A blog looking at business communication, knowledge management, scripting tools, OS technology news and other things of interest to mobile tech workers. As I find interesting news this will also contain pointers to thoughts related to configuration managment, change management and general software development.
When Cooperation Breaks Out, Civilizations Advance
As a mobile technology professional (ok an on the road every day of the working week consultant) cooperation with my peers is extremely difficult and yet when it happens the rewards are great. I believe that the impact that community or collaborative tools can have on mobile professionals is even greater than on people who have opportunities to interact face to face on a regular basis. This is kind of like an un-tapped market for collaboration ...
Bill Venners interviews Ward Cunningham (Link Simon Willison), initial creator of wiki. He has an interesting view about the suitability of Wiki for business. Noteable W. Cunningham quotes:
For questions like, "What's going on in the project," we could design a database. But whatever fields we put in the database would turn out to be what's not important about what's going on in the project. What's important about the project is the stuff that you don't anticipate...
In addition, wikis work best in environments where you're comfortable delegating control to the users of the system...
Wiki has a feel of brainstorming, though it's not as interactive. You can do 10 minutes of brainstorming, and 30 minutes of analysis of the product of that brainstorming, and have something in 45 minutes. The pace on wiki is slower. You could write a page about an idea, or maybe a page about a bunch of ideas. Then you could come back in a week and see what's developed on that page. But if you came back in 15 minutes, not much would have happened. Things happen in a pace of days or weeks on wiki, because people tend to browse by the day or week...
What you get as a wiki reader is access to people who had no voice before...
Do you think that's a viable area for knowledge management?
It's really interesting for internal communications. The term "knowledge management" has gotten a bad wrap, but some people say that's because systems have gotten too complicated. A Blogger-like system is the lowest common denominator to putting stuff up, which may be its benefit. If you can easily search over that stuff or follow topics of interest, I think it could be interesting, but it's not yet well explored...
Also, everyone is linking to Seymour M. Hersh's article in the New Yorker titled THE STOVEPIPE. Mr. Hersh also appeared on NPR's All Things Considered reviewing the article. Check out the audio here. Scary stuff.
In the same vein, I just finished reading David Corn's THE LIES OF GEORGE W BUSH MASTERING THE POLITICS OF DECEPTION (Crown Publishers, October 2003). Not bad in-flight reading although I was a little disappointed with the lack of footnotes. Always a great conversation starter though ;-)
Prior to that, I read Paul Krugman'sThe Great Unraveling. Good reading. I also tripped over the Paul Krugman Archive which has a lot of his audio interviews, webcasts, etc. In case you're interested or haven't noticed all the furour...
The book I am thinking of reading next is Bruce Schneier’s Beyond Fear. According to Crooked Timber:
... it describes in clear, everyday language how we should think about security in the modern world and why even the most sophisticated (especially the most sophisticated) security systems are likely sometimes to fail.
Sounds like something that won't make sleeping on a plane any easier ...
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