Science Library Pad

LinkedIn maps my connections - I analyse the meaning

A surprisingly stark clustering into three very thinly linked groups, as generated by LinkedIn Labs Maps:

See the source of this image at LinkedIn Labs.

While LinkedIn can tell you the interconnectedness of my connections, it doesn't (yet) tell you how strong the connections are - although presumably this could be derived at least for online by analysing Twitter traffic, blog links etc. to see how often you @ message people, retweet them, link to their blog posts, comment on their blog posts... Then thicker lines could indicate stronger online connections (an interesting research project).  And you might want to use brightness to indicate a fading over time of connections, if they are not maintained.

(I should mention before I launch into the rest of this that I am fairly stingy with my LinkedIn connections - in general it's limited to people I have worked with or communicated with extensively.  I know some people use LinkedIn as an online rolodex of everyone they encounter in a work context, but I don't use it that way.)

In the absence of LinkedIn explaining the connections for me, here's my analysis: the story this tells is that I have three groups of LinkedIn connections: people from my workplace where I hold my substantive position, NRC-CISTI (green, lower left); people from elsewhere in the Government of Canada (blue, upper right); and a library / science / scholarly communication group (various orangey-purple colours, upper left).  Most of the last group are not in Ottawa, and many are not even in Canada, instead being in the US, the UK and elsewhere.

What I think is interesting is the online and offline story this tells.  In terms of maintaining social connections, when I'm working at CISTI, the green connections are maintained by face-to-face contact daily.  The government contacts I see face-to-face weekly, mostly at after-hours events related to social media, collaboration and public service renewal.  And the scholarly comms / library connections I see usually at most once or twice a year, at conferences.

So in an interpersonal sense, the lines to workplace colleagues would be very thick.  But if you were to be able to apply an "awareness of work activities and interests" filter, the picture actually changes dramatically.  In that case, the connections are strongest, the amount of information transferred largest, for people with a sustained online presence.  Communication within an organisation is a classic problem.  But it's interesting that it now is possible in some cases for me to have a much better understanding of what is happening outside my organisation, what people are working on and investigating, than to understand what's happening internally. 

Twitter in this case can be thought of as a vibration of the connection, a continuous thrumming of quick notes of activity - a thought shared, a link retweeted.  In network terms we would call this a "keep alive", a ping.  "I'm here, I'm working on things," Twitter says.  But for real information density, you need to have blog posts - a blog post is a thick solid line, a rich informational link, particularly if it has a lot of out-links and comments.  And of course, this starts to look like synapses - frequently used connections get stronger.

This can lead to an odd dichotomy, where your social connections at work, which traditionally would have been the richest sources of information about what's going on, may actually serve only a tribal purpose, whereas "virtual" connections link you much more strongly into the information you need to do you work, and provide a sense of ambient awareness about important developments in your fields of interest.

The change - the fact that when people narrate their work, regardless of where they are, you can understand better what is going on - this change I think is part of what drives the gap in understanding, between the people who say they must be connected in order to do their work, and the people who see online activities are purely social, the "why do employees need Facebook" question.  This is a result of a confusion between networking for social connections, and networking for information connections.

I also think people apply an odd scepticism to these online connections, as if they're somehow not "real", as if only face-to-face is real interaction.  To which I say, is calling someone to tell them you love them not "real" because you're not both in the same physical space?  Is writing someone a heart-felt handwritten letter of thanks not "real"?  It's a very odd concept of real if that's the case.

All this to say, we have to be careful about analogies from the physical world to the digital world.  People hear the "social" in social media and think employees are going into purely entertaining spaces, to take a break.  Whereas what has actually emerged for some is a professional knowledge network that gives them more information and more context more rapidly from external sources than is available within their own organisation.

So be aware: if your organisation is a tight cluster of interconnections, with few links reaching outside the organisation, and with very thin amounts of information exchanged across the connections, you're going to be outperformed both by employees within your organisation who are better at making professional connections online and contributing to the online ecosystem of information, as well as by organisations that as a whole are able to learn this communications lesson.

