The Knowledge NETWORKER and R&D for Angels
06-Jan-03
This is less an article; more a space under communal construction.
Before Christmas I had this telephone chat with Frithjof , and the idea emerged: suppose we constructed a sig where people who are coming to the Berlin Knowledge Angels meeting could leave their “post-its” on what they most wanted to discuss.
The reasoning for this idea being that a lot of the presentations or dialogues for the meeting are to be open spaced by the participants and so that people can use the two days to make useful people connections and start practicising the angel values of
• build on smart relationships
• act as a living system
• to be open, transparent, excellent
• to think big.
I understood Frithjof to say that he will invite different people to start themes within this sig chosen with the hope that everyone coming to Berlin will find at least one article where they want to add their post-it of what interests them most. My sub-theme is the idea of the knowledge NETWORKER.
THE KNOWLEDGE NETWORKER & idea of ANGELS
I think that the knowledge networker faces the same challenges as Peter Drucker’s Knowledge Worker. Most of us are still so inexperienced – at 8 years of age I am quite old to have relied on virtual modes for doing a lot of my business since 1995. And the knowledge networker is I believe dependent for his or her performance and relationships of trust not just on level 1 personal qualities, but 4 more levels:
- 1 personal qualities, networking beliefs and experience
- 2 the community space you are trying to practice networking in such as a CoP or a knowledgeboard
- 3 the organisation system that may own or co-own the community space
- 4 the system of system interfaces – so if a company has extranet that interfaces not only with the company’s intranet but with other organsiation’s extranets, and our knowledge networker has to find his/her connections through all the knowledge support –or lack of support – designed into levels 2,3,4
- 5 there are even system of system of system interfaces. At least I believe this comes into play when you ask fundamental architecture questions like what was the founder of the wwww or the inytenet or the blopg or the co-content managing architecture trying to design in so that knowledge networkers could use their time to most valuably productive and social effects. Another System Cunbed impact may be the EU’s own Knowledge Society plans and implementation which aims to contruct the infrastructure for our 25 countries development of human capital, social capital as well as businesses
So please feel free to add your "post-its" at any of the 5 levels of networking: 1) personal, 2) within a community space, 3) within a system, or 4) system squared, or 5) system cubed. Or across the board if these 5 levels get in your way of raising what matters.
Both questions or statements of experiences you have at any level or anything else that you want to debate regarding the overlap between:
-what will further the R&D needed for Knowledge Angels to get lift off
and
-how does the human or technology needs of the knowledge networker’s growing up at the 5 levels come into your picture of things to come.
I will be trying to add some links to some candidate resources that we have already started to develop at the Emotional Intelligence Sig.
For example, until someone gives me a better bookmark, I believe Debra Amidon’s new book the Information Superhighway is the best opening primer to understand system cubed infrastructure issues and connect them all the way round to what great knowledge networkers will do. We also have many extrordinary papers on the EU's Knowledge Scoiety vision for social and human capital - bottom left of EI homepage
Equally I have started some bottom-up threads no. 1 & no. 2 on my learning by mistakes as I have fumbled into being a knowledge networker with permission to contact 4000 professionals in my inbox.
One of the greatest problems as I see it is that most of the good clues for networking at human and community levels remain tacit if that’s the right word for something where we need simple meta-disciplinary vocabularies which we don’t yet have; and where we need to realise that most intangibles productivity stands or falls on human connections and trust-flow. Unfortunatley, large organisations do not yet have the right governance systems or maps to be sure that the dynamics of networking are being sustained in progressively better ways. Most numbers supplied by accountants and business cases supplied by professions that prefer to rule over the knowledge networker rather than openly learn with them are in reality destructive of intangibles productivity as this (largish) EU Report concludes .
If you don't want to openly "post-it" at this article without a private chance to rehearse perspectives, please post to wcbn007@easynet.co.uk your mails on knowledge networker - I may not have great expertise but I do have passion for trying to understand what I see as a vital human component of openly growing our communally preferred futures of our 21st C.
Sincerely, Chris Macrae in London, looking forward to first visit to Berlin in 20 years...
Details
- Author:
- Chris Macrae
- Publisher:
- KnowledgeBoard
- Date:
- 06-Jan-03
- Categories:
- Knowledge Angels
- Sections:
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some updates to this thread
Currently for reasons the gods only know: nobody has editing permission for knowledge angels sig - perhaps water angels were too examinationally transparent 1,2 , 3in the big questions they wanted to open space and raise across Europe cities
In spite of profile suggestions to the contrary, I still edit one story interest group - on maps that help emotional intelligences (trust, communal love, courage, openness, deep care) flourish between people and the relationship systems that compound what is done and well as how time is pent innovating in service economies. (Hush: Biggest Valuation Secret to keep faith with: Service & knowledge multiplying economies are wholly different from industrial machine-capitalised thing economies.
love, chris
Ps can anyone tell me ho Olaf's post got vaporised?
communities always will grow at their own slow speed (unless a god kills them off)
Olaf
I am just adding a counterpoint to some of what you have said , not that I disagree with the passion but
1) It is still my personal experience that however urgent I think a topic is, communities tend to grow slowly in their actual participation even while this whole seems to be growing quite strongly in its total numbers. The worst mistake a virtual community can make is to expect people to come to it fast. It's also the case that we have quite a huge volume of content now; I think sig editors should do more cooperative planning than we do but I am not sure how
2) I am more hesitant about the google priority than you. I would rather focus on quality by getting most newcomers to knowledgeboard coming because they were personally recommended it; and having some way to greet the newcomer so they found at least one sig that felt like home. The pattern behind my thinking makes knowledge angeling more important and the mass search links much less important. My vote would be to really prioritise how we think about the relationship connecting pattern that humans can do before what the technology can bring in from the cold.
