• Are lawyers really knowledge workers?
• If they are, what kind of knowledge workers are they?
• And what are the implications for those of us who support lawyers and law firms?

Obviously, a lot of this cogitation is triggered by the impending commencement of the Legal Services Act in the UK, as well as by the shift in the balance of power between law firms and their clients as a result of the prolonged recession (amongst other pressures). There are longer-term drivers as well, as exemplified by Richard Susskind’s work.

I don’t expect a lot to change here (although I have taken the opportunity to refresh the design a bit) — my reflections will still be coloured by my own personal interests, and they should also be relevant to non-legal readers too as often as possible. Venerable commentators in this field, such as Bruce McEwen, Jordan Furlong, Ron Friedmann or John Flood can rest easy.

It is probably worth reiterating, for the avoidance of any doubt, that the things I write here are purely my own ramblings. None of my past or present employers are responsible for these thoughts, ideas or fancies. Equally, there may well be times when I am deliberately silent or opaque about my work and that of the firm where I am employed. (And sometimes my silence may have no relation to that — no inferences should be drawn from an absence of comment.)

This is not a place where I write about the day job. But, like many others, I use this blog (together with Twitter and the like) as a place where I can learn and develop my understanding of a wide range of things for my own benefit and (ultimately) that of the firm. Many many thanks to all of you who have joined in that process.

With immense presence of mind, she went into the utility room, saw flames, knocked off the power, closed the doors to the house, and told our daughter (revising for her exams) to leave the house. They then called the fire brigade from a mobile phone. The fire engine arrived within five minutes — the fire station is not far away, and one of our neighbours had a dishwasher fire a couple of weeks ago, so they knew where to go!

Once the fire was out, the firemen stayed around for a little while: to check that it really was out, and to assess the damage. They were very impressed that our basic glazed kitchen door had held the fire back from the rest of the house. The glass was cracked and soot-blackened, but when it is closed there is no other evidence (unless you look closely) that there was a fire on the other side of it. That’s the first lesson learned — keep your internal doors closed as much as possible — even if they appear to be flimsy, they could buy you an extra 15-20 minutes of escape time.

After the firemen had left, my wife spent the rest of the afternoon on the phone to me and then to our insurers. As the power had been turned off and couldn’t be turned on until it had been certified safe, she could not charge her mobile phone once it ran out of power. Also, our usual house phone is a wireless one, which will not work without a constant supply of electricity. Fortunately, I have always kept a wired phone connected to our landline. Second lesson learned — the old technology still has value when the new stuff is useless.

The third lesson learned? People are great. The following day, two of our neighbours let us use their washing machines — one of them even ironed the shirts when they came out! Everyone has been very supportive — even though there was no harm done, beyond the destruction of a few white goods, some groceries and a very functional room. There is nothing broken that the insurance can’t put right. And that is a blessing.

I have an interest in photography, where focus is clearly a part of taking good pictures. However, there is more to it than that. Cameras come with a number of settings that affect the image — what is actually in focus. All of these settings require the photographer to make choices, which are similar to the choices we make when we talk about focus in a more general sense.

The first choice to be made is selection of a lens (or a zoom setting, for lenses with a variable focal length). Is the subject of the image distant or close? Do you want to concentrate on a single item or a large landscape? Variants of these questions can be used when considering personal focus as well. Is your objective finely detailed and distinct? If so, make sure you concentrate on it to the exclusion of other things (the telephoto or macro lens). Is it more diffuse — exploratory, perhaps? Then use a more inclusive approach (a wideangle lens).

Then there is a set of choices that are all interlinked — aperture, shutter speed, ISO (sensitivity or film speed, for non-digital photography). These need to be set to take into account the depth of field required (how much the subject stands out from the background or foreground), whether the subject is moving, and how much ambient light there is. Again, similar considerations can be borne in mind in a non-photographic context. Does your objective stand apart from other issues or do you need to consider it in a wider context? Are things moving fast, so quick action is required, or is a slower, more reflective pace acceptable? How much information is there on the topic — do you need highly sensitive receptors or is a strong filter preferable?

