometimes feels like playing tennis with your shoes tied together.

This dislike of rhyme is not unequivocable. I am very fond of G.M. Hopkins. Frost also has some great poems. But rhyme can be a barrier. Add to that Dickinson's short lines, arbitrary and incessant use of capitalization and dashes and you have something more resembling a billboard than a poem.

Be that as it may, there is something enjoyable about her poems. It is not just the marching band rhythms (bang! bang! bang!). It is a turn of phrase, the flutter of language underneath the beat. So when she says "When Men -- and Boys -- and Carts -- and June, / Go down the Fields to 'Hay' --" it is like skipping with the entire village -- including time itself (June) -- heading into the fields. I can see the pleasure in that. So maybe I don't dislike everything she does...

"The Elephant" by Carlos Drummond de Andrade
from Travelling in the Family edited and translated by Thomas Colchie and Mark Strand, Ecco 1986
[Sunday, Oct. 19th]

Drummond's poems are what I think of as South American Surrealism. French Surrealism was about language. The entire context of the poem -- the subject, the location, the words describing them -- falls under the surrealist lens. In South America, Surrealism tends to be about objects. The object is surreal, unnatural, or out of place, but it plays within a perfectly normal, real landscape. Neruda perhaps epitomizes this style in poetry while Garcia Marques is a master practitioner in prose.

In Drummond's poem, the elephant itself is the surreal element, not only because it is out of place but it is manfactured ("I made an elephant from the little I have"). Once this surreal element is introduced, everything it does and the reactions of those around it are perfectly normal ("my elephant goes down a crowded street"). The juxtaposition of the fragile man-made elephant and its interaction with our everyday world are what gives the poem its power.

It is interesting that this style is very hard to reproduce elsewhere. US poets who try it tend to come off as posturing. (Perhaps we don't have enough everyday life in our poems to make it come off realistically.) In Eastern Europe, surrealism takes more of a theoretical turn, where everything about the poem, including the landscape, has the feel of some sort of great social experiment. (I am thinking of poets like Vasko Popa here.)

"To a Red-Headed, Do-Good Waitress" by Alan Dugan
from Poems 2, Yale University Press 1963
[Monday, Oct. 20th]

I have a love/hate relationship with Alan Dugan. One day I read his poems and find them energizingly irreverent, witty, and erudite. The next day I find them pretentious, self-important, and petulant.

At first I thought it was me. There certainly are poets where I have to be in the right state of mind to be able to fully appreciate their work. Otherwise I read too fast or too slow and miss the essential ingredient.

But I have come to believe it isn't me this time. Dugan's poems truly are that hit and miss. Because he spends so much time tilting at the gods and demigods of poetry -- ridiculing high-blown language, mocking the favorite topics and attitudes of "classic" verse -- he runs a risk of leaning too much the other direction. I don't object to the four letter words or discussion of taboo subjects (drunkenness, masturbation, etc.). But these aren't the unrestrained outburst of working class minds. They are often strategic and staged more for shock value than for real need of expression. And that is when his poems fail for me. It is the false harshness, the studied realism that tends to let him down as a writer.

But when he escapes this and mixes traditional styles with modern sensibility (as he does in "Waitress") he is well worth reading.

"The Heat" by Cornelius Eady
from Boom Boom Boom, State Street Press 1988
[Tuesday, Oct. 21st]

Eady is one of my favorite young poets. I say "young" although I have no idea how old he is. It's just that his writing is refreshingly individualistic and has the air of youth.

I am currently reading his selected poems (Hardheaded Weather), but today I chose to go back to the first book of his I read. Eady's writing is light -- not subject-wise, but in the language. The rhythms are punchy, almost syncopated, like a good jazz riff. The lines also tend to be short. There is no shortage of words -- his poems are not minimalistic, just well crafted. And each poem is set off by one or two really beautiful turns of phrase, like this poem's closing: " Muggy, the announcer predicts, / Like a man who is / The last one to know."

In fact, the only real danger in Eady's early poems is that the images may be too perfect and remind us that this is, after all, artifice.

"Dr. Nigel Bruce Watson Counting" by Russell Edson
from The Tunnel, Field Editions 1994
[Wednesday, Oct. 22nd]

Russell Edson is a perfect example of why poetry is undefinable. As soon as you define it and try to nail it down, you find a poem that defies that definition. Edson's poems defy almost all definition.

