Originally published @ OnCollabNet

Imagine being lost on a deserted island with no hope of being discovered with only a volleyball named Wilson to keep you company.  There’s a reason pirates used marooning as a form of torture.  It’s a miserable existence (if you can call it that) that usually doesn’t end so well.  But yet that’s what becomes of most corporate knowledge.  It’s left on various file servers across the enterprise with little hope of discovery or rescue (aka. reuse).

In my last post entitled Strategic Reuse Process, we looked at an overall framework for analyzing how information flows through an organization and the hurdles encountered on its way to reuse.  But how does an artifact go from Publication to Discovery (see here for definition)?  In this post I want to dig a little deeper and discuss the first hurdle on our way to reuse, Findability.

find-a-bil-ity n
a.  The quality of begin locatable or navigable
b.  The degree to which a particular object is easy to discover or locate.
c.  The degree to which a system or environment supports navigation and retrieval

Peter Morville from Ambient Findability (more…)

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Originally published @ OnCollabNet as Strategic Reuse Process

Community managers have a tough job. They deal with lots of different stakeholders trying to find that elusive “middle ground”. They incessantly cheer on community activities and push adoption of collaboration best practices; but when it comes to validating their position through tangible and quantifiable metrics it can sometimes seem daunting. Is the best measure user participation? How about community size? Each of these seem like great things, and they are, but typically organizations don’t have a lot of tolerance for soft measures that don’t directly impact the “bottom-line”.

Recently I have been working to identify ways in which organizational performance gains can be tied to community activities. Since my current position involves helping large organizations increase performance from their development teams, I started first by looking at something that may seem far removed from community, knowledge reuse. (more…)

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Twitter is the first communication mechanism I’ve been a part of that actually helps me build new relationships without any preexisting knowledge (or trust) with the other party.   Much hoopla has been made about the micro-format of Twitter and how it enables new forms of communication, but the amazing power of Twitter comes from it’s ability to allow people to connect and develop new relationships seemingly out of nothing.

My Twitter relationships may lack the depth of trust that I have in the “Friend” model (in some cases of Facebook, LinkedIn, or email but they’re still relationships that I’ve come to value and that provide me with a sense of community.

How this happened surprised me.  I had sporadically used Twitter for about a year, but wasn’t finding it very useful until I started using the search feature of Twitter to discover people that I shared a common interest with.  I’ve talked about this in the past, but in a nutshell to get an action (or Twitter usage, in my case) requires the following… (more…)

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Trust influences nearly every interaction we have during any given day.  Every communication, every action, every conversation is shaped in some way by the trust and reputation that we infer on the interacting party.  It is the currency communities, both online and offline, trade in.  Without trust, lasting relationships can’t be built and authentic communities can’t be maintained.  As a Community Leader, part of our job is to build reputation and trust for our communities and the people associated with them.  This may sound easy, but it can be very hard since you rely on the actions of others for much of your community’s reputation and trust.  Think about it…  You may be the most trustworthy and reputable person in the world, but if your community is acting in the wrong way, your efforts may be for naught. (more…)

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I recently saw survey results from a 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll that stated only 15 percent of Americans believe Twitter to be an important new tool for communication and I believe it.  Not because it’s true but because Twitter can be hard to understand and get the hang of at first.

I distinctly remember my first experience with Twitter when I noticed someone casually mentioning they were “putting lipstick on at a redlight”.  My first thought was “this is totally worthless”.  My how times have changed.  Not only has the growth of Twitter been off the charts (1382% to be exact), but I’ve actually started using Twitter on a regular basis and find it extremely helpful and useful in my job. (more…)

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