Once you have thought about all those variables, it is time to compose the image. Like everything else, careful thought about these preparatory questions improves the quality of the output. Equally, whether the output is good or not, it can be used to refine the initial settings before repeating the action. A plan-do-refine approach can also be useful in other contexts too. I can’t pretend to be a great photographer, but I do try to get better.

Over at the 3 Geeks… blog, Lisa Salazar argues that there is nothing new about social media.

Social networking isn’t new. I t has been around since the very first introduction to the internet. Just like Alexander Graham Bell, the first sign of life on the internet was an communication between UCLA and Stanford computers in 1969. And that certainly was social–the internet was built in response to the threat of USSR dropping bombs onto the US. Not exactly friendly but certainly social.

Through the internet, I have met people from all around the world. As I like to say on my job, I have traveled “virtually” everywhere.

Like Lisa, I have been online in one way or another for many years, but I feel that things have changed significantly between my early experiences and now. (This may just be a function of who we are — it is quite possible that Lisa invested better in her early online community than I did — so we should just be regarded as two anecdotal data-points.)

It is true that, as Lisa points out, people have built communities using e-mail lists, IRC and Usenet (as well as the closed networks such as Prodigy, AOL, Compuserve, The WELL, CIX, and all the others) since the late 1980s or early 1990s.  Those networks have been used to create content and connect people, just as we do now with the plethora of Web2.0 tools. Where is the difference? I am still trying to work it out.

I used to have an interest in Internet governance. I was a member of the CYBERIA-L mailing list (now apparently defunct); I spoke at conferences in the US and UK; I wrote journal articles. But I never felt a connection with the governance community in the way that I do with the KM community now. It was as if we were all operating in our own focused silos. (That may also have been a result of the academic ivory towers that many of us inhabited.) I also pursued personal interests in Usenet newsgroups and on CIX. Those activities rarely spilled over into my work interests. I think that partitioning of lives is a hint as to how the old online world differs from the new one.

By contrast, my Web2.0 journey has been more open and fruitful. Apart from a couple of abortive attempts at blogging (I had no real focus, so they withered away very quickly), I started as most people do — reading other blogs and then graduating to comments. Once the comments became longer I felt I had found my voice and it was time to start blogging. At the same time, Facebook and LinkedIn gave me connections with and insights into people on whose blogs I had commented. As people started reacting to my blog posts with their comments and on their own blogs, I found that I was part of a real community. That sense of community has only deepened over time and with more interactions via Twitter and the like. I have even met some people face to face.

The difference between then and now, for me, is that the variety of interactions and ‘places’ where I engage with this community has broken down the silos that I experienced in the past. Because it is impossible not to see more facets of someone’s life and personality in their blogs, comments, tweets and status updates, it becomes easier to see them as real people — not just participants in a mailing list discussion, a conference or a newsgroup. We talk of work-life balance, but as Orson Wells points out early in this interview (from 0:48), there isn’t really a distinction.

Interviewer: Would you say that you live to work or work to live?

Welles: I regard working as part of life. I don’t know how to distinguish between the two; I know that one can and people do. I honestly think the best answer to that question that I can give you is that the two things aren’t separated in my mind.

Interviewer: There are people who devote everything to their work and have no life at all, but you have lived in a big way and you have worked in a big way…

Welles: And I don’t separate them. To me they are all part of the… Work is an expression of life for me.

For many of us, I think this is now true of our interactions with each other via online networks. Earlier this week, John Bordeaux provided a magnificent example of this in his post, “A Year Ago.” This time last year, John was laid off. His reaction was unconventional, but may offer a taste of future convention.

Using online social media tools, I stitched together a loose network of future colleagues and relationships to be tended.  Rather than broadcasting my increasingly urgent need for income, I trusted the network effect would work in time.

And it did.

Today I find myself engaged in meaningful and rewarding work to redesign a failed education system; working alongside leading professionals in innovation, public policy, and social change.