First, if poems are about format, Edson's poems are prose poems, so there are no line breaks or rhyme. If poems are about things, Edson's prose poems -- although narrative in style -- bend and weave keeping their actual subject a secret, sometimes beyond the end of the poem. If poems are about emotion, Edson's prose poems often result in a sense of ambiguity -- ambiguity towards what the poem is about and ambiguity towards one's own feelings about the poem.

When you get to the end of one of his poems, you feel almost as if you are on the deck of a ship in high seas. What do you think of the poem? What is it about? The impact is dizzying. It is as if the poem keeps moving long after you finish reading.

"Mirror of October" by Gunnar Ekelof
from I Do Best Alone at Night translated by Robert Bly, Charioteer Press 1977
[Thursday, Oct. 23rd]

I respect Ekelof as a poet, but I can't say I ever liked any of his work. His poems are deeply philosphical -- everything turns to the universal so quickly, it is almost as if the narrator needn't be there. Even the title poem with its titular first person quickly surrenders to the universal. "Somewhere / chance is sleeping in the cards. Somewhere / a truth has been said once already..." Personally, I can only take so much of this type of ominous foreboding, this mystical visioning before I begin to have my doubts. Where is the everyday in this? Nowhere, perhaps. But the poem has to have some grounding if it expects to reach across the gap in the page and convince me.

As I say, this is a personal bias which might be exacerbated by the distance created by the translation. But Bly is a good translator in most cases. So I think it is just a difference between Mr. Ekelof and myself...

"The Hollow Men" by T.S. Eliot
from Collected Poems 1909-1962, Harcourt Brace 1970
[Friday, Oct.24th]

I don't have much to say about Eliot. I liked his early poems (1917) when I was younger. Probably because they were closest to what I was reading of contemporary poems -- somewhat narrative, somewhat imagistic. Now I am beginning to understand his later poems, when he became more interested in the complexities of philosophy and religion. Not organized philosophy and religion (well, not only those) but his personal views and how they and he fit into society. He was still a poet and his goal was to express both thoughts and feelings. Without resorting to imagism, he managed this by layering impressions and descriptions one on top of another to try and build the complex portrait he wanted: "In this valley of dying stars / In this hollow valley / This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms / In this last of meeting places / We grope together..."

"Shirley Temple Surrounded by Lions" by Kenward Elmslie
from Motor Disturbance, Columbia University Press 1971
[Saturday, Oct. 25th]

These poems are enjoyable. Like browsing through the dictionary looking for unusual words is enjoyable. There are surprises at every turn ("scenario: an albino industrialiste, invited to the beach at noon"). But there is very little to hold these twists and turns of speech together. (Except, perhaps, the poems' titles and even they seem relatively random.)

I used to get upset at Elmslie and poets like him. It seemed like they were wasting the reader's time. But I've got to the point where I can enjoy them for what they are. The problem is, any one poem is as good as another; there is no real distinction. So you can enjoy them, but you can just as easily put them down.

"Letter to my Mother" by Sergei Esenin
from Confessions of a Hooligan translated by Geoffrey Thurley, Carcanet Press 1973
[Sunday, Oct. 26th]

I have always been attracted to Esenin. He is the romantic/ tragic figure of the artistic personality in the face of overwhelming indifference (or outright belligerence) from their the social environment. Unfortunately for Esenin, the portrait ends up being more tragi-comic than romantic, as his own conceit and self-destructive tendencies made him the poster child of the narcissistic dissolution the socialist art councils believed was the ultimate outcome of individualistic artistic expression.

These are not particularly good translations. but then again, I have never really found any good translations of Esenin. I suspect it gets the words across, but the music is missing or distorted. It's like trying to read a book of poetry on the subway or while a marching band is going past. You get the gist of it, but the sound is drowned out by the surroundings.

"Junkman's Obbligato" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
from A Coney Island of the Mind, New Directions 1958
[Monday, Oct. 27th]

Ferlinghetti was one of the first contemporary poets I read as a youngster. His poems are the right mix of rebelliousness, anger, excitement, and a moderate level of awareness of literary past to appeal to a teenager. It is not so much what he was saying as how he was saying it that struck a chord.

