Workflows - Collaboration Technology

I found this excellent quote in Frosty Troy's Oklahoma Observer:

We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject. For both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped us in finding it. - St. Thomas Aquinas

in other news:
a FileNet Book has been released to the public.

How you sort information counts
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, with nearly 60,000 names engraved on it, is unlike any other American monument. This simple yet solemn reflective wall has captivated millions with the tragic story it tells. The creation of the memorial was a very large project. It involved two U.S. presidents, the U.S. Congress, scores of volunteers, a full-time staff, and donations from hundreds of thousands of Americans who raised nearly $9 million to build it.

The goal was to create a monument that would acknowledge and recognize the service and sacrifice of all who served in Vietnam. The Memorial's design was selected through a national design competition open to any U.S. citizen 18 years of age or older. Ohio native Maya Ying Lin, an undergraduate at Yale University, submitted the winning entry.

There were four criteria for the design:

1. It must be reflective and contemplative in character
2. It must harmonize with its surroundings
3. It must contain the names of those who had died in the conflict or who were still missing
4. It must make no political statement about the war.


There were 58,229 names that had to be listed on the Memorial.
What do you think would be the best way to organize that data and why?
How important do you think the ordering of the names was, in relation to the design criteria?

In this facinating article, Gifford Pinchot talks about two distinctly different types of economies. In commodity economies, status is given to those who have aquired the most. In a gift economy, status is attained by those who have given the most to others. After all, not all economies are based on maximizing personal gain - some are founded on giving.

...Defining success by what one gives rather than what one has is neither a new practice nor an overly idealistic view. It is rooted deep in history and human nature, and is more basic than wealth or money.

...Antelope meat called for a gift economy because it was perishable and there was too much for any one person to eat. Information also loses value over time and has the capacity to satisfy more than one. In many cases information gains rather than loses value through sharing. While the exchange economy may have been appropriate for the industrial age, the gift economy is coming back as we enter the information age.

In his 2001 article Cornucopia of the Commons, David Bollier had this to say about gift economies:

Gift economies are potent systems for eliciting and developing behaviors that the market cannot — sharing, collaboration, honor, trust, sociability, loyalty. In this capacity, gift economies are an important force in creating wealth, both the material kind prized by the market and the social and spiritual kind needed by any happy, integrated human being.

Changing our organization's cultures to enable stronger collaboration and knowledge sharing will require powerful forces, beyond markets and authority hierarchies. Studying the dynamics of gift economies provides insights into a wide and diverse variety of subjects such as: software development, Native American culture, the human blood supply, and the rise of the Internet. It may be the point where the rubber meets the road, with reguard to the common knowledge management goal of creating communities that share knowledge more freely.

To learn more, read The Gift : Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property by Lewis Hyde

Creating a culture of knowledge sharing within an organization goes way beyond KM systems. Cultural changes in such things as facilitating trust building, communication skills, and dynamic feedback loops will often have more substantial impacts the KM system implementations. A powerful and inexpensive book listst ways you can get the ideas and innovations flowing within any group. The textbook style paperback offers:

* An easy to read, user-friendly introduction to knowledge management.
* A long list of practical applications for business professionals.
* An Online Instructor's Guide with PowerPoint slides, case studies, exercises and review questions included.

Introduction to Knowledge Management : KM in Business