A year ago, I could not predict where I would be today.  Such is the nature of complexity and networks.  The theory suggested I should place myself in conversations, expand my connections into new networks, and a vocation would emerge.  (While I embrace the notion, I hope I never again have to conduct such experiments with my family’s financial health.)  I saw the traditional reaction to job loss as creating one-to-one intense conversations trying to match my talents to a company’s need.  Instead, I took this path.  Which amounted to no path at all, certainly not one any could predict.  To paraphrase Mr. Frost, that has made all the difference

The thing is, we knew that John was going through this. Not from his blog, but from changes in his LinkedIn status, from clues in his tweets. I hope he felt that the support we were able to give (often from a distance) was enough.

Ultimately, I think John’s experience shows that effective participation in online networks allows one to see a more authentic picture of people. Perhaps it is becoming less true that “on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog.”

The first juicy nugget came from Anne Marie McEwan. In writing about social networking tools and KM, she linked some of the requirements for successful social software adoption (especially the need for open trusting cultures) to the use of technology for monitoring.

And therein lies a huge problem, in my strong view. Open, trusting, transparent cultures? How many of them have you experienced? That level of monitoring could be seen as a version of Bentham’s Panopticon. Although the research is now quite old, there was a little publicised (in my view) ESRC-funded research project in the UK, The Future of Work, involving 22 universities and carried out over six years. One of the publications from that research was a book, Managing to Change?. The authors note that:

“One area where ICT is rapidly expanding management choices is in monitoring and control systems … monitoring information could connect with other parts of the HRM agenda, if it is made accessible and entrusted to employees for personal feedback and learning. This has certainly not happened yet and the trend towards control without participation is deeply disquieting.

If ICT-based control continues to be seen as a management prerogative, and the monitoring information is not shared with employees, then this is likely to become a divisive and damaging issue.”

On the other hand, the technology in the right hands and cultures creates amazing potential for nurturing knowledge and innovation.

What struck me about this was that (pace Mary Abraham’s concerns about information disclosure), people quite freely disclose all sorts of information about themselves on public social networking sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and so on. The fact is that some of this sharing is excessive and ill-advised, but even people who have serious reservations about corporate or governmental use of personal information lose some of their inhibition.

Why do they do this? In part it may be naïveté, but I think sometimes this sharing is much more knowing than that. What do they know, then? The difference between this voluntary sharing and forced disclosure is the identification of the recipients and (as Anne Marie recognises) trust. Basically, we share with people, not with organisations.

The second thing I found today was much more worrying. The UK Government is developing a new strategy for sharing people’s personal information between different government departments. It starts from a reasonable position:

We have a simple aim. We want everyone who interacts with Government to be able to establish and use their identity in ways which protect them and make their lives easier. Our strategy seeks to deliver five fundamental benefits. In future, everyone should expect to be able to:

• register their identity once and use it many times to make access to public services safe, easy and convenient;
• know that public services will only ask them for the minimum necessary information and will do whatever is necessary to keep their identity information safe;
• see the personal identity information held about them – and correct it if it is wrong;
• give informed consent to public services using their personal identity information to provide services tailored to their needs; and
• know that there is effective oversight of how their personal identity information is used.

All well and good so far, but then buried in the strategy document is this statement (on p.11):

When accessing services, individuals should need to provide only a small amount of information to prove that they are who they say they are. In some situations, an individual may only need to use their fingerprint (avoiding the need to provide information such as their address).

But I can change my address (albeit with difficulty). I can never change my fingerprints. And fingerprints are trivially easy to forge. Today alone, I must have left prints on thousands of surfaces. All it takes is for someone to lift one of those, and they would have immediate access to all sorts of services in my name. (An early scene in this video shows it being done.

What I really want to be able to do is something like creating single-use public keys where the private key is in my control. And I want to be able to know and control where my information is being used and shared.

Going back to KM, this identity crisis is what often concerns people about organisationally forced (or incentivised) knowledge sharing. Once they share, they lose control of the information they provided. They also run the risk that the information will be misused without reference back to them. It isn’t surprising that people react to this kind of KM in the same way that concerned citizens have reacted to identity cards in the UK: rather than No2ID, we have No2KM (stop the database organisation).