Unfortunately, many years later, one's earlier enthusiasms often seem embarrassingly naive in hindsight. So I was trepidatious to pick up his books again. Yes, he is a sort of second-rate Allen Ginsberg. Yes, the overly serious "Beat"-ness of Pictures of the Gone World has not aged particularly well. No, poems like "Junkman's Obbligato" do not hold together conceptually as we might have come to expect from reading more thoroughly in the genre. But rereading this poem and others, it is surprising how much of Ferlinghetti's voice and concerns do still come across. I have never heard him read in person, but I have a strong sense of how the poem was meant to be read -- impassioned, involved, and enthralled -- and I still can put on that mantle and enjoy these poems much more than I had expected.

"Wave/Rock" by Ian Hamilton Finlay
from Poems to Hear and See, Macmillan. 1971
[Tuesday, Oct. 28th]

Finlay is not a poet. Or rather, he is many more things than just a poet. He is an artist who works in many different media and forms.

In truth, Poems to Hear and See may be one of his least successful works of "poetry". It falls under the general category of concrete poetry and -- like much of the genre -- is intellectually intriguing but emotionally unmoving.

However, several of these "poems" were also sculptures. "Wave/Rock" itself was produced as words etched in glass. Other poems in the book I have seen as sculptures in glass, marble, or neon lights. The real impact of these works simply are not apparent on the page and do not become visible until you see them in their "natural" environment.

Perhaps the ultimate expression of Finlay's work is the "garden", Little Sparta, which he created in a small town in Scotland. For anyone who has not been exposed to his work, I strongly encourage you to look up and find his sculptures if you can. At a minimum, visit the Little Sparta web site to get a feel for one unique way in which poetry can be created, and the impact it can have.

"The Tub" by Karen Fish
from What is Beyond Us, Harper Perennial. 1992
[Wednesday, Oct. 29th]

Karen Fish is part of the University of Iowa post neo imagist influence that pervaded the 70's and 80's (and a good part of the 90's). I can say that because that's part of my intellectual heritage as well. Her writing is very precise, with an eye for detail and a well-formed turn of phrase. "The mountains in the distance are pewter -- / like the pitcher, cool and sweating on my grandmother's lace / tablecloth." The focus is not on the object, but on the collection of objects -- the tableau -- and in many cases, their emotional history.

She does this well. She has a very good ear ("the light has only one thing left to do"). My only concern is that her work relies so heavily on the emotional baggage that it can at times seem almost like cliches. The lace, the barn, the old lady washing in a tub in the kitchen. I have seen this before in movies and in paintings and she is relying so heavily on the feeling this evokes that it becomes, well, trite. The danger of relying on the cultural associations of objects and landscapes is that the poem becomes fragile, like ice on a puddle -- trying to hold still something that is moving.

"One evening at the turn of the century..." by Jean Follain
from A World Rich in Anniversaries, Logbridge-Rhodes 1981
[Thursday, Oct. 30th]

Follain is also interested in objects, in the details of a moment in time. However, one would never mistake him for an American poetry school student. It is not just a matter of talent; it is approach and a vision.

I have always been intrigued by this book; it attracts and repels at the same time. I am drawn in by the writing, but left uncertain by the poems as a whole. Looking more carefully now, I think I see the reason for both. Follain's poems follow a pattern. They start with a detailed description of a scene -- a tableau vivant almost. ("One evening at the turn of the century you see a mathematician reach home carrying a birdcage.") The scene expands with more details ("black and yellow hansoms... the dog running down an alleyway... the furious, mustachioed butcher...").

But the poem soon moves beyond the scene into the abstract ("In the future... citizens who have survived the massacres..."). What massacres? What future? Any emotional baggage that you bring to the original scene is forced to vie with the abstraction, creating a new view and response to the entire proceedings. Follain then brings the poem to a close physically linking the abstract to the present ("before their eyes, the ghost of the professor.. the uninhabited cage in his hand.")

It is almost like a magician's sleight of hand with which Follain brings present and future together. But the uncertainty? It is a trick, and it works. And Follain's final twist usually adds another perspective to the scene, which sounds like closure, but is it? The closure brings the pieces together but tends to leave the scene suspended, often with a sense that the future has already been decided. But what that decision is -- even if you know the results -- is not clear.

This sense of suspended animation is very powerful and reading a few of his poems can be a very moving experience. Unfortunately, the more you read, the more you begin to recognize the pattern and start to lose the surprise at the end. They all kind of end the same way. Can that be? Well, can it?

