Museum 2.0

A 2 day conference with 200 librarians, museum staff, and archivists. It could have been musty, and death by droning powerpoint, but it wasn't. I've just been at the National Digital Forum, and it was fantastic to see Web 2.0, folksonomies, podcasts and mashups being embraced by this community. One of the speakers had already made a del.icio.us account with bookmarks for the sites he referred to, common enough among digerati, but fairly radical for Museum people.

There were some magnificent speakers including Toby Travis from the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Susan Chun from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. These and other institutions are enabling users to tag art works and gallery objects (online) to improve discoverability, and blogs and podcasts to reach out to a wider audience. Some were using Flickr mashups to let the public contribute images to exhibitions, setting up famous dead photographers as Flickr users, creating gallery profiles in MySpace, and even a gallery in Second Life.

One of my favorite examples was a 'Design your own Arts&Crafts Tile' flash application. People could create tiles, and rate each others. They had a very limited number of patterns and colours to work with, and only a title and brief description field for metadata. Given this very limited palette (in fact probably because of it) it was amazing to see what people did, and the kind of dialogue by picture and metadata that occurred as a result.

Another interesting aspect was the thought going in to the interaction between folksonomies and rigorous academic taxonomies as used by archivists and curators. Folksonomies were being used to inform enhancement to taxonomies and the more formal descriptive content around art works. Discussions were starting about faceted folksonomies, the notion of hierarchies and clusters of tags. I'm wondering whether this will get us closer to the emergence of the semantic web. Certainly having the 'memory institutions' involved in this process is going to add something, whether it's needed academic rigour and inspiration, or restrictive pedanticism remains to be seen. Their increasingly excited and engaged though, and that's a great start.

Human Traffic

A number of European cities are trialling a traffic management approach involving a massive reduction in the number of signs and traffic signals.

The mantra is "Unsafe is safe" and the rationale is that the more you try to control people, the less personal responsibility they take. Where there are less rules people take more care, and negotiate via gestures, nods and eye contact. It's been tried in some towns in Germany, and accidents reduced dramatically.

This thinking seems to me to resonate well with reactions against rules based approaches to managing organisational performance. The more you trust people (within an appropriate minimal set of boundaries) the more you get emergence of functional, adaptive behaviour.

OnlineGroups.Net

It's a big day, OnlineGroups.Net have released their 'start a site' and 'start a group' service using a paid subscription model.

I've been using the technology for three years now, right from a very early alpha stage. This was mostly because I shared an office with the creators of the software. I've seen it evolve from being pretty rough and ready to being extremely functional. There are still a few things I don't like, but overall it's fantastic.

I'm a member of ten active groups, and am the administrator for a site that comprises six groups, and is likely to have many more. The things I like the best about the system are:

• the user management - where users can manage their account details in one place, while being members of many groups
  
• the centralised file storage (this makes a huge difference for committees and groups that aren't on the same IT infrastructure)
  
• the focus on good online group facilitation processes
  

Enterprisey

I recently spoke at the Brightstar 6th Annual Strategic Intranets and Portals conference
I was going to blog some notes at the conference, but I stopped as soon as I saw that Michael was doing a much more thorough job than I could have done.

One thing that Michael's presentation raised for me was the relationship between web 2.0 and enterprise collaboration/km technologies. Which is driving which? I've said for a couple of years now that corporate users expectations have been raised by Google. How is it that you can normally find what you're after on the Web, where there's 8 billion pages, and you can't find anything on your corporate document repositories where there's only a few hunderd thousand documents?

Michael asked whether perhaps Web 2.0 was just the bringing of 'enterprisey' collaboration functionality to the public web. To a certain extent I think that's true, especially for those who have been using Lotus Notes for years. I also think that Web 2.0 is driving some innovations from the public web into enterprises though. Blogs, wikis, and faceted classification (tags) are to me, clear examples of this. Lightweight, 'paper thin' portals like Netvibes are also examples of the kinds of customisation that corporate users may start to expect.

Google page rank style search power is another thing that should come into enterprises. The challenge with this is that there just aren't that many links between corporate documents. The reason Google works is that a lot of relevance ranking can be drawn from the number and type of links between web pages. I think this offers a lot more promise than automated context extraction technologies like Autonomy (as fantastic as they are). It was therefore interesting to hear BEA talking about incorporating contextual links between people, documents, and groups to improve search within the enterprise portal space.

I await these developments with interest.

No One Cares

This is my new favourite t-shirt design. I think it's both amusing and enlightening. Amusing because perhaps some people do get all excited about their blogs and want everyone to read them, as evidenced by these "read my daddy's blog" suits for babies.

Enlightening because it's got me thinking further about a podcast I listened to recently which talked about the way people are actually using blogs. Anil Dash from Six Apart talked about blogs and LiveJournal, and the way that the anthropologically derived numbers of 15 and 150 seem to play out here. So while a very small percentage of bloggers have very large audiences, most people 's blogs are read regularly by less than 15 people. They've become another medium for communicating with our close friends, and of forming loose relationships with other people on the periphery of our social circles.

Titillating hexes

I've been using hex post-its for a while, and think they're fantastic. I was therefore very amused to find my partner had bought this T-shirt.

Another interesting observation I've made is that IT people don't seem to cluster hexes very well. They sort of overlap them and get them all wonky. Maybe they're just so use to putting things into rows and columns that they find it hard. Other people (scientists, managers etc) seem to do it with no problems.

Also amusing is that when I use the word 'tesselate' to explain why we use hexes, most non IT people find it very titillating, and snigger things like "I don't actually think it's appropriate to tesselate in public...". IT people however are totally familiar with the term and don't find it funny at all.

Visualcomplexity

This site is a collection of links to projects which visualise complex networks in some way:
http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/

The creator of the site spoke at MeshForum.