In the Summer of 1985, I spent six weeks at Wayne State University Law School, which had an exchange programme with my home university. (This may seem odd, until one adds the information that the University of Warwick was actually sited on the edge of Coventry, the closest Britain came to having a Motor City.) In retrospect, this was a very happy time. I had work to do (mainly researching the activities of the Department of Housing and Urban Development with special reference to the Urban Development Action Grant program), but I also explored the city itself. Not just the civic magnificence of Woodward Ave (the Public Library and the Institute of Arts), but also the commercial opulence of the Fisher Building and General Motors Building in the New Center and the comparatively characterless Renaissance Center downtown.

My recollection of the city, though, is not rooted in these overbearing buildings and boulevards. It was the people and heart of Detroit that I fell for. Even in the mid-80s the beginning of decay was obvious. There were neighbourhoods that had not been touched since being burned in the 1967 riots. Few streets were without a gap where a house had been torched. Even so, everyone I met was unfailingly courteous and welcoming. I walked nearly everywhere, and never felt particularly unsafe. (Although being propositioned by a rather seedy gentleman downtown one afternoon was a bit of a low point. He thought I was Canadian.)

Because of GM and their ilk, Detroit is very much in the news at the moment. Whatever the cost to the American tax-payer (which appears to be the greatest concern to the likes of the Harvard Business School and the Wall Street Journal), the real cost is being felt by the people of Detroit left behind as their more mobile neighbours abandon this great city. As Don Witt, the cab driver in the interview above, puts it:

They [the motor industry] have always been the heart of Detroit — the heart and soul of Detroit. They made the middle class in Detroit. If General Motors and Chrysler go bankrupt, I don’t know what’s going to happen to the city for a while. … You’re actually destroying the middle class of Detroit so that, along with the city, you’re going to have to rebuild the middle class.

[I hope non-UK readers can see the footage. There is an associated story on the BBC News website.]

Bill Ives recently linked to a touching collection of photographs of Detroit’s dereliction. Others have also documented the physical toll wrought by the decline of this city.

• The ruins of Detroit, a series of photos by Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre (also in Time)
• Sweet Juniper, a blog by two Detroit-based parents.

I cannot pretend to understand all of this. But I feel that Detroit (along with similar cities) bore the brunt of our prosperity. Just as Dorian Gray stayed beautiful as his picture aged, we have prospered as Detroit suffered. It suited the motor industry to concentrate its activities (almost to the exclusion of everything else) in a small number of locations. As a consequence, the failure of that industry brings about the failure of the city. There was no back-up plan. The diversity of Detroit’s people was not matched by diversity in its industrial leaders. That is surely unforgiveable.

One of the things I wanted to do was to see some of the First World War cemeteries. I didn’t know why — it was just something I had never done. I am glad I did, although it was much more harrowing than I expected.

Prior to the First World War, the bodies of soldiers who fell in battle tended to be buried, cremated, or left in situ. The cemeteries created by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (founded in 1917) provide a clean break with this tradition. The Commission’s principles have been emulated by other nations and traditions, but few memorials are as moving as those on the Western Front. The simplicity of those principles is immensely respectful of the dead.

• Each of the dead should be commemorated by name on the headstone or memorial
• Headstones and memorials should be permanent
• Headstones should be uniform
• There should be no distinction made on account of military or civil rank, race or creed

Wherever you are in the UK, you are never far from a memorial to local soldiers, sailors or airmen lost in war during the last century. Even the school I attended had a plaque immortalising the old boys who had given their lives in 1914-1918 or 1939-1945. (I saw similar memorials in many Italian towns and villages as well.) Despite these constant reminders, I was not prepared for the emotional impact of the memorials in West Flanders.

Despite the generally flat landscape of Jacques Brel’s plat pays, there is a curved low ridge around Ieper (Ypres), which has been the site of conflict on a number of occasions (even before WWI). Between 1914 and 1918, a number of battles over this salient accounted for the lives of about 450,000 young men. (All the information provided in West Flanders suggested nearly 250,000 soldiers of the France and the British Empire, together with just over 200,000 German soldiers.) These numbers are almost unimaginable, but awful when you can actually see the landscape over which they fought.

