Lessons in Licensing and Red Rubber Balls

About a week ago, I attended a presentation at SFU on "Rights and Contracts in the Digital Age." (I have to mention here that I attended this presentation on a sunny Friday night at 5pm -- I do expect congratulations for that.)

I thought I was going to die of boredom during the first presentation. Although it turned out to offer one or two good nuggets of information, Karen Gilmore's session on "Contract Issues in the Digital Age" consisted of her talking through a two-page handout containing various legal clauses. Not exactly my bag. I couldn't even look out the window longingly because we were in a sealed room. I satisfied myself with making a list of home renovation projects I'd like to undertake if I ever found the time. Incidentally, if anyone knows anything about bathroom renovations, let me know.

I was there in the first place to gather information, really, about whether what we're doing in online magazine publishing is on the up-and-up, and how to ensure that we stay on the right side of the law, and on the right side of our authors.

Turns out that we're OK. Hoorah!

The big bonus of attending the session was learning more from a fellow named Andy Kaplan about Creative Commons: a fascinating oasis for me within the dullest of dull topics and justification for missing out on early Friday afternoon sunlight. Creative Commons is all about letting artists reserve 'some rights' on their work rather than going for the whole shebang (the traditional 'All Rights Reserved'), and thereby preventing anyone else from having any fun whatsoever with it. The concept seems to be born from the entire idea of remixing and mashing which is a grounding principle of the whole Web 2.0 or whatever you want to call it movement.

In short, an artist can now, under Creative Commons, choose what to secure copyright on, and clarify -- legally -- exactly how other people can use their work. Just one example of a Creative Commons license would be this: Non-commercial, requires attribution, and share-alike. What that means is that: the work can't be used to make money; if anyone else uses it they need to reveal who the original author was; and yes, it can be used for re-mixing or mashing AS LONG AS the new work that results is also licensed under the share-alike terms of Creative Commons, too. Pretty nerdily cool.

In other news
I attended a half-day of the Vision marketing conference here in Vancouver last Friday (another one I wasn't super-wild about attending but still determined to learn something from) and was absolutely gobsmacked by the presentation of Kevin Karroll -- an absolutely lovely, inspiring guy who anyone could learn from when it comes to public speaking. Really incredible stuff. His message was a simple one: nurture your creativity, be passionate about what you do, and remember how to play. "What is your red rubber ball," he asked. "What is it that you want to jump out of bed and chase every morning?"

Good questions indeed.

Northern Voice 2007

Heading out to my second day of Northern Voice 2007, a blogging conference hosted here in Vancouver by a group of incredibly bright, passionate people -- and being attended by same. My head was spinning yesterday as I considered everything I learned and heard (not always one and the same, unfortunately) and all the amazing people I met.

Day One was called Moosecamp and billed itself as an "unconference", meaning that volunteers came forward with ideas for sessions and pitched them first thing in the morning, and the group itself scheduled them throughout the day. Sounds chaotic, but it worked brilliantly. Not all sessions were brilliant, mind you, but the best more than made up for the so-so. Most useful to me: a session on getting sound right in podcasting (with a reference to an incredible new FREE tool called the Levelator that I'm going to be downloading first thing Monday morning at work); an open discussion on community identity; and a presentation on search engine optimization for blogging by Alexandre Brabant, a super-bright and passionate guy behind eMarketing 101. Incredibly useful stuff. More today.

Oh and the New York trip is off. I'm bummed, but in the end was the one who actually made the call. We're launching our first mini-site next week and it would be crazy if I weren't around. Next year, I guess.

success tips

I haven't been a reader of Business 2.0, but have subscribed to their RSS feed and am finding it surprisingly useful. I particularly liked this feature I discovered today: How to Succeed in 2007. Who's not interested in that? It features succinct tips from a diverse range of success stories, including Richard Branson, Steven Covey, and Muhammad Yunus. My favourites: Yunus (who talks about how to do well by doing good) and of course Michael Scott of The Office. Chocolate as a motivator. Brilliant.

