Apin Talisayon’s blog

Today I accidentally stumbled upon a weblog of significance. Apin Talisayon has started a feuilleton of posts on Knowledge management. http://apintalisayon.wordpress.com/ If you have some time, read it. It is a very nice contribution to the field in my opinion, especially his perspective on KM in the context of the Philipines.

Data collection in London

Last week I have visited London city-centre for the first time. The reason of the visit was to collect data for the requirements analysis with one of the SME-partners of the OrganiK project. Obviously I can’t say much about the data collection (confidential, not analysed properly yet) but I can write a bit about London.

My wife is from Northern England, born in Liverpool, raised in Manchester. If you are not English it is perhaps hard to understand how that affects the opinion on London. In one word: A LOT. Oh, that is two words, but you get my drift. I have the same with Amsterdam, which is a horrible city, but only to me it seems. London however was interesting, not in the least because of my colleagues. I went with one of the Greek partners and as he had never been before either, it was a reason to be… touristy. He even had a camera that he normally never has .

Anyway some pictures I took with my HTC 710 phone :

The fact that all these pictures were taken around the same area means two things: We didn’t have a lot of time and it was getting dark and I am not really interested in taking pictures of everything. The South Bank was nice though, and seeing Big Ben, the changing of the guard, Prince Harry and Prince William arrive at the opening of the Quantum of Solace, discovering that there are Wetherspoon pubs with decent prices, Trafalgar and Picadilly squares and the West End… was all rather eventful for a two-three hour visit.

We didn’t find Harrods, we missed Downing Street although we probably crossed it and we never really found any shopping precinct or anything so we must have missed that as well. Altogether it was fun though, as my colleague says: Work is Fun.

More on networking

In a previous post I discussed the value of LinkedIn as a networking tool. I expressed my surprise that there is no real culture of networking in the UK. In the Netherlands it is one network event after the other, here it is all more formal, networking for networking sake seems to be out of order.

No matter whether I am right or wrong about this, I think it is my duty to write about networking the Dutch way so that I can educate the English. I know I am arrogant like that…No really, I have a different interest and that is that I think Web 2.0 features are going to push forward the concept of social networking in a large way throughout the World.

Read this blog on Yahoo to get an idea about what networking is when applied to face to face situations. Where Web 2.0 is actually helping us to understand this concept better and better, as well as helping us to get better at it, it is no substitute for ‘real’ networking events. In a sense the technology gags us, as shown by this excellent picture:

thanks to noblelglobel@Flickr

At the University of Groningen network events are commonplace, lets make this part of the Sheffield culture as well!

Part of my networking affliction stems from the fact that I have a broad knowledge rather than a specific knowledge, I am always painfully aware of shortcomings in, let’s say, my programming knowledge. Knowing the people I know however I can almost always find the answer to questions (once I decided how to best formulate them!).

This is the essence of good knowledge management, knowing what you know, and knowing who knows what you don’t. There is no codification effort that can replace that basic stance, there are however codifications (of knowledge) that help find the knowledge you need. It is this area of codification I am currently investigating in the OrganiK project, on which there will be more info in later blog posts.