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.
Knowledge happens via connections & relationships, deep dialog and emergence, not via the collection, arrangement, organization of information objects or access to personal tools.
Knowledge flourishes in an ecology, needs diversity exchanges and creative abrasion to be articulated and verified.
Makes you wonder how you might capture knowledge ... That seems to be something I hear too frequently as the rationale for knowledge management, either personal or corporate. Knowledge occurs in the gaps between facts and artifacts ...
There is always a struggle with initial wiki use by corporations. This is particularly so in environments that are enamoured with taxonomies and categorization. It is so tempting to try to preconcieve how a wiki will be used and to force it to work a certain way ... and it turns out that this is precisely the approach that makes it less a wiki and more likely to fail. Frank Carver puts it well:
Trust me, if you want people to contribute on a Wiki, give them a real blank page and actively encourage posting by making it as simple, obvious and unambiguous as possible. Look at c2.com. Look at my demo installation of my own Wiki software. Wiki is about freedom and simplicity. With the the possible exception of the formatting markup, Wiki technology nestles in a "sweet spot" of approachability, usability and power. Move away from that sweet spot in any direction, however well-intentioned, and you begin to lose or dilute the things that make it work.
As you work to establish a wiki in your organization, you are more likely to succeed if you make adding / editing dead easy.
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