Mopsos

Another excellent paper about social software from Clay Shirky, called " Social Software and the Next big Phase of the Internet", which you can download on GBN

A gold nugget I extracted from this paper:

One of the problems we've got with social software is that it relies on a large architectural model. But this doesn't serve goal-oriented groups terribly well. I'm beginning to think that a better model is shipbuilding, where the goal is to provide groups with a place to gather and go somewhere together. It provides a way to say "We're going to use this medium, this vessel, to accomplish this goal." Ships are part space and part tool. The ways they work are quite obvious: They divide roles among the people on them. So it's much less of a generic idea than architecture. it assumes, among other things, that in many cases the group is going to come together, use the tool and then leave.

What is wrong with current KM software, I believe, is their business focus -because this is where the money is. They are basically sold as power tools to managers with a budget. They emphasize the "user" side at the expense of the governance side - the "core group" who actually runs the knowledge sharing show- and implicitely or explicitely assume that the manager who pays for the software (the "client") should also be in a central position (a.k.a. "super-administrator") to control the users and store their collective knowledge. That's why there is so much emphasis on workflow design. Very clever workflows (how people should work) are wired in the software, and reinforce the idea (illusion) that software can be used to enforce new behaviors, presented as generic, but in reality decided by the management. The underlyng philosophy is that knowledge is context-independent: what has worked well in a given context (e.g. consulting firm) should work in another (e.g. medical research). This has proven wrong many times, because in knowledge related work, people vote with their feet. But control-driven managers don't see this, and software companies are unlikely to tell them. A typical example of such a business-focused strategy is described in a previous post

What these approaches fail to understand is both technical and social. Technically, there is now far more storage capability at the edges of the network than there is at the center, as P2P software has taught us, yet vendors keep on designing server-centric systems because this is more easy to sell to companies (control!). Socially, the framework and governance rules of a group, whether team or community, is not something that can be pre-designed without their involvement.

The argument over whether a community has the right to self-govern is, in many ways, the very catalyst that creates a community

I totally agree!

* The technology is easy and the sociology is hard
* Client/Server is a great tech model to support hierarchy but it is stupid for social/business networks

Posted by: Valdis at February 11, 2004 04:07 PM

Yep. I'm always amazed by KM lit- I can hardly read it any more.

It's always "business this" and "business that." I'm just wondering how to organize knowledge, and find information better. But KM is all about business.

I haven't given up on the field. I just shy away whenever it's called "KM."

Posted by: LionKimbro at February 11, 2004 07:52 PM

the concept that the knowledge of a business can be 'managed' has always amused me...

i recently blogged a newpiece in which a consultant group referred to employees and their associated knowledge in their client's organizations as cars in a car park... i posted it as a tongue-in-cheek piece since i feel that this analogy points out the 'wrong-mindedness' of the approach of many organizations to the implementation of a 'knowledge' program...

i have been recently blogging about, and was interested in your views on, creating 'knowledge worker infrastructures' martin...

Posted by: judith at February 14, 2004 08:14 PM

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