knowledge

22 Oct 09

05 Aug 09

knowledge sharing toolkit - KM4 Dev community

great resource for KM

www.kstoolkit.org - Preview

knowledge management KM interesting work business

17 Jun 09

BBC NEWS | Technology | Japan's ambitious digital future

news.bbc.co.uk/...8102854.stm - Preview

technology Japan future society internet knowledge IPR

"Since high bandwidth at low prices is the life blood of an IT society - that is precisely the structural advantage Japan has,"
Tokyo hopes to double by 2010 the number of telecommuters, estimated at about 6.74 million in 2005, or about 20% of the working population, who will take advantage of super fast and cheap broadband connections.

07 May 09

The Magazine » How to Make Sense of Weak Signals « MIT Sloan Management Review

sloanreview.mit.edu/...-to-make-sense-of-weak-signals - Preview

future bias organization knowledge interesting futurology trends KM essential

10 Apr 09

Edge 279: Yochai Benkler as keynote...THE END OF UNIVERSAL RATIONALITY

nice summary and video of his 'thing'

www.edge.org/...edge279.html - Preview

networks information economics creativity knowledge

In evolutionary biology, for example, one thing that you saw was the rise of very sophisticated ways of explaining behavior that seemed to be altruistic, purely in terms that redounded to the benefit of the individual organism. This is where reciprocity becomes so important. What we see again throughout all of these different disciplines is that somewhere around the 80s in some places, like organizational sociology, somewhere closer to the 90s, if you talk for example about evolutionary biology and the resurgence of the possibility of multi-level selection and group selection where it's not all reduced to the individual, there are also components that happen at the group level.
In economics, we see a substantial work in experimental economics, like Ernst Fehr's group in Zurich and Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis in Santa Fe, starting to do experiments that show that people deviate from selfish rationality. That people systematically and predictably behave in ways that are much more cooperative than would be predicted by the game theoretical impact.
18 more annotations...
- You've got theoretical economists, like Roland Benabou, Jean Tirole, and Matthew Rabin, who begin to build quite sophisticated models that try to implement very different kinds of motivations, like even a sense of self image and a sense of 'I'm okay' relative to the world. (There is a beautiful study, for example, from two or three years ago about knowledge workers. (Bruno Frey and Margit Osterloh)) A sense of what's normal and moral.
- In organizational sociology, in management science, you look — Toyota production system was the big ah-ha moment, when Toyota came to the U.S. for the first time and created the first NUMMI plant in GM's Fremont plant in the early '80s. All of the stories that used to be "oh it's Japanese culture, it's something completely different, it's not about us," were flipped. One of the worst performing GM plants in 1980 closes down, opens up two years later under Toyota management, almost the entire same employees said the entire union leadership. Within a couple of years it becomes the most productive plant in the U.S.
- Who knows what the situation is now, but as of the numbers last year, it continued to be one of the three most productive plants in the U.S. Same people, same industry, very different organizational structure built a lot less on hierarchy, a lot less on precise specification of exactly what everybody needs to do. Much more on teamwork, much more on supporting normative commitment to innovation, to process innovation. And still relatively very constrained. It is the automobile industry.
- You move from having 70 process engineers on the floor telling each employee exactly what to do, to having none. And having the teams have a lot of autonomy on how they do things.
- A) that people systematically do not behave according to the traditions of selfish rationality under controlled conditions; B) that when you set up systems with different assumptions, you get different behavior, and you get actually better results. There is a beautiful study, for example, from two or three years ago about knowledge workers. Knowledge work is one of the hard things to get precise in contracts. How do you tell somebody, "How creative have you been at 11:00 in the morning?" And so that's a classic place where having precise contracts to precisely monitor what you do and what you don't do becomes very difficult.
  
  They did observational studies, and they built a model and they built observational studies. What happens to knowledge-sharing within teams if on the one hand, you create explicit incentives, monitor the incentives, you share more, you get more; on the other hand, you build much more team spirit and you make it the thing that's the right thing to do as a member of this team and create much more social relations within the team. What they found was ... setting up a social dynamic that's a team dynamic, and what's understood to be the right thing to do achieves much greater internal knowledge flows than setting up an effort to create incentives. So you have very real implications.
- The answer is, what you have to do is you have to align the incentives of the person at the top with the company. That way they don't want to shirk, because for every dollar that the company is making, they are making ten cents or however much they're making. The result? Executive compensation packages that emerged in the 1990s.
- I have been looking at the social implications of the Internet and network societies since the early 90s. Before that, I was looking at questions of property and 19th century land reform in the U.S. in the Homestead Act, and it struck me as identical. Because it was about how we structure the basic rules of control over the core productive resources of our economy, as a way of structuring both economy and society.
- in fact we're at a major decision point now. These are the core resources that will decide who has economic power, who has social power, who has political power, what are the modalities of organization.
- The decision point is whether we will have a much more radically distributed capacity to create knowledge, information and culture, and participate in the creation of knowledge, information and culture, or whether we will have a replicated and only slightly different industrial structure to information and knowledge production.
- Where we are now, and we already know that we are there, is in a much more permeable and fluid society and a much more permeable cultural environment where the difference between producers and consumers is much more blurred.
- Suddenly you have radically decentralized practical capacity to act. And what do people do? They act.
- They use chunks of time, particularly chunks of time that they used to spend watching passively finished goods as entertainment, in an activity that's a social activity and a creative activity and an expressive activity on a very large scale. This is tilting all of our information, knowledge and cultural industries something between a quarter and two-thirds of the way around.
- but also social production now comes in as a major force. And that re-aligns in different industries more, in different industries less.
- In music today, for example, we're seeing the recording industry fighting an ongoing battle, but we're beginning to see artists really coming out and having a much more direct relationship with their fans.
- In film, we're seeing a much more widely dispersed set of preferences and tastes that are able to be addressed, some of them simply because of the Netflix/Amazon phenomenon of long tale.
- But the decision point is essentially which of these worlds we go. And it's a decision point we're making through law. The copyright wars are a classic instance of trying to set up the technology and the legal environment in such a way that you can keep the horse in the barn, and rent it out for rides, as opposed to having all the horses out. Situations where you get digital rights management and criminalization of breaking or distributing things that overcome digital rights management. That's a place where you see law playing catch-up against the technology that doesn't want to be there, or that isn't going there in any particular way.
- Interesting what'll happen with Kindle, right? Once you can actually load whatever you're downloading into something that's the only thing you're going to use, that gets more ambiguous.
- the non-fungible is the human relationships. That's where the talks come from, that's where the services and teaching come from, that's where the live performance for the musician comes from.
  
