January 2009
57 posts
Here comes everybody (clay shirky) p100
“…community of practice, a group of people who coverse about some shared task in order to get better at it”
Here comes everybody (clay shirky) p99
“the activities of the amateur creators are self-reinforcing. If people can share their work in an environment where they can also converse with one another, they will begin talking about the things they have shared” - this is exactly about cultivating the conditions for knowledge sharing
Here comes everybody (clay shirky) p98
“filter-then-publish…rested on a scarcity of media that is a thing of the past. The expansion of social media means that the only working system is publish-then-filter”
Here comes everybody (clay shirky) p91-3
“fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention, more arrows pointing in than out” Conditions 1. Attention from at least thousands 2. Unable to reciprocate - even without the technological limit of TV’s inability for two way interactivity, it still wouldnt be possible to reciprocate the attention due to cognitive limits, thus an imbalance we call...
Here comes everybody (clay shirky) p90
“now that the cost of posting things in a global medium has collapsed, much of what gets posted on any given day is in public but not for the public”
Here comes everybody (clay shirky) p88-89
“…there is no obvious point where a blog…stops functioning like a diary for friends and starts functioning like a media outlet…community now shades into audience; it’s as if your phone could turn into a radio station at the turn of a knob” - in reference to the same technology being used for both communications and broadcasting
Here comes everybody (clay shirky) p85-7
“most user-generated content isnt “content” at all, in the sense of being created for general consumption, any more than a phone call between you and a relative is ‘family-generated content’” “we misread these seemingly inane posts because we’re so unused to seeing written material in public that isnt intended for us” “the distinction...
Here comes everybody (clay shirky) p79
“the spread of literacy after the invention of moveable type ensured not the success of the scribal profession but its end. Instead of mass professionalisation, the spread of literacy was a process of mass amateurisation. The term ‘scribe’ didnt get extended to everyone who could read and write. Instead, it simply disappeared, as it no longer denoted a professional class”
Here comes everybody (clay shirky) p67-8
TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIAL CHANGE
“because social effects lag behind technological ones by decades, real revolutions dont involve an orderly transition from point A to point B. Rather, they go from A through a long period of chaos and only then reach B. In that chaotic period, the old systems get broken long before new ones become stable.”
“in the late 1400s scribes existed side by...
Here comes everybody (clay shirky) p57-60, 67-69
RESISTANCE TO PROFESSIONAL OBSOLESCENCE - “What happens when the cost of reproduction and distribution go away?” “A profession exists to solve a hard problem, one that requires some sort of specialisation…most professions exist because there is a scarce resource that requires ongoing management…the scarcity of the resource itself creates a need for a professional...
“This newly-realized importance of the network reminds me of biology, where we...”
– The Connected Economy - O’Reilly Radar
“Knowledge Management refers to the management of the components and enabling of...”
– Dr Fuzzy
“Many organizations struggle to balance the conflicting demands of efficiency and...”
– Wellsprings of Creation: Perturbation and the Paradox of the Highly Disciplined Organization — HBS Working Knowledge
“Process is “how work should be done.” And Practice is “how...”
– Jack Vinson
Here comes everybody (clay shirky) p51-53
TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS “…situations wherein individuals have an incentive to damage the collective good” Eg sheep grazing on commonly owned pasture - self interest to not over graze (keeps pasture healthy) - if no-one is greedy all benefit - it only takes one to overgraze to ruin it…”the decision not to overgraze is provisional on everyone else making the same...
Here comes everybody (clay shirky) p49-51
LADDER OF GROUP UNDERTAKING 1. Sharing/participating/collecting - low barrier or demand to take part (self driven for self benefit) - group is an aggregate - shared awareness 2a. Cooperating - higher demand “because it involves changing your behaviour to synchronise with people who are changing their behaviour to synchronise with you” - creates group identity Eg community,...
Here comes everybody (clay shirky) p47
“for the last hundred years the big organisational question has been whether any given task was best taken on by the state, directing the effort in a planned way, or by businesses competing in a market. This debate was based on the universal and unspoken supposition that people couldnt simply self-assemble; the choice between markets and managed effort assumed that there was no third...
