Knowledge Management

There are 49 posts filed in Knowledge Management (this is page 1 of 5).

Knowledge management and organizing information for use

A short podcast on some of my recent experiences on knowledge management and organizing information for use:

Some references from the podcast:

Organizing information for use – A Github repo summarizing writings from Ken Smith on organizing information for use

Link Zettlekasten – My experiment in organizing bookmarks using OPML

Writings on Organizing Information – Frank McPherson list of essays on this topic, this is one on the value of indexes

Op-Ed Links – Source of information on writing op-eds/letters to the editor from Ken Smith

Knowledge management – My collection of knowledge management posts on my weblog

Commonplace book – Wikipedia

Chris Aldrich – Differentiating online variations of the Commonplace Book: Digital Gardens, Wikis, Zettlekasten, Waste Books, Florilegia, and Second Brains

Waste book – think of a “Field Notes” notebook that you capture ideas/info and transfer to something else

Chris Aldrich – Reframing and simplifying the idea of how to keep a Zettelkasten

Maggie Appleton: Daily Notes Pages – Describes a practice of having a daily page which serves as a collector of thoughts/ideas, which can then be refined and turned into more detailed notes, or left in the daily page to be found through tags or searches.

Sometimes I feel bad that I collect links and don’t do anything with them (except create more link dump documents), but after reading Karl Voit’s article about his PIM debt, I don’t feel quite as bad about it!

More on curation workflows

Ken Smith has written a reply to my post on engaging and curation. In the post, he discusses “standing searches” for a topic or phrase, and how (to me) that curating RSS feeds can be a search at a particular level. He also addresses the topic of activism, and how the concept of search might apply there, but that activism needs something more. I would like to explore this more.

The most common type of “standing search” I am aware of is Google Alerts (see link to this at Google). I am sure there are other services providing this type of functionality. As for curating RSS feeds, this can be done for private consumption using any feed reader (Feedly, River5, The Old Reader, FeedLand, and so on). I like using River5 because it supports display of aggregated feeds (or rivers) easily in a single page application (such as bloggers using the Old School blogging tool in Drummer, bloggers using the 1999.io blogging tool, and writers from Politico following the Ukraine war).

So, curation can be performed by collecting feeds that generally post on a topic. However, these feeds may benefit from further curation, in that if a user is interested in a subset of stories/posts contained within those feeds, it could be distilled into an even more focused list of stories/posts. The Radio Userland tool supported creating feeds of this kind in an easy manner, displaying items from subscribed feeds and checkboxes next to the items if you wanted to copy those into an editing window and then post them in a particular category on your weblog. I think there is a need for this kind of tool – I am going to try to prototype this in the near future.

Another level of curation could be to provide additional text/narration/analysis of the stories/posts – to add more value than just a link and the initial paragraph from the post – to tell the reader why they should take a look at this post. Blogger Jason Kottke been practicing this type of blogging for a long time. Currently, several people whose work I follow add this analysis within the context of a newsletter (Stephen Downes’ OLDaily, Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from An American, and Joyce Vance’s Civil Discourse are excellent examples).

All of the above examples can feed into groups of people interested in activism related to a particular topic. Jennifer Hofmann runs the Americans of Conscience Checklist. Started as a single person effort, this site has grown into a group of people who review items to include in the checklist, and organize the work of distribution. The checklist itself is a set of concrete actions to protest or support different issues. From past posts to the website, it is apparent that multiple people are monitoring activities of multiple websites/organizations, and the group draws on this information to select issues to push out to subscribers. Ken Smith himself has created lists of things to do in Indianapolis, which is another example of organizing information for use.

To sum up, I think that there are tools that can be used and workflows that can be defined to support curation and engagement. I have tried to collect some resources/food for thought in this post. I welcome Ken’s further thoughts on this topic.

Engaging and curation

Ken Smith recently wrote about engaging others on a topic and on curation – I have a few comments.

From the engaging others post:

The famous speaker works up the crowd about this or that issue, and then at the end the audience files out and recedes and fragments into their many private lives. It is a parallel case for blogging and other social media, isn’t it? We nod at the end of a message that moves us, but the publishing platform is not set up to encourage and simplify further steps: affiliation with others, for one thing, the power move that gives political beliefs a kind of social body moving, speaking, and echoing widely in the world.

From the curation post:

Used to be if you followed the daily writing of 15 interesting bloggers, each one would be following 10 different bloggers and journalists you weren’t following, and so your 15 would keep you informed about the best writing each week by 10 x 15=150 people they respected.

These are important ideas. The first suggested that there should be ways for readers to engage and stay engaged with a subject or topic. The second suggests that there are workflows that could be created to follow posts on a topic and create linkblogs or other collections that could curate the best info out there. For both of these, it sounds like users and developers should start to “party” and work together as mentioned in a number of Dave Winer posts (Dear Doc and Dave, What I Wanted from Blogging, What I Wanted from Blogging Part 2, Scripting News from January 22, 2020). If anyone is interested in working together on these ideas, let me know!

Zettlekaste.de: Building a Second Brain and the Zettelkasten Method – This post goes into great detail contrasting the “Building a Second Brain” ideas of Tiago Forte and the Zettelkasten Method as practiced by Niklas Luhmann. The author states that both methods can be used simultaneously with little to no overlap (BASB is project focused, ZKM is knowledge-focused). It’s worth the time to read!

Keeping track of a topic

Ken Smith is looking at workflows to help develop a topic over multiple blog posts (at least, that is one part of what he is writing about, I think). I would like to offer some examples. The first is drawn from my zettlekasten experiments last year (link is to my zettlekkasten file). I created a section in my topical outline for the history of podcasting, and was adding posts and articles to it, and arranging them in chronological order. The Politics section was similar, where I was collecting information on the Kari Lake election conflicts in Arizona. Finally, I created a Github repo where I was editing posts by Ken Smith on organizing information for use. I think all of these are possible solutions for what Ken Smith is trying to do.