Since we started using the Confluence enterprise wiki platform at my current job, I’ve come to a better appreciation for the use of fields in wikis, particularly as I’ve worked more with wiki templates.  With hundreds of projects deployed on multiple tiers, it’s very important to have the information about the servers, infrastructure tools, and applications organized in a standard way, so we can find and share information more easily (especially when getting a 3 am page and troubleshooting a system).   Templates and field structures can certainly help with that.  For example, one could have a drop-down list of approved operating system versions to pick from on a server information page template.

I still think fields should be used judiciously (if at all) when trying to encourage wiki use.  When just trying to add some data, it can be very frustating to encounter a field mechanism that seems poorly designed, such as incomplete dropdowns or incorrect-seeming unalterable items (though sometimes these may be due to fundamental disagreements about the intended use of pages/information).   Some people will not have the time or patience to try to contact wiki admininistrators or other users to work out a fix to the field or a common understanding of the page; they may just give up and not make the contribution they were planning. I was happy to notice recently that LibraryThing had fixed the dropdown that had so annoyed me before.  There was a long stretch of time before that where I just wasn’t as enthusiastic about them.

Where there are wikis with multiple users and audiences, sometimes compromises will have to be made, or one path or another chosen in structuring input mechanisms.  Sometimes this just doesn’t happen fast enough to keep up with changes going on in the world.  Where possible, I recommend having some kind of an open notes section in addition to fields, so that there’s at least a hope of keeping the contributions flowing and finding the (up-to-date) info one needs.  Also, anyone with ownership of the page (or at least some feeling of responsibility towards its contents) should probably set up a notification so they’ll know if the contents change, and perhaps be able to address problems/disagreements in good time.

When I first read the Wimsey quote, it appealed to me powerfully, bundling up ideas of a clear mind, no wasted actions, and excellence in form and function in one word, “efficiency”.  I still think there’s a lot to be said for efficiency (I’m thinking of meetings years ago that went around and around and around with no goals and no action items, resulting in nothing but frustration and rapidly declining attendance).  However, efficiency isn’t everything, and efficiency-uber-alles can actually be harmful.  Over-engineering for efficiency (e.g., a determination to eliminate all redundancy) may engineer out flexibility and responsiveness, making a process fragile.  Moreover, an over-focus on efficiency can mire one down in incremental changes, distracting one from innovations with great potential for the Big Picture.  Not an exact analogy, but I’m reminded of all the work being done to improve web map performance (turnaround for users) before Google came along with a new idea for web maps (drag the map with the mouse!), making online maps much more exciting.

If you hadn’t had a devkit buffer open before the extradimensional mugging, you wouldn’t even have noticed the missing twelve thousand lines of code. [...] 

“Who’s got access to your version control system?” you ask Venkmann.

“Huh?  What’s that got to do with it?”

“Plenty, I think.”

Version control!  In a fun near-future novel (international finance, spies and skullduggery, ubiquitous computing, and MMORPGs)! I was looking forward to seeing how the version control angle played out (and what tool was being used), but it was never directly mentioned again, just the larger security angle.

There are 15 reviews of this book already up at LibraryThing, so I’ll just mention a few more odds and ends:

•  annoyance at rushed ending was compounded by the realization that some of the interesting stuff that had been dangled before the reader in this book was just sequel set-up, like Stross did to The Family Trade
• but at least the romance was more believable in this book
• corporate and tech aspects were convincingly portrayed
• contrary to one reviewer’s confused account, the zombie flash mob was NOT the same as the zombie horde.  They were on/used by different sides, in different places, in different ways.  That was part of the *fun* of this book.

I enjoyed this book, but as a book, Stross’ Glasshouse was better, and one I recommend unreservedly.

As with ”knowledge gardening”, a web search reveals that others have used the phrase “sustainable development” (in the context I mean in this entry) before me.   In fact, Kevin Tate wrote what looks like a pretty good book about about it; here’s an excerpt.

It’s a bit frustrating that there seems to be more excitement and easier access to XO information at OLPC News (not affiliated with OLPC!) than at laptop.org (=OLPC).  There was talk last night of forming a user group via OLPC News to do our own self-support.  Someone else came up with a better Give One, Get One ad (clearer explanation of benefits to the giver).  Another non-affiliated site is xoforall.com, but I haven’t had a chance to look them over yet.