  In some cases the spectacle is really the equivalent of the rock star live performance. It's not at all about the human relation, it's about the unique experience. Which in some sense is somewhere between the human connection and the artifact.

02 Apr 09

Fluther: Tap the Collective

www.fluther.com - Preview

web2.0 knowledge crowdsourcing

13 Mar 09

2.10: Meme, Counter-meme

www.wired.com/...godwin.if_pr.html - Preview

memes information evolution knowledge

When a meme catches on, it may crystallize whole schools of thought.
While the world of the Net is filled with diverse critical thinkers
who are ready to challenge self-indulgent or self-aggrandizing memes,
we can't rely on net.culture's diversity and inertia to answer every
bad meme. The Nazi-comparison meme has a peculiar resilience, in part
because of its sheer inflammatory power ("You're calling me a Nazi?
You're the Nazi in this discussion!")
1 more annotations...
- The best way to fight such memes
  is to craft counter-memes designed to put them in perspective. The
  time may have come for us to commit ourselves to memetic engineering -
  crafting good memes to drive out the bad ones.

Institut | Nicod :: [ijn_00000123, version 1] The Trouble with Memes: Inference versus Imitation in Cultural Creation

jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/...ijn_00000123_00.doc - Preview

memes culture evolution knowledge information

Memes are hypothetical cultural units passed on by imitation; although nonbiological, they undergo Darwinian selection like genes. Cognitive study of multimodular human minds undermines memetics: unlike in genetic replication, high-fidelity transmission of cultural information is the exception, not the rule. Constant, rapid "mutation" of information during communication generates endlessly varied creations that nevertheless adhere to modular input conditions. The sort of cultural information most susceptible to modular processing is that most readily acquired by children, most easily transmitted across individuals, most apt to survive within a culture, most likely to recur in different cultures, and most disposed to cultural variation and elaboration.

02 Mar 09

McKinsey: What Matters: Three forces that will transform management

First, as I described earlier, companies today face a set of new and inescapable challenges that lie outside the performance envelope of management as usual. The second driving force is the Internet, which has spawned a vast array of new tools for managing collaboration. In the past, nothing could be done at scale without a lot of bureaucratic structures.
These new Web-based tools will allow hierarchies to form around natural leaders rather than beneath the individuals who have been given formal, hierarchical appointments. They will democratize the workplace and give everyone the chance to help create strategy and offer advice on critical issues. This won’t happen overnight, but organizations will eventually figure out how to use these new tools, just as those early management pioneers learned how to use the telegraph and then the telephone to better manage large-scale organizations.
The values and attitudes of the Millennials now entering the work force make up the third challenge that will compel organizations to retool their legacy management models. If you spent your adolescence creating, collaborating, and learning on the Web, you’ve developed some sensibilities that will be very hard to change once you enter the work force. One of these is the belief that all ideas should compete on a level playing field. The twentysomethings who take this as a point of faith won’t want to work in organizations where a senior executive’s point of view gets an extra measure of credibility simply because he or she sits higher up in the hierarchy.

This new generation also believes that all information should be accessible. The ethos is to share information freely, not to dole it out on a need-to-know basis, as management often did in the past.

What’s more, this new generation believes that people should be measured on the basis of their contributions, not their credentials

whatmatters.mckinseydigital.com/...that-will-transform-management - Preview

management organization KM knowledge internet collaboration

First, as I described earlier, companies today face a set of new and inescapable challenges that lie outside the performance envelope of management as usual. The second driving force is the Internet, which has spawned a vast array of new tools for managing collaboration. In the past, nothing could be done at scale without a lot of bureaucratic structures. Now thousands of people can collaborate around the world online with little in the way of formal hierarchy or management structures.
These new Web-based tools will allow hierarchies to form around natural leaders rather than beneath the individuals who have been given formal, hierarchical appointments. They will democratize the workplace and give everyone the chance to help create strategy and offer advice on critical issues. This won’t happen overnight, but organizations will eventually figure out how to use these new tools, just as those early management pioneers learned how to use the telegraph and then the telephone to better manage large-scale organizations.
3 more annotations...
- The values and attitudes of the Millennials now entering the work force make up the third challenge that will compel organizations to retool their legacy management models. If you spent your adolescence creating, collaborating, and learning on the Web, you’ve developed some sensibilities that will be very hard to change once you enter the work force. One of these is the belief that all ideas should compete on a level playing field. The twentysomethings who take this as a point of faith won’t want to work in organizations where a senior executive’s point of view gets an extra measure of credibility simply because he or she sits higher up in the hierarchy.
- This new generation also believes that all information should be accessible. The ethos is to share information freely, not to dole it out on a need-to-know basis, as management often did in the past.
- What’s more, this new generation believes that people should be measured on the basis of their contributions, not their credentials.