Troy Rice, 05-Aug-05 @ 10:38AM

value our life's time

Around Washington we have started a club which debates any specific issues that a member chooses but where our club's united beliefs are these:
At the end of the day, each of us "exponentially" compounds either: goodwill, trust, sustainability, greater prosperity and quality of life's win-wins with all people around us or badwill, distrust, destruction of quality of life of others

Not to know which we are doing with our time is particularly critical :

the greater the purpose of the system you are connecting
the more power you have to infuence others within the system
the more networks connect local systems with global ones

In choosing these, we were influenced by an expert group , originated in the Southern Hemisphere, who give a lot of their people's time to work witnessing humanitarian conflicts, particularly ones whose root causes begin with rights of very local sorts

I was wondering whether PKM experts have any comments on our values- are these optimal for changing the world as far as citizens in our place (connecting networks to your place) can?

Also does any other citzen group club evolve around some specified trusts? if so who is the group and what are their trust codes? who's most there in the community to sew the seeds of trust and diversity?

Ton Zijlstra, 06-Dec-04 @ 14:40PM

my take-aways from the workshop

Chris asked about the lessons we took away from the workshop. These are mine:

# Personal information strategy is worth exploring

# Hosting conversations like these fill a need

# Learning how to go beyond attending and create results/feed them into your workflow is a need

# Reinforcing the idea of responsibility and activism, and picking up a term for it from John Curran: Knowledge Activist.

# The question where the boundaries between individual and the group are, and how this relates to their interaction and group dynamics

# and a number of things about facilitating events like these.

Ton Zijlstra, 16-Nov-04 @ 14:38PM

Thanks for the compliments

Hi all,

Anne, Sami, thanks for your positive reviews. Although I do think that it reflects somewhat more on how people experienced the other events. Anyway, it was a great afternoon, and I thoroughly enjoyed facilitating it.

Up in the knowledgenetworker wiki (http://wiki.knowledgenetworker.net) I have posted all the post-its (pictures, and transcriptions) so we can try and refactor them into constellations that make sense to us.

I hope Ed will be able to write up a first report of the event, but I will try and order my thoughts about what I took away from it as well, and post it here. About my impressions and a description of how stuff took its course I already wrote a blogpost here:
http://www.zylstra.org/blog/archives/001487.html

It was great to work with KnowledgeBoard this way, and hope we can carry on the discussion we started in the workshop.

best,

Ton

Chris Macrae, 13-Nov-04 @ 08:16AM

Is open to be really tacit and to dare to ask deeper questions than before?

Anne, can you share with us us one AHA, or learning that may lead to a different view -and series of actions on your part - that came out the openness of this meeting and its potential for personal best experience?

Same question for any of the 50 who share the spirit that this was one of KM Europe's best dialogues, meetings? It does need sharing of AHA's to understand what the btreakthrough knowledge is whether in terms of how one person is committed to apply things or communally.

I have started to feel something that is often a bit tacit about community. This feeling is to do with the following paradox of change. Communities cannot really see the changes they need unless individuals are prepared to voice a change experience they got whilst immersed ion a real communal gathering and ask: was that also what made the experience insightful for others who shared it? Daring to raise the question is somehow the opposite process of repotrting what knowledge we acquired - would you say?

Anne Jubert, 12-Nov-04 @ 15:04PM

Real dialog

This workshop was one of the best experiences at KM Europe in my opinion, and a great start for dialogs that will or could go on after this event, dialogs that really matter to the people involved. The topics varied from one group to another- hopefully there will be discussions between the groups as well when the discussions will become "visible" at KnowledgeBoard, so that more people can join in.
Bravo to the organising team !

Chris Macrae, 11-Nov-04 @ 18:14PM

thanks for the report

Thanks Abdul - sounds great; will you be at the knowledge city exchange in Barcelona Saturday through Wednesday. Have managed to get back from teh sates in time for that, and would be good to catch up as I try to catalogue every variant of open space that moves (for the worldwide listerve and among our COP at http://www.openspaceuk.com)

By Saturday I hope to have logged up my vote for the 10 networks other than KM that I would most like to be known in; its a type of PKM quiz I would also welcome anyone joining in at http://chrismacrae.blogspot.com/1999_12_01_chrismacrae_archive.html

Abdul Samad (Sami) Kazi, 11-Nov-04 @ 11:43AM

The beggining of an interesting conversation

I was one of the participants at the interesting PKM workshop. With a turnout of about 50 active participants, engaging in dialogue through the open space method, it was fun trying to digest the views, concerns, and perspectives of all those in the room. As mentioned on the front page of KnowledgeBoard, a workshop report will soon come through followed by a summary of the many take aways from the workshop. My sincere thanks to the organisers and participants for not only making it an engaging experience (one of the best at KM Europe as noted by many) but for setting the groundwork for what I am sure will be an interesting conversation. :)

