Knowledge, Communities and Virtual Spaces

Knowledge, Communities and Virtual Spaces

UPF MBAKnowledge Management

26/10/2005 – Joan Mayans[[email protected]]

MBA Universitat Pompeu Fabra Joan Mayans, 26.10.2005


Anthropology

Research

Practice

Business

Tim

e e

volu

tion P

roje

ct evolu

tion



Social Anthropology

Ethnographic method

Fieldwork

Participant observation

Social Group’sCULTURE

Knowledge

Behaviour

Everyday practices



Social Anthropology

Culture is what we are dealing with when we are managing knowledge.

To manage knowledge we must distinguish between people’s knowledge and knowledge about people. To be able to manage people’s knowledge, first we must have a deep knowledge of them. To put it in other words, we need an ethnographic or, at least, a qualitative approach to every social group –i.e., organization- before we pretend to manage their knowledge.



Research and practice

Why VIRTUAL spaces?

-As a community research place-As a practice/practicated space (Certeau)-As a deliberated, designed, produced space

-As an experimentation & innovation space-As an information & knowledge space-As an event production space




Two points of view in analyzing & designing “virtual life”:

Technological emphasis[Everything in virtual spaces is technologically created and managed]

Social emphasis[Everything in virtual spaces is social and makes society and culture]




Morningstar, Chip & Farmer, F. Randall, 1990, “The lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat”, publicado en Michael Benedikt, 1990, Cyberpace: First Steps, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,

Available: http://www.communities.com/company/papers/lessons.html

Social emphasis:

Cyberspace has to be planned and thought as something:

“defined more by the interactions among the actors within it than by the technology with which it is implemented”

Cyberspace is:

“necessarily a multiple-participant environment. It seems to us that the things that are important to the inhabitants of such an environment are the capabilities available to them, the characteristics of the other people they encounter there, and the ways these various participants can affect one another. Beyond a foundation set of communication capabilities, the technology used to present this environment to its participants, while sexy and interesting, is a peripheral concern”

And, as a conclusion, they state that:

“Managing a cyberspace world is not like managing the world inside a single-user application or even a conventional online service. Instead, it is more like governing an actual nation. Cyberspace architects will benefit from study of the principles of sociology and economics as much as from the principles of computer science. We advocate an agoric, evolutionary approach to world building rather than a centralized, socialistic one”




Donath, Judith S., 1997, Inhabiting the Virtual City: the design of social environments for electronic communities, Massachusetts: MIT.

Available in: http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/Judith/Thesis/Cover.html

Technological emphasis:

“To a large extend, the future success of virtual communities depends on how well the tools for social interaction are designed”

“If they [virtual communities] are poorly designed, the online world may feel like a vast concrete corporate plaza, with a few sterile benches: a place people hurry through on their way to work or home. If the tools are well designed, the on-line world will not only be inhabited, but will be able to support a wide range of interactions and relationships, from close collaboration to casual people watching”.



Ethnography and social sciences

methods +

Technology +

Design +

Practical and sociological orientation


Inte

gra

tion

Social places designed for social

interaction and information sharing

High degree of management and monitorization

capabilities

Places for knowledge transfer

and acquisition



… Places for knowledge transfer and acquisition…

3 examples:

• Free software & open code community

• ONLINE conference on cyberculture and knowledge society (November 2004)

• KM project at the Universal Forum of Cultures, Barcelona 2004



Free software, open code & digital development

Features & examples:

- Product sharing & open DB – http://sxc.hu/index.phtml

- Program and tutorial sharing – http://www.hotscripts.net

- K sharing - http://www.php.net · http://www.todoexpertos.com

- Open development projects – http://www.sourceforge.net

- Hacker culture/ethics· Non economic profit· Personal / symbolic / prestige / reconnaissance · Social structure with community bounds· It’s the social structure what allows sharing and transfer

http://sxc.hu/index.phtml





http://www.hotscripts.net/

http://www.php.net/

http://www.todoexpertos.com/

http://www.sourceforge.net/



ONLINE conference on cybersociety

About the conference:

-Definition of ‘online conference’

-Second edition

-Primarily ONLINE, but evolving to a blended event

-Participation success

-Some basic Data: · + 4.000 participants from 80 countries· + 400 papers in 5 languages· 78 Working Groups· + 4.000 messages

http://www.cibersociedad.net/congres2004/index_en.html

http://www.cibersociedad.net/congres2004/index_en.html




About the conference:

Participants origin:

Language of interaction / Paper:

Participants origin (2):Evolution of CSO members:



T.Team Scientific C. Support Committee

Working Groups Coordination

Active Participants (with paper and discussion)

Active Participants (in discussion)

Lurking Participants

Non-participant Participants

Aprox. 50%

Tim

e e

volu

tion




Technical team:

-Personal experience

-1st edition account and methodology

-Personal acknowledgement

-Community sociological knowledge

-Technological expertise

Main functions:

-All-around coordination and organization

-Information, assistance, education and knowledge transfer

-Group(s) dynamization




Scientific Committee:

-Personal acknowledgement and charisma

-Reputation transfer

-Stress in their expertise areas, topics and location

Main functions:

-Establishing main topics and conference title

-Signing conference editorial line

-Working Groups validation

-Some main lectures on the conference

-Allowed to lurk… so they almost disappeared…




Support Committee:

-Being there from the beginning

-Building the human base of the conference (and next?)

