Animal Sacrifice ...

There are interesting articles in the ToI today ... In the View-Counterview section ... about animal sacrifice. This is a topic which is quite controversial, so let me just write my two bits on this.

Actually, on second thoughts, maybe i dont want to write about animal sacrifice, because i dont have an opinion about it. I believe that if someone doesnt like the idea, they are welcome to abstain from doing it, while on the other hand, anyone does believe in it, they are free to do as they choose. Either way, when something is sanctioned by religion, it becomes a part of personal belief and hence, must be looked at, as such. For, if this was a universal reality, we should all have been Vegetarian. Of course, my personal view on this is not material to this blog, so i am not mentioning it.

What i wanted to write about, instead, is the way certain journalists treat the idea. We are a secular country, and one would expect journalists, who are responsible for forming public opinion, to be secular too. But when animal sacrifice at Kamakhya makes them write about the barbarity of the act, and this is the only occasion when they feel that it is a barbaric act, this brings into question their standing as being truly secular. Though i would like to applaud the newspaper in bringing this out in the form of a debate, the concern is the occasion, or the reason behind the debate, which seems to be restricted to only one dimension of our society.

The Craze Over Knol

There are a lot of things being written about Knol ... first glance? The user interace rocks. But, if we go beneath that, what would we find? Lets examine this for a minute ...

Firstly, knol is like a multi-author blog ... a place where, with controlled access, multiple authors can pen their thoughts. At the same time, it is a wiki. Now, i know this is a crude way of compartmentalizing something which is a completely new concept, into concepts which have been around for some time now (wouldnt call blogs and wikis old!), but i thought this was called for, because these are the kinds of descriptions i am hearing about knol. This is not fair to the tool, while at the same time, restrictive in terms of defining what the tool is all about.

Having said this, i am more interested in looking at knol from the perspective of an organization, and how a tool like knol may have advantages over existing tools.

First of all, controlled authorship. As i am sure you would appreciate, controlled authorship of wikis is something which is required in the organizational context. While you might want everyone to read a wiki about a particular topic, you might want specific people to write on the topic. Now, this does take a bit away from the egalitarian idea of the wiki, as espoused by wikipedia, but then, whoever said that the tool can remain that way within the organizational context, too? Two reasons ... Firstly, you dont want a novice to write to the wiki, because this might mislead people, and have them make mistakes which is not desirable. Second, the possibility of leakage of IP. While these are not concerns on the internet, behind the firewall, these are concerns which a lot of knowledge managers face when it comes to social computing. Now, they are not necessarily justified, and i am sure there cannot be a single justification for all, and that existence of non-existence of justifications for this would depend on the unique context of each sutiation. But, where there is a valid requirement, this concept can be quite useful.

Second, this doesnt restrict the organization to having only one entry on a particular topic. If there are multiple projects running on similar domains, they might have different viewpoints on the same topic, so instead of having to compartmentalize them into a single page, it would be a better option to give them their own space on the intranet. Of course, this could be provided by a blogging engine, but then, blogs, once written, are written, and editing them takes quite a bit away from the flow of the conversation. This is functionality which is more suited to the wiki compartment.

Bottomline ... this seems to be a tool which can address a few requirements which come up in the organizational context, and which have not been addressed by the internet based, completely open paradigm of web 2.0 tools.

Fantasy App ...

Is it a pointer to me being a wierdo if i am fantasizing about an application? Well ... maybe! But then, whatever ...

I have been using both facebook and twitter for over a week now. And the way i see it, both of these applications actually complement each other. While facebook is about connecting with folks, and doing your own thing, twitter is about being yourself, and just penning down your thoughts from time to time. I am thinking of a facebook homepage where updates from twitter, from my network get reflected, and where i can not just keep in touch with what my friends are doing, with their statuses, photos, work, play, etc., i can also keep in touch with what they are thinking.

And, this is a pointer to a larger thought process ... Right now, i am confused about which social network i want to log into. So, i log into twitter, because i want to share my "thoughts of the moment" with others, and i log into facebook to connect with friends. And, i log into ning for communities, and ... What is required, to an extent, is an aggregator, which can give the functionality of the social networks i am a part of, in a single place. This way, i am sure a lot of folks would save a lot of time not having to update multiple social networks?

There is, of course, the argument of diversity which multiple social networks brings in, but i dont see too much logic in that, considering that most of the folks on my network in facebook overlap with those on twitter, and hence, the impact of diversity is only minimal.

Saddening Thought ...

Everyday when i come to the office, i think that i should write this post ... i have been thinking this for some time now. But when i do come to the office, there is work to do, and hence, i tend to forget about this. And, this is the sad part about the society we are a part of ... no, i am not exempted, all of us are equal.