As a side note, my trip to New York is now up in the air. We'll make a final call this week. Cross your fingers for me.

new york city!

Woo hoo! It looks like I'm heading to New York for an amazing-sounding conference on digital magazines.

Magazines 24/7 promises to be a fast-paced primer on publishing online -- absolutely perfect for me right now. Presentations of particular interest for me include:

• Perry Nelson of Dwell magazine speaking on Dwell.com's relaunch
  
• Reps from Business Week, TVGuide.com, and nymagc.om speaking on blogging strategies
• Deanna Brown from Yahoo! Media Group discussing the use of a variety of mag content on a web site

Absolutely can't wait. I love New York and I'm hungry to learn.

Random Thoughts on A Few Cool Resources

I've been working on about a thousand things lately as I get more comfortable with my role in developing a digital division for a print publishing company here in Burnaby, and in my varied research have come across these excellent resources ...

On Digg, I found a link to Smashing Magazine.com which links in turn to some of the best free templates on the web -- CSS, whole websites, and Flash. Very potentially useful.

Through my RSS subscription to Read/Write Web (which is fantastic) I found this article from BusinessWeek.com yesterday about how social networking sites like Facebook are making themselves more available to third-party developers -- kind of like a controlled open-source-ish model for improving themselves and inviting innovation. This is interesting to me as my company is now considering using Drupal, an open-source CMS for our online publishing going forward. I love the idea that a piece of software can be continually improved by a group of passionate, smart people -- and with Drupal am really impressed by the look, feel and quality of the software. I also particularly like this quote from the BusinessWeek.com article:

"Part of what's exciting about a developer community is you don't know what people are going to do," says Lucian Beebe, director of product management at LinkedIn, which is considering opening up its software. "It offers you the ability to harness innovation."

I have to add that I'm liking LinkedIn a lot, as well, particularly because as we proceed with hiring for our growing Digital team, I've discovered that LinkedIn lets you post jobs to your personal network for no fee. It lets you post more widely, too, for a small fee ($125/job, I think) but by just posting to your contacts, you can feel out your network -- people you trust -- for interest in prospective jobs. This works for me, as I'm not quite sure I'm ready to post positions widely yet, but am interested in finding out about the types of people who might be up for the positions we will have open soon.

Post-Knowledge

Just renamed my blog after realizing that the former title (How Do You Manage Knowledge Anyway?) doesn't so much apply to my world any more. Sure, I'm managing knowledge personally, and will continue to learn and apply as much as I can concerning knowledge management to my business practices, but I'm also managing so much more now -- including a brand new marriage and a brand new job.

The key to my new blog title is that I really don't feel that I know anything any more (I got lost going to the parkade last week, for example) ... I feel a bit like I'm taking each step not knowing quite whether there will be ground under the next step -- and I feel great about it.

I feel a bit post-everything, to be honest -- which to me means that some things that needed to change have changed, and that there's room to start again. To learn. To get things right. And yes, to make some new mistakes.

More on the new job in posts to come.

In the meantime, I'm still in a post-wedded state of bliss. Brent and I just celebrated our marriage at a party on the weekend in Vancouver and I'm completely voiceless as a result. But ecstatic. What lovely friends we have -- and Campoverde, what a perfect venue for a smallish group (50-60 people). Check out wedding photos on our group site at www.flickr.com/groups/shannonandbrent06. I'll be posting some photos from our wedding reception this past weekend as well.

Missed Barcamp, looking ahead to KM workshop part two

Shamefully, I had to miss barcamp this weekend -- but I suppose sometimes there are things you can't get out of (I was hosting my future mother-in-law, who paid us a last-minute visit).

In being curious to hear how it all turned out, I checked out the Barcamp site, where you can find various notes and materials relating to many of the presentations given. I suspect there will be more uploaded as the week goes on. In the meantime, check out James Sherrett's site for AdHack, a very cool-sounding venture targeted at crowd-sourcing advertising: letting the viewers make -- and get rewarded for making -- the ads.