If you want a classic example of an organisation failure in this area, there's no better one than the organisation intranet, an inward facing mirror that reflects only your own images and ideas back at you, typically outdated ones frozen in the web of intranet approvals and process.  There's a reason it's called the World Wide Web, not the organisation internal network.  The power came with open worldwide connections, not with organisations talking to themselves.  Open allows serendipitous connections, unanticipated discoveries.  Choose open.

two tech positions available at OpenWetware

Jason Kelly contacted me and informed me that there are two technical positions open for your wetware at OpenWetware, one's called senior tech developer, the other senior knowledge developer

http://openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Hiring

Perhaps of interest to those of you who bridge the boundary between librarianship and developer.

Previously:
December 20, 2005  OpenWetWare, biological research sharing wiki

Tapscott: turn your organization inside-out

Ok, the way he puts it is

Part 5: Platforms for Innovation

This is a very important, key concept.
In fact, let me say it again, with colour and size:

This is a very important, key concept.

This is absolutely foundational, in fact, to understand a lot of the issues that I talk about.

The core is as simple as simple can be: you get more from sharing than from secrecy.
But you have to understand the context of "secrecy".  In many cases, anything that is not published on the public Internet, might as well be in a locked box on a high shelf.  In fact, you might as well print it out, send it to the new Library of Alexandria, and burn down the new library.

The benefits of sharing are so enormous, and the extra overhead so tiny, that I have never quite understood why people don't post more information publically on the net.  My thinking has always been "if I do this for myself, maybe there is someone else out there it might be useful for".  Considering that a page I did for myself as a firewall sysadmin gets over a million hits per year, it appears this concept is valid.

During the time of the Clinton Administration, as reported (in passing) in The River at the Center of the World by Simon Winchester, they turned classification inside out.  Instead of saying "prove this should be declassified", they said "prove this should be secret".  That led to the author of the book getting a map of China that, I suspect, he would no longer be able to get today.

This is the challenge for your organization.  Don't ask yourself "what's the justification for sharing this information on the net".  Ask "can anyone strongly justify NOT sharing this on the net".

I see the most ridiculous stuff go on.  Librarians (and many others) take written notes at conferences, then labouriously transcribe them to a written report, which is then emailed to like two other people and immediately forgotten/lost.

People don't have crystal balls to see within your organization or within your mind.  If you don't share your information, you might as well be invisible.  How's that for a slogan?  "Share transparently or be Internet invisible".  Additionally, these are not the days of late-1994, early-1995 when I first put up a website.  Then an interesting effort was highly visible, because there were so few pages.

There are now billions of pages.  The good news is, you can still rise out of those "foothills".  The bad news is, if you have a search surface, an acreage (hectarage?) if you will, that is tiny, you have very little chance of being noticed.  If your land isn't continually being expanded and improved, in fact, it will probably get little (search engine) notice.  So here's another concept: "Sharing increases your search surface".  In security, we talk about making your "attack surface" or "vulnerability surface" as small as possible.  Internet presence is the opposite: you want to make your Internet surface as big as possible.

I know this is true, because my website and my blog bring me incredible contacts and opportunities that I could never have imagined, despite the fact that both Internet surfaces are often little more than "stuff that I wanted to research and think about anyway, which I'm sharing because there's no reason not to, and someone else may have similar interests".

Anyway, this posting has grown very long, but that is because it is of such critical importance.  Think beyond container to content.  Think beyond content to sharing content.  That is where everything is going to be happening.  That is going to be the new expectation.  If you've seen the controversy in Toronto and Ottawa about private municipal contracts and secret city meetings, that thinking is mired in the past.  Citizens, young and old, are going to be demanding the end to ridiculous, needless secrecy, from their governments and from all other organizations that they deal with.

So what is library Service-Oriented Architecture about?  It is about no more (and no less) than helping libraries collectively to build an open, shared platform, that enables sharing of containers (e.g. books) as well as sharing of content (e.g. articles).

Here's how Tapscott puts it

A growing number of smart companies are learning that openness is a force for growth and competitiveness. As long as you're smart about how and when, you can blow open the windows and unlock the doors to build vast business ecosystems on top of what we call "platforms for innovation."

Because I am a prideful creature, I must say I wrote this entire posting after having read only the first few sentences of Tapscott's article today, it is therefore heartening synchronicity to read

Jeff Barr, who runs Amazon's Web services program says developers and marketplace sellers are "increasing the surface area of Amazon." They add more and more things to sell, in more and more places on the Web. All of this happens in a completely self-organizing fashion, which makes Amazon's already low overhead even lower.

So let's wrap it up with a final combination: library SOA will increase the Internet surface of all participating libraries.

ICSTI winter 2006 workshop - information and data in e-science

ICSTI: 2006 Winter Meeting Workshop
Information and Data in e-Science: Making Seamless Access a Reality

February 3, 2006
Paris, France

The agenda includes CISTI's Director-General Bernard Dumouchel speaking on Knowledge Discovery

Knowledge discovery can enhance digital library services by providing richer, more interactive methods of accessing the collection. Although a new field, knowledge discovery complements the role of the library bringing in structure to information, and making that information useful. Knowledge discovery is a natural extension of the library’s traditional role of organizing documents. In this instance, however, documents are organized dynamically according to the relationship of their contents. Knowledge discovery is also an inherently participatory process. While knowledge discovery techniques can uncover hidden relationships in the data, only the user’s expertise can give those relationships meaning. CISTI is developing two knowledge discovery applications. ...

Note:
ICSTI = International Council for Scientific and Technical Information
CISTI = Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information

human reference - various answers

I'm not sure really what to make of these answers sites.  Isn't every discussion forum basically the same thing?  What does it tell us that people keep reinventing "generic answers" sites?  Is it just part of the ongoing battle to create communities?  Need answers = need enough people answering...  In the post-USENET world, with specialized discussions scattered on thousands of sites, is it even realistic to try?

Anyway:

• Google Answers (selected experts, and you have to pay)
• Yahoo Answers (anyone can ask, anyone can answer, AFAIK)
• Wondir (any to any)

Have libraries missed an opportunity?
Could the Wikipedia community be leveraged?  (I guess Answers.com is doing that in a way.)
Do enough eyeballs make any question answerable?

It will be interesting to see how the tension between new and established, between decentralized and centralized, continue to play out.  It seems to me that many organizations that have moved to the Internet world have lost sight of their audience.  Most libraries are surely intensely local organizations.  Are they making that connection?

After having pondered these things and written my posting, I see Gary Price has lots of info from earlier in the month along similar lines: Other Q&A Services, Most Available For Free.

social networking at the BBC

Or the Beeb, as Canadian anglophiles might insist.

Euan Semple from the BBC keynoted the track on social networking. The BBC has created a gateway allowing its employees to use a number of social networking tools. The first is a forum with 11 different discussion groups, including Editorial, Production, What’s Going On, etc. Over 11,000 people use the forum to ask questions and get answers. One result of this platform is that trivial questions can turn into interesting issues; misinformation gets corrected, and lurkers (people who read but do not participate in the discussion) get the benefit of the discussion. Euan stressed that these types of systems must be sociable places where people will want to go to get their information, and it can be a challenge to get conversations started. Once the conversations begin, the statistics show that thousands of people may read posts, but only a few contribute comments or replies.

Other social networking tools that have been added to the BBC’s gateway are:
• Connect.gateway—used to identify and find other people in the organization. A search tool allows employees to find others with specific expertise (foreign language speakers, etc.)
• An internal blog has had a large impact on journalism processes. Over 250 people within the BBC are blogging, even senior managers. Blogs have started to replace “all hands” broadcast e-mail announcements from upper management.
• Wikis are used by over 1,500 people and have become a rich resource for all kinds of information. With their freely available editing capabilities, wikis are very different from traditional documents. For example, when new policies are proposed, employees are encouraged to comment and change the initial documents, and then they are considered for incorporation into the final policy.
• RSS software that runs and syndicates content for those interested.

as reported in InfoToday Blog - Social Networking at the BBC.
There is also an audio interview (WAV) with him.

He spoke on Day 3 of Online Information 2005.  The presentation doesn't seem to be available, err, online.

I've never seen a blog report that a link came from someone's bookmarks, so anyway... via Darlene Fichter's Furl bookmarks.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations symposium Australia 2005 and Laval 2006

The 8th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations - ETD2005: evolution through discovery was September 28-30, 2005 in Australia.

