sensemaking

If companies cannot develop a culture of knowledge sharing and innovation, it's primarily because they are having a hard time measuring the benefits. All metrics of intangibles -and KM in particular- are shaky, and the most promising ones, based on network analysis (VNA) still have a long way to go before they become generally accepted practices. In the meantime, organizing a knowledge market might be the best way to go. Let's imagine what it would look like… First, a separate organization for shared knowledge services would have to be set up, if it doesn't exist already. For lack of a better phrase, let's cal it the corporate university. The problem is that corporate universities, when they exist, are focused on executive programs, which is a very small part of the problem.

Social capital is the invisible stock of connections between people that makes collaboration possible. It basically measures trust and how people really care for one another. When members of a group know each other very well and share the same values, social capital is high. When they don't and have no shared awareness of the situation facing the group, the same words can mean very different things to them, and the trust level is low. Social capital and culture go hand in hand.

Yesterday, together with my colleague Ricardo Sueiras of PwC UK, we had a demo of Connectbeam the entreprise social bookmarking appliance. Connectbeam is an enterprise social networking tool using shared bookmarks and tags as a way to connect people. Basically it connects people who use the same content, on the grounds that it is likely that they have similar activities or interests, and will benefit from knowing each other.

The problem with social networking services is that you do not control a social network, which can behave in highly unpredictible ways according to the theory of complex systems, especially if the strategic intent of its originator is not clear. For me, no human society, whether in the real world or in the virtual world, can survive without some form of visible leadership, i.e. someone who symbolizes what the brand stands for. I don't know about Facebook, and I honestly do not understand where it is going. But for Wikipedia, there is a big risk remaining faceless. In France, Wikipedia is said to be in the hands of the far left of the political spectrum, and manipulating content accordingly. It might be true or not, but if nobody stands up against this accusation, it might prevail in the end. Perception is reality.

I've been running Simpy for almost 4 years now. Every once in a while I get the "Why should I use Simpy?", "Why is Simpy better than, say, del.icio.us?" This post answers those questions in the form of "Why I use Simpy" answer. This are my personal reasons for using Simpy, but you can also read other people's opinions. I also encourage you to add your reasons in the comments, so I can add your reasons to this list.

The key to the semantic approach for Zigtag is that shared tags are just that - they are more precise than strings. They are not only words - they have definitions.

And when all these things exist, what will happen to our memories? As the Atlantic article suggests, we may find that the net effect is to "scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration," - or, as it argues in another part, we could spur a "golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom." The result may well depend on the quality of the efforts.

BlogMarks is a collaborative link management project based on sharing and key-word tagging. Build on a blog basis, BlogMarks is an open and free technology. Now, you can access your favorite URL's from any computer. And with BlogMarks, you share your favourite with other users.

Functional Requirements for Sharing Tag Data The TagCommons effort is operating something like a software project. The process is very lightweight, but has an important step that is often forgotten in discussions about ontologies and formats: for what purposes are we designing this? These days, a good way to look at functional requirements for software is to identify use cases and then derive engineering requirements. This was the first outcome of the working group, and the results are summarized here. We will describe the use cases first and then the requirements.

The goal of this twine is to gather relevant information and people around the project of establishing a new adressing layer in cyberspace : semantic space. Semantic space is designed to augment : - semantic interoperability - distributed social semantic computing - exchange of personal and collective interpretation of vast amouts of data - collective intelligence reflexivity

Software for mindmapping and information organisation

Email list about sharing tags

While Montague isn't ready to share the results - he's still gathering data - what he's found so far is, he says, "stunning, shocking even…. For me the lesson has been that people act very badly in groups. And now we can see why."

Dreamfish helps change makers to connect in order to collaboratively create a sustainable future.

This is the "Eclipse of Web Browsers", a secure social web browsing environment that runs off of your own highly personal and private data store. Written primarily in Java, it uses Gecko as its web runtime, and has a back-end driven by MySQL and Lucene See also http://www.suprasphere.com/

S. I. Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action has been one of the course's handbooks for a memorable number of years already, but the manner in which it has been used has changed somewhat over the years. Although the basic concern of the book is with «informal» semantics (not the formal brand of semantics concerned with, e.g. the computation of truth-value), i.e. the «symbolic» way in which utterances are used to convey meaning, it also raises the more cognitive issue of how language affects human thought and conditions behaviour, and addresses the resulting «ethical» question of how language should be used to achieve cooperation and understanding rather than confrontation and conflict. These questions (though viewed in a somewhat «optimistic» perspective) give the book additional value as one of the pioneering works in «critical linguistics», a discipline which was to develop only much later.

Upper Mapping and Binding Exchange Layer A lightweight, subject concept reference structure for the Web

NEPOMUK Deliverable D7.4: Mozilla Community