Stewart Mader has written about keys to wiki adoption. To quote: Meetings are an especially good place to start. Plan agendas using a wiki, then record minutes & notes, and action items. Between meetings, you can update the status of items, and this sets the stage for deeper wiki uses, like project management.

[Thanks to Michael Angeles]

So considering Mother’s Day was a couple of days ago, it’s not surprising that I’ve been thinking a fair amount about my own mom who died suddenly 27 years ago (has it been that long?) leaving me with a slew of unanswered questions about my family history, my young childhood, her views on life, etc.. Seems like just as I was getting old enough to really have a somewhat intellectual relationship with her as well as a mother-son relationship, she was gone. Still makes me sad.

Last night I had this kind of cool waking dream that is no doubt related to her death and to the holiday. It was at some point in the future, after my own death (hopefully way, way into the future) and my kids were struggling with some of the same questions that I had about my own history. What were they like as kids? Why did we move? What were my grandparents like? But in this dream, even though I wasn’t there to answer them, they had another resource.

What I envisioned was them turning to the computer and accessing an avatar representation of me who carried in him the compilation of all my writing, blogging, photos, movies, oral histories and more that I had created while I was alive. And that avatar was able to sort through all of that information and answer their questions, have a conversation with them in fact, in my voice. At some point in the dream, I realized that the avatar was not only feeding back historical data, but was also using the sum of my work to offer advice and counsel in ways that I most likely would have offered were I alive. Even though I wasn’t there physically, it’s like a piece of my brain lived on, one that was able to provide for my kids a richer understanding of their histories and legacies. Certainly not anything that hasn’t been thought of before, but It was, as I said, a pretty cool vision.

I think that dream brought to light another aspect of why I blog. Not just to reflect. Not just to learn. But in some small way to leave a trail for those who come after me. I certainly can’t predict to what extent those people might find any of this relevant or compelling or useful, but I know I would love to have the chance to dig through the work of my own mother, to learn about her more deeply, to understand who she was and what she stood for. If nothing else, my kids will have that opportunity.

And with that thought, it’s 26 hours of travel home…

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Avi Rappoport has written about "search tools junk". To quote: Search logs contain a lot of weird things, and some of them can have a significant effect on search log analysis. Having looked at tens of thousand lines of search log entries, I offer this first attempt at defining some of the weirdest and least useful kinds of log entry, which I call "Search Log Junk". Here are the types of junk that I've seen most frequently.

on a cue from the IJG, Alan Watts speaks on Life and Music, brought to you by Parker and Stone:

My last full day here in Australia before the long trip home tomorrow. I get my day back, but who knows how long it will be before I get my body clock back. Last summer it took almost two weeks for me to get straight. Tips anyone? (Be nice.)

Haven’t had time to think much of this through, so excuse the relatively thin thinking. (Feel free to poke holes in it, as always.)

I’ve visited a couple of pretty interesting schools during my visit, one that’s in the process of being built, another that’s been around for 30 years, both different in their design. The new school, a high school, will be one built on open spaces for learning, project based learning concepts, individualized learning plans and very different roles for teachers and classrooms. The spaces have been designed with the great thinkers in mind, DaVinci and Einstein spaces, spaces that on blueprint at least offer up a great deal of potential for creativity and independence and passion based learning. Arts are embedded in the curriculum, and there is a really different concept of assessment. With any luck, I’ll be writing more about this place in the near future.

The other school was out in the country, surrounded by fields filled with cows and chickens and pigs. It was a small, PreK-6 school where the classrooms had all sorts of angles and skylights and patterns. Everywhere you look there is evidence of performance learning. Every classroom has a kitchen where kids do a lot of cooking. Outside, playground spaces are performance spaces as well. And the kids tend to the livestock and the farm as well as the school. I loved the feel.

Technology plays a role in both of these schools, though the roles are different to be sure. The high school will be a 1-1 school. The other is expanding the access of computers to its kids. Both are ripe for the ways in which technology can supplement real learning in the classroom, not just information processing. Obviously, there is much more about the culture and the infrastructure and the climate that goes into all of this.

The early thinking that’s evolved from those visits for me is this: we have been living in a world with pretty much one, ubiquitous model for schools for a long time now. This strikes me every time I take off on a plane to somewhere and am able without any trouble to pick out the school buildings we’re flying over. They’re all at right angles, with baseball and football fields nearby. The sizes and number of buildings vary, but it’s rare that I see yellow school buses parked next to anything that looks like something other than a factory.