-Broadening of the expertise and location basis

-Broadening of the conference human talent basis

Main functions:

-Diffusion and distribution of the event and its calls

-Supporting technical team tasks

-Participation, participation, participation

-Stress on participation and creativity… so they invented




Working Groups Coordination:

-The bigger group in the organization

-Even more broadening of conference human basis

-Scientific/University experts at work

Main functions:

-Paper revision, evaluation and first comments

-Personal contact with paper-writers and participants

-Online coordination (with many tools)

-Forum dynamization

-Writing conclusions after the conference




TEC

HN

OLO

GY

, th

e o

ther

acto

r…

CONTENT management

(and processing)

Profile and PERSONAL

management

Social and knowledge

INTERACTION

• Personal data & photo• Personal presence, own and others• All the contents in the Conference• Other contents in the CyberSociety Obs.

• On-time content publishing• Keyword and supragroups creation• Random content entry• Tools for topic-focused navigation

• One-to-One• One-to-Many• Many-to-Many• A/Synchronous• Everywhere, a way to interact




Participation/Interaction arenas:

Paper submission

Working Group Discussion Fora

Multilingual chat room

General Discussion Fora

E-mail contact

More

In

form

al

More

Asi

nch

ron

ou

s

John Dewey: “knowledge is a mode of participation”




Organization conclusions and paths to improvement

-Better content organization (too much, too disperse groups)

-Better personal/emotional management (too many ways out during the process)

-Technological improvement of the chat-room application

-Other Tech & Design improvements (suggestions from participants)

-More video and audio capabilities

In order to get…

-More social density

-More knowledge density and usefulness



KMP @ Forum 2004

What it was?Defined as “a meeting point for citizens from everywhere and a dialogue space for the urgent debates of the 21st Century”

Main topics:- Sustainable development- Cultural diversity- Conditions for peace

Attempt to create the post-industrial new kind of big international knowledge-leisure based celebration.

Huge urbanistic intervention; in & out



KMP @ Forum 2004

Activities…141 days for…

• 51 Dialogues (conferences)

• 4+23 exhibitions

• 17 Installations and places

• Workshops and activities

• Traditional Sports & Games

• Performances• Music (423 concerts)• Dance, theater, circus

• The place itself and its shops, restaurants, etc.



KMP @ Forum 2004

Problems…Social misunderstanding: lack of past referents, lack of understanding the objectives

Citizenship indifference or even reaction against it

Too many and too diverse activities, collapsing agenda

Too much meaningless space and places

Too poorly linked and lack of a general contextualization of different kinds of activities



KMP @ Forum 2004

KMP GoalsHelping communication and press departments in order to transmit more accurately what the Forum was being

Creating new participation and personal communication channels through new and broader uses of the Forum website

Creating knowledge products coming from the Forum’s activities and contents

Building the Forum’s Knowledge Open Legacy through a wide knowledge capture, segmentation and storing methodology



KMP @ Forum 2004

KMP + GoalsExplain ourselves the general sense of what the Forum had been

Extract strategic value and international prestige beyond the physical and temporal boundaries, through real after-Forum projects

Find and transfer to society and governments the main and most relevant topics and ideas that occurred in the whole Forum

Create an own methodology of the whole organization, a how to Forum? for next editions



KMP @ Forum 2004

Ethnographical and strategic

analysis Project conceptualization and methodology Project

coordination and management

Intranet for collaborative capture

and knowledge processing

Hiring, training and actual work

of knowledge capture teams



KMP @ Forum 2004

9/05/04 26/09/04Forum’s rythm of activities and content production

Knowledge capture rythm. Ordered integration and storing of information.

Generation of first outputs

Evolució Fòrum

Evolució Captura de Coneixement

Evolució Gestió de Coneixement i primers productes



KMP @ Forum 2004

Diàlegs Exposicions Espectacles

Banc de Coneixement FÒRUM

SíntesiCatalogació

Gestió de Coneixement

Act. Participatives

Resum Visual Mapa d’idees Diccionari de futur



KMP @ Forum 2004

Project direction

Sectorial coordination

Content production & revision

Dialogue Managers (freelance)

Knowledge ‘hunters & gatherers’ (university volunteers)

Ass

iste

nts

Software Development & Multimedia Production Externalization

Organization internal sources of information

Organization consumers of Managed Knowledge



KMP @ Forum 2004

At the place capture

Data input to the DB through the collaborative work area

Actual review writing

Vectorization

Catalogation

Knowledge Bank ?