Why is this sad? What am i talking about? It started when i read (dont remember which newspaper it was) someone writing about Gurgaon as the Millenium City. This is really nice. Though, this makes me laugh. You might ask why. Simple ... If you see the way the city is, it doesnt seem to augur well for the next millenium. Because if this is the picture of this millenium, then we are looking at a millenium with roads riddled with potholes the size of lunar craters, traffic which can make sluggish snails seem swift, electricity which loves to play hide-and-seek, and of late, mountains of mud, which have been the same way for months.

Now, this is, by no means a picture only of Gurgaon ... this is true of Mumbai, where the potholes on some of the roads actually lend credence to the theory that Dinosaurs were made extinct by meteor showers (and the remnants of those meteors landed here), or Kolkata, where water-logging plays a crucial role in teaching kids how to swim (or dodge fish swimming by, as they walk through the Great Lakes of Kolkata!), or Delhi where rainfall of two drops of water leads to water-logging of four drops (remember the Water Conjurer?) ...

In short, the way things are, this promises to be an interesting millenium.

On E-Mail ...

I quite agree with Luis when he says that email is probably not the best way to communicate. In fact, looking at the way email has come into the business ecosystem, it basically replaces the inter-office memos that used to circulate in offices. Email brought those online, and made them instant, so an electronic "inter-office memo" could be sent instantly to someone, without having it being sent by hand, and reaching the other person after hours, if not days, depending on whether he was based in the other building across town, or across the globe.

Thing is, with the advent of email, and its widespread adoption, the mindset of people has not changed much. While e-commerce technologies were changing the way things were being done, the fact is, people still have the mindset of inter-office memos. So, what is wrong with it, is the question that comes up. Something is ... The way the world is changing, and the way the world of business, and the nature of work is evolving, this inter-office mindset may not be the best possible tool for building a business for tomorrow, when the participants in the business are going to be far more distributed (if not fragmented), with work going more and more to places and people who can do it much better than where it is being done now.

However, i was reading a post by Dave Pollard ... interesting reading! He makes a compelling case for more open-ness in business interactions. The new paradigm of openness in the organization could change the way things are being done ... though, i would guess this is going to take a long time. No matter, as long as the world of business is on the path, we will get there sometime. Having said that, i am not sure whether there would be any such thing as "nothing in the inbox", because it would, in all probability, be "lots in your feed reader"!

A lot has been written about this, too ... about the feed reader replacing the inbox ... but, thats not so much the issue, considering that this would be symptomatic of increasing open-ness in interactions, and generation of content far more dynamic, and up-to-date. After all, people are usually more up-to-date than platforms.

Value of KM

Admittedly, theres plenty written about the subject. And, we are yet nowhere closer to what could be a framework for measuring the value of KM. So why am i writing about this? I came across an interesting blog by Jenna Sweeney about the idea of measurement of Training ... and, look at it closely, Training and Knowledge Management are related, so i have thought for a long time.

The basic point that Jenna is making here is the fact that measurement must be done in the context of whatever you are measuring. And, this is quite valid for the entire question of value of KM. First of all, KM means different things to different people ... and if this is so, it is quite difficult to come up with adequate measurement norms. Leave aside the fact that even if it were to be able to come up with these norms, it would still be very difficult to measure, because of the basic structure of knowledge. And this is something i have written about before ... that when we are measuring something as nebulous as knowledge, it is a nice idea to not abstract it from its context, and try to build up something generic, but instead, stick to things which are specific to the context of the measurement.

Whither General Knowledge ...

There was a time when your prominence depended on the amount of things you knew about a variety of subjects. Those were the days when people actually memorized time-tables, knew the schedules of trains, buses, and flights by heart, and knew so much about so many things which they remembered. And this was all possible because there was the requirement to remember.

Today, we dont remember as many things as folks used to remember, say, in Dad's generation. The reason, to my mind is that the requirement to remember is not there (no, it has nothing to do with shrinking brains, though there are folks who lend credence to that theory, too!). Probably this is why quizzing was an activity which was way high in prominence on college campuses, and the more you knew about different things, the better it was for you, because it meant you were really smart. Today, however, this is not the scene. And probably this is why i dont see so many quiz shows these days?

The other day, i was talking to my nephew, and our man had just been for an interview at reputed consulting firm. One of the things they asked him (maybe because he is straight out of college ...) was the GDP of India in the last financial year. And this got me thinking. Here was a consulting firm (and they do a lot of projects on KM, too ...), asking in an interview the GDP of India? