Remixing 2 articles: Wikileaks' US embassy cables and organisational design

On 28 November 2010 I read two articles. At first glance, these 2 articles were not related to each other. But by remixing them in these weblog, they now are!

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I just read an article in the Guardian about the leaked US embassy cables. This article is a terrifying account of current global relationships. However, it also includes an interesting passage which can be linked to the ability of organisations to share knowledge.

Many reports on how the 9/11 attacks could be avoided were emphasising on better information and knowledge sharing among the different intelligence agencies. Therefore, information and knowledge sharing became key in counter-terrorism. More than 5 years after these reports were being published, we can see how intelligent agencies try to become better in information and knowledge sharing, but completely dismiss the interwoven complexities of an environment that promotes information and knowledge sharing. One of these complexities is the culture. And it is obviously that the US intelligent agencies thought they could continue their Cold War culture in a interconnected global world where information and knowledge sharing are so important. The article describes this as follow:

Asked why such sensitive material (the US embassy cables) was posted on a network accessible to thousands of government employees, the state department spokesman told the Guardian: "The 9/11 attacks and their aftermath revealed gaps in intra-governmental information sharing. Since the attacks of 9/11, the US government has taken significant steps to facilitate information sharing. These efforts were focused on giving diplomatic, military, law enforcement and intelligence specialists quicker and easier access to more data to more effectively do their jobs". He added: "We have been taking aggressive action in recent weeks and months to enhance the security of our systems and to prevent the leak of information".

So, this example of leaking information and knowledge is massive failure from the US (which hopefully will not have any international consequences). It shows that it is not an easy task to just say: and now we will embrace better information and knowledge sharing. In many cases - and probably especially in the case of US governmental agencies - existing systems need to be rebooted first. These Cold War systems cannot embrace the structure and culture of an interconnected and co-evolving system. But from this article it becomes clear that the US intelligent agencies did not want to reboote their way of thinking about organisations. They continue their old thinking by programming ways to 'enhance the security of our systems' rather than that they approach their organisation as a complex system

This brings me to my final comment. At the same day I also read Dave Snowden's latest weblog post of chickens and eggs. In this post he writes:

People make bad systems work by working around them, the problem is that this disguises failure for too long. So when the system does fail, it fails catastrophically ... (and)... Systems that evolve are more successful in managing people than ones that are designed in the abstract.

I think that Dave Snowden perfectly outlines the catastrophically failure of the US intelligent agencies. Furthermore, he also writes that 'at all cost massive and complete re-organisations should be avoided in all cases other than those of catastrophic failure'. So, now that the US government made a catastrophic failure: where will the re-organisation occur?

IFLA 2010: A case-study of a global knowledge sharing initiative (3/3)

This blog post is a part of a presentation I gave at the 76th World Library and Information Congress. In the presentation, I explained why we should embrace KM initiatives, how we should do this, and how a global KM initiative has successfully been implemented. 

After mentioning in the previous weblog post that there are two incentives in global development aid why they should embrace global KM initiatives and in the other weblog post about how institutes, NGOs and many more of these clubs should roll-out a global KM initiative, I will now show you an example of global knowledge sharing initiative in the field of global development cooperation. 

The Focuss.Info Initiative

The Focuss.Info Initiative is a cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural community in the field of global development cooperation who are collaborating on sharing knowledge.

Cross-disciplinary because everybody who is a part of this platform are somehow involved in global development cooperation, but each of them have specialised him or herself in a different topic in this domain. Focuss includes - for example - researchers in food security, individual practitioners in women empowerment or students in climate change issues.

Cross-cultural because the people who are targeted by and involved in the Focuss Initiative are from the whole world. From Europe to Africa, to Asia, to North America. From Bolivia, to Nepal, to Zimbabwe, to the United Kingdom. From Nyanza in Kenya, to Götaland in Sweden, to Sabah in Malaysia.

So, the Focuss Initiative is trying to impact a global discipline through local engagement.Focuss aims at enhancing the exchange of information and knowledge between the Global North and Global South, and improve the access to this information and knowledge.

Let me illustrate this by showing a screenshot of one of the pages on Focuss. On first sight it looks like a regular search engine. But appearance deceives. It is more than only a Google type of search engine because this search engine is only indexing the qualityselected websites on the Internet. As a result, the search results consists of hand-picked resources from not only librarians, but also students, researchers and individual practitioners from the Global North and South.

