The United Nations Public Administration Network (UNPAN) has posted a free online copy of my outline of Knowledge Work, at this URL: http;//unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/unpan/unpan031277.pdf Please take a look.
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Cheers, Andrew
]]>I suspected as much, thank you for confirming it
Best regards, Andrew
]]>We are all just walk talking insurance policies for the web. Keeping it from going feral.
thank you for your comment.
To be honest, I mostly agree with you 100%. I guess I am more over the FB hype than FB itself, although the appspam is a concern.
Don’t get me wrong – Facebook has issues, and needs to address them. Let’s just treat it as one more SNAP evolution-in-action rather than the be-all and end-all. So what if it is next year’s Google? We should be looking for the year after next’s Facebook now
Best regards, Andrew
]]>Personally though I think Facebook differs from services like Skype and Twitter in that it isn’t immediate and that creates a more “honest” and pure sense of social networking. You close off a chat conversation when it is done, whereas walls, feeds and applications are there for a lot longer and for most of your friends to see. Much more conducive to word-of-mouth networking activities. Just like mobiles and SMS hasn’t killed email, I think that Facebook fills a communication niche.
The biggest problem in my opinion is takeup. Not just of Facebook, but of the Internet in general.
Having said that, I’ll give it a little while longer before I am completely sick of it, unless, like you say, it gets some ubiquity about it. ]]>
My point was deliberately expressed in an ironical circumlocution; it was a pastiche.
If you believe there’s an HQ and a person driving a business process in an incorrect, damaging, or bad way then you should have said just that, and said it much more directly than you did say it. Using the terms you used obscures the fundamentals you were seeking to address.
Similarly I didn’t denigrate the site or your motives for writing it; nor did I attack you personally. I denigrated your actual deployment [use] of language; how one uses language is at least as important as the subjects one is addressing. The language you used is more obscure and indirect than it needed to be and by being obscure and indirect it perpetuates the obscurity and air of mystery and confusion that surrounds this complex and increasingly important subject.
We have a saying here in the UK about attacks on people: play the ball and not the man. Which is to say that one should not descend into ad hominem attacks on the person – stick to the subject. A good and critical friendship can be made through, and will survive attacks on, thinking and message content, but will rarely if ever survive an attack on the person.
Incorrect thinking leads to incorrect action, and language IS action.
Information architectures have clear relationships to data architectures on the one hand and to knowledge architectures on the other. If the language used to express our thinking about information architectures is in any way fuzzy or obscure then we perpetuate and propagate errors throughout that hierarchy.
Use the same critical and analytical tools you are clearly able to apply to other people’s processes to examine your own thought processes. If one is saying things in an obscure manner then the critical question to be asking oneself is why?
Your use of emotive terms has nothing to do with this; be as emotive as you wish, but be clear and direct. Using emotive language won’t offend anyone who has any integrity – least of all me – so long as the language genuinely speaks directly to the subject. On the other hand woolly-minded or vague or imprecise language that obscures the subject or deflects the discussion will either put people off or offend them, regardless of any emotional content. This is the politician’s disease – failing to speak to the question or to the point.
You may, if you wish, see my commentary as a backhanded compliment: you’re doing good work – I’d like to see your work get better.
Robert
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