The Knowledge Management Connection   

Very cool and useful -- the Google Toolbar (21-jul-2003)

It's still in beta form, but the Google Toolbar is very useful. 

From the Google Toolbar Web page:

The Google Toolbar is available free of charge and includes these great features:

• Google Search: Access Google's search technology from any web page.
• Search Site: Search only the pages of the site you're visiting.
• PageRank: See Google's ranking of the current page.
• Page Info: Access more information about a page including similar pages, pages that link back to that page, as well as a cached snapshot.
• Highlight: Highlight your search terms as they appear on the page; each word in its own color.
• Word Find: Find your search terms wherever they appear on the page.

Go to http://toolbar.google.com/ to download and install your copy.

The dangers of blogging (03-jul-2003)

I'm a proponent of blogging, but one of my concerns about this fascinating phenomenon is that unless you are extremely diligent about tracing a chain of citations back to the source, you are at risk of creating a chain of misinterpretations.

I fell victim to this temptation when slamming a comment attributed to David Weinberger. [See "Explicitness an act of violence? NOT! (24-jun-2003)"]

It's an old temptation in every form of publishing, but I offer a partial excuse: There seemed to be no chain of connections to a source document. Just a dead end -- that is, until I found this entry by accident in Weinberger's "The Unspoken of Groups" Weblog entry of 01-jul-2003 (which appeared after my entry of 24-jun-2003):

In general, making explicit does violence to what is being made explicit. (In the modern age, Heidegger gets credit for this idea.) Making things explicit isn’t like unearthing an archaeological find that’s just been sitting there, waiting to be dug up. Making explicit often – usually – means disambiguating and reducing complexity.

The reason is simple. The things of the world exist as they are only within deep, messy, inarticulate, shifting, continuous, fuzzy contexts. This is certainly true of human relationships, although I believe it’s also true of all that we find on the earth, waiting in it, or promised above it. The analog world – the real world – is ambiguous. That’s a source of its richness. In making a piece of it explicit, we make it less ambiguous and thus lose some of its value and truth.

Source: http://www.hyperorg.com/misc/unspokengroups.html

My comments of 24-jun-2003 still stand. And I assert that we gain at least as much "value and truth" by making knowledge explicit as we might lose by sloughing off all possible contexts. We call that establishing a consensus understanding of a topic.

But back to the dangers of blogging. Blogs tend to form a consensus among a group with similar interests. That "consensus" has a dark side, especially when it is reached by linking rather than reflection.  Because the creation of links among blogs (and other resources) in Web space is more than just a technical phenomenon; it is a human communication phenomenon strongly reminiscent of high-school cliques. 

• A hot "topic" is spread to most members of the group within the space of a day. The circle of links rarely includes people with strongly dissenting opinions, which would be a natural balancing mechanism.
• The communications/linking serve as a means of strengthening bonds, not just as a means of transferring information.
• There is a danger that the message may get twisted both by misinterpretation and by personal motives.

Those dangers are balanced by great benefits, and there is less danger when bloggers analyze assertions -- which they often do ... in large numbers. But consensus can be dangerous, and it is especially dangerous when it is used to exclude. Our society once had a  consensus understanding that homosexuality was perversion and that minorities were stupid.

The traditional editorial/publishing model may have many weaknesses, but good editors, reporters, and columnists aggressively seek dissenting perspectives to test their assertions.

Explicitness an act of violence? NOT! (24-jun-2003)

The Gurteen Knowledge-Letter (Issue 36, 6 June 2003 -- www.gurteen.com) praises a conversation between David Weinberger and Esther Dyson that appears in Dyson’s Release 4.0 Google News of April 25, 2003. The brief record of the conversation contains the following:

DW: Explicitness is an act of violence. You think it’s archeological: You take something and dust it off, but in fact explicitness reduces things; it destroys.

(http://release4.blogspot.com/2003_04_20_release4_archive.html)

Ridiculous! Especially in the business environment, whose problems David purports to address. David is a very entertaining speaker and columnist, but he’s dead wrong on this one. Dangerously wrong.

Lack of explicitness (or, stated positively, “ambiguity”) is at the heart of all major problems in knowledge-driven businesses. Ambiguity (and the unresolvable complexity that it creates) forms the burdensome chains of knowledge work, wastes the contributions and creativity of knowledge workers, wreaks havoc on all attempts to provide meaningful compensation for knowledge work, and serves as the foundation for incredibly destructive management practices.

Other than that, lack of explicitness is just fine. And we have so much of it that we certainly don’t have to go looking for it.

Today’s key business problems are rooted in lack of precision, not in explicitness.

Finally, someone else is talking about reusable units (13-jun-2003)

Peter Van Dijck recently pointed to information about the XML-based DITA “architecture” for reusable content developed by several people at IBM. See http://xml.coverpages.org/dita.html and http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-dita3/.

I’ve been preaching in technical documentation environments about the need to make content reusable for nearly a decade. Even developed and implemented a model similar to DITA.

The idea is hardly new. It goes back at least as far as Hewlett-Packard “structured documentation” practices of the 1980s. And the Symbolics Document Examiner pre-Web hypertext system is a similar electronic implementation. Hypertext in general implies the intelligent fragmentation of valuable information into self-contained units that make sense in a variety of contexts. (After all, you can’t predict how someone might arrive at a particular unit, so you can't make any assumptions about context.)

But, at first glance, it still looks like the designers of DITA need to address the semantic accessibility and indexing of such units. (I have to look deeper, and I’ll definitely touch base with the IBM people.)  The categorization of re-usable units should be re-usable, too. You’re going to want that categorization information wherever you use the units — on a Web site, in the index of a manual, or in a customer-support knowledge repository.

Ultimately, the whole process of “technical documentation” needs to be redesigned. The way companies do it now doesn’t make sense. (Trust me. I’ve been doing tech doc for over 20 years for a range of companies.)

Think about it. Much of the work of current tech pubs departments is already done elsewhere in the organization … in prior chains of oral and written communication. The difficulty of tech pubs is recreating the usable information created by these chains of disambiguation. The process of communication of information destined for user manuals and help systems is reduced to a single dimension — static documents dissociated from information seekers, contexts, and experts. The painful, error-prone effort to communicate “knowledge” is summed up in yet another one-dimensional document that has the goal of recreating all the contexts — a goal it always fails to meet.