"Departure" by Carolyn Forché
from The Country Between Us, Harper & Row 1981
[Friday, Oct. 31st]

Forché is another member of the Poetry School School. This group is not identified by a specific style as much as a general aesthetic, focused on precision and detailed descriptions of scenes or objects; what I sometimes refer to as the post neo imagist movement. These are the poets who were taught or were teaching in the various writing programs in the 70's and 80's. It was the pervasive form of poetry pretty much until the Language poets showed up.

Forché is both a member of that general caste and a demonstration of how diverse it is. Her writing is precise and sometimes overly "writerly" ("I am the woman whose photograph you will not recognize, whose face emptied your eyes...") But there is no fragility here. Underlying all of her poems is a fierce personal vision that drives the poems forward. You may not always understand or agree with everything said, but you feel the scenes unfolding as much as you see them. In her best poems, you become the persona, the narrator. At worst, you see them in third person; detached but fully aware.

(Go to part 3)

The Alternatives to Collaboration

2008-09-30T19:42:00.003-04:00

Ever since knowledge management as a discipline began some thirty years ago, there has been a strong focus on collaboration. We always assume everyone knows what we mean when we say that: groups working together and sharing knowledge. Even if we define “collaboration” at a more granular level (distinguishing between team collaboration and communities of practice or communities of interest), our intent is clear.

So why is it so difficult to get users to play along? At times it seems like we have taken something people do naturally and we have turned it into something they don’t want to do. Partially this can be attributed to regimentation: even if 90% of the people would do it naturally, there are 10% who don’t and will resist all efforts to enforce it.

But if we are honest with ourselves, the resistance to KM programs is a much larger ratio than just human disinclination. Frequently, an adoption rate as low as 20% is considered success for a KM initiative.

So where is the gap?

The Problem With Collaboration

We assume that collaboration is the preferred and most effective approach for sharing knowledge and solving problems. However, collaboration can be a surprisingly elusive goal. Reticence, resistance, even outright refusal can strain relationships among team members or employees.

The fact is not everyone is comfortable with the practices used to encourage collaboration. Not everyone likes brainstorming. Some people are simply not comfortable opening up to a group of relative strangers. And no amount of team building or facilitation seems to completely resolve these differences.

So, if collaboration is so fundamental, are the methods themselves insufficient or is there a deeper problem?

The Alternatives to Collaboration

Perhaps we need to consider the possibility that some people simply don’t like to collaborate. I am not talking about the “dead wood” and underachievers. In many cases, some of the most productive workers are also the most resistant to collaborative activities and group meetings. Despite not “playing along” they continue to work effectively. Sometimes more effectively than the rest of the team. How do they do it? What alternative approaches do they utilize to continue their high level of contribution?

In my experience, I have seen at least three behaviors people use to work with others. (This is in no way a scientific study, purely a personal observation.) The first is what is traditionally called "collaboration": working in teams, sharing knowledge and experiences openly, etc. The other two techniques are conspiring and competing.

Conspiring and Competing

At first, these two activities might not seem effective methods for working with others. However, they each provide a measure of collaboration that has -- in each case -- unique advantages in terms of achieving business goals (which, in the long run, is the ultimate goal). Of course, they also have offsetting and equally unique deficits.

Conspiring

Conspiring is very common among senior contributors within a team. Conspiring is simply a form of collaboration where the"community" is limited, usually to select members who the contributor trusts. Rather than speak out or agree during meetings, this individual will seek out others who they feel will understand and appreciate their contribution and work with those people to flesh out their ideas. They may even strategize privately about how to bring the rest of the team "around" to their way of thinking. (This is the conspiratorial part of the equation.)

The advantage of conspiring is that ideas gestate rapidly -- far more rapidly than in public discussions -- due to the level of trust and commitment of the participants. They talk almost in a private shorthand, there is so much understanding within the core conspirators. No need to explain fully or argue seemingly irrelevant details as can happen in broader discussions. Ideas and inspiration grow and move forward rapidly.

The disadvantage of conspiring is that the individuals who practice this technique can be seen as not "team players" or as underhanded if their conspiring is found out. When they finally reveal their opinions -- fully-fledged and often in opposition to ideas being openly discussed -- it can result in hard feelings, even though the ideas are well thought out.

Competing

Competing, on the other hand, happens out in the open. Competing is founded on two basic assumptions:

Ideas reached by consensus are not necessarily the best ideas. Rather, they are ideas that sound most agreeable or that provide the least resistance to current conditions (in other words, ruffle as few feathers as possible).
By openly pursuing multiple approaches in parallel, you can test more possibilities and (the key to competing) inspire each group to reach farther and develop a more complete and creative solution.

