Croeso

A plague on all their houses

Sometimes those little annoyances of modern life get me really pissed, I know on most occasions  I do not have any rights to be so pissed off as I'm sure my actions are not always appreciated by all, but there we are pissed off I can be.

Little strategies to deal with such annoyances sometime strike a real accord with me and the rebellious streak that sits deep in us all becomes ignited and off we go with the sweat allure of revenge lading us to wards some form retribution.

What has sparked this off you may wonder? Well it was a little action by Lycos to enable the Internet community to fight back against the spammers. SPAM being the afore mentioned offender. All you need to do is download their screen saver from MakeLoveNotSpam.com, and when the screen saver runs the spammers get spammed back - Now that's the spirit. It even gives you a running score of your contribution to the fight!

Another little technique I do I learned from Ben Elton, when you get junk mail , rip up all the junk mail, put it into the pre paid envelope (with your name and address on the top). Then the people who bug me at home, a) have to pay for the postage b) and pay for the time for the worker to open the envelope.It always brightens up my day when I walk to the postbox with such replies. I know some people's jobs rely on this work but really I'd rather the economy put these people to a much more productive (from my point of view) use.

I'm continually impressed by the power of the mass Internet users, lets hope this little screen saver can mobilise that and clean the inboxes of the world from SPAM

Croeso

There were two young ladies from Perth
Whose mother had just given birth

Said Jelte with a fright

Or a shriek of delight?

Oh no 3 people wearing a skirt!

A warm welcome to Paulien and Nora.

Who said being married to a poet and writer has it's down sides?

Game development worries

Carla, Lilia, Janine and me are developing a game as part of our R&D KM work. The game is designed, we hope, to introduce new CoP moderators to all the thrills, spills and crashes they might encounter whilst running a CoP, open up our long experience to them, and guide them though the set up - all in 2 hours - We hope!  We had a meeting Thursday to further develop our thinking as well as enjoying a good lunch together.

Now Anke this evening suggested we play a game whilst we ate our evening sandwiches with the kids around our kitchen table. So she suggested the Hare/Carrot game, leave the burrow picking up salad cards on the way to the carrot patch then return with your carrots not losing any to the other hungry hares - 'Good idea Anke' I thought.

First Owain threw the dice all the way across the kitchen, and then proceeded to do that every time, then Femke decided Anke's pink hare was much nice than her turquoise one. Then Owain scattered the hares everywhere and tried to each a lettuce card. Femke then would not play and pretended to sleep on the board, then Owain gave up and Femke played by herself. All that in the first minute, the second minute into the game Anke and I gave up, ate our sandwiches and stuffed the kids with theirs in between salad cards, flying carrots and the general mayhem.

Just the prefect preparation to play the game to be with our CoP leaders and our senior KM Steering Committee - The only difference is I had a glass of beer to calm the nerves whilst playing, this is not allowed in the workplace.

Todays theme on the MP3 jukebox, was France (Jacques Brel, Edith Piaf, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant Live in Paris (Great Bootleg), 'It's wonderful' song (forgotten who that was) & Vanessa Paradi? - Or maybe it's those voices in my head again!

Talking always frames your thoughts

I was talking to Leones.com and some of their KM clients this morning, and as I was talking about Jon Seely Brown's metaphor of tree for best practise and 'we participate therefore we are' ideas,  and how this maps into the Shell KM work. When my own thinking and reasoning why this appealed to me, suddenly became very clear. I'll blog about it very soon as soon as I've let the initial thoughts embed for a while longer.

Isn't it great how explaining yourself outloud to others, allows you to self reflect better then mulling it over in your own mind.

A spirit in the machine?

I've noticed a lot recently that my MP3 Jukebox seems to be running themes, today it played for me Tom Jones, followed by Catatonia, then the Manic Street preachers, then Gorky's Zycotig Mynci, then Welsh Male Voice Choirs followed by the Alarm. These are all Welsh bands! How does it know??

I've heard it before play me all my school boy favourite bands together, and on another occasion then lots of live tracks together.

Gee is it me or is it developing some form of intelligence i.e I play therefore I am, or as John Seely Brown puts it we participate therefore we are

Jon Seely Brown's talk at KM Europe 2004

I've still not had time to put my thoughts together but here for now are his slides, (Thanks to Henry Anson from Ark)

Download km_europe_2004.pdf  Download kmeurope2004_keynote.ppt

I haven't got his basketball video which is a pity as that really fooled me - what Gorilla I said! Carla claimed to have seen something but I was too busy counting people passing the basket ball in white T shirts, to notice a man in a Gorilla suit centre stage beating his chest! I kid you not, when I saw the re-run it's kinda embarrassing. He was making his point about tunnel  and peripheral vision. Well made I felt.

KM Europe Day 3

Today I got there at 11 or so and attended a session on learning and it was awful, some Dutch consultant telling us all we were stupid and that he was right, then contradicting himself so much he nearly disappeared up his own arse - he was contorting the line of argument so much. Dreadful, how I kept quiet I'll never know! I must be mellowing now I'm nearly 40.

