Current Affairs: May 2004 Archives

I am always inspired by Howard Rheingold. I find his enthusiasm infectious. This latest post about a new literacy for cooperation is intreguing. It describes how companies, rather than competeing should employ cooperative strategies. As Ross Mayfield said "We are just at the beginning of developing language and models for cooperation...Howard is really on to something by moving us past zero-sum thinking."

We achieved our first milestone on the beginning of a long road with the Cooperation Project I have embarked upon withThe Institute for the Future. We used the Socialtext wiki, and Ross Mayfield, who was there, blogged the event.

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[Smart Mobs]

Yahoo Picks! posted links to a UN site which I felt it was imperative to highlight. The page is called "10 Stories the World Should Hear More About". The site says:

To shine a spotlight on some of the important international issues and developments that often do not get sufficient media attention, the United Nations Department of Public Information presents a new initiative - "Ten Stories the World Should Hear More About."

This list includes a number of humanitarian emergencies, as well as conflict or post-conflict situations and spans other matters of concern to the United Nations, although it is far from embracing all of the many issues before the Organization.

THE STORIES
(click to read)

Uganda: Child soldiers at centre of mounting humanitarian crisis
Central African Republic: a silent crisis crying out for help
AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa: a looming threat to future generations
The peacekeeping paradox: as peace spreads, surge in demand strains UN resources
Tajikistan: rising from the ashes of civil war
Women as peacemakers: from victims to re-builders of society
Persons with disabilities: a treaty seeks to break new ground in ensuring equality
Bakassi Peninsula: Recourse to the law to prevent conflict
Overfishing: a threat to marine biodiversity
Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation

Yesterday I posted about who owns the profile that you create as you interact electronically with the internet and devices that record your transactions. Today, I found an another mention of electronic profiles posted at EEK Speaks on December 31, 2003:

Wed, Dec 31, 2003

Knowledge Management as Information Brokering #
DavidGilmour, CEO of TacitKnowledgeSystems, wrote an excellent (and short) essay in the October issue of HarvardBusinessReview entitled, "How to Fix Knowledge Management." The gist of the article: (P3)

The problem is that most organized corporate information sharing is based on a failed paradigm: publishing. In the publishing model, someone collects information from employees, organizes it, advertises its availability, and sits back to see what happens. But because employees quickly create vast amounts of information, attempts to fully capture it are frustrated every time. Even the most organized efforts collect just a fraction of what people know, and by the time this limited knowledge is published, it's often obsolete. The expensive process is time consuming, and it doesn't scale well. (16) (P4)

Gilmour's solution: (P5)

Instead of squelching people's natural desire to control information, companies should exploit it. They should stop trying to extract knowledge from employees; they should instead leave knowledge where it is and create opportunities for sharing by making knowledge easy for others to find. This requires a shift away from knowledge management based on a publishing model, and a focus on collaboration management based on a brokering model. (17) (P6)

TacitKnowledgeSystems's system does this by scanning all of the email and other documents on a corporate network, and building profiles of individuals based on these behaviors. The system can then alert people to other individuals with similar interests, brokering an introduction between them. If you think there are potential privacy problems here, you're not alone. JoshTyler's SHOCK works in a similar way, but distributes control of the profile to the individual; see his paper, "SHOCK: Communicating with Computational Messages and Automatic Private Profiles."

I clipped this post from SmartMobs because it resonated with me. You should take a look at the original post and the replies, especially Arnaud Leene's discussion about personal profiles. I agree that my profile is mine and we should do everything we can to empower ourselves with the information that accretes around us during our day. Then we can make available to others what we wish!

Interesting comment of Blue Arnaud on John Battelle's widespread posting on the trail we leave on the internet.

In Arnaud's perception privacy is a lost case. It is impossible to keep your data private. A user should make his profile explicit. It is all about the ownership of this (private) trail information. Be in control over your own profile, Blue Arnaud suggests. This profile can be the basis for the social networking services.

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[Smart Mobs]

Steve Garfield points out a great article in the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review. It is an interview with Jack Driscoll who is the editor-in Residence at the MIT Media Lab. Mr Driscoll has many great insights into how people can micropublish.

MIT Media Lab Offers a Simple Recipe for Publishing Homegrown News. Veteran journalist Jack Driscoll's research group has teamed up with senior centers and schools around the world to teach would-be journalists how to write and publish community news. The program gives participants simple online publishing tools -- and a few key lessons in how to be reporters and editors. I followed a link to the Silver Stringers site that had a neat page on how to be a journalist. Somone asked that question of a reporter in one of the BloggerCon II sessions, but it couldn't be answered in a few sentences.