The only way I could start to comprehend the scale of this sacrifice was to personalise it. In Ieper, I found five graves belonging to soldiers killed on the same date as my visit, 21 April, but in 1918.

• 139636 Lance Cpl. E.J. Jones (Royal Engineers)
• 18934 Lance Cpl. A.R. Ockelford (Royal Engineers)
• 143532 2nd Corporal R. Wilson (Royal Engineers)
• 177166 Sapper Oliver Smith (Royal Engineers)
• 42544 Private C.G Hawkes (Essex Regiment)

May they rest in peace.

At the largest cemetery of all, Tyne Cot, the dead of Passchendaele 1917 are commemorated. Here there are nearly 12,000 men buried, and a further 35,000 whose graves are unknown remembered on a massive memorial wall. Another 55,000 casualties whose graves are unknown are commemorated on the walls of the Menin Gate in Ieper.

The emotional impact of these names, and the landscape over which the men bearing them fought and lost their lives, was heightened by the knowledge that so many of them were born in the 1890s and slain in their 20s. My own children were born in the 1990s. Little facts like this start to put the large numbers into perspective.

In fact, I have spent many hours searching for more effective ways of working. As far as I can tell, this is the ultimate displacement activity. But I have never had any success with any of the methods advocated in these sources. Part of this is undoubtedly due to my innate laziness. However, I have come to the view that although I am interested in new working techniques and ways of organising my time and activities, I am a basically disorganised person and I am unlikely to change that. As such, I have settled on some techniques that may only work for me.

At the heart of this system (if it is a system) are two principles:

1. The more complex a way of working is, the more likely it is to be ignored.
2. The test of a good system is how well it fits with existing practices.

Over the years I have discovered that I just don’t do categorisation. My CDs are stacked irregularly, my bookshelves are a shrine to serendipity, my e-mail is never filed in topical folders. However, I do have a fairly strong sense of time. If someone asks me to find something in one of the many piles on my desk, I do so by thinking when I last saw it. That will put it in a particular place, or close to some other things I was working on at the same time. I have tried storing e-mails in folders as I work on them, but the only result is that I can’t find them when I need them. Instead, I keep everything in a folder for each year. I find Outlook’s native search function is quite good enough to find anything I have stored away.

I have a fondness for gadgets. This also extends to non-electronic things — especially stationery and pens. As a result, I have had many Moleskines. I have also acquired a few very nice fountain pens. I have tried to use the Moleskines to fit particular productivity mechanisms. However, I got bored with most of them. Finally, I settled on a simple solution — basic note-taking. I now combine my basic tendency to thing of things chronologically with my interest in pens and paper. Essentially, I now make notes all the time (as long as I remember). As well as capturing things on delicious or in e-mail, I make a note of the salient points that made me want to store them away. I make notes of conversations. I make notes in meetings. As I do this, I mark the notes in the margin — a box marks a to-do (with room for a tick when it is done); an asterisk marks something important; an arrow marks something relevant to a future date or for someone else. In order to mark the passing of time, I start each day with the date, and mark continuation pages with the date in the top left-hand corner. I also use a different pen on alternate days. One day will be the Lamy 2000 using blue ink, the next I will use black ink in the Rotring 600. I also sometimes use the notebook for first drafts of or notes towards blog posts or other writing — I tend to do this in pencil.

Since starting this process about three months ago, I have impressed myself by keeping up with it. I really think it might work for me. I even managed to carry undone to-dos over when I filled one notebook. Obviously, the note-taking is only part of the process. In order to keep up with the tasks I set myself, I set aside some time each day and a little more at the end of the week to review recent notes. Occasionally, this has brought to light other things that I had not marked as significant at the time. It has also helped me keep my focus on my key priorities.

