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Back to School
So, the summer is over, and it's time for a fresh start.
Now that we're all (relatively) grown-up, we may associate that
"fresh start" feeling with January 1st, and the turning of the year. But on Knowledge Street, we still remember fondly the days when the new year really began in September, with the start of
school. Remember school supplies? The smell of fresh pencils and rubber erasers? Spiral notebooks? Maybe a new book bag, or new shoes?
For us, September has always been a month for hope. Another
chance to be one of the cool kids; the lead in the play, a star on the soccer team. In fact, Knowledge Street itself was formed in September of 2002, riding on that tide of seasonal optimism.
This
week, we've started our fourth year in business. That's probably more amazing to us than it is to our readers, but we'd like to take just a brief moment to pause, smell the coffee, acknowledge the event,
and say thanks. Thanks to our clients, and thanks to all the friends and colleagues who've supported us.
Onward and upward!
KM, Communications and Katrina
About 18 months ago, the proceedings of the September 11th commission were being broadcast
live in the US. Although no one we heard put things in these specific terms, the failure of Knowledge Management was an obvious, recurring theme. If the agencies involved had been able to "know what
they knew," things might have been very different. But culture clashes and mismatched technologies and management blunders made effective knowledge sharing impossible.
Things don't seem to
have improved all that much, if the response to Hurricane Katrina is any indication. There's an irony here, because an oft-cited example about the power of KM has this exact context. It can be found in Learning to Fly, and is the
story of a US Army colonel, dispatched to deal with hurricane cleanup. It was something he'd never done before, but by consulting the Army's Lessons Learned database, he was able to find a profile of
troop deployments for previous storms (including types of staff, skill sets, numbers of personnel in each category), a pro-forma budget (projected and actual), the 10 questions most likely to be asked by
CNN, a list of every state and federal agency that would be involved, with contact information, and the names and contact information for other Army personnel with relevant experience.
The
government seems to have some kind of amnesia now, perhaps forgetting there even is a Lessons Learned database. Not knowing what to do means not knowing what to say, and given the collapse of the
communications infrastructure, the horror of the situation is almost too much to think about. The good news, though, is that the power of the web has made it much easier for individuals to do something
positive. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of Katrina websites appeared almost overnight, sprouting like mushrooms after the rain.
There are the major philanthropic engines like the Red Cross, and the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund. But there are also specialized
sites, to help people find jobs (Hireability.com, Moonlight Real Estate, SOS Hotels), make in-kind contributions (tools and blankets, clothes, children's books), support displaced students (eLearners, Columbia, Rutgers) and find homes for orphaned pets (Alley Cat Allies, American Kennel Club, Days End Farm Horse Rescue). There are bulletin board sites, listing people who
are lost, or people who've been found -- the virtual equivalent of the missing persons walls we remember from four years ago. One grass roots effort combines Google maps with an overlay tagging function, to produce a kind of visual wiki where Katrina survivors can post their own notes. Yahoo and Lycos have both put up special Katrina portal pages, and there's a list of all major relief groups at the Network for Good.
So it may be we can't really count on those in charge to take care of things. But we can do a lot more than we used to,
when it comes to taking care of ourselves.
Knowledge Sharing and the Tribe
It's not a new idea to observe that knowledge is tribal, although it may still be an
original one. David Weinberger wrote an essay on this topic way back in October 2000, and almost all of the
Google hits on "knowledge is tribal" still lead you to Weinberger's original article. He wrote that to be accepted, "knowledge has to come from someone in the tribe or else it must be
delivered in the way the tribe chooses to receive foreign ideas."
In the last few weeks, some personal experiences have driven home Weinberger's observations. We've been doing research
on best practices for collaboration, and realized it was a shared membership in the tribe of KM True Believers which made people so willing to talk to us, and openly exchange ideas.
In fact, all
of us are part of many, overlapping tribes, and they all offer opportunities for human connection and knowledge transfer. There's the exDMR tribe, for example, and the Folk Project tribe. Bill Bly is a long-time member of the Hypertext tribe. One of us has
recently been accepted by the eBay tribe, which is particularly good at providing tools to reinforce tribal boundaries. It actively solicits feedback on both buyers and sellers, making each person
responsible for their own reputation, good or bad.
The need was for a particular, hard to find item, for a stage prop - a working seltzer bottle. You can find sellers of antique seltzer bottles
on eBay, so that was a good place to ask where working seltzer bottlers could be found. Within an hour, we had the email address for Walter Backerman,
the "last of the seltzer men," and within a day, he'd made contact. So far, Walter isn't interested in this transaction (having had some bad experiences with past theatricals). But he did
answer the note. That's because it wasn't really from a stranger.
It was from someone in the tribe.
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