I started using LibraryThing because I liked its tagging power (for browsing and searching). I also liked its less-commercial book pages, fondness for and willingness to work with libraries, and above-average books reviews from LT members, and book-based discussions (easy to find and see updates on discussions of one’s favorite books/authors). But mainly, I liked their approach to tagging. View one’s own tag cloud, author cloud, tag mirror, and community tags for books! Play with tag combinations to find very specific books! This last feature I especially like, because it combines the metadata from individual taggers to allow searches they might never have thought of trying to foster. One person might tag a book by what interests them about the author, another by something about the characters, another by the locale; the sky’s the limit. If enough people are tagging, useful and interesting information will bubble up, and the noise won’t matter — and what’s noise to one person might still be useful to another, and it’s all there.

Now, however, LibraryThing is rolling out its new Common Knowledge feature which uses fielded wiki technology. I don’t know how much effort this will take away from tagging by LT members; I intend to ignore this as much as possible (not easy, considering it’s on the book and author pages). Other people have written about issues with specific fields (e.g., binary thinking above does not work for some authors/collaborations). I know some people like it, and I know some of the issues may be smoothed out. However, the idea of one person at LibraryThing getting to decide what are valid values to allow people to put in for some of these fields seems like a step back to me. I’m afraid it will combine the worst of both worlds: rigid (“expert” knowledge determining categories/values, not necessarily so expert/authoritative in all cases, and prone to being outdated/inflexible) and error-prone (at least Wikipedia facilitates footnotes/cites/references for factual claims, and makes it easy to discuss potential changes with a discussion page per article … and offers RSS for both articles and discussion pages).

[Edit: removed scare quotes (see comments) and an unconstructive aside]

[Update!  I was happy to notice in 2009 that LibraryThing had fixed the dropdown depicted above.]

(Bigger version of this picture)

Voting with my feet, I unsubscribed from that branch’s feed and subscribed to the feed of another nearby branch (I’m sort of in between three different library branches) which provides more useful info (i.e., the title/author of the next work being discussed at its next book club meeting).

• Why OLPC’s Give One Get One Will Sell Out Fast
• Handy; sealed-rubber keyboard; screen swivels into tablet/e-book reader
• September review, by 12-year-old

Camera, video/voice recording, music-making, long battery life  and solar power / pullcord recharge, browsing, word processing, drawing, read in the sunlight, …

[Update:  might get a pullcord recharger, or a foot pedal, or a crank, but not a solar panel for G1G1 ]

1) from other bookseller sites in addition to Amazon.com (e.g., Barnes and Noble, but you have to search from one page higher, the 1st search results page, not the specific-edition book page). It’s all about where the site gives the ISBN such that the bookmarklet can feed it through to the library search engine.

2) From other windows browsers, better in some (Opera?) than others (Internet Explorer broke the one-click-ness for bookmarklets, but if it’s worth it to you, you can make it into a regular old pull-down bookmark sort of thing). Instructions for alternate browsers are at Jon Udell’s Library Lookup page (linked from my original entry).

But wait, there’s more! Having that URL allowed me to finally get John Udell’s LibraryLookup bookmarklet generator (search from an Amazon book for a copy at your local library) to work. I had to tweak the URL a bit, but here’s the bookmarklet: MCPL (MD). Left-click the link and drag it to your Bookmarks Toolbar in Firefox, go to any Amazon book (specific book/ISBN number, not the search results page with multiple books), and click on the MCPL-MD link to see if the library has it and place a hold.

[Update:  "Find At" is now called Buy, Borrow or Swap, and it's now at the top right of a book's Work page]

LibraryThing MAGICNUMBER URL: http://webcat.montgomerylibrary.org/uhtbin/cgisirsi/x/x/x/57/5?user_id=webserver&password=ibistro&searchdata1=MAGICNUMBER

Library Lookup URL for bookmarklet to search from Amazon: http://webcat.montgomerylibrary.org/uhtbin/cgisirsi/x/x/x/57/5?user_id=webserver&password=ibistro&searchdata

Vendor: sirsi

Bookmarklet text: javascript:var%20re=/([\/-]|is[bs]n=)(\d{7,9}[\dX])/i;if(re.test(location.href)==true){var%20isbn=RegExp.$2;void(win=window.open(‘http://webcat.montgomerylibrary.org/uhtbin/cgisirsi/x/x/x/57/5?user_id=webserver&password=ibistro&searchdata’+'/uhtbin/cgisirsi/x/0/0/5/?searchdata1=’+isbn,’LibraryLookup’,’scrollbars=1,resizable=1,location=1,width=575,height=500′))}

Penguicon prep: I was very glad that the time I spent pulling slides together, doing dry runs (thank you co-workers!), and adding last-minute Penguicon images paid off with a well-received presentation. I had also spent time emailing with my co-panelists (who was covering what), copying don’t-miss events into my Palm Pilot (with over 10 events going on simultaneously much of the time, it would have been easy to overlook items of interest), and acquiring and reading Nifty Guest John Scalzi’s The Android’s Dream (I’d already read stuff by most of the Guests of Honor). Fun read, with more to it than reviews had led me to expect.

