Units of Knowledge

Types of Wikis:

• Groups or project wikis - 71% of people responding to survey indicated they used wikis for purposes such as team communication, documentation of product features, orientation of new workers and discussions of special interests.
• Single-contributor wikis - Two types: personal information management tool intended for the owner’s use only and a written resource made by one person and shared with others (they often anticipate others will contribute at the onset)
• Pedias - Intended to be a stand alone, comprehensive source of company knowledge. Target broad readership, whereas group wikis target a specific audience. 

Finally, the comprehensive ambition of a pedia means that it requires more resources, management, and thought devoted to incentive structures and conflict resolution policies.

In a large organization, responsibilities are divided and over time people become authorities on or responsible for particular subjects. People do not edit one another‟s web pages, and a wiki initiator may hope others will contribute, but other people may not be sure how much the creator really feels about it. This tension and lack of clear norms for participation may deter contributions, and inadvertently force what was intended to be a group effort into being a single-contributor wiki. 

Key Issues:

• Encouraging growth - There is a natural tension between pushing contribution and making sure that content is of the type and level of detailed desired (company level detail versus team level detail). Norms need to be established in order to grow the community.

the people who needed to put in the work to make the system useful were not necessarily those who saw direct benefits of use [9]. Contributing to a pedia was not part of the employees‟ day-to-day jobs, nor did it appear to help them do their jobs any better (although it could assist others)

• Territoriality - Even with tools to assist adding content to the pedia, will individuals or teams want to expose this information to the company at large?

This suggests a capability for providing one view of information for the team and another for the company at large. Yet will employees spend the time to keep multiple views up to date? Maintaining multiple views may require having people who take active responsibility and receive recognition for the task.

There appears to be some good ideas here on how one might do this.

This is a lot more of a QS thing around personal data, but there are some interesting thoughts here.

Planz provides a single, integrative document-like overlay to a folder hierarchy through the dynamic, ondemand assembly of XML fragments. This overlay provides a context in which to create or reference not only files but also email messages, web pages and informal notes. This paper describes an evaluation of Planz over a period of several days during which participants compared their experiences on two projects – one involving “status quo” methods, a second project involving Planz. Also discussed is an architecture that extends on the front-end to provide additional overlays and on the back-end in support of additional information stores. Work on Planz is guided by a vision of “structural integrity”: Many tools, many modes of interaction applied to a common structure for the organization of and access to personal information.

signalfound:

Personal information management (PIM) refers to the practice and the study of the activities people perform in order to acquire, organize, maintain, retrieve and use information items such as documents (paper-based and digital), web pages and email messages for everyday use to complete tasks (work-related or not) and fulfill a person’s various roles (as parent, employee, friend, member of community, etc.).

One ideal of PIM is that we always have the right information in the right place, in the right form, and of sufficient completeness and quality to meet our current need. Technologies and tools such as personal information managers help us spend less time with time-consuming and error-prone activities of PIM (such as looking for information). We then have more time to make creative, intelligent use of the information at hand in order to get things done, or to simply enjoy the information itself.

This is an oldie, but I am going to give it a skim tomorrow as it directly assess some of the psychology around some of the issues we are looking at.

“This paper illustrates how many of the issues involved in the automation of information management are essentially psychological in nature. These principally devolve upon the processes of recall, recognition and categorisation. Examples of existing information management techniques show how there is a trend to automate with a view to simulating office practices, or to develop according to the availability of technological solutions. Both of these are inefficient with respect to the user’s psychological needs. A framework for developing user-oriented information management systems is discussed and relevant research issues presented. “

I don’t love the approach here, but I think there could be something valuable in thinking about how knowledge collection can form narrative arcs in the development of knowledge, particularly if you were to grab it at the smallest unit and pull narratives together based on source and context. There are also some interesting thoughts around exploratory search.

This could be useful in thinking about ways to potentially kick-start group formation within organizations.

Not sure that information scraps are the information we are after as I think a lot of what we are looking to capture is knowledge that is not typically articulated (see my earlier lazy blogging posts), but the chart below gives a nice outline of the types of information that typically falls through the cracks (note the how-tos):

• “I would like to have time to organize what I’ve captured, but this never happens.” DOC adds that she wishes she were an adherent to the Getting Things Done methodology [Allen 2001]. 
• “By Friday, no stickies and no papers on the desk,” UI2 preemptively excused the existence of information scraps on her desk. 
• “Ideally, I wouldn’t need this anymore,” ADMN2 says of the disorganized notebook in which she keeps all of her important information. (Clearly, it’s not going anywhere.) 

The design recommendations outlined here reflects a lot of what we have been thinking.

Key Takeaways:

• “Information sharing, self-promotion (links to personally created content) and questions to followers were valued highly, while presence maintenance, conversational and ‘me now’ statuses were less valued.”
• “Our analysis suggests: embed more context in tweets (and be less cryptic); add personal commentary, especially if retweeting a common news source; don’t overuse hashtags and use direct messages (DMs) rather than @mentions if more appropriate; happy sentiments are valued and “whining” is disliked, and questions should use a unique hashtag so followers can keep track of the conversation.”