BarCamp Vancouver: Blogging in a Corporate Culture

I just found out about and signed up for BarCamp Vancouver, a very cool-sounding event coming up from August 25-27.

It sounds a bit like a jam (as in music) of minds around all topics new media. People are invited to attend this free conference as long as they volunteer to present or share their own knowledge. I love the sound of it. Here's the description from the site:

As stolen from BarCampNYC and BarCampLosAngeles, as copied from BarCampSanDiego) BarCamp is an ad-hoc un-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees.
All attendees must give a demo, a session, or help with one. All presentions are scheduled the day they happen. Prepare in advance, but come early to get a slot on the wall.
Presenters are responsible for making sure that notes/slides/audio/video of their presentations are published on the web for the benefit of all and those who can’t be present.
Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited to join.

Slots appear to be filling up fast, so join in if you're interested. I'm going to do a brief presentation on 'blogging to change corporate culture', sharing some of the experiences I've had with getting people to blog. I know, it sounds easy -- but in an environment where people have been taught for many years to compete with each other rather than collaborate with each other, it's tough to get them talking. There are a few people who are indeed changing this -- people who are brave or bold enough to just come out and say what they think. We encourage and applaud them as best we can within the knowledge group, but what's really required is a little corporate nudge every so often.

It's funny -- I was writing up a brief yesterday on blogging for our execs, and what I'm really trying to tell them, I realized, is that they shouldn't blog. The reason is simple: in this culture, these are the guys who people are most afraid of. These guys fire people. These are the guys that already tell us what they want us to do. I believe what we need in our company is a little more trust among peers ... so what I have found myself advising our executives to do is really to just shut up and listen. Read the blogs, yes. Comment on them occasionally -- in encouraging terms -- let let people know that they're listening. But for now, let the blogs be a forum for the people, at a grassroots level.

I'm interested to hear how they respond to this.

Sychronicity and the Sound of PinPon

Every once in a while I feel like I've switched on a turbo-boost button in my brain and I'm somehow able to absorb large quantities of material in relatively short periods of time. At these same times, it feels as if one discovery leads miraculously to THE THING I've needed to know.

I have a friend from an old writing group who called this phenomenon "synchronicity." She refuses to believe that these flashes of insight and 'rightness' had anything to do with luck or serendipity; rather she believes that when you feel like you're on a bit of a learning tear like this, you're really and truly on the right path for you, and that the universe is rewarding you with little bursts of inaudible applause along the way. (I personally prefer to hear these inaudible applause in the form of the good pinpon noise -- like on a Japanese game show when a correct answer is given. But whatever.) Anyway, for my present purposes, I think this definition works and I'm going to go with it. A synchronicity it is.

My synchronous and turbo-boosted right path these days has -- remarkably -- to do with knowledge management. I've been struggling for nearly a year now to generate true community support among my peers and superiors for the idea of creating and supporting a company-wide knowledge management strategy. I've pursued this even while I logically acknowledged that it wasn't going to happen overnight and while I went ahead with some 'quick win' strategies and plans in the foreground. I let it stew on the back burner.

And now, wham: the semi-hidden Blog system that we built into our knowledge base is taking off. Employees are using it -- and generating honest discussion! People are stopping me in the hallways asking when we're going to be offering Podcasts of our knowledge. People are talking about communities -- and departments are actually fighting over who's going to 'own' them. 'Where's our Scoble?' I'm being asked. 'Let's go ahead and free this previously walled-in, top-secret material', I'm being told. And everyone is gaga for 'Web 2.0' -- even if they don't quite get what that means. (Um, what does it mean, anyway?)

So OK. All my dreams are coming true. How did it all happen? And is it really going to continue?

This, I do not know. But when I suggested some of these things a year ago, nobody gave me the time of day. Nobody knew or cared what knowledge management was. Now, at the very least, they are interested. Or perhaps people are just finally, simply realizing that we can't go anywhere else as a company without figuring out how to learn, and then apply what we've learned, in some reasonably effective manner. In any case it's a great thing to watch.

