The Network Singularity: Recent Comments

Comment on Knowledge Inventories

The Network Singularity — 2012-03-29T12:01:29Z

Sorry James, you just don't get it. It is not semantics either. Don’t feel bad as a newbie and asking questions. That’s important for beginners!

BTW, ‘beginner’ here is an important, critical behavior to seek. I URGE and understanding of Shoshin. Without it your transformation and of KM people is impossible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin

Again, knowledge is a human-only phenomenon; Knowledge involves complex cognitive processes: perception, communication, association and reasoning of humans -- not machinery of any type.

Your comment is badly confused by conflating knowledge and information. Until you understand the difference, talk to more people, truly embrace the uniquely human property of knowledge, you will continue to be lost.

Of course INFORMATION technology is advancing rapidly. Information aids human activities, but information has NO capacity for abstraction, while humans have infinite.

No, you do not understand praxis intervention or distributed phronesis. Give professor Flyvbjerg a call. He certainly agrees with me.

Stay on the path, you are getting close, and you may soon be enlightened.

-j

Comment on Knowledge Inventories

James Gunn — 2012-03-29T11:06:09Z

A forceful post – unfortunately although you aimed at knowledge repositories, you scored a direct on information repositories!
Let’s start with where we agree – much evil has been done in the name of the knowledge and knowledge management using information technology. Using a mental model based on a library rather than a human mind will not produce a knowledge repository, however many clever indexes you add. The human mind has a variety of elements missing in information repositories including many mental models of the world, a reasoning capability, judgement and the ability to compensate for missing information or missing knowledge. Almost all repositories use the library metaphor and are no more useful than a library with good librarians.
Second point of agreement – filling up what you call a knowledge repository (and I regard as an information repository) is a Sisyphean task and a full time job, which is a pity when people have a day job to do - one of the jobs won't be done properly. Capturing knowledge needs to be focused on valuable knowledge which can be found and re-used.
Now where we disagree:
Bent Flyvjberg indeed points out the biggest flaw of social science – in centuries, no predictive social science theory has yet been developed. That’s fine if doing research, but industry and government is looking for solutions, not questions and theories and this is why scientists and engineers find favour. Although many knowledge managers are still stuck in the information technology rut, others are not and their technologies originate in psychology and philosophy, not information science. I have seen several “knowledge repositories” which store carefully selected knowledge (and I don’t mean information), include limited reasoning capabilities specific to the business process they’re supporting. I haven’t yet seen industrialised (as opposed to laboratory) examples of judgment or learning, but the technologies are maturing all the time.
So while I understand why many people (and my generalisation includes you) have closed their minds to what they see as “knowledge repositories”, I respectfully challenge your mindset (have I understood “praxis intervention” correctly?) and ask you to do a little more research into knowledge - not information - technology (avoiding snake-oil vendors as you go).
BWs
James (Newtonian rationalist)

Comment on 7th Conference on Applications of Social Network Analysis

Anton Gadeev — 2012-02-29T06:31:16Z

Look at Platform for Collaborative Prediction (http://trendfor.me)

Comment on Survival Guide

Richard O. Legendi — 2012-02-26T11:33:11Z

Just for your information, there is a quite extensive collection of these abbreviations at the following site:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/

Comment on Marketing Confusion

jack — 2012-02-24T08:09:47Z

Its very true that finding customer or creating customer is of prime importance for any business. As the online business is growing so internet marketing is getting more popular. Its easy to use, less expensive and more favorable results.

Comment on The Siren Song of Social Media Metrics

CV Joint — 2012-02-09T09:54:16Z

This is amazing website and pretty informative for the car parts!

Comment on The Weakness of Strong Ties

Angela Dunn — 2011-12-11T22:43:58Z

Your post is spot on John! I will ping John Hagel and Valdis Krebs who will have more to say. Weak links are also the source of serendipity. "“We need serendipitous encounters with people because of the importance of the ideas these people carry with them and the connections they have,” “The Power of Pull” by John Hagel, et al. Please see my more in my post "Are Weak Links Key to Realizing Good Ideas?" http://blogbrevity.posterous.com/ideachat-nov-13th-are-weak-links-key-to-reali.

Also, see my prezi on the value of weak ties and "superconnecting," in "Innovators are Conversation Architects". http://screenr.com/w4F

Thank you for an interesting and valuable read.

Angela Dunn
@blogbrevity

Comment on Marketing Confusion

kaizen consultancy — 2011-12-02T11:31:25Z

Business ultimate goal is to earn profit. Providing jobs for people is one benefit that society can get in establishing businesses.

Comment on Tapping Into Social-Media Smarts

Donald V Steward — 2011-11-29T04:35:50Z

PROBLEM SOLVING MAY BE MORE THAN JUST KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
For the purpose of this article I will contend that the goal of knowledge management is to solve problems.
The problems faced by society today are becoming much more complex than they used to be. Where once they could be solved quite easily as many individual problems, due to advances in communications and greater connectivity, these many problems have now become so intertwined that they must be solved as large, more complex problems. That’s not easy.
Unable to solve these problems, people resort to using oversimplifications and fallacious reasoning, which results in problems not being solved, frustrations, anger, and hostilities. This, for example, has left us with a gridlocked Congress unable to do anything more than argue and threaten to shut down government by not passing the frequent continuing resolutions necessary to keep government operating. So we have government by threat and accusations rather than government by negotiations.
We need to find a way to solve these complex problems to avoid disaster. Fortunately, there exists a way. Unfortunately it has not gotten the attention it deserves because people are still convinced it cannot be done. Sometimes when the future has arrived, it takes several decades to recognize its presence. But our current problems are so serious that we may not afford the time to recognize that now these problems can be solved.
Solving problems requires more than just information. It also requires working with the relations between various aspects of information and the ability to use logic with these relations in order to understand their implications and solve problems.
The Explainer is a running beta version of a program that helps people with different perspectives collaborate to collect and discuss the cause-and-effect relations that define the situation from which a behavior may arise. We use some license by calling these relations ‘knowledge’.
People are fairly good at collecting these cause-and-effect dots. For example, ‘Joblessness’ is caused by ‘Businesses unable to hire employees’, which is caused by ‘Businesses unable to sell their products’ OR ‘Businesses unable to acquire funding to maintain and extend their businesses’. And ‘Businesses unable to sell their products’ is caused by ‘Joblessness’. The Explainer program makes it fairly easy to directly enter these relations without the need for the intervention of a knowledge engineer to translate them into a form the computer can recognize.
Then given a behavior, the Explainer does the abductive logic to find what explanations would produce that behavior. But since each explanation may predict other behaviors as well as the one intended, the Explainer uses deduction to find these other behaviors so that they can be tested as to whether they occur. If an explanation predicts a behavior that does not occur, it is ruled-out.
See http://problematics.com/articles/ARTICLE-B.pdf.

Comment on The Support Economy

David Hawthorne — 2011-09-10T12:47:59Z

Good to hear from Shoshana again. I'd like to hear more about the role of 'cash.'If more than a metaphor, I have trouble with the way 'cash' tends to "pool" in the system and becomes a sinkhole of speculation. Also, am I quibbling if I think individuals only create value when they act socially?