Then I joined the KennisCirkel by Proven Partners, whom Ton and Hanneke Lambrets (ex Pink Roccade, ex KPMG) work for.
This had a speaker from Aon who was just getting the the part of his story where he was inspired by the KeyNote speakers at KM Europe 2003, when I had to leave to attend a keynote for 2004 - John Seely Brown. Pity. Upon leaving the room I literally bumped into 2 more good KM friends, Carl Theilen and Ursula Stocker from Holchim the Swiss concrete company. I first met Carl and Ursula in London at another Ark event  and Carl was pretty fed up with that event and we sat next to each other for lunch, and so he vented his frustrations . Again today he was not happy with the workshops, the keynotes, and the venue, he really is a sucker for punishment if he always feels this way, still I like him though.

So off to John Seely Brown with Carla from the TI and Phil Riding from Cambridge, He was everything I expected and some more. I took some photo's with my phone camera of all his slides, but the quality is pretty low, but I'll see if I can get them readable and place them here. I also ask Henry from Ark if he could forward me the slides.
I'll put a separate blog entry in about John and his Social / Anthropological view on business improvement - I hope I can do his thoughts and my current enthusiasm justice.

KM Europe Day 2

Today I just attended for the PKM workshop lead by Lilia and Ton, here again I met some old friends:  Martin Dugage, Aldo, plus others from yesterday, as well as some new ones Piers Young , Phil Riding from Cambridge.....
The PKM session went very well the High Priestess of  Euroweblogshpere reigned supreme ably and skillfully assisted by Ton. Many people in the large audience were very excited by the session and much discussion ensued. I'm still not convinced these ideas are new, I feel good KM has always been built on PKM values (otherwise it would not have worked), but it was nice to see an interesting mixed bunch of people get excited and engage so openly about things.
As Aldo refers to, this was in stark contract to the exhibitors hall in KM Europe which was very downbeat in deed, pity as there were some interesting developments indeed hidden between all the EDMS and search engines.

We all trotted out for dinner at some Australian restaurant just off the Rembrandt plein in Amsterdam (bad food, nice beer, excellent company) where I continued some very nice conversations with Phil Riding, Martin  and Piers.

Anne Jubert and I plus Paul Hearn were discussing how to get a little more balance back into the exhibitors area. It is hard as the humanistic, social, community approaches have no products to sell only concepts to get across. Plus the vendors sponsorship makes most of KM Europe free for all. I might follow this up with Anne and see if we can place some stalls which are a bit different, to liven up the exhibitors area a bit but allowing the commercial workings of KM Europe to go on as it. Hmm I'll give that some thought

KM Europe 2004 - Day 1

Well we're lucky again in NL as KM Europe is on our doorsteps - literally 15 minutes drove from work.

I spent most of yesterday there and bumped into all sorts of people I hadn't seen for a while. Anita Pos (Unilever) and Chris Fox (ex Unilever) were there and it was good to bump into those guys, their people Km work is very impressive and fully justifies their MAKE winners position.

I bumped into a Shell colleague Toin van Dijk, and blogger consultant Martin Roell

I also saw the Site-scape folk Harriet and Pim plus Joel Friesergie? (Unisor) sorry Joel I lost your business card I do hope I have your email address on my system!

I also saw Marleen Huisman from the Vrij universitiet of Amsterdam, who we all hope will join our research consortium next year.

Lilia, Wolf, Henk (Saw you henk but did not speak to you) were there from the Telematicxa Instiuut.

I spoke to Richard McDermott for the first time in years which was good.

Anne Jubert ex Siemens and now with Knowledge Board.

The event was stuffed full of software vendors whom I largely ignored although there was some interesting ontology work done for financial fraud - maybe interesting for Aldo?, and some interesting search result presentation styles to think about.

I'll be there tomorrow where my old buddy Arjan van Unnik will be speaking and Lilia and Ton are running a PKM workshop for knowledge board.

On a final note I ran into Arie Baan who unfortunately will be leaving Shell soon, his DTW work was excellent and I will ceratinly miss him.

Intolerance

A dreadful murder was carried out last night in Amsterdam when a member of a radical Muslim group killed a Dutch Film director Theo van Goch. Link
Such barbaric acts have no place in a democracy such as Holland's where free speech and open debate must be an absolute standard, irrespective of how controversial your points of view. It is a very sad day indeed and makes me fearful for the future.

KM Europe

Well KM Europe is fast approaching and as per usual my phone and email are going mad with people want to see me or sell me systems at the event, the system sellers are easy to deal with, where a short sharp 'no thanks' suffices there - when will they every learn!

But I do seem to be able to juggle the rest of the invites to please me and the inviter's

Lilia and Ton are presenting the PKM thinking on behalf of knowledge board - which will be interesting. From half of the PKM debate I've heard I feel it is being lead by people who see the individual ahead of the team/community and focusing the KM processes (or at least theories) on enhancing the individual. I am somewhat counter that argument as KM for me is all about the collective and working together, not self promotion or self gratification (Which I do feel the 50% involved in the debate I refer to are somewhat guilty of). Lilia and Ton offer a balanced view but I'd be interested in what everyone else says. I belief PKM is all about the skills and competencies we all need to play in the community/team arena effectively, with the main focus on the Enterprise First mindset. But let's see.

Siemens and Opentext are talking about their co-work which will be interesting and John Seely Brown has caught my eye and I'll be attending his talk.

I'm also interested in what SAP have to say as they have such a prominent position in most companies

It's really lucky it's in the RAI in Amsterdam, I could virtually walk there from my office!