Competing is one of the key characteristics of open source development, as described in Eric Raymond's book The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The concept is that competition, the same basic principles behind capitalism's supply and demand and Darwin's theory of evolution, will drive innovation faster and result in the solutions with the best fit "surviving".

Rather than pursue a single line of thought resolving differences in the discussion, individuals inclined towards competing will break off in small groups offering to come back with the solution after they have tested and refined their theories. They will also argue the correctness of their ideas even in the face of significant opposition from the majority of the group. This is based on the thinking that only the marketplace can determine the true right or wrong of a concept. Theoretical discussions, although interesting, are not decisive or binding in any way.

The obvious advantage of competing is that less obvious but more creative and possibly, ultimately, stronger ideas have a chance to survive and thrive. Competing can also break the stalemate that sometimes arises when groups or teams try to achieve consensus.

The major disadvantage of competing is that the individuals are often seen as loud, disruptive, and stubborn as they tend to stick to their ideas in the face of overwhelming opposition.

Understanding and Bridging Multiple Styles of Interaction

I have discussed these styles of interaction in terms of group decision making. However, they affect other forms of collaboration as well, which is where they can play havoc with knowledge management initiatives.

Each behavior leads to a preference for particular technologies. Those who conspire tend to adopt 1-to-1 technologies, such as instant messaging and IRC. Those who like to compete tend to favor group technologies where they can carve out their niche and take the lead, such as wikis and Twitter. Whereas, those who are collaborative tend to prefer more "democratic" tools, such as forums and distribution lists.

That is not to say there is a cut and dried separation. Conspirators may use forums, but they will tend to hang back and only respond when prompted or specifically requested. Those who compete will tend to use forums and distribution lists in bursts -- arguing their point of view vehemently (it is a competition after all) -- leading others to fall silent or complaints of aggressiveness or other asocial behavior.

Of course, there are times when people act trollish in forums. But that is not always the case. Sometimes they are simply communicating in their own, competitive, style which is seen as abrasive by others. But the backlash against their approach will tend to drive them underground until the next subject comes up.

Similarly, there has been a recent fad for using Twitter and live blogging during events (presentations, seminars, etc) as a "backchannel", sometimes even presented on a separate screen during the event. These technologies tend to favor those who favor competition -- literally competing with the presenter in terms of attention. They find this format invigorating. While those who tend to collaborate are extremely uncomfortable with the "noise" created by the competing inputs; their tendency would be to let the speaker have their say before opening the floor to discussion and alternatives.

Mix & Match

The good news is that -- like any personality traits -- there are no hard and fast rules about people's tendencies concerning collaboration. Some people are extremely conspiratorial, some are extremely collaborative, and some seem able to perform well in two different modes. Some people can both collaborate and conspire, while others conspire and compete and still others compete and collaborate. However, I don't think I've ever met anyone who does all three well.

The key is there are points of intersection and the individuals able to bridge the gap between different modes are critical to making the systems "work". For example:

Cultivate personal relationships with the "quiet" members of your communities. Rather than trying to force senior contributors or other conspirers to participate in forums, contact them directly if there is a question you know they could contribute to. In many cases, individuals who would not speak up in public because they "don't have the time" or "have nothing to offer", are more than generous if asked directly 1-on-1. The output of these discussions can then be fed back into the forums by the intermediary.
If someone is making a strident argument (and possibly verging on the abrasive), ask them directly what their suggestion is, making sure they get to explain it in full. You can do this either in public (the forum, meeting, or other venue in which the argument is occurring) or personally 1-to-1. Although this is the opposite of many people's tendency (which runs more towards "you are in the minority, please shut up") it offers a way for competitive members of the community to "have their say" and circumvent further bad feelings. In most instances, they are not trying to block a decision. They simply want to make sure that their point of view is being seriously considered. So once they get to voice it in full, they will allow the decisions be made and the discussion move on.

What I'm Playing: Monster Hunter Freedom 2

2008-09-29T14:00:00.002-04:00

This is not my sort of game. That's not to say I don't like, I do. But I would never have picked it up unsolicited.

What happened is my son played it first and then became insistent we all play it, since it has a multiplayer co-op mode.

