January 2006 Archives
Knowledge maps are one of those knowledge management tools that seems perfect in theory but often ends up as a disappointment or a failure. The idea is to collect all of the experience and skills in an organization into a single map, which can be an online database, a directory, or some other repository. In most maps people rate themselves on the skills they posses. The maps usually take the form of a matrix or table listing skills along one dimension and people along the other. The use for these maps is supposed to arise when someone needs to find an expert in a particular area but doesn't know anyone directly. They look at the map and find who the experts are.
Unfortunately there are all kinds of problems with such maps. Self-rating is rarely very accurate, experts usually downplay their knowledge while novices will overestimate their skill. The skill lists may not match what people perceive to be their actual skills, but if people submit their own skill names there is a problem with the vocabulary getting out of control. In addition there are the value and incentive problems, just who is this data really good for, management, employees, HR? The initial investment of time to enter the skill information may be larger than the perceived benefit, resulting in an adoption problem.
What I'd like to see built is a social interest map instead of a knowledge map. Change the map into a map of interests instead of skills, and use an interface similar to popular social tagging sites such as delicious. So, for example, a person would login and tag themselves with different interests such as "chess", "python", or "web-design." On another page you would aggregate all the people who have used a tag to describe themselves, thus showing you all the people who declare an interest in chess. People can then browse other profiles and other interest tags.
Some other possible features might be:
- Let a user can add information feeds to an interest tag page, say from delicious, a blog, or flickr. Then each interest page becomes an aggregator for information about the topic.
- On each profile pages there could be an aggregator that collects the union of information from all of the users interest tags.
- Further variations could be to create a recommender system that would look for close neighbors with similar interests.
- Another variation would be to use some kind of filtering system on the information feeds, letting people rate items or delete feeds.
I think the idea has a lot of merit for use in a particular community that might already have something in common, such as a school, neighborhood, or alumni association.
Neil Johnson from Oxford visited Ann Arbor this week and today he gave a talk at the Complex Systems seminar series. He described some very interesting research that his group has been doing to model complex network/agent like systems, such as trading behavior or traffic patterns, guerrilla warfare, and relationship building. His Arxiv papers look very intriguing.
It's interesting to see how physicists have taken to sociometry and agent networks so enthusiastically. Basically there is a whole lot I need to learn.
On the tenth of January, I went to my first meeting of Eric Rabkin's science fiction and fantasy discussion group. The book under discussion was Accelerando by Charles Stross.
I first encountered Stross in Asimov's SF magazine. In fact the novel Accelerando was serialized in Asimov's. The first story I read was 'Tourist', now one of the early chapters in Accelerando. I was blown away. It was some of the best short SF I'd read in a long time. The discussion on Tuesday gave me a chance to think about why I thought this was so good.
I think the strongest point of the book is the style. It's very densely referential, one single page may refer to Slashdot, Shakespeare, Lovecraft and Bertrand Russell. The references remind me of the information overload sometimes encountered on the web, where just clicking on one more link or reading one more blog feels like it will provide the answer to some unknown question or satisfy some addiction to information. I could relate to the style of the book. In fact the style felt more like a description of contemporary life than a projection of what the future might hold.
The plot is pretty basic: the recurrent conflicts over three generations in a family that lives through the singularity. There's a lot of jealously, in-fighting, political and personal manuvering. But it's not really very memorable. Some of the ideas he generates are more interesting than others. Most of the reading group agreed that his computer science speculations were questionable or at least thin. The science was very speculative. After all the whole idea of the singularity is questionable.
The Small Things Loosely Connected student group had its kickoff meeting this afternoon. As Brian noted it was a good start to a very interesting endeavor. Michael Cohen mentioned that he had thought more student groups like STLC would have formed at SI before now. I was surprised by the same thing when I first arrived last fall. There are a couple of chapters for student professional organizations such as the ALA, SLA, SOCHI, SIMPLE, but no ad-hoc interest groups. What we need are SIGs. I hope this will be a good start.
So how can we use the Web to make it easier for student groups to form? What keeps them from starting up? I think some of it is because the masters program lasts only two years, that's not much time for a student group to recruit new members and pass the torch. Part of our conversation covered social networking sites, such as LinkedIn, Friendster, etc. I wondered if any of those models could be used for an alumni or student organization. The University of Michigan apparently already has a social networking system in place but according to Brian it hasn't gained much traction with alumni because it requires a membership fee to continue using.
Another project that was mentioned was a bookmarklet to lookup items from Amazon in the Mirlyn library catalog. I'm surprised this hasn't been done. There is a Mycroft plugin to search the catalog. That should be running in Javascript. Hopefully we can port it over to a bookmarklet.
Last Friday I attended a seminar by
Part of this lends credence to the idea that the information issues confronted by the contemporary world are not all that different from those being worked on 100 years ago. The problem of managing information has been around for at least the last two centuries, extending back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In fact the Industrial Revolution was the impetus for many of the information management problems of the present day: the need to control businesses over large distances, across time zones, and among people who are less likely to know each other outside of work. This is essentially the argument she made in Control Through Communication.
So is there anything new under the sun in the contemporary information landscape? I find two possible threads particularly intriguing. The first is the idea that the computer enables new ways of solving or approaching problems. I can see examples of this in computer modeling of many different phenomenon, from weather to architecture to social networks. Here the computer augments human understanding in unique ways and makes previously intractable problems at least approachable. The other thread is the internet. I think this is particularly interesting as a social phenomenon, a way for people to connect with each other more than ever before. Each of these developments has historical roots in the information age but eventually a difference in degree may become a difference in kind.
One of my oldest friends,
Well it's a new year: 2006, and therefore it must be time to blow up the old site and put something else in place. I'm still using Wordpress and have installed the latest version, 2.0, in a brand new instance. So everything from the past is gone, vanished for the moment into Google's cache. I'm hoping to import past content soon, but time constrains everything. Not to mention the fact that I have the old posts only in a SQL form that is incompatible with the new 2.0 schema. The problem is minor but it's still an annoyance and my patience grows thin quickly. So in the meantime I'm going to add some new entries for things going forward. Onward, into the future!