In my own thinking about what schools might become, I’m realizing that I’ve been thinking that this old model is going to turn into a different model. But what’s really going to happen, I think, is that we’re about to explode into many different models. Obviously, this may not happen with any great momentum until we free up our ideas about assessment and learning culture, neither of which is an easy road. But we do need to find ways to support more unique, passion-based schools, places that like our kids, come in all shapes and sizes. I can’t remember when he said it, whether blog or e-mail, but Tom Hoffman reminded me a while ago that we have a lot of different models out there already, many of which are successful in their own right. And as we move away from that one factory model, we need to be open to whatever types of new models might evolve.

(Photo “old classroom” by shuichiro.)

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The phrase 'trying to boil the ocean' refers to tasks that are clearly and heroically impossible. This is exactly what most teams take on when they try to get every intranet page up to the same high standard.

In the earlier article titled Intranet authoring: a hobby?, the role of intranet authors was explored, highlighting that many are required to maintain their content 'on the side', with little training or support.

Most intranets struggle to deliver consistent, accurate, readable and valuable content. Despite this, the goal of many intranet teams remains to deliver universally 'good' content.

This briefing will discuss common approaches to improving content, focusing on those that have failed. Suggestions will then be made on ways to target efforts for best effect.

Failed: content cleanups

Many teams attempt a content cleanup on a regular basis, perhaps every year or two. These involve reviewing most sections of the site, and the content contained within.

These reviews are looking for ROT (redundant, outdated or trivial), generating 'hit lists' of content that can be removed.

While these very easily remove hundreds or thousands of pages, the long term impact is negligible. As fast as content is reviewed by the central team, more is published by decentralised authors.

The process drains the energy of the intranet team, and often frustrates content owners. Even after a major cleanup, the intranet rapidly accumulates more content problems, and reverts to its previous state.

[CM Briefing 2008-06, read the full article]

The rise of enterprise search has put an increasing focus on searching ever broader collections of content and documents within organisations.

While enterprise search projects generally start with simple intranet search, attention quickly moves to searching document management systems, collaboration tools, business systems and fileshares.

Underpinning this work is the belief (or hope) that business value will be delivered to users by deploying a more extensive search tool.

Unfortunately it is often the case that searching more is not better than searching less.

This briefing will look at some of the challenges involved in implementing enterprise search, and provide practical tips on how to proceed.

Relevance and value

The fundamental goal of any search tool is to provide users with useful and relevant search results.

Within the enterprise, this means finding valuable information across the many different repositories, sources and systems.

The difficulty is that increasing the amount of information being searched almost always reduces the relevance of search results. Once called the 'Altavista effect', this was seen in the millions of hits generated for any set of terms entered into that search engine.

This is equally significant within an enterprise, and the challenge is to maintain (or improve) relevance as the volume of information grows.

Consideration also needs to be given to user needs and expectations. What types of queries are being entered into the enterprise search, and what sorts of results are expected? Gaining a deeper understanding of these questions helps to shed light on what to search, and how.

[CM Briefing 2008-05, read the full article]

So you're sitting at your desk and you have to redesign your intranet (or design one from scratch). Where on earth do you start?

By any measure, this is no easy task. The multitude of factors that need to be taken into account can be overwhelming.

Over the years, we have published a vast amount of information on intranets, offering the benefits of our experience and giving practical advice on intranet management, information architecture and content management.

In this article, we attempt to wrap up all the activities that form part of an intranet (re)design into one concise checklist.

Along the way, references will be given to our most popular articles, giving you more detail on particular topics. The goal is to give you an excellent starting point for undertaking an intranet (re)design and also to provide support throughout the process.

User-centred design methodology

As a basic framework for this article, a simplified intranet (re)design process has been devised, illustrated in Figure 1.

Before going through each of the steps in order, it's important to point out that best practice for designing interactive information systems -- such as intranets and websites -- involves using a user-centred design (UCD) methodology.

This simply means that input from the people who will actually use the intranet is given equal weighting with the business objectives and the information (aka content).