This generates added value to global development cooperation, because local resources are becoming more visible. Google - for example - let’s us search through all the resources it can index on the Internet. And this is quite something, because in 2008 Google announced on their weblog that - at that time - it had indexed 1 trillion unique URLs (1.000.000.000.000). You can imagine what kind of noise it generates when searching for domain specific topics.

But how does Focuss indexes the quality-selected websites of all these peers? This all has to do with the first ability that people should possess in network-based work environments: structural knowledge.

Social bookmarking as structural knowledge

Focuss encourages peers to start using social bookmarking. The main reason why peers should start with social bookmarking is not that they should do it for the benefits of Focuss. Focuss encourages peers to start with social bookmarking as a way to work more efficient for themselves, because if peers are social bookmarking, they can then always access their favorite websites, as long as they have a computer connected to the Internet.

Focuss also encourages social bookmarking because this information sharing and collaboration tool makes it possible to work more effectively in the domain of global development cooperation because personal knowledge can be fed into collective knowledge base. And Focuss is becoming such a collective knowledge base, because by indexing the social bookmark accounts of peers, it is making the hand-picked resources accessible, and therefore enhance the exchange of information and knowledge. This is the reason why the Focuss Initiative passes on structural knowledge regarding social bookmarking to its peers.

Local empowerment as cultural knowledge

As the Focuss.Info Initiative is promoting the usage of social bookmarking on a global level, it cannot induce every individual - from Sweden to Nepal to Botswana to Bolivia - exactly the same way. Cultures and the conditions under which peers share knowledge are very different from each other. But, as mentioned earlier, in order to become successful in a global KM initiative, we should promote a real and transparent culture in which peers from all over the world are willing to share their domain specific knowledge.

Saving your favourite websites, your knowledge of valuable resources, on the Internet, can give an uncomfortable feeling, because knowledge was seen as power and as your competitive advantage. This way of thinking and working does not fit when using social bookmarking, and therefore individuals should change its culture. In most cases learning how to use the new collaborative technologies cannot be done without changing the culture. And this change cannot be realized by giving the same workshops or presentations from the shelf. In every culture people induce each other in an other way.

Additionally, Focuss is coordinated on limited resources. In order to coordinate this Initiative, we only use 15 hours per week. This limitation shows that it is not possible to facilitate workshops all over the world. Therefore, Focuss supports the work of workshop facilitators from Africa, Asia and South America both financially and intellectually.

Workshop facilitators are getting the opportunity to organise a workshop in their own local area. Librarians, researchers, students or others who are interested in the latest information sharing and collaboration tools - and who are from Africa, Asia or South-America - can apply for a workshop grant. Because the workshops are facilitated in different continents, countries and regions, we give the workshop facilitators the freedom how they organize this workshop. However, they should describe this in a workshop proposal.

Even though I say they will have the freedom, the workshop facilitators from Africa, Asia or South-America should still have to comply with two minor requirements. They need to focus on social bookmarking as a way to share and create knowledge, and they need to document everything on their own weblog.

The requirement to include social bookmarking within the workshops is because - as I told you before - the search engine incorporated in the Focuss website is only harvesting and indexing the websites that have been selected and stored in social bookmarking accounts (such as Delicious.com) from peers in global development cooperation.

The requirement to maintain a workshop dairy on a weblog is that through this the workshop facilitator can get more information and knowledge from the readers and connect with workshop participants before and after the workshop, but it also gives the workshop facilitators a platform to show how they persuade a local community to use social bookmarking and change their culture in order to work and learn in network-based environments.

Conclusion

So, if we want to start a knowledge sharing initiative, we should think of 3 crucial elements in order to make a success out of it.

First of all we should embrace network-thinking, because the world is increasingly being shaped by organisations and network of organisations, and therefore individual system thinkers are, ultimately, of little significance. Staff members will increasingly be working at many levels, within and beyond organisations, in teams and networks that span industry and communities. In the Focuss example network-thinking is important, because the move from educated and well-resources in developing countries to developed countries is a fact, and cannot be stopped so easily. Therefore it is crucial to create cross-border networks to maintain the access to information and knowledge.

Secondly, organisations should focus on knowledge flows rather than knowledge stocks. This means that organisations should change themselves from controlling what is happening in the organisation to distributing. Focuss is therefore not an initiative that is controlling the quality-selected content on the Internet. It is facilitating a way to distribute it to others.

