Tom Steinberg

Well done! Now tell us, how has it changed your operation as a think tank?

John Craig

Excellent question. I think it has changed us, but more interestingly, not as much as it could have. At times I want to put bits of work that I or others within Demos have done on the greenhouse (we can attach files, but people rarely do). Paul S wrote recently on the Greenhouse about embedding it more better embedding our organisational processes within it. Do people think that using the greenhouse to share broader kinds of knowledge is a good idea? Should we give people the green light on this?

Paul Paul

I think that there is an external discipline that comes from writing for a wider audience that is very useful in our work more widely. Interestingly the other thing we did a year ago was develop a stricter set of branding guidelines and templates for different documents to ensure that they were consistent and looked professional. It sounds very superficial but the cumulative impact of embracing those and the blog has been that whenever I write I do so bearing in mind the possibility that others might one day read it.

The question for me is how to ensure that this blurring of internal and external production evolves into a very positive thing, in which the blog can become a tool for involving a much wider audience in creating and shaping ideas and content throughout the process. At the moment I think the same process is acting as a kind of self-censorship, where the only things we put up here are either tame or tangential to our core business, or completely finished pieces of work.

Charlie Tims

Depends what you mean by core business. I often read things on the blog that genuinely help me with my research. They may not be core to "the business", but they are core to "mine".

I do agree that people are often a little ginger about entering postings that go to the heart of their work, but by doing that it enables them to possibly go to the heart of somebody else?s (either in or outside of the organisation). Isn't that just the cross-program learning that we champion; a sort of un-conscious collaboration?

Paul Paul

But suppose I knew more about your own work (because you posted more about what you were actually doing) then I could be more pro-active and deliberate in posting things that I thought you mind find useful. This is classic KM stuff about the benefits both to you and I of you making your tacit knowledge more explicit.

Will Davies

In knowledge management terms, I think that blogs contribute towards a general shift to 'reputation management'. Rather than logging information asocially, you reveal yourself as a source of information to your peers. This way, the social networks in which knowledge is embedded are used as part of the knowledge management process - knowledge remains 'stored' in people's heads, whilst the internet is simply used to locate the appropriate head.

Charlie Tims

err what's classic KM stuff? more familiar with MK down here. You don't know what that is? I suppose there's a point here isn't there. I agree with charlie; I think he was just trying to make it sound a little less bleak than you pointed out, paul.

Oh no, hang on. Knowledge Management, right? Deary me. How's about we move forward into 2004 with a blog moratorium on all acronyms for those of us who don't think in letters.

Paul Paul

I like that distinction a lot, and I can certainly see how it makes sense in the context of managing knowledge across what we might call (and not just because it will get Will excited) 'weak ties'.

Yet within an organisation the size of Demos, i.e. when i'm primarily concerned with knowledge management across strong ties, I know enough about people and what they're doing to "locate the appropriate head" with or without a blog.

But I don't know enough about what they're doing to help fill their head, by pointing them towards interesting content or responding to papers that they might have written etc, and that's where I think the blog ought to be able to help.

So I suppose my question to Will is, if not greater content knowledge, what would we have to log more of or better if we are to pinpoint the appropriate head more accurately, or conversely, to attract appropriate knowledge to our head?

Paul Paul

To clarify, I was referring to Will's distinction not "Threlbert"'s frankly rather unhelpful contribution about TLAs.

Bobby Webster

There are two variations on the blog which I've been tinkering with, and may set up.

First, I think project blogs are a tempting if difficult idea, and would help us move towards being a genuine 'Open Source' organisation. To work, we'd need to use these as the route for internal communications: allowing the kind of discussions which take place over email in a project team to be visible to - and open to comment from - the outside world.

The other would be a simple 'blog of links' - as interesting websites crop up during research, we could pop these up onto a shared blog. This would create a sort of self-assembly research portal: a useful resource for people inside and outside Demos.

Will Davies

I'd be delighted to answer your question, Paul, at my usual rate of ?100000/hour...

OK, OK, (but what *is* the impact of a blog on market competitiveness? Why should open source have anything to do with sound business practice?)

My point about reputation management does not apply internally in a small organisation. And even in a big organisation, a blog would not be an entirely internal reputation system or KM system.

The feature of blogs which makes them interesting from a reputational (and KM) perspective is not only their handling scale, but their internal/external status. This gives what so many KM systems lack: an incentive to use them well (i.e. a watching public).

So in your case, the blog helps us in the outside world find out what you're doing, and which individuals are interested in which topics. It ought to enhance internal/external network effects, and enhance DEMOS's reputation externally. But within DEMOS, your blog is no different from an email list. I don't think I could suggest better ways of supporting internal reputation effects - ever thought of a team meeting? :-)

Paul Paul

You clearly haven't tried sitting though our team meetings. I'm a researcher, blog me out of here...

Duncan O' Leary

Isn't the important point about a blog that it can mobilise intellectual Capital in a way that simply hoping to 'know the right head' in an organisation can't? One of the major advantages of networks is that they do not require one person to have intricate knowledge of the network as a whole (such as exactly who has which knowledge on a certain topic). By building the blog in to the process of producing work, those who have knowledge are given the opprtunity to share it, whereas in the existing system that we have there is a reasonable chance that this knowledge simply won't be located, because people don't realise that it exists in the first place.

jackdalton jackdalton

Putting 'team' and 'meeting' together always has that 'cats' and 'herding' feel to it...

More seriously, I'd like simply to congratulate all associated with this blog and to wish you well in the future development of the Greenhouse. Please don't underestimate how useful and provocative this window on your eclectic and (often) thought provoking world can be to an outsider. We all need the occasional orchid in our lives... as well as the stuff in good currency.