[May KM Column written by Patrick Kennedy, read the full article]

Hard to decide which is more completely wrong-road twisted and lost of way, the multiple bloggers I've found citing this stuff as sliced bread goodness, or the people who proffer it up for profit, or maybe the folks who buy into it to the tune of a major industry. The objective is fine of itself, to work to be better tomorrow than one was today, to work to keep mentally acute and fit, to stay mentally agile and so save others the need to dote and care over your advancing years, or even so as to ensure the peak condition and progressive cognitive development for growing minds, from 8 to 80 as the boardgames used to say:

Participants play fitness games for about an hour per day on a computer, training their brains to react to certain stimuli faster, thereby speeding up the process of when nerve cells talk to each other.
[ Reality Sandwich | Brain Workout ]

But dig, before you shell-out the subscriber fee for your ticket to übermench-hood, I want you to know something: there is something very very wrong here, fundamentally wrong, epidemically wrong, culturally wrong, and needlessly wrong, and I'll tell you what it is.  read more »

• from Barbara Dieu (in answer to my Big Question "Where Do I Belong?") -- You belong to yourself man!
• from Patti Digh: Maybe life is very simple. Very, very simple. And to make it more interesting we complicate things. We seem to love to impose laws (marriage laws, for example) that do nothing more than allow us to abdicate our personal responsibility.

I relegated my manifesto from the blog header to a subsidiary page just last weekend; it includes that phrase “seemingly irrational”, which this letter also uses ….

Your article (How did no-win, no-fee change things?, 7 May) bears out the fact that the “rise” of no-win, no-fee is more of a perception than a reality. But it’s a powerful perception, and one that is often the root cause of seemingly irrational decisions to require schoolchildren to wear goggles to play conkers, but not to wear them in the swimming pool when the chlorinated water irritates their eyes! My profession, health and safety, then gets saddled with the blame. But the reality is that it’s not a result of advice given by health and safety professionals - rather officials seeking an easy way out of a difficult decision or racked with unrealistic fears that they might be sued should something go wrong. Modern health and safety practice is about striking a sensible balance. Unfortunately, it’s a powerful and believable excuse for some in positions of authority. Health and safety professionals are not interested in preventing people from doing activities that have gone ahead without serious harm for generations. We want people to have good fun - in a safe and healthy way.
Ray Hurst, IOSH President, Wigston, Leicestershire.

Healthy balance being destroyed by “enforced” choices … enforced by the decision-making psychology, not by any reality or necessity to do so.  Perception is the root cause.

This is a photo I took late at night in the cemetary at the top of Wellington city centre. A beautiful and haunting place, even after they put the road through the middle of it. The highlight was created by a small LED torch I happened to be carrying.

By the way, I'm posting this photo from my new Flickr account, which I'll be using to share just my best work. My old account will still be in place, and you can follow this for my work-in-progress shots.

(I don't know whether having two Flickr accounts is sensible or practical, but I guess I'll find out over the next couple of months.)

• Business is war or sport; business is 'organic', information has an 'ecology'
• A leader is a country or a company ("Russia says...", "The White House responded...", "ExxonMobil believes...")
• Collectively, the documents of an organization are its 'corporate memory'.
  
• The change needed in human culture and behaviour is a metamorphosis from today's larval stage to the future butterfly adult stage.
• America under Bush is like a family that has been repeatedly brutalized by a drunk father.
• Ideas and beliefs and behaviours can spread like viruses, 'infect' others and even lead to 'epidemic' change.

Some random observations of my first few days in Oz:

First, how is it Qantas can serve a free hot meal and free beverages on a 55 minute trip from Melbourne to Sydney when most US airlines I fly on can barely provide a cold, stale sandwich on a cross country flight? It’s also cool, by the way, that the people meeting you off the flight can do so at the gate instead of being relegated to baggage claim. Overall, flying has been much more pleasant here, kiss of death I know for tonight’s flight back to Melbourne.

Surprisingly, what hasn’t been great is the Internet. The connection at my workshops thus far has been spotty or nearly non-existent, and buying it in airports or hotels is insanely expensive. From everything I’ve heard from folks here and others answering questions on Twitter, access is very uneven and, in general, pricey. In fact, many state right out that they are worse off than some third world countries in the connection respect.

As always, the Aussies that I’ve met have been exceedingly generous, helpful, and complimentary. Just like our trip here last year, I’ve felt very welcomed. It’s definitely a place that I would highly recommend making a journey to, despite the fact that our currencies have almost reached parity making things a bit more expensive here than in the past. (Obviously, that’s the case for us Yanks no matter where we go these days.)