“My general response to people who ask the question How do we get people to share...”
– Dave Snowden
Definitions of camaraderie on the Web:
SOURCE - http://gog.is/define:camaraderie
chumminess: the quality of affording easy familiarity and sociability wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
Friendship is a term used to denote co-operative and supportive behavior between two or more beings. This article focuses on the notion specific to interpersonal relationships. … en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camaraderie
Close friendship in a group of...
Definitions of acculturation on the Web:
“acculturation” may be a new name for my blog, still thinking about it
SOURCE - http://gog.is/define:acculturation
socialization: the adoption of the behavior patterns of the surrounding culture; “the socialization of children to the norms of their culture” all the knowledge and values shared by a society the process of assimilating new ideas into an existing cognitive...
“If you want to point to more proximate harms, it would be very hard to argue, for example, that innovation, inventiveness, new intellectual discoveries had slowed as a result of the Internet, and so people are left with these kind of mealy-mouth cultural critiques, because nostalgia becomes the only bulwark against change. The actual effects of making more information available to more...
“…there is no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure…”
“If you took the contents of an average Barnes and Noble, and you dumped it into the streets and said to someone, “You know what’s in there? There’s some works of Auden in there, there’s some Plato in there. Wade on in and you’ll find what you like.” And if you wade on in, you know what...
In a knowledge-driven economy, talk is real work -Thomas Davenport and Larry Prusak
“i never teach my pupils; i only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn” -albert einstein
“We once heard knowledge management likened to herding cats. Stop for a minute...”
– Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell - Learning To Fly
“You can’t manage knowledge – nobody can. What you can do is to manage the...”
– Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell - Learning To Fly
“…the new technologies “focus not on capturing knowledge itself, but rather on...”
– Nicholas Carr on Andrew McAfee
Here comes everybody (clay shirky) p46-7
COASEAN LOGIC GETS STRANGE “small decreases in transaction costs make business more efficient, because the constraints of the institutional dilemma get less severe. Large decreases in transaction costs create activities that cant be taken on by business, or indeed by any institution, because no matter how cheap it becomes to perform a particular activity, there isnt enough payoff to support...
“And they believed that just about everything you needed to know existed in a document somewhere, with the only real task finding out where the document you needed was buried.” “Look Phil – that’s the employee phone book over there on my desk. You can see at a glance who works here, where they work and how they can be reached. But you won’t see there who needs to be called for a...
“Efficiency programs such as Six Sigma are designed to identify problems in work processes—and then use rigorous measurement to reduce variation and eliminate defects. When these types of initiatives become ingrained in a company’s culture, as they did at 3M, creativity can easily get squelched. After all, a breakthrough innovation is something that challenges existing procedures and...
Here comes everybody (clay shirky) p44-5
WHEN TRANSACTION COSTS FALL OR COLLAPSE (Cosean Floor) - large firms increase in size - small firms are more effective as they are doing business at a lower cost “anyone who has worked in an organisation with more than a dozen employees recognises institutional costs. Anytime you are faced with too many meetings, too much paperwork, or too many layers of approval…you are dealing with...
Here comes everybody (clay shirky) p41-4
COASEAN CEILING - HIERARCHY DOESNT SCALE “…not only does managing resources take resources, but management challenges grow faster than organisational size” - lower transaction cost by increasing managerial structure - simplifies lines of responsibility and communications - workers are agreed to be managed by pay and this is based on responsiveness to their managers request ...
Here comes everybody (clay shirky) p35
“the basic capabilities of tools like flickr reverse the old order of group activity, transforming ‘gather, then share’ into ‘share, then gather’. People were able to connect after discovering one another through their photos” - networks of self interest are the new breed of expert locators with a sustaining purpose as they are not just a look up tool, but a...
Here comes everybody (clay shirky) p29-31
WHY ORGANISATIONS? “running an organisation is difficult in and of itself, on matter what its goals. Every transaction it undertakes-every contract, every agreement, every meeting-requires it to expend some limited resource: time, attention, or money. Because of these transaction costs, some sources of value are too costly to take advantage of. As a result, no institution can put all its...
