Twitter supports knowledge networking

Knowing who has the knowledge is more important then have the knowledge yourself. This businessrule we often hear in our interviews with customers. An the other hand we see that networkingplatforms are growing every day outside the companies (linkedin, xing ed.).

But how can we use both trends useful for our organisations so that we achieve a sort of knowledge network in the organisation? So that employees are knowing from each other which knowledge is available in the organisation. Who knows what?

An other trend that we observe is that people more and more working in networks. When people are working for your organisation they use their own network to get the job done, but they also enlarge their netwerk with new contacts outside of your organisation. So it seems also important to keep also the network alive when employee’s leaving the organisation? The people who leave the organisation have specific knowlegde, they also are a part of the network of the employees who are still working for you and the leaving employee has a network that is interesting for the organisation (a part of the network is build up in your organisation).

We think that twitter can help the organisation to combine the trends in a positive way for the organisation. Twitter can help to:

• get many twitter friends and followers to get everyone involved (it is very easy to become friends)
• read what your friends are doing and what is on their mind to get more knowledge or ideas form the twitter network
• have an easy and fase way to get to know your coworkers and be known by the existing group
• blur the organizational borders, twitter networks do not care about your job. So if you stop working somewhere you can still be part of the network
• get to know new people and take a peek into their thoughts, so you can get new ideas and knowledge.

Is it hard to get above avantage? We think it is not, the implementation of the twitter-technology is a small change on your intranet. The most work will be to explain the value of the knowlegde network and the reason to twitter to your employees. But the most of them are using networkplatforms outside the company, so why would the change be big?

In the above situation, twitter is used as a social software but then applied in a business context. What are your thoughts on this subject? We would love to hear!

This post was made by @hendri_ende and @robberthomburg

So, Why do we bookmark socially?

The post my colleague Robbert published yesterday got me wandering. I totally agreed on his conclusions, but I couldn't help but ask myself the question: why do we act so socially nowadays? Twitter, Del.icio.us, et cetera.... What ever happened to the ancient paradigm Knowledge = Power? And ask the expert, he knows best?

Well, my thoughts aligned quite quickly on this one and to say it frank: this paradigm is gone. Nowadays, it's about Knowledge Sharing = Power. Probably this "new" paradigm was there "in the old days" all along. It's just that, with the entrance of the Web 2.0 platform, the threshold for it to establish itself in full force has vanished.

Robbert explained the meritocracy principle already quite excellently in his last post. I want to dive a little deeper: it's excellent to have good UFC, but, why does one want to be a good knowledge broker?

First, in my opinion, it's because the networked society, demands us to be. It just not enough to have published so many articles in (1.0) magazines. The merits you get are more and more coming from the blogosphere. If you're not there, you're lagging behind. You're still an expert, but a far higher percentage of users "read" the Internet, than they read the magazines. You have to do the math 1.0 + 2.0 to get the synergy going. Otherwise, you're just not visible.

Secondly, the expert, or "the Einstein" who sits at his desk inventing and creating innovation is being overtaken by the crowd. Not because the expert doesn't know, but because the crowd always knows. And know they can get together easily. Therefor, when you share, co-create, jump in, you, in reverse get shared with, are connected to en tied into the crowd that knows. No expert can ever "beat" that. As a matter of fact, just that last sentence is very "old paradigm"-like. It's about mass collaboration.

Does this mean the "expert" is gone? No, it doesn't. The "expert" is just tied to a strong network. The expert can become a primary knowledge broker quite naturally. Their blogs and twitters a read more frequently.

Does this mean that we should all connect to everyone and all become a heavy knowledge broker? No as well. Social Bookmarking is about being social. Just as you pick out your friends, you pick out your brokers. Your social network isn't an automatic aggregation of people. If you do that, just use an aggregator like Digg. Thus, your network will grow socially due time, naturally evolving into the blogosphere of your interest.

If you're reading this and thinking "Hmm, so what's new about this?"; then you're 2.0-certified. If you're reading this an thinking "Well that makes sense!"; then you're 2.0-certified. I just wanted to share it with you.

User Filtered Content is great!

Sunday I was trying to make sense of a remark Marcel de Ruiter made when we met last November. He said that having a social network was a great way to filter out important information. On sunday I did not get my thoughts right but today I saw a post on User Filtered Content from Ross Dawson and everything made sense!

Besides all the automatic or semi automatic filtering options Andrew Mcafee describes in SLATES a completely human filtering option is a great asset to the bundle. When to take into account who is liking what, you get a far better view of information. Example: I follow a few people on Twitter because I think they are interesting for me and I find links to conferences I did not hear about from another source. Delicious is another fine example. I follow my collegue Vincent amongst others. I can see his links and evaluate if they are relevant for me to. Almost all his links are relevant for me and thus he is one of my filters on information.

This way of filtering gets far better results than a search on google, a search on google is not filtered for what my friends or coworkers like! Extensions like Amazon delivers to me are from everybody in the world. Amazon supposes that if I read a book and most people also buy another book I might be interested. This would be more accurate if this is corrected for the people with the same interests. These people will be in social networks!

The reason this works lies in the meritocracy principles of the internet. On the internet we give more credits to people how say and do smart stuff than to people how only talk about saying and doing smart stuff. The people who get more merits from a person will be a great filter. The giving of merits is very personal. Vincent my coworker can get more merits than a professor in college.

Conclusion is the UFC is a great filter to have on information. The more people you 'use' as a filter the better. UFC must always be used in combination with other filters so the information that gets through the filters is of higher quality. To prevent a kind of groupthink you should sometimes get rid of all the filters and just surf around a bit! This gets you fresh ideas and another look at the world.

The game design attitude

The workshop about Learning from Games that Marinka Copier and I organized took place this past Wednesday. It was quite an accomplishment to have this very diverse group of people around the table in this busy week before Christmas. We had representatives from IBM, the Dutch Innovation Platform, the Utrecht School of the Arts (Game Design program) and Nyenrode Business Universiteit. So a combination of views from game design, education as well as business. And this was exactly what we were aiming for.

The basic rationale behind the workshop was that there are things to be learned from game design principles that can be applied in other settings, such as education or management. At the end of the day, everybody agreed that this is an idea that has immense potential. We arrived at some common understanding of the challenges and exchanged ideas for potential projects in 2008. More about that as soon as these ideas are more concrete.

One of the most important insights I took away from the workshop has to do with the attitude of the game designer. Game design is about building a solution on a small scale (with a focus on the things you can control), letting people play with it, observing and evaluating what happens and then adjusting the solution. Because what you are designing is not an end product but a dynamic process (basically, you are designing behavior) you need an iterative approach and constant monitoring.

The second thing that stuck with me is the different view on the world that playing, studying and designing games can give you. This view has to do with not taking rigid, old structures as a given (such as bureaucracies or hierarchies in organizations) but deliberately organizing things in a different way. Studying games can give you these insights. Once you realize there are other ways of organizing, new doors will open in many areas. Right now, gaming is the only arena where the network society is truly taking shape. What if we could expand this to other fields such as education and organizational life?

This design attitude combined with a view on the world inspired by games could be a very powerful instrument for managers. Especially when you consider that these tools may be essential if they want to use the full potential of the new generation entering the labor market.

However, my attempts to pry open the black box of the game design process during this workshop were unsuccessful. There are a few design principles that you could make explicit (such as giving meaning to meaningless actions, mystification of the rules and direct feedback) but these principles are always connected to the design practice of the individual designer. It is hard to make them explicit as clear-cut rules that a manager could use.

So more work is needed before we can start helping managers adopt a gaming mindset. I have the impression we can work on that from the platform we created with this workshop.