Mostly papers in PDF format are available.  However for Stevan Harnad's opening keynote, both his paper Maximising research impact by mandating institutional self-archiving (PDF) and his presentation (PowerPoint) are online.

ETD2006 will be at Université Laval in Quebec, Canada.  In June 2006 I think.

Laval has lots of cool electronic developments.  The page for the Bibliothèque de l'Université Laval is certainly an interesting starting point.  They have been working on their electronic theses project for years, see

ETD Implementation at Université Laval (PowerPoint) from 2002
E-Theses Project at Université Laval (PowerPoint) from Access 2003
R&D @ Laval University Library -- Archimede and ETD's (PDF) from IATUL 2005

The repository itself is searchable at http://www.theses.ulaval.ca/

Knowledge Management 2.0

Dave Pollard has some very insightful writing about tech watch and other knowledge management challenges.  He contacted me to point out his summary of a talk he's presented to the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) and C2: Connect and Collaborate meetings recently.

how to save the world: Knowledge Sharing and Collaboration 2015

I particularly liked the following quote, which is something I encounter again and again - it's not the technology, it's the people and the culture that are the challenges, and we have to be realistic: adapt to the way people work, don't try to get them to adapt to the technology.

The challenges we face today in getting people to share what they know and to collaborate effectively are not caused or cured by technologies, they are cultural impediments. It's extremely difficult to change people's behaviours (they usually exist for a reason), so the solutions we find have to accommodate these behaviours, and these cultures, rather than trying to 'fix' them.

Atlantic Scholarly Information Network blog and info

I don't know much about the Canadian ASIN (Atlantic Scholarly Information Network) project, but they do have a blog with some info.  (Prepare for acronym fever.)

The CAUL [Council of Atlantic University Libraries] have begun implementing the ASIN Portal which includes single-signon authenticated access to the combined licensed and public resources of the CAUL libraries. The [Atlantic Provinces Library Association (APLA) conference] session will cover the individual components of the Portal including federated/broadcast searching, OpenURL resolution, Relais document delivery and Subject Rooms which are all maintained by the Sirsi’s Rooms context management system.

Via Stephen on CISTI Architecture internal bliki.

LoC series on managing knowledge in digital environment

It was a bit of a breadcrumb trail for me to follow, but anyway.
Library of Congress lecture series

Managing Knowledge and Creativity in a Digital Context

a series of lectures including Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, who spoke yesterday, and upcoming speakers including Lawrence Lessig.  The series is available on CSPAN.

C-SPAN: Library of Congress - The Digital Future

Collaboration for Knowledge Management and Campus Informatics

Collaboration for Knowledge Management and Campus Informatics By Sarah M. Pritchard,  August 23, 2004

http://www.library.ucsb.edu/informatics/informatics/documents/UCSB_Campus_Informatics_Project_Report.pdf 

Project home page:

http://www.library.ucsb.edu/informatics/

seen on Rocky Northern Shepherd, a blog by Peter Levesque of the SSHRC.

Particularly relevant channels from that blog are Knowledge Mobilization and Community Research.
(The rest of it is pretty cool too.)

IL2004 - Tuesday - 11:30 Developing an Enterprise-wide Knowledge Management System

Originally posted 2004-11-16.

Barbara Silcox
Jo Ann Remshard
NIST - National Institute of Standards and Technology
isd?

NIKE - NIST Integrated Knowledge EditorialNet

Project Vision: To capture, organize, and make available NIST’s knowledge assets in the form of documents and digital objects.

(system doesn’t exist yet)

they looked at Application Service Providers (ASPs)
decision is being made

unique piece: CrossWalk - migrate data from NIKE to online catalog
just maps MARC to online catalog (MARC to OPAC)

Digital Library and Institutional Repository

copyright issues

Search Component

maintain online catalog from Sirsi

Next Steps

- migration of legacy data to new database, doing much cleaning
- continue exploring options for building digital library
- continue to acquire needed skill sets through training and recruitment
- expand digital library to include museum objects
- assessment

US GPO (Government Printing Office) doing a lot of scanning.