It may seem odd that I use pen and paper, with the drawbacks that old technology entails. However, I think the advantages outweigh those drawbacks. My penmanship is pretty poor, but I think it is improving as I use it more, whereas my very basic keyboarding skills seem to have reached a plateau (at not particularly speedy). Pen and paper are also more acceptable to use in a wider variety of contexts. So I aim to use the right tool for the job. Another reason for avoiding a technology solution is that it helps me avoid the distractions that are just an Alt-Tab away.

Having tried it, I think my method works because it is simple, and because it fits the way I naturally think and work. Anything more complex might become an end in itself. This method is, for me, a facilitator. It might not work for anyone else, but I think those basic principles are still a good test for systems of various kinds — whether personal or organisational.

Happy New Year!

The most significant is owed to Mary Abraham, who posed a question to a few of us back in November: how do you decide how/what/when to blog?  Finally, here are my thoughts.

The how is easily dealt with. I use whatever comes to hand when I have an idea. I have started blog posts from my Blackberry, using the wordpress.com mobile tool; I have worked directly in the full WordPress dashboard; I have recently started using BlogDesk as an offline editor — very useful when on the train without connectivity; and I have sometimes written the bulk of a blog post in long-hand (for which, read “scrawl”) in my notebook. Essentially, I use whatever works at the time.

What I blog is linked inextricably to why I blog. I have come to rely on this as my place for crystallising thoughts. More than anything else, I am continually learning about things that are at least tangentially related to my work. I find I learn best by reading, cogitating and discussing (which can extend to formal presentations or writing). The blog is therefore my place to do this — primarily for my own benefit. I do something similar at work, but that is only a limited solution. I have found that two significant things characterise people who do KM. They are firstly extremely willing to discuss ideas, even with total strangers. This makes KM conferences especially useful for the mingling time, even if the official content is of marginal utility. The second thing is that they tend to be rare or isolated within their own organisations. This makes it (a) difficult to find local kindred spirits with whom to discuss KM topics, but (b) easy to created mutually rewarding realtionships with KM people in other organisations. As a result, I think sharing my thoughts here results in a greater benefit to me and to the firm I work in because of the way that people in the wider world engage with it.

So the things I blog about are the things that pique my interest and which I think can usefully form the basis of this wider engagement. When I started out, I thought I would be able to use the blog to challenge accepted KM truths and traditions. This hasn’t worked out quite as I expected, but I may yet get there with time.

Finally, when do I blog? Practically speaking, it tends to be in the gaps of the day — on trains, while the children watch TV, and so on. Taking a different perspective on the question, I tend to write when I have been free to ponder for a while. At times when work requires more action than thought, it is harder to get round to blogging. That explains some of the gaps in transmission during the past year.

One of the reasons I eventually took the plunge to start blogging publicly was that I found conversations via comments on other people’s blogs valuable. In particular, Doug Cornelius’s KM Space and Neil Richards’s Knowledge Thoughts provided places where I developed some of the thinking that started me on this track. Having started by commenting, I particularly appreciate those who have commented on or linked to my posts during the year:

• Doug Cornelius
• Graham Durant-Law
• Mary Abraham
• Ben Hoffman
• Eva Schiffer
• Michael Idinopulos
• Dennis McDonald
• Derek Wenmoth
• Joe Firestone
• Simon Price
• Penny Edwards
• Daniel J. Pritchett
• Rob 
• John Tropea
• Samuel Driessen
• Venkatesh Rao
• Neil Richards
• Gilles Beauchamp
• David Gurteen
• James Mullan
• Greg Lambert
• Jordan Furlong
• B. Fay

Many thanks to you all, and I hope the festive season brings you all you hoped for, with an exciting new year in prospect!

(For completeness, you might be interested in the answers provided to Mary’s question by Jordan Furlong, Patrick Lambe and Doug Cornelius.)

My comment at LawyerKM:

Blogging is just writing. Did people stop keeping diaries because Samuel Pepys came along? Did the New York Times render The Journal News obsolete? We don’t all blog for a mass audience (I think the best bloggers actually blog for themselves).