Monster Hunter is not my kind of game for several reasons:

It takes a long time to learn. There are a number of training "quests" as well as a slew of different activities you can be involved in (and need to learn about) in the village before you can effectively play the game. There are even "books" filled with information provided for you within the game to help you understand the game mechanics and environment.
There are innumerable little upgrades and tweaks you can (and must) apply to your character and his weapons to make even moderate progress in the game.
Individual quests can take up to 50 minutes to complete, never mind the 10-15 minutes needed to prepare for the quest.

Be that as it may, my son insisted. I relented. And I am now well on my way to being completely addicted.

It is easy to see why Monster Hunter is so popular in Japan. It is essentially Pokemon for the older set. (Older as in over 15; not older like me necessarily!) The game is not only replete with options and configurable details, it is also graphically gorgeous. The landscapes are rich and evocative. (This is all the more amazing when you examine them carefully because -- despite the power of the PSP hardware -- the real magic is in what simple graphical tricks such as two overlaid moving images are used to create this visually rich canvas.)

There are even details to the game with no (at least apparent to me now) purpose beyond adding to the ambiance. Cats cook for you (with individual names and coloration), pigs follow you around (why? I don't know), and a bird occasionally perches on your bedpost. The cooking matters, but the name and color of the cats has no bearing on your quests. And the pig and the bird are -- as far as I can tell -- purely decorations.

At its most basic the game is just a quest, with collection, upgrades, and incrementally more powerful "boss" monsters. But oh what a quest! I would never have had the patience to get through the initial learning curve if it hadn't been for my son's prompting (and instruction). But having got through it, the game is entirely absorbing. I am losing two to three hours a week battling my way to a higher ranking, learning the ways of the monsters as if they were real world threats, and reveling in my victories -- much to my wife's dismay.

I can't recommend this game if you are short on time -- you need to dedicate at least several hours to get into it. But if you have the time, it is quite a ride.

Postscript to a Month of Poems

2008-09-06T19:50:00.003-04:00

After reading a poem a day for a month, I didn't even get through two shelves out of ten. So it will take at least three more months to read a poem by each of the authors in my collection at this rate.

I'm not daunted by the task. The reading is easy. Writing the entries for each day is what takes the time. But I am interested enough in the results to want to continue.

However, there are other things I am eager to write about and don't have enough time for both. So I intend to take a break and start back up the month(s) of poems again in October.

Not surprisingly, I found myself writing more about how I read poetry than about the poems themselves. It is, after all, my blog and poetry is a very personal experience. What did surprise me is that I ended up, more often than not, thinking and writing about the poet's larger work rather than the specific poem I read.

It probably shouldn't surprise me since I have read all of these books before. And, as I began to realize and discuss towards the end of the month, one's reaction to the poems is heavily influenced by the context it appears in. This is not just the difference between reading a poem in a magazine vs. in a complete book of verse. It is a very personal context of all the work you may have read of that poet, when you read it, how you reacted to it before, what you were thinking at the time, what else you were reading, what you heard about the work, etc. Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief" can be heavily influenced by any of these factors.

This intensely personal experience is not unique to poetry; it applies to all of the arts. However, in novels, movies, plays -- even dance and music -- the author has a larger field in which to play and influence the reader's response. We speak of being "engrossed" by books and "enthralled" by dramas. This is where we let the author take control of our responses as we become part of the work of art.

But the poem, in general, is a much smaller physical space where the author may have as few as two or three lines to "set the scene". So we as readers are more likely to provide additional context to "fill in the gaps", so to speak.

The more the poet depends on the reader to bring things "to" the poem (Ferlinghetti for example, or Wakoski), the more possible it is for the poem to be misread or "under-read" as shallow and vacant. Poems that build their own world in miniature (such as the work of Vasko Popa or W. S. Merwin), on the other hand, can appear strange, distant, and almost inhuman to some readers.

This is not a judgmental distinction. Brilliant poems have been written using both methods. The remarkable thing about it is -- given the personal nature of the experience and minimal space the poem allows itself -- how often and how powerfully that experience can be shared. That is the talent of the poet.

(go to A Month of Poems Continued)

Searchable

2008-08-31T09:15:00.000-04:00

Searchable is a lightweight application I wrote for use in a corporate intranet. It is a good case study in how the simple answer is often the most effective.