2005 update - my biggest error - if I put anyone off google, I repent and correct here, and as for google's freeware of a personal search on my lap -wow that's the greatest advance for a messy 1 million file person like me in my knowledge experience since I saw & 12th graded email
distributing content and participation
wow-olaf you identify the key challenges of social capital of virtual communities
Here's my 2 views to start the ball rolling to see other people's views
1) We are still at the stage of under-participation rather than over-participation. Welcome everyone who spends time posting that's positive and connected to your sig. Topics interesting me most often connect sigs not specialise their silos. So good practice could be:
-make sure any contribution is customised to sig you put it in BUT also link to any main prior conversation so people interested in the topic can know where its pure roots are as well as its sig-applications. ( Individuals have to take responsibility for this because currently sig editors cannot over-edit threads )
2) Best way to avoid having a content clique is to encourage the widest of all participations. Very few virtual communities achieve more than 5% regular content participators. We must be the exception but this will require learning in at least 3 areas:
2a structural design - some of K'board is very clunky for linking and summarising prior understanding; this cannot be changed until a version change across all Sift boards; SO we should have a suggestions area where we collate ideas for improvements all in one place when reversioning is done
(example suppose anyone who chose to could register to receive all mail posted within a sig's threads in one go; this device would increase participation within article threads hugely versus today where you have to have contributed to a thread before you can get its mails. This is why most threads (even those with 70 posts have less than a handful of participants)
2b as a meta-cop, there's lots to learn - even the sig editors seem shy to exchange learnings with each other; but do we yet have the right spaces for this?; most of us are volunteers, do we need some budget? eg then we could have a once a year real reunion
2c even more broadly than what happens within our virtual confines at the Board, is the issue of do we all behave as knowledge angel ambassadors behind what gets seen on the board and everywhere else-eg how proud are we to promote/identify K'Board as the world's open best of its kind. Knowledge Angels process and behaviours needs a deep research and practice program; its new to many of the 4000 of us; and truth to tell its probably the biggest agenda that KM funders forgot to make pivotal- so you could say the future of Knowledge wherever it is applied is now desperately seeking to fill the gaps of what the keyonote speaker at the EU social capital conference called the 3 key sucess factors: participation, participation and participation
Thread for discussing KM & Social Capital and surrounding papers appears at bottom of KM&EI sig
K'Board family of open meta-communities
Here is a layer of contexts ripe for networking angels if ever there was one -at least I think so and am passionate about any debates around these claims
EU K'Board vision: a global movement for knowledge sharing and discovery, a Linux-type movement for everyone involved in KM...Review 1 (from Japan): I have learned from Knowledgeboard that "if we share, we can win"
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As I see it co-content managing may be to web-based communities and networks what email is to those without webs
Questions this raises in my mind:
-Is K'board already the best co-content managed structure on the web for open professional use?
-Do we as a practice community of co-content managing share learnings and experiments as time productively and in a way that builds all our learning cuirves?
-Assuming you feel yes to the above two -or that we can get to yes - then how do we make sure that the EU's other open profession and policy applications build with K'board experience rather than reinvent the wheel. The biggest open community experience of the next 3 years looks like being the Commissioner of Employment and Social Affairs' "Knowledge Society" aimed at open convergence of 25 country's social and human capitals. How do we make sure enough angels network across to all the experts in social and human capital so that their movement is also patterned around knowledge sharing and discovery of K'Board's Linux-type genes - wouldn't it be wonderful if we can all learn from each other even if our content applications have different end uses? Conversely, it would in my mind be a negligent waste of European taxpayer's money (and a missed opportunity for our continent's people and knowledgeworthy capitals) not to whitebox what K'Board already enables. That would be like starting 3 years behind in co-content managing meta-practice communities, and doing so without 4000 experts in knowledge management that already commune through this space. How do we get The Employment Commisioner to understand the subtleties of the human connecting progress the four thousand of us have made in our first 3 years to being one of the best spaces on the web, and especially as one conducive to and passionate about developing knowledge angels values and the ICT that supports them?
update of parallel 2002 work inspired by knowledge & water angels
List of Authorities being monitored by Water Angels
Macrae
Water authorities we could never choose to be near anyone we loved: Bechtel
Water interests we have heard many unhappy reports of : Nestle, Coca-Cola ( do you wish to transparently share views
The 1000 Water Angels are congregating with this pledge and purpose.
My pledge as a Water Angel is to write to the Water Board I am a customer of and to ask what does anyone in their company do that specifically helps people in the poor world with desperate need of drinking water. We are compiling an online public scoreboard and your rating will be zero unless you provide an answer we can scale
0=No expressed Interest
5=Does stuff that the world should know about
(intermediary gradings 1 to 4 still to be verbalised)
If my Water Board replies I will send the reply to the grading centre. Once there are one Thousand Water Angels we will celebrate by circulating our communal knowledge pack, and those interested in this issue can then further the cause by leading local briefings etc confident in the knowledge that we have world class research to feedback to our local communities.
More Details on EU Water Angels Updated European Union open discussion thread started October 04 : The Day that Water Dies
The 1000 Water Angels is a sister to The Million People Webs