Presenting at Web Directions Government

After receiving some encouragement from John Allsopp, I’m presenting at Web Directions this year on the topic of knowledge management and social computing.

For many people, knowledge management is an IT system that sits somewhere and gobbles up documents. Some vendors claim that their Records Management System or their Document Management System will do all your knowledge management, and for us KM practitioners this focus away from people and to systems has led to nothing but trouble for a decade.

Knowledge management is, first and foremost, about people. It’s not about software. It’s about storytelling, having a coffee and sharing war stories, about getting together after a difficult project and doing “lessons learned”, and even about watching a video to learn techniques from other sporting teams. If you can get your people together to share the important bits inside their heads then you can ensure you’ve got ways to equip people with the information they need do successfully do their jobs in an information-demanding world.

The people-centric part is why the boom in social computing tools out of the Web 2.0-sphere is so exciting. In the modern world, people just don’t have lots of time to get together and chat, so a system that supports the way people tend to share information, that is, in a social-way, is vital.

Want to learn more? Come see me at Web Directions Government on 19-20 May at Old Parliament House, Canberra Australia.
M

Book launch: The Emergence of the Relationship Economy

I’ve been working with Scott Allen, Jay Deragon, Carter Smith and Margaret Orem on a new book: The Emergence of the Relationship Economy. I’m the author of chapter nine — The Cultural Factors. And today the book was officially launched.

This new book explores the factors of relationships: how our networked marketplace turns out to be a profoundly social one that can only be enlarged and improved by relationships; and how social computing has turned the web into The Human Network.

M

Navel gazing predicts blogging behaviour

In past posts, I’ve looked at various aspects of motivation that influence people and their adoption of social computing tools. Originally, this was influenced by Andrew Boyd’s post on Maslow and meeting social needs. More recently, though, I’ve been looking at Hofstede’s cultural dimensions — Individualism, Collectivism, Power-Distance, etc — and asking the question, “how does culture affect use of social computing tools?” When writing my recent article on this topic, I was looking at descriptions of Individualism and wondered whether it specifically influences blogging behaviour.

Oyserman, Coon and Kemmelmeier [1] showed that core aspects of Individualist beliefs include:

• personal independence
• uniqueness
• competition
• personal achievement and success
• introspection
• emphasis on internal attributes rather than other people’s opinions and indications

It was introspection in particular that started me thinking, “is this why people blog?” Do Individualist beliefs motivate people to gaze away at their proverbial navels?

Andrew’s lean on this was toward achievement and success, saying that his “pick for Maslow’s sustainable motivator of choice for bloggers is Esteem”.

Kimando, though, thinks introspection is behind her musings:

“I have felt that I have nothing much that I want to write about. This is bad not because I delude myself to think that anyone is depending on me writing in my little blog but because the introspection that I do while blogging is good for me.”

I agree with Kimando — introspection drives my blogging behaviour and I suspect the majority of others’ behaviour.

This may suggest that, for those cultures high on the Collectivism index, the networking building aspect is what drives them. This is certainly the activity we see reflected in Korea and their use of websites like CyWorld — where 90% of Korean’s under the age of 20 are said to have accounts. For those cultures high on the Individualism index, though, blogging might well be more their preferred activity.

So, what drives your blogging behaviour? Or even your other social computing habits? And does it reflect your countries cultural dimensions?

M

—-

[1] Oyserman, D., Coon, H.M. & Kemmelmeier, M. (2002). Rethinking Individualism and Collectivism: Evaluation of Theoretical assumptions and meta-analyses. Psychological Bulletin, 128, 3-72.