The one I like the best is 'We Feel Fine'
It extracts sentences from blogs that are likely to express emotion, e.g "I feel ...", "I'm feeling ..." to create kind of a dynamic mood map of the planet.

Knowledge based on what?

This week we had a very interesting NZ Knowledge Management Network lunch in Christchurch. Mark English from Hindin Communications presented on his experience implementing 'knowledge bases' primarily for large public sector clients.

This approach stirred up a lot of discussion. Many people in the room came from a more 'organic' view of KM, and had a good understanding of the importance of narrative and experiential knowledge in organisations. What the speaker was advocating was a very structured, organised repository of knowledge, so that people could consistently give the 'right' answer. There was a lot of resistance to this until it became clear, through his patient explanations and examples, that there were contexts where this made absolute sense.

In the public sector, there are a lot of government departments and services that do have to give the right answer. The answers are based on policies, which are based on laws. These are things like 'where can I pay my rates?', 'am I eligible for a student loan?', 'what are my rights as a tenant?'. While there is often still some room for interpretation, the answers are fairly well set. The job of a knowledge base in this context is to help customer service representatives to give people accurate information. The knowledge management problem is not one of sense making in complexity, or expertise location, it is getting the right answer, to the right place, at the right time.

While we might be far more fascinated in the less tangible, more intellectually complex aspects of organisation culture and experiential knowledge in our KM programmes, I think there's a real place for better management of this sort of very structured knowledge.

Some of the answers the speaker had to questions raised further reinforced this for me. It wasn't an 'instead of' it was an 'as well as'. Sometimes the answers to questions were "ask this expert". It was just as valid for a system to connect people to people, where the answer couldn't easily be codified. They also had commenting and feedback mechanisms so that people using the information could identify where the rules or facts no longer seemed useful or accurate.

I think it's useful to see KM solutions and strategies as needing to encompass the whole spectrum of knowledge in organisations. If we get too caught up with the tacit, we'll miss real opportunities to add value in the explicit.

Giving up on internal search

I've completely given up on using internal search features of NZ public sector web sites (well, actually all web sites really). I've recently discovered the 'Search this site' button in the Google bar for Firefox. You can of course just use the site: modifier, but the button makes it one step easier. I consistently get much better results using Google than I do the search features on individual web sites. Often they won't turn up anything for a particular query, whereas Google will have exactly what I want right at the top of the list.

I can't help but think that Google has some options in terms of exploring alternate business models for exploiting this advantage they have. Corporates are unlikely to tolerate ads in the search results from their own site, but having some method of paying Google to make it fully transparent that Google is driving the search on a particular site might be attractive.

Spatial memory vs linguistic memory

My colleague Dan is about to launch a new version of his software. They've replaced their existing files and folders system with a tag based one. That's gotten me thinking further about the benefits of taxonomies vs folksonomies. The thing folksonomies lack is the ability to use our spatial memories. With a taxonomy, represented by a navigation tree I can remember physically 'where' I put something. It's up near the 'top' of the tree, and about four folders to the 'right', and about 'halfway down' the list of files. Of course this spatial distinction is arbitrary, the computer could display those folders many different ways depending on sort order etc. Most of the time though, we leave the tree displaying a particular way. With folksonomies there's no 'where'. Everythings in this kind of void, addressable through search and tags. It relies solely on our ability to remember words, to remember what we called something, rather than where we put it. Don't get me wrong, I love folksonomies, and am an avid user of Flickr, del.icio.us, openomy and other tag based sites. Maybe position in a tag cloud might help us use spatial memory to achieve similar results? I'm intrigued to see how easy/hard it will be for people to shift to folksonomy style approaches. I wonder if people who rely heavily on their spatial memories will find it harder than those who are more linguistically oriented.

Filed in: folksonomy taxonomy ontology

The vibe of the thing

For almost 10 years now I've had my own browser start page. Having always worked with, rather than for, large corporates I've never been forced to have a bland company Intranet as my start page. I am, earlier in my career, guilty of architecting and project managing large (perhaps bland) Intranets, however in my defence I always argued strongly for introducing personalisation, even before there were portal technologies to make it easy.

The first versions of my browser start page were just static HTML files, populated with links to sites I used to visit often. I then moved to a content management system that allowed wysywig editing of this. When Google launched their personalised page service last year I started using this. Being able to have the blogs I read feed into portlets was the killer functionality for me. I wanted more though, being an early adopter of Web 2.0 services like del.icio.us and Flickr I thought it'd be great to be able to integrate those. Google hasn't done that yet, but there's a new service called Netvibes which does. It's a fully customisable start page, into which you can feed blogs, Flickr photos, your del.icio.us bookmarks and a whole host of other things. It feels like Portals have actually come of age, when all they are is a single aggregator page for your own purely self selected content...

The Art of Demotivation

Organizational Storytelling is becoming a big movement. So much so that it's been satirised wonderfully by Despair Inc.. There's a link to an audio podcast and a video podcast at the bottom of the page.

LinkedIn tipping point?

Just back from holiday and I'm getting lots of requests from people I know to join LinkedIn. I've been a member of various web based social network systems for a couple of years, but have only been reactive. That is, if someone asks me to join I do, but I don't try to 'build' my online network (I do put lots of effort into my offline social network). I've always been intrigued by the potential for computers to facilitate social networks, but I've been leary of the simplistic approaches taken so far. Then there's the truism that whenever a human system is made explicit it can be gamed.

I'm curious as to what's happened with LinkedIn that's suddenly made it more popular. It will be interesting to see whether this surge dies off, or continues.

What I really want though, is for it to be integrated into the automatic checkin kiosks at the airport. I want them to say "this person in your network is also on this plane, would you like to sit beside them?".