Travel and transit: People reacted with concern when I mentioned flying with Northwest, but it worked out fine for me. I liked the Detroit Metro airport (DTW), especially its shiny red monorails. Driving to/around the con was fine except for construction slowdowns and rush hour Friday night.

Convention organization: Check-in was quick and painless. Con Ops was right on the main hall and appeared available and in control every time I passed by. In most cases programming had guessed how to match room size and audience size pretty well, though I was sad that I got to the RepRap talk (open source personal manufacturing device) too late to be able to really see in — that one was packed and flowing out the door. The program book was above average. It came with a map of the main floor, pointed to the Consuite (which provided sandwich materials and fresh veggies, not just chips) and reminded readers that eating real food and getting sleep would help maintain stable moods (another blogger noted what a drama-free con this was), and had a cool essay in the back on Knowledge Ecology by Programming Chair (Wrangler?) Matt Arnold that tied in neatly with my presentation.

Pictures and more entries forthcoming.

A close second was “Geek Spaces” (organization and display of one’s books, art, and collectibles), chiefly due to the enthusiasm of an attendee for the game room project I mentioned (leading to much drafting on paper and brainstorming of possibilities). 

Alas, the Regency Dance was cancelled.  Fortunately, the waltz and tango classes were great.  What does dance have to do with Knowledge Management?  I’ll give you a hint:  buzz, bzzz, buzz…

I’m very happy my group is doing this.  Our manager participates along with us and encourages us to set aside time for this as part of our continued learning efforts (participation in the book club is voluntary).  I think we learn more from the books by discussing them than we would if we were just reading them individually.  No book has been perfect, but we can profit by flaws in a book, too, as long as we read the books critically (not the same as negatively!).  I think it’s a good team-building activity; it brings us out of our cubes and we exchange our thoughts about how/whether to apply lessons from a chapter to our own practices.  Even the shyer/quieter folks talk some during the book club.  It’s helping us improve as a group.

I read this book in the fall.  I wanted to get a better grip on ideas in and application of the discipline, for my group’s use of collaborative software. This book turned out to have some of that, but was less academic than I was expecting (this may be a plus to many readers). Instead, it introduces concepts of knowledge management (including controversy over using the term at all, and fallacies), suggests getting started with personal knowledge management, broadens into team approaches and change management, and addresses issues that come up in practicing KM (management v. leadership, and strategies). There’s even a Careers in KM chapter at the end.

A selection of key concepts and points in the book:

• Data v. information v. knowledge, tacit v. explicit
• abstract thinking, narrative thinking, systems thinking
• Danger of overfocus on gadgetry v. culture
• Information triage
• The better-organized, better-connected (associative memory!) and more easily retrieved knowledge is, the easier it is to come up to speed. The addition of metadata to a document vastly increases your ability to retrieve it for future use when you need it.
• Different people have different layers of abstraction. We can capitalize on this by working together to discover hidden assumptions and develop richer solutions. … collaboration often uncovers ideas that we find alien or threatening … We need those ideas!
• KM must establish or further forums for dialogue (e.g., on best practices). Developing a culture of KM involves tasks such as encouraging trust building, collaboration, connectivity, and dynamic communication paths.
• Consider every document as a potential template.
• Use documentation work as an opportunity to demonstrate your ability to make the solution to an issue reproducible.
• Maximizing your knowledge exchange requires that you carefully examine all of your points of information exchange and search for improvements.
• Attention is the currency of the Information Age, and trust is the bandwidth.

There were some points at which I disagreed with the book (noted in the margins). The worst was when, like our book club’s Applied Software Project Management selection, it seemed to advocate lying at one point, if not as egregiously (it suggests “developing” stories to spread at the water cooler to change corporate culture).

There are discussion questions and pointers to further reading at the end of each chapter, which might make it good book club material.