Arturs Puga, 30-Oct-04 @ 06:12AM

Understanding of PKM

Good morning

Sami, I agree with regards to my personal KM for the job and personal life: "Personal KM: A set of concepts, disciplines and tools for organizing often previously unstructured knowledge, to help individuals take responsibility for what they know and who they know." – the definition from European Guide to good Practice in Knowledge Management. Website European Committee for Standardization. The guide also provides: "KM only makes sense if knowledge is important for the job at hand and when the individual possesses and/or needs knowledge to reach his or her objectives."

About PKM and KM issues, creating desirable futures through actions, there is my presentation „Foresight in Latvia: first experiences” ( for an informative conference "FORESIGHT – A NEW VISION BUILDING PROCESS FOR DEVELOPMENT OF KNOWLEDGE – BASED SOCIETY IN THE EUROPEAN UNION"
in Riga, 01.11.2004). http://www.geocities.com/forwardstudies/forlatv.ppt

Presentations and blogs - I look at them as a powerful tool to help in tacit knowledge sharing. In my opinion, we have to re-think them again and again, to have "a give and take" - to communicate and be with authors at Ba.

Arturs

Cindy Hoong, 27-Oct-04 @ 07:48AM

Might be interesting to know ...

Here is one article that might not at first glance says anything related to PKM or KM or EKM ... but the underpinning message is clear. At least to me.

Article here

Thought provoking. Reality.

Cindy

Chris Macrae, 26-Oct-04 @ 11:53AM

let's all be knowledge workers, and help each other get out of machine age slavery or other bossy regimes

the point as I understand is is that everyone becomes a knowledge worker once we escape from a machine age where most people at work had to stand in line to fill the gaps that dumb machines couldn't do;

in effect wherever you have anything other than command and control - whether that anything is self-organising, your own network, your craft community, you have knowledge work - to which it should be added that there was some great EU research but little follow up that shows that everyone will need access to lifelong learning, and that this should positively discriminate towards those who in the past have fallen out opf educational systems early or not found it easy to linkin later

If you will look here
http://whynotvisakhapatnam.blogspot.com/
you will see some details and can of cousre help boost the conversation of how microfinace in Indian sustainable India villages starts with women - and surely microfinance done caringly as in this context is empowering people to be knowledge workers; more than that, we are saying sustainable escape from poverty comes when everyone in a community co-organises; what traps people in poverty is being commanded & controlled (ie treated as if they have no ability to develop skills beyond thiose that the most repetitive machines or the most basic of farming involve)

It may interest Lilia that Prem's idea for his 150000 vilagers is that they are ready to learn to process instead of just grow cashew nuts; they would like to exhchaage knowhow with Russia in that area where what they believe they can offer is how to organise local NGOs from the people up; somewhere in the midst of this is a wired-up Scottish-Russian angel who is going through hundreds of Russian contacts she has to see if she can find a match. This seems to me to be very good interpersonal KM and network age search , which in effect is where all network KM opens up should we find the project energies to action it.

Discover a project that you know is worth doing for someone else and where trust can flow, throw what knowledge and people network links into it that you can, and then the KM world moves round another way (any other way than the world's biggest psychopaths must be worth your while)

Cindy Hoong, 26-Oct-04 @ 00:19AM

Knowledge workers vs. non-knowledge workers

Hello Lillia,

That is why I highlighted it.

Do we really want to see people being divided into knowledge-workers and non-knowledge workers? Or do we prefer to treat everyone the same and just look at what kind of skills and competences one need to survive in a global, knowledge economy market place? Each of us have different needs. Satisfy my needs that I am lacking and not because I am in this or that bins.

Once we start putting people into different pockets, we are looking at inclusion and exclusion. Something that I don't think the world needs more of it. There you have your win-win case.

Furthermore, as long as we look at knowledge in a 'digital' format, we will have problem understanding the 'analog waves' of human behaviour. One comes in fixed sizes and shapes, and the other not.

Cindy

Abdul Samad (Sami) Kazi, 25-Oct-04 @ 09:15AM

The start of an interesting conversation

It is interesting to observe the divergence and to an extent convergence of various opinions on PKM. Based on my personal experience both as a researcher and consultant to the industry, many people have their own definition/understanding of PKM. In a nutshell, many seen PKM as a means for enhancing one's own productivity through interaction with peers using networking (online and offline) as the main conversatoinal mode. I am sure we are all in for a treat of interesting views adn opinions at the workshop. Hope to see you all there for an interesting dialogue.