Thirdly, and finally, organisations should induce peers with structural knowledge - how to use the social technology to ease the connection - and cultural knowledge - how to create a human culture to enhance the willingness to connect. Focuss is doing this by encouraging peers to adapt to social bookmarking - which is the structural knowledge - and by creating a culture where people still have the ownership over what they are doing on the Internet - which is the cultural knowledge.

Moving from meaningless to meaningful

The previous blog post 'Knowledge Sharing through Conversations - a Homage to Twitter' already illustrated the strength of Twitter-kind-of-technologies. It highlighted how powerful conversations are via these technologies in order to share knowledge with people who you did not know before. So you did not know that you needed to share that particular knowledge to that particular person. A great story about how it is to create and share knowledge in networks and probably already convincing enough to you. However, I want to share another great story which I experienced today. This story goes far beyond the idea of being a part of a network to make yourself heard. Let me first share the story with you.

Friday 28 May 2010 (around 8h00)

From 2005 to 2007 I worked together with @kattebelletje in the Netherlands on migrating the data from a library catalogue. The project was finished in 2007, I left the business, moved to London, moved to Copenhagen and we did not have that much contact anymore. However, Twitter managed to connect us and I kept an eye on her. This morning I saw she sent out a message via Twitter with a picture. I scanned the message and what I read was 'Regent Street', 'Apple' and 'Tweetphoto'. Even though I did not read the message, my eyes were triggered, because I knew Regent Street from my stay in London and I like watching pictures so that a message gets more context. Additionally, the message was sent by @kattebelletje.

Was she in London? If so, what was she doing in London? In a split second I scanned the 3 words from the message, I asked myself these questions and I clicked on the link to the picture. The picture on the left shows you what I saw. Not knowing what was going on there, I clicked it away and continued with my work. I was really thinking this was one of my moments where I lost valuable time by looking at these 'meaningless' things via Twitter - time I could have better used to work without having such an interruption.

Friday 28 May 2010 (around 8h30)

It was 30 minutes after I saw the meaningless picture and did I learn from wasting my time? No, because I saw an other message from somebody not related to @kattebelletje at all. It was a message from @dereckbreuning. A couple of months ago I was his lecturer in knowledge management. Since that time I also follow him and once a time his messages are attracting my attention. And this was a message that attracted my attention. Why do you think? Yes! Can you see it? @dereckbreuning used similar keywords in his message as the ones that triggered me before. By scanning the message I saw 'Apple' and 'Oxford Circus'. And because I have experiential knowledge the London streets (for 1 1/2 year I biked through London) I immediately knew that Oxford Circus is more or less the same as Regent Street. I knew that this message would be related to the previous message from @kattebelletje.

However, it seemed that @dereckbreuning was in London and planning to travel to the Apple store at Regent Street, while @kattebelletje was in The Hague and 'retweeted'/forwarded the picture because she probably enjoyed seeing all the people standing in the line for just an iPad. Additionally, as this all was occuring in my network, I was still able to give @dereckbreuning knowledge about what was happening at Regent Street - knowledge that I shared while working from my office in Copenhagen. As a result, I had sent @dereckbreuning the message on the left.

A meaningless message at 8h00 in the morning resulted in a meaningful message at 8h30. Even though @dereckbreuning still went to Regent Street, he could have prepared himself better by bringing a warm jacket, coffee or umbrella with him, because he got to know through me (located in Copenhagen) that there was a big queue at Regent Street (in London). I hope he saw my message before he left and that he took these precautions, because a couple of hours later @dereckbreuning replied with the message on the left.

This story shows the value of networking and being a networker. A collection of fragmented knowledge (the messages of @kattebelletje and @dereckbreuning) resulted in valuable knowledge. I do think that mobile communication technology is playing such a crucial role in the way how we can be better informed in the future. Imagine when more and more people are using these technologies, more and more people are sharing fragmented knowledge, and more and more people are recombining the fragmented knowledge and make it useable to the context the people are in. That what future learning is. Whether you want to call it informal learning, mobile learning or what else, it is a new way of learning that increasingly is becoming a part of our daily lives. Finally, the story also shows how valuable wasting time is. Or should we just look differently to time when working in knowledge intensive economies?