The design goal for Searchable was quite simple:

The corporate search engine did not cover all of the content employees needed to access
Several applications had their own search interfaces
Employees couldn't remember where all of the content was
Design goal: improve this situation

The design constraints were that we did not control the corporate search engine (we could not change its scope) and we could not replace it or compete with it (both for political and resource reasons -- we did not have a server sufficient to run our own search or produce a federated search).

The team had already tried providing a web site with links to all of the relevant resources. That had -- not surprisingly -- resulted in little significant improvement. It was just too cumbersome for users to jump from site to site, find the search interface, search, fail, then back up to the list and repeat.

What the users wanted was a consolidated or federated search: perform one search and have all the results in one place. This is usually expressed by the exasperated question "why can't we just use Google?"

Since federated search was technically beyond our means, I tried the next best thing. Rather than federate the results, I federated the interface. The result was Searchable.

The key to Searchable is that it provides a single interface. Enter your search terms, select a target, and press Go. The search box remains with the results in a frame underneath, allowing the user to switch targets and search again without losing context or having to jump back and forth. From a design perspective, the entire application operates in the browser (the client) and doesn't require any server resources except hosting the files.

My initial reaction, beyond being proud of the implementation, was that it wouldn't have much impact on the original problem. It doesn't do anything new: the results are the same and the user still has to search each site separately, even if I simplified the process.

But to my surprise, the users were happy, very happy. I could tell because they kept asking for new features and additional targets. (The e-mail link was one such addition, so if they found something they could e-mail the current search results to a friend.)

It seems that simply putting all of the search targets into a single input form was sufficient to alleviate much of their frustration with the fragmented content. They hadn't realized it was possible, so it looked like magic to them.

Searchable Revisited

The other assumption I made about Searchable was that it wasn't much use except on an intranet. I figured the internet is open enough and search engines like Google and Yahoo! are thorough enough that there was no need for a federated interface. (Besides, there have already been federated search engines like Dogpile. What could I provide that they didn't?)

But I actually answered the question myself one day when I was looking for some images online. I found myself trying Google first, then Flickr, then other sites. This was both tedious and not terribly rewarding, since I had to keep entering the same search terms.

So one aspect of Searchable which is not addressed by internet or federated searches is logical scoping by topic. Oh, search engines do segment by content type (images, video, maps, shopping, etc.) But the results are neither complete nor easy to sort and decipher.

Another aspect of searching (which was not originally addressed by Searchable but that I added for this version) is localized preferences. Some search engines allow you to refine your search based on various criteria. For example, if doing job searches you can specify the location to search. In many cases these are attributes that do not change from one search to another. So I added the ability to set and save advanced properties for specific search targets as part of the change options... function.

Try It

This version of Searchable is just a demonstration. I've provided some example targets. There are many more that could be included. The same goes for the advanced properties.

The technology is most powerful when tweaked for specific audiences (by adding and customizing the search targets to match the needs of the audience, such as a corporate intranet). But I have posted it as a sample so people can see it in action.

Pros and Cons

As mentioned above, the advantage of Searchable is that it satisfies a need. The disadvantage of a solution such as Searchable is that it is totally dependent on the REST interfaces of the target sites. If they change their parameters, rename them, or require new parameters, Searchable breaks. In the six months I managed an intranet version of Searchable, I had to update the mappings at least four times. So there is definitely a maintenance cost that needs to be considered before putting a solution like this into production.

The Purpose of Wikis

2008-08-18T08:45:00.001-04:00

In one of the email distribution lists I participate in, the inevitable discussion of whether we need a wiki came up. As usual, this suggestion was followed by arguments for and against, etc.

I won't even go into the issue of people suggesting technologies without any clear reason for using them. What particularly caught my attention was one message that began something like "As I see it, wikis are meant to be..." Why did that attract my attention? Because wikis are a technology. They aren't meant to be anything. they simply provide a set of functions that may or may not be useful for different purposes.

Of course, like all technology, wikis were dreamed up to solve a problem. So if they were meant to do anything, it was to solve that initial problem. In the case of wikis, it was to let a group of people -- anyone -- easily create and edit a website without worrying about versioning, permissions, ownership, HTML, complex formatting, etc. The goal was simple, collaborative creation.

Now, once the technology existed, people found more and more purposes for the technology. Collaborative encyclopedias (wikipedia), event scheduling (barcamp), team/business collaboration (SocialText) etc. To say wikis were meant for one of these purposes over another would be inaccurate... and limiting.

We don't know yet what innovative uses will be discovered for the technology. It is still too early to tell.