Knowledge Management and elists

[Doyle Saylor <djsaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings Comrades,
    The form of e-lists is familiar enough.  Some people have remarked on
how the lists themselves don't serve as good organizing tools (see Carrol
Cox).  I want to look at the contemporary business model of like forms of
"knowledge" production for examples of how e-lists might evolve toward
organizing tools.  Knowledge management as a term summarizes capitalist
thinking about managing the intellectual capital in an enterprise.
Primarily how do workers get information in a timely way and how work groups
communicate internally in knowledge production and that relationship to
external communications.

    Typical of the tools being developed in the corporate site is something
called Placeware.  Combining some intranet or internet interface with
telephone business conferences, these sorts of software solutions to
combining work groups give us some picture of what to look for in e-lists
with regard to organizing workers.  The theory of practice of what to aim
for I mean.

    For example for e-lists flaming is a typical problem of production of
knowledge which confronts the list manager.  A larger volume list will
frequently overwhelm the manager so that problems arise but the
manager/reader has lost content due to too much to read or not able to
competently make judgements about the nature of conflict.  In fact
judgements are primitive with regard to knowledge management since much of
the potential automation of knowledge production is not yet being reflected
in list management.  What precisely is the organizing point to the rules of
participating on e-lists?  The moderator may have some simple rules but are
those rules really meant to produce knowledge, and is knowledge production
really the goal for typical e-list managers?

    Placeware represents a method to coordinate a small group of organizers
shaping the meeting of a much larger group of workers to facilitate
knowledge production.  A typical meeting might have several hundred
participants, and maybe a dozen organizers performing different kinds of
organizing functions.  In addition various kinds of summary mechanisms for
the whole group exists.  Those summary mechanisms might be automated votes
on questions that arise, common visual interfaces (charts and graphs to show
the content of decisions made by a group in an election) in real time to see
content being made jointly by designated individuals (a page being worked on
by several hands at once).

    Let me just draw out some points here, collaboration in producing
content is the norm for which these softwares are being built, therefore
reflecting a sense that knowledge is being produced with a purpose of the
group not individual production.  So that e-mail writers would no longer be
just making comments alone into the group, but that groups create the
knowledge production together.  The content is visual (aside from written
text which is already available in e-mail), and sound content which gives
quite a bit more reality (human emotional production) to what people feel
that are working together.  It is difficult in e-lists to know what people
(lurkers) feel about debates yet their content is very important to e-lists
in terms of growth of the audience, and dispersion of knowledge on wider
scales across great geographic spaces.

Bandwidth WAP and knowledge production

On e-lists where a person is paying for the time spent online, there is a
heavy cost to bear for large expansions of data coming down the pipeline.
For example sending graphics may make the content of an e-mail go from 15 kb
of space sent to 1.5mb.  The download time would go from seconds (at the
rate of standard 56 kbs modems) to many minutes and put someone in a
particular part of the world that has only limited time access at a
disadvantage with respect to others who do not pay for access by their time
online in the larger context of e-list knowledge production.  A parallel
further to what can be said also of people with cognitive disabilities such
as blindness where graphical information sent has to be seen to be
understood.

Knowledge production with visual content (pictures) depends upon broad band
techniques to be useable in real time (responses go back and forth in
seconds).  Pictures and sound allow real emotional content to knowledge
production, and real emotional content allows stabile group formation for
common work processes.  Frequently it is unclear to participants in e-lists
that emotional content is important to knowledge production.  This is an
historical artifact of rationalists thinking which rejects emotions as a
part of human thought.

There are two main avenues for sending a lot of information at once, wired
and wireless techniques.  WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) does not
require the implementation of wire infrastructures in places where there is
no money to pay for laying wires and other support systems for broadband
networks (see Cisco Systems, Nortel, and Lucent concerning methods for wired
production).  WAP refers to being online through a mobile device such as
cell phones, or PDA (personal digital assistants).  It is likely that as the
expansion of knowledge management grows more important that large parts of
the globe that are not now wired and won't be wired for economic reasons in
the near future will be accessed through wireless means.  More than two
thirds of humanity will not be wired into the internet.  Included in that
are issues of literacy also.  Wireless techniques are meant to be
voice/speech controlled rather than written.

Wireless production implies for a knowledge production group, very like the
e-lists groups, that embodiment is an important issue.  That is that we are
carrying around on our bodies (literally to embody information to human
being requirements) access to the knowledge production group (the
contemporary e-list group).  There are various methods that reflect
embodiment issues, XML, GPS etc,.  XML (a recent upgrade in HTML for the
www) ties communications on line to the producer source-machine of
information, GPS (satellite global positioning methods) locates a machine to
a geographic point on the surface of the planet.

Therefore lurking in the background anonymously in an e-lists impedes
knowledge production.  Said another way, embodiment of knowledge production
implies that being connected anywhere anytime places new demands upon
"privacy".  With regard to Marxist, this is a business force that destroys
individualistic understandings of how knowledge is produced.

For example, to not participate in a networked group doing knowledge
production puts one outside the capitalist economy.  Wherever knowledge
production remains off-line, the business manager (in the capitalist sense)
no longer knows where or what the worker is doing.  Keeping in mind we tend
to think of work as being in one physical location for a group of people,
whereas on-line knowledge production implies dispersed or de-centralized
production of knowledge.  A manager cannot rely upon knowing a person face
to face in order to insure production being met.  Therefore all that needs
to be known about a person must go on line in order to produce knowledge.
Thus ending individual autonomy in the sense that lurking implies.

Typically Placeware tells organizers a great deal about each participant
whether they speak up to the group or not.

Bandwidth.  Standard modems of 56 KBS for e-mail.  Or slower.  3G systems
(3rd generation) 2.4MBS which is fast enough for video and music downloads
and uploads.  (see Scientific American, October 2000, page 54)
thanks,
Doyle Saylor