While the new government has allocated some significant funds to getting all high school students on a computer in short order, the amazing thing from what I hear is those computers are going to be desktops. Just as in the states, there is not a lot of vision at the top in terms of where to spend technology dollars and what the future might look like.

My “Small World” moment came when my phone suddenly rang and it was Tess calling from back home. Nothing special these days, I know, but a first for me. I just can’t get my brain around how many wireless signals we must be floating in if her phone call found me here in Sydney. Amazing.

And one last: when I was in Brisbane the other day, I was walking down the street when I saw a long line slinking around the corner, dozens of people queued up to get, believe it or not, Krispy Kreme donuts. I kid you not. People were walking out of the store with boxed dozens of the things, and apparently, it is the latest American sensation to hit the continent. Let’s hope it’s not followed by those other sensations that we’re getting more and more famous for: obesity and diabetes.

Finally, one very cool moment: when in my keynote I was discussing the fact that my kids had been taught to use Scratch by Neil Winton’s son Andrew from Scotland during one of our “extended classroom” sessions, it turned out that Neil and Andrew were watching live from Scotland. I only wish I would have known when it happened; what a great model-able moment that would have been.

I’ll try to carve out a few more observations this weekend before my final presentation in Melbourne on Monday. Then back to the states on Tuesday.

In case anyone is interested, my keynote was Ustreamed here, and the other sessions are on this page. Enjoy!

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Thomas Vander Wal has written about achieving success with enterprise social tools. To quote: Social tools require much more than just the tools for their implementation to be successful. Tool selection is tough as no tool is doing everything well and they all are focussing on niche areas. But, as difficult as the tool selection can be, there are three more elements that make up what the a successful deployment of the tools and can be considered part of the tools.

The last two days I've been running a workshop in Wellington, New Zealand. A great group, and very vigorous discussions and debates.

As ever, for the record, these were the "big questions" raised by participants at the beginning of the workshop:

• Homepage policy?
• Intranet vs document management?
• Process for delivering a business-effective intranet?
• Intranet redevelopment process?
• Conducting needs analysis?
• Collaboration tools?
• Web 2.0?
• Getting the launch right?
• Project management methodologies vs intranet team?
• Keeping momentum going?
• Governance?
• Managing scope?
• Working more effectively with business units re content?
• How to find the right "activities" to add to the intranet?
• Different needs for each area?
• Analysing research results? And choosing the right activities?
• Obtaining business buy-in?
• Usability testing and information architecture?
• Trimming fat?

From the “Circling the Wagons Department” it seems the New York City Department of Education has laid down the law about employees referencing their blogs in their e-mail signatures. For some reason, letting others know that your are a blogger is highly problematic, and the city is providing disclaimer language for anyone in the department who blogs and who comments on other’s blogs. (Hadn’t heard that one before.) As Lisa Nielsen, the manager of professional development for the Department of Instructional Technology writes on her blog, it’s not a direction that serves the DOE.

I find this particularly upsetting because…having a blog is a great way to get the digital footprint conversation going as well as model best practices for using 21st Century tools to build professional learning communities and personal learning networks that support the work we do. In fact, I think it would be terrific if all educators with professional blogs celebrated and shared their work in their email signatures.

No doubt, employee blogs can be problematic and are not always to be celebrated. And I do recognize the need to monitor what people in your organization are doing. But the reality here is this: educators in New York City who want to connect and share with other educators around the world are going to do that. Some of them will do it well, others, notsomuch. Celebrate the former, educate the latter. Learn from the experience and from the sharing that takes place. In the end, this is once again just lazy policy in action.

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Just wanted to point briefly to a new ethnographic study on young kids in online social environments that was released this week by Consumer Reports Web Watch and the Mediatech Foundation, which is the brainchild of my good friend Warren Buckleitner (and for which I serve, badly I might add, as vice president of the board.) The study looked at kids 2-8 and asked parents to create video journals of their children’s use of sites like Club Penguin, Webkinz and others, videos which were then analyzed for a number of different outcomes.

The bottom line:

We discovered that the digital world offers a wealth of opportunity for young children to play and learn. But even in this small sample of 10 families we found–too easily, in several circumstances–repeated examples of attempts to manipulate children for the sake of commerce.

And here are the key findings:

• Even the very young go online.
• The Internet is a highly commercial medium.
• Web sites frequently tantalize children, presenting enticing options and even threats that their online creations will become inaccessible unless a purchase is made.
• Most of the sites observed promote the idea of consumerism.
• Logos and brand names are ubiquitous.
• Subtle branding techniques are frequently used.
• The games observed vary widely in quality, in educational value, and in their developmental match with children’s abilities.