Cheers,
Sami

Chris Macrae, 25-Oct-04 @ 07:44AM

scales

Lilia - resized!

Frithjof- I would be interested if you can find us some links to conversations that take PKM into the areas you mention. I believe that PKM has actually been defined in primary use around such questions as : are the organisations around us structured to enable people to apply knowledge with each other maximally? and if not what can we as people do about it? Although, you might hope that we build organisations to enable people to achieve stuff together that they could not do alone, this is something of a fantasy while the main measurements governing organisations treat all machines as investments but all people as costs.

PKM is seen by many people whose conversations I have listened to for many hours an attempt to focus again on Drucker's knowledge worker construct. Does the organisation honor knowledge workers (their right to self-organise around competences and experiences to action learn) in every relationship and reward that it systemises? Drucker's point was that to develop such PKM organsiations would require as much a revolution in every aspect of the system in going from machine-age to knowledge age, as was required to go from agrarian ways of working to industrial ones - when machines were indeed the kings of organisations, and the people controlled to stand in line to feed the connections between machines. So are computers now smart enough to be the feeds between people, or are we still organising around the idea that all people do is serve gaps between computer programs? The latter would mean that we haven't begun to do PKM or trustworthily enable knowledge workers to network yet.

If in every conversation we have about KM we cannot see any construct to help people make network-age organisations more humanly trustworthy - more transparently progressive towards work directed towards the spirit of what the world would uniquely and truly miss if this organisation ceased to exist - then we start to blur why people of all disciplines should have any interest in KM. Are we in organisations where people feel they regularly get a chance to use their greatest abilities (in America, 1.5 million interview by Gallup shows that 70% of people say we are not- this is an exact measure of how systemically immature at PKM organisations are)

Arturs Puga, 25-Oct-04 @ 05:41AM

PKM microactivities

Good morning
Frithjof, you are right, we have more and more to look into PKM microactivities. They could be also explained easier to "non-knowledge workers" promoting KM for everyone and in everyday’s practice.

Sitting on business flight, what could be better for a knower, to increase productivity......
To read the last report or sometimes better to be almost sleeping + thinking, debating at „Ba” space with known and unknown people from the past, the present, the future ?

Arturs

Lilia Efimova, 25-Oct-04 @ 00:47AM

PKM vs. EKM and some other things

Technical note: Chris, could you please resize your image or link to an external version because it brakes the layout and makes text difficult to read?

Now to the point :)

Contrasting PKM with EKM was intentionally provocative, for me the focus is pretty much about discussing "what and how personal KM can add to organisation-wide KM initiatives" :)

Denham, I guess we both know and respect positions of each other :) This workshop is a good opportunity of f2f to have a conversation with larger group of people about dilemmas and uncertainties on the topic.

Cindy, you are right on the issue of knoweldge workers vs. those who are not... I wonder if contrusting them brings a lot of value (and I wonder if contrusting personal vs. team interests brings value - can we think of a win-win case?). Also thanks for bringing the topic of individual and cultural differences into the discussion.

Rereading the text now I realise that it's contradicts the title of the workshop a bit (should be more question marks than statements in the text :)

Frithjof Weber, 24-Oct-04 @ 23:14PM

What about something narrowmindedness like: "do not sleep on the aircraft"

Hi,

Aren't there so many moments where we are not productive? There are!

Sitting on a business flight and sleeping well. Hmmmm... Shouldn't I be reading the last report or a good topic journal or preparing the next presentation? This would certainly increase my productivity!

Why not having a look at these micro activities? I am sure they will have a strong impact on increasing productivity.

This first example was intentionally a bit polarising (and still true :-). But what about activities like: "Tell your lunch mates the problem which currently bothers you" (-> and it is very likely that they will come up with good suggestions). This is another way how to increase your K productivity.

I think PKM could have a look in such micro activities. One half of them will belong to classical issues like time management, systematic way of working, etc. and are not so new (but still relevant) and the other half will look more from a real knowledge and social perspective and produce some new behaviours.

And I can still enjoy a short nap on the aircraft or the overwhelming bird's view on the snowy Alps in the sun rise.

Frithjof

Chris Macrae, 24-Oct-04 @ 12:10PM

sounds celf-centred but..