When we write, the medium we choose is often selected because it fits the subject matter or the context particularly well. Sometimes I write in a Moleskine. Sometimes I write in Word. Sometimes a blog is best. People can’t comment on my Moleskine, and people outside the firm cannot see my Word document. If I am lucky they may have something interesting to say about the blog, or it may spur them to write something of their own elsewhere. Either of those reactions is fine by me — they spread knowledge.

To be honest, when I started doing this I did not expect to be part of the spread (and growth) of knowledge. I think this platform, along with many other Web2.0 tools, is first of all a mechanism for developing personal knowledge. Flickr, del.icio.us, Librarything, last.fm: these are all excellent ways of storing information that we already have or that we create. The fact that they are online is a bonus — their contents are thereby always ready for use. (Up to a point.) When you layer on top of that the capability to tag your information, it becomes even more useful. I can see how many of my books have an Irish connection, for example (or I would if I had finished tagging them all), which would be difficult without the technology. Then, more significantly, these systems are open by design so that all the information I create can be shared with others.

This tagging and sharing gets better and better. One can create networks of like-minded people and easily dip into the pool of information that interests them. But this is just information. It has no context beyond the association of the raw data and some tags which make sense only to the person using them.

It is the next step where things get really interesting. One of the reasons why I started blogging outside the firewall (I have been doing it at work for some time) is that I needed to add more context to some of the material that I found online and stored in del.icio.us. I could only do that by writing about it. How should I do that? As mentioned in my original comment, I am fond of my Moleskine notebooks, but it is difficult to link lots of different web pages together using paper and ink. They have their place, but this is not it. In order to make more sense of this ocean of information, one has to start swimming. And so this blog. Its first purpose is to give me a place where I can start to make more sense of things.

And then unexpectedly people start to join in. They pick up on things that one writes, and they leave comments or write on their own blogs. A cycle starts. Before you know where you are, there are new ideas driving new blogposts. I can honestly say that my understanding of a whole range of things has increased directly as a result of these interactions. And these are interactions that I could never have had if I had remained a silent user of del.icio.us. Across my chequered career, I have collaborated with people in a variety of different ways — writing articles with colleagues, speaking at conferences with people I had just met, participating in Usenet and on mailing lists — but this experience has been as good as the most fruitful of all of those others.

That is why blogging will not go away. It enhances the human capacity to communicate and it does so in a fair and just way. It gives everyone access to giants on whose shoulders they can stand in order to see further. We all get better by that collaborative effort: the lone genius is mythical.

Interestingly, bearing in mind that the Wired piece promoted Twitter as the new great thing, I have come to this conclusion in part because of my short experience in using that service. That has shown me more of the people I know only virtually: fellow bloggers, commenters, journalists and cultural icons. Twitter gives more context to the blogs, comments, articles and podcasts that these people produce. With that additional context, they have commensurately greater value. 

Altogether awesome.

Coming back to earth, and to the queries raised by the actKM conversation, how does all this translate into the working environment? There are two issues.

1. (How) can the enterprise leverage the activities of its people using Web2.0?
2. Can we replicate the success of Web2.0 inside the firewall?

On one view, we should be concerned that people’s use of these external services creates valuable knowledge that is effectively lost to the business because it cannot be searched, stored or managed as a discrete set. My own experience makes me sanguine about this risk. If people use these tools to develop themselves and their knowledge in ways that would not be possible inside the enterprise, then the business can only be richer as a result. If they do not develop, then there is no useful additional knowledge created and the enterprise should only be concerned at the waste of time (which may well be the employee’s own, which cannot be a concern).

The second point is a more challenging one. One of the real points of value in external collaboration is the sheer diversity of potential collaborators. That diversity is most unlikely to be reflected in any but the largest businesses. This is why we need to manage internal collaboration. On that point, I finally got a chance today to review James Robertson’s presentation “Ten tips for succeeding at collaboration” recorded at the Open Publish 2008 conference in Sydney, July 2008.

James presents a really simple, but effective, model for successful collaboration. One of the most powerful elements for me was the distinction between publishing and collaboration, and especially the need to bridge the gap between the two in clearly defined ways. With the benefit of this insight from the other side of the world, I think I will be able to do some of the things I need to do much better than I would otherwise. Thank you James.