Bootstrapping the knowledge network

In the first stage, the tools encourage a degree of commentary and reaction to what you find or create (in k-logging mode). However, it also encourages a degree of stream of consciousness style. Progress, in that it can represent a contemporaneous record of the contextual issues that were top of mind. Problematic, in creating new content that eventually needs to be revisited and processed at a level once removed from the moment.

[McGee's Musings]

It's true that I'm impatient for knowledge networking to reach critical mass. I thought the singularity would occur years ago, and I was wrong. I hope it's happening now, and while I could be wrong again, it's clear that something has changed. People are doing what I spent years of my life and hundreds of pages of my book advocating. They are migrating communication that is not necessarily private and interpersonal into spaces that are public and group-oriented. This behavior lays the foundation for all else that may follow.

We want nothing to interfere with the evolution of this behavior. In particular, we don't want burdensome rules and complex protocols to slow things down. The lesson of HTML, vis-a-vis SGML, must never be forgotten. At the same time, we would like -- if possible -- not to foreclose options unnecessarily...

[snip] 

...The progress that Jim McGee cites in his posting is becoming a reason to care. Once enough people do care, the problems he cites can be addressed. Maybe you could say that RSS .92 is the booster rocket, and RSS 1.0 the payload.

I don't think the boost phase would be compromised by enabling (not requiring) Radio writers to exercise the titling option in RSS .92, and then enabling Radio readers to scan titles (from .91. 1.0, and perhaps .92 sources). But in truth, it can wait. Until we get ourselves into orbit, it won't matter.

[Jon's Radio]

Like Jon, I've been impatient and frustrated that knowledge management/networking has been so slow to accelerate. I have a long list of things that I'm pretty sure won't work (they're usually the first half dozen things management thinks you should do, BTW). I'm now starting to hope that this most recent influx of creative energy will be what finally lifts us to orbit.

[There's a lot more to reflect on here, but I've just been told there's a grilled cheese sandwich (with some great Vermont Cheddar)with my name on it downstairs. I'll be back (sorry Arnold). Refueled and back to work...]

Fundamentally, knowledge management is a misleading term. It conjurs analogies to managing inventory or finances that lead to wasted time and energy. Or we think of knowledge as some next step up the ladder from data and information on our way to wisdom. Most large-scale industrial organizations work diligently to absolutely control the creation and application of new knowledge. In the industrial model, a little knowledge goes a long way.

Years ago I worked for one of the big systems consulting firms. In a conversation on a flight from New York to Chicago, one of the partners told me, "Jim, we can't have everybody thinking for themselves, 90% of the people here are just pulling on the oars. If everybody decides to steer we won't get anywhere." There's a huge amount of industrial logic in this. You want to control risk. You want predictable results. You want control and replicability.

What makes the transition to a knowledge economy so scary is that it disrupts this equation. What if one of those guys pulling on the oars figures out how to make a sail? Contemplation of these questions makes innovation and new knowledge creation feel like potential chaos. Easier to push the problem into the categories that promise continued control.

This is not simply a story of pointy-haired bosses trying to keep the cubicle mice contained in their maze. Life is scary and uncertain in the cubicles as well. A knowledge economy takes us back to a craft world that we've all left behind. We're educated and socialized to operate in an industrial model, not in a knowledge craft one.

Instead of being able to relax within the certain boundaries of a specific cubicle, we're having to learn how to be new kinds of generalists. We're having to learn Journalism 101, Library Science 101, Economics 101, and Organizational Behavior 101. Not as a path to specializing in one well-defined silo. But as a new distribution requirement for well-rounded member of the knowledge economy.

12:53:27 PM •  • comment