Cindy, Denham, anyone

would love to see you construct your own version of chris macrae networks

reason: then I could see which social nets I love most might twin with those you love most; by love I mean will move the earth for with what means that I can be and time that I can give

Of course, we can also look at this from the universe down; and this is where guided interpretaion counts; but remembering I am a simple low-tech but hi-net guy, I'll place my bets with google for a while, and if you can explain to me why you'll bet somewhere else, who knows we might be able to make the links so both do no eveil in every relationship they multiply

that's all we need to link through spaces, people, places who no the do no evil code in everything they measure and have human contexts they are prepared to be transparent about

I dont know why it should have become such a big all until I map back what organsiations who didnt measure & trust this code every quarter compounded (the Enron family has dozens of surviving and not so good bretheren among the 100 most powerful orgs in our world, as now - see http://www.thecorporation.com if you prefer a socila lawyer's research to mine). However, I do try to open source this sort of globalization consequences research here

Cindy Hoong, 24-Oct-04 @ 10:24AM

PKM vs EKM

Putting aside what are the right/wrong skills and competences for PKM. I also have problems with the terms PKM for knowledge-workers. What do we do with people who are not knowledge-workers? Does that mean THEY don't need to know all the skills and competences of PKM?

Furthermore, if we do know who is knowledge-workers, and who is not ... we still have another problem. Even a knowledge-workers have to work with a non-knowledge-worker sometime. The picture I see is instead of narrowing the division, PKM is going to widen the gap. I must be missing something here. Should PKM ONLY for knowledge-workers?

White collar vs Blue Collar. Knowledge-workers vs non-knowledge workers.

Cindy

Denham Grey, 24-Oct-04 @ 02:19AM

Improving k-worker productivity

In many ways the PKM vs. EKM polarity misses the point. To be an effective knowledge worker means you have to build social capital, network, feed weak ties, engage in creative abrasion, share emergent meaning, make sense and participate in deep dialog.

This is clearly not a personal thing, it is about building relationships so learning, awareness and knowledge can flow, maintaining trust, asking interesting questions and listening. The keys to personal productivity in knowledge work all appear to point to social skills, open communication, continual learning and holding diversity as a quality.

I do not think the key PKM skills are time management, personal idea organization, PIM tools, contact management, blogging or reflecting in private - rather engaging in dialog, collaborating in learning, exploring as a community, making distinctions, bringing forth new meaning and contributing to group practices.

The real paradox is: K-worker productivity is ALL about working in community - not what or how YOU do, but what you can achieve TOGETHER with others!

Be interested to see down which path this meeting heads

Cindy Hoong, 23-Oct-04 @ 21:33PM

One grain of Rice feed many different kinds of personality

Sure. We would like to coach knowledge workers how to network, how to 'make them see' what are good for them ...

But, are we all born equal? Do we all born with the same characteristics? Do we all perceive things the same way? According to Hofstede, there are 3 levels of human mental programming: Individual, Collective and Universal. The other two can be influenced by the environment, society etc. Characteristics for 'individual' is(are) unique. Not even share by twin. Which means, just the same as everything else, PKM might help some knowledge wokers to improve their productivity. I see the shift of focus from organizational level to individual level.

We first encourage globalization. Globalization means people have to work with people of all nationalities and types. By promoting PKM that means we are encouraging 'individualistic' behaviour. If that is true, how then can we work 'collectively' in a global economy?

Networking for the goal of achieving collaborations for the good of the team is very different from networking for 'PERSONAL' KM.

So, which way should we go?

Cindy

Chris Macrae, 23-Oct-04 @ 18:57PM

picturing the second systemic view of PKM

Chris Macrae, 23-Oct-04 @ 11:51AM

do you agree that there are 2 main views of PKM

We can either say: what context do I care about so much that I will sustain/change around it in everyway I can. Two experessions of this are:
a) how Prem Kumar has spent 25 years building an NGO that now supports livelihoods of 150000 Indian vilagers
b) How to teach children to use email to be their open space gatewary to mentors and agents through life

Or we can ask is an organisation's system up for enabling PKM as well as hierarchy. If so, what is the first flow other than just top-down that KM must change systemically/measurably coordinates given that personal networks and knowledge workers start from individuals up - whether the flow that matters most in your organisation is eg social network mapping , CoP , Blog links with intranet. To embed such a second system, a new type of auditing wholly different from tangibles that global accountants monopolise will need to be included in every audit cycle. Unless accountants move over for this new maths, KM, personal KM and indeed globalisation's knowledge impacts will never make organisations better for people.

As case after case now shows from NASA to productivity studies by London's Work Foundation, low productivity isnt a worker problem anymore it is management's systemic problem with measurement.