“we use the word ‘organisation’ to mean both the state of being...”
– Here comes everybody (clay shirky) p29
Here comes everybody (clay shirky) p18-9
MANAGEMENT AND COORDINATION COSTS Economics says “people respond to incentives”…the easier it is (eg processes, tools) and the more self interest (personal gain) the more they will contribute - this ties into the ‘invisible hand’ of economics where everyone can pursue self interest which promotes the greater good for the market (cooperation without coercion) via...
Literate Knowledge Worker
“They have the ability to use the best sources to gain the information they need, which are both accurate and current. Next, with the data on hand they excel at extracting the key information, comprehending it, and then manipulating it to provide the organization the greatest benefit possible.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_worker
1st sentence - using networks and blogs, etc...
“Knowledge grows like organisms, with data serving as food to be assimilated...”
– Weiss
“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.”
– Peter F. Druker
Here comes every body (clay shirky) p16
…”the centrality of group effort to human life means that anything that changes the way groups function will have profound ramifications for everything from commerce and government to media and religion”
Here comes everybody (clay shirky) p18
…”forming groups has gotten a whole lot easier” (due to the webs architecture of participation)…getting free and ready participation of a large, distributed group with a variety of skills…has gone from impossible to simple” The economic cost has collapsed (money, time, effort, attention)
Here comes everybody (clay shirky) p17-8
…”new technology enables new kinds of group-forming” - we now have the online tools to coordinate and scale lots of people, not only this, but this may occur in a self organised way “when we change the way we communicate, we change society. The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life. “but mere...
Emergence (steven johnson) p222-3
MANAGEMENT AS FEEDBACK FOR ADAPTIVENESS …”emergent systems can be brilliant innovators, and they tend to be more adaptable to sudden change than more rigid hierarchical models” “ A number of companies…have experimented with neural-net-like organisational structures…building a more cellular, distributed network of small units” “units can assemble...
Emergence steven johnson p196-9
.”Social imagination is missing in 99.99 per cent of the world’s living creatures” “The world is full of imperfectly shared information, and that other individuals may have a perspective on the world that differs…” …and we can exploit the difference for our self benefit. Eg chimpanzee concealing something from one mate but not the other ie “capable...
Emergence (steven johnson) p178
.”the designer, in other words, controls the micromotives of the player’s actions. But the way those micromotives are exploited-and the macrobehaviour that they generate-are out of the designer’s control. They have a life of their own”
Emergence (steven johnson) p169
OBLIQUE CONTROL “…obey rules that we define in advance, but those rules only govern the micromotives. The macrobehaviour is another matter. You dont control that directly. All you do is set up the conditions that you think will make that behaviour possible.”
“when we come across a system that doesnt work well, there’s no point in...”
– Emergence (steven johnson) p162
Emergence (steven johnson) p160-1
It’s not the medium or the message, it’s the rules or feedback loop that “govern the way the message flows through the system” Do emergent systems that adapt via feedback loops in the form of user self regulation (eg rate posts based on a quality whether it will be liked by the average user) suffer from groupthink or an echo chamber? May we get a tyranny of the majority?...
Emergence (steven johnson) p152-7
CONTROL DOESNT SCALE FOR QUALITY (OR EFFECTIVENESS) -slashdot.org- 1. A website for friends to share links 2. Attracted thousands of contributors and readers, as a result the volume of post submissions was too much for one person to filter/moderate the signal from the noise 3. Staying with a top-down method a crew of people were in charge of moderating. Besides eliminating spam they had a tool to...
THOUGHTS ON CAS AND PEOPLE
Humans r not ants or cells, we will never cluster as a perfect CAS as we have minds of our own that get in the way, our self interest may compromise the system. No amount of guideline, rule or self regulation (feedback) is going to be good enough alone. At times we need the help of facilitation and constraints, to aid the self organisation/growth and to adapt (dampen/attract). Even though this is...