For me, a few things have come together. The first was reading Verna Allee's "The Future of Knowledge: Increasing Prosperity through Value Networks." It may not sound thrilling, but for me it was. I was attending GDC 2006 and even skipped a party to read it. For me, that's serious. What Allee has to say is, perhaps, not groundbreaking in itself. But for me, after having struggled through books upon books and sites upon sites taking in all the conflicting 'rules' about managing knowledge and after analyzing a host of approaches that I felt just couldn't work within my company -- given my particular circumstances -- it spoke to me.

Fundamentally, what Allee has to say is this: knowledge management is about managing anything at all; rather it is about attending to. It is about ackowledging the very basic reality that there are existing systems akin to living organisms -- living networks, as it were -- already in operation, and that we must understand and find the tools to work within them most effectively. Here's what she has to say:

Perhaps what we really need is to manage less and attend more. The word "attend" has a range of meanings that are far more appropriate for leaders and managers in the current socioeconomic environment: "to pay attention to, to look after, to be present with, to apply oneself, to apply one's mind and direct one's attention." What do we need to attend to in order to be successful and create a more hopeful future?

She says more:

As business people, our core learning challenge is to understand network principles and apply them all across our business practices, from technology networks, to human networks, to business networks. Networks constitute the pattern of organization for living systems, which are far too complex to control or engineer. This means learning new tools and methods that will help us see network patterns and work with what is emerging.
1. Operationally, we must understand how digital networks and technologies support people in creating, organizing, and accessing the everyday knowledge they need to complete their tasks and make good decisions.
2. Tactically, we need to understand how social webs such as knowledge networks and communities of practice help create, diffuse, and leverage knowledge and innovation.
3. Strategically, we need to understand our organizations as participants in multiple business networks where intangibles are important for building relationships and smoothing interactions.
4. Everyone, especially leaders, needs to learn the new ethical underpinnings of success for networked organizations, and how to engage with each other in the conversations that matter.

Amazing, isn't it? You may not think so. Regardless, it was simply exactly what I needed to learn at that moment.

Next, I attended one of Dave Snowden's "Sensemaking" workshops. While I found many of the activities completely irrelevant (again for my company's particular circumstances which may or may not be utterly unique but which by God appear as such) what I LOVED was the idea of quite possibly being able to develop a decision-making framework that would not only take into account the worlds I live in (Chaos! Unorder!) but that would allow the decision-maker to thrive within them. If you haven't already, I encourage you to investigate the Cynefin framework and see if it may work for you.

Since then, I have been reading non-stop: blogs, books, articles, and probably talking non-stop as well and thereby learning more. I've attended local events like VidFest that introduced me to some brilliant thinkers in the fields of design, digital media, and community development (Josh Davis, Mark Pesce and George Oates of Flickr spring most readily to mind). And most recently I've helped to set up the second in a series of knowledge management workshops for some of the key stakeholders in my company, which I am very much hoping will ignite in those attending the same passion I'm feeling for the power to truly change and improve our current situation.

If this is synchronicity I'm all for it.

blooming most recklessly

my first blog. oh boy. perhaps i should begin by introducing myself.

hello. i'm shannon.

i wonder if this is how most blogs start? there's a fumbling introduction, some confusion about how to address the audience (what audience?), a truckload of self-consciousness and you're off.

further introduction.

i manage a small team at a large entertainment company that builds and publishes video games. my team is responsible for capturing and sharing the knowledge of the people who make the video games. at this large entertainment company, i have thus far is worked with my team to build a knowledge base where we collect and share the knowledge, and to actively document the ongoing lessons being learned by people in our studios all over the world. Part of my job is managing my staff, part is creating a strategy for my team to improve the knowledge base as well as all the processes that go into populating it with useful knowledge, and a bigger and bigger part is trying to help create a strategy for the company that will improve the way we collectively communicate and share knowledge internally.

i've tried to explain my job to my grandmother, and so far what she understands is that i work at a computer company.

in any case, i'll be using this blog to jot down my thoughts and theories on this strange and evolving field knowledge management, and to share my travels with anyone who may be interested. and off i go.