Matt Moore has revisited and refined his enterprise 2.0/ email detox medley. I particularly like this sensible advice for a five step approach: 1. ban attachments & instead link to files sitting in a more permanent location 2. if an email conversation involves more than 5 people then shift it elsewhere 3. make your tools as simple to use as possible 4. encourage role modelling of good behaviours by senior staff 5. begin with a ...

I’ve had a couple of brushes with bestness in the past week. Well three brushes actually, illustrating four distinct dangers of the notion of “bestness” in knowledge management: • The notion of bestness is attractive but has little utility in dealing with human systems • The application of the notion of bestness can be abusive • The notion of bestness can give you licence to switch off your brain • The notion of bestness can ...

Via Michael Idinopulos this New York Times article is not only a good story of wiki adoption (in the US State Department) but it also has this great two-liner: “The decision to embrace wikis is part of a changing ethic at the department, from a “need to know culture” to a “need to share culture,” said Daniel Sheerin, deputy director of eDiplomacy, which was created in 2003. “This is a technological manifestation of a policy ...

Jack Vinson has done a great job of annotating the “Is KM Dead?” video with Dave and Larry together with timings. Mea culpa, should have done it myself, but Jack has done a much better job.

John Wilkins has an intriguing (anti-creationist) post explaining the differences between taxonomy and typology in biology. It’s the difference between classifying by identity (homology) vs similarity. The crispness of this distinction doesn’t hold up as well in the social sciences, I think, where types have a different meaning as exemplars of particular combinations of attributes, nor in the world of knowledge classification. The distinction is also not unassailable among scientists either, as John points out. ...

Dave Snowden has a nice piece in the latest edition of KM World entitled “Everything is Fragmented”. The piece itself is an interesting hypothetical recipe for building naturalistic patterns of collaboration and sharing as an alternative to the formal methodologies (and platforms) for building CoPs. I’d really like to see some examples of this (NOT best practice case studies, but some nice, diverse examples showing this working), because it sounds both plausible and very human, ...