Knowledge Networks..

We frequently look for use cases when studying communities of knowledge workers. The largest and most successful (IMHO) knowledge network today is the open source community. One of the few major companies to tap into it in a constructive manner is IBM, the rest have different degrees of antipathy towards the community. The tools provided by sites such as Freshmeat provide the framework for very effective collaboration and information sharing.

The knowledge captured and shared by the open source community is probably one of the most dynamic and dense public bodies of knowledge available today. The concept of open source and blogs are very similar around the open sharing of ideas and allowing the network (i.e. empowered individuals) to select and propagate useful code or posts.

The open source community is probably the largest R&D laboratory in existence today. It is a classic example of simple tools for collaboration providing more value than all the complex tools combined have ever produced. While companies such as RedHat have tapped into this and created successful businesses they have only tapped into a small fraction of the value that the network has produced. Is there an organizing principle here where value can be created. By value we do not necessarily mean financial value but rather new applications that will benefit the community as a whole. Applications that move beyond the creation of Linux and GNU to the mass of users of computers.

Simple tools - Just the facts

Effective Social Networks on Ross Mayfields blog brings up the point of the complexity of groupware tools - I would add to this the whole field of knowledge management as being guilty of the same sin. There is a self perpetuating myth that there needs to be a complex set of software to manage large amounts of unstructured information. The myth appears to be that this information is hugely valuable and needs sophisticated tools to ensure you can squeeze the last drop of value out of it.

One of my professors taught his class a key rule in any engineering project - always do a rough estimate for any calculation/project to get an idea of the size before doing a detailed analysis. This serves several purposes - makes sure you understand the variables in the problem and makes sure you do not misplace any zeros in the detailed analysis. Doing the same in any groupware or knowledge management application is a similarly revealing exercise - take a representative sample of information and reduce it to the key facts - it quickly shows there is not much there and what is there does not benefit from complex tools.

So what is all this unstructured data - mainly attempts to create the evidence to prove the few facts that we are all trying to reach agreement on. Perhaps we should be looking for tools to assemble evidence in favor of the few key truths that we all hope exist.