The entire study, “Like Taking Candy from a Baby: How Young Children Interact with Online Environments” (pdf) is available for download. And, you can see excerpts from the video journals on YouTube.

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1. Use cap-auction-trade systems for basic resources (energy, wood and other raw materials). Set caps according to source (scarcity of resources) or sink (waste produced in using the resources and loss of carbon absorption) constraint, whichever is more stringent. In other words, cap the maximum amount of usage of each natural resource at levels that are sustainable, and then allow the market, by auction, to determine how to allocate that maximum amount of usage by setting the price where the demand is greatest.
2. Institute ecological tax reform—shift the tax base from value added (labor and capital) and on to “that to which value is added”, namely the entropic throughput of resources extracted from nature (depletion), through the economy, and back to nature (pollution). This internalizes external costs and raises revenue more equitably. It prices the scarce but previously unpriced contribution of nature. In other words, tax 'bads' (depletion, pollution and waste) not 'goods', by lowering social and income taxes and taxing extraction and pollution instead.
3. Limit the range of inequality in income—set a minimum income and a maximum income. Without aggregate growth poverty reduction requires redistribution. Complete equality is unfair; unlimited inequality is unfair. Seek fair limits to inequality. The minimum, he argues, should be sufficient for a comfortable life; the maximum probably not more than 100 times the minimum.
4. Free up the length of the working day, week, and year—allow greater option for leisure or personal work. Full-time external employment for all is hard to provide without growth. In today's automated world, there is no need for everyone to work all day every day to produce a comfortable living for everyone. I have argued before that one day a week, or one hour a day, should be all that is needed; most of our labour is wasted in bureaucracy, hierarchical politics and the production of junk.
5. Re-regulate international commerce—move away from free trade, free capital mobility and globalization, and adopt compensating tariffs to protect efficient national policies of cost internalization from standards-lowering competition from other countries. This is not an argument for reducing trade, but rather for eliminating the component of trade that exploits weak social and environmental standards and unsustainably low long-distance transportation costs.
6. Reduce and amend the authority of the IMF-WB-WTO, to something like Keynes’ plan for a multilateral payments clearing union, charging penalty rates on surplus as well as deficit balances—seeking balance on current accounts, and avoiding large capital transfers and foreign debts. Instead of being an ideological force for globalization and deregulation at any costs, it would become an arbiter and a check on reckless and unsustainable national policies.
7. Move to 100% reserve requirements instead of fractional reserve banking. Return control of money supply and purchasing power to governments rather than private banks. This step is designed to curb irresponsible lending and borrowing practices, speculation and currency devaluation, and allow elected bodies to manage fiscal and monetary policy, not private sector parties with an inherent conflict of interest.
8. Move all remaining publicly-owned natural capital (the 'commonwealth' of land and resources) to public trusts 'priced' at their true value, while freeing from private ownership the 'commonwealth' of knowledge and information, making it free. Stop treating the scarce (natural capital) as if it were non scarce, and the non scarce (intellectual capital) as if it were scarce.
9. Stabilize population. Work toward a balance in which births plus immigrants equals deaths plus out-migrants.
10. Reform how we measure and manage national well-being—separate GDP into a cost account and a benefits account. Compare them at the margin, stop 'growing' the economy when marginal costs start to exceed marginal benefits. Never add the two accounts. This reflects the fact that many economic activities (e.g. the clean-up of the Exxon Valdez disaster) actually add to GDP, and that hence GDP is not in any way a meaningful measure of economic prosperity or well-being.

Wikis are spreading like wildfire within organisations, driven by their quick setup and comparatively easy use. As yet, however, little has been written on how to make wikis work well.

That is why the new report from J. Boye, titled Wiki in the Enterprise is so valuable. Many have written about the potential value of wikis, but this work talks about what has worked in real-life (and what hasn't).

Drawing upon research done in a number of organisations, this report discusses the reasons for deploying wikis, the cavets, and how wikis meet reality.

Most importantly, this reports a range of practical and pragmatic recommendations on how to setup and use wikis. These will give teams a valuable leg-up when approaching this new publishing technology.

A recommended addition to the dialogue on wikis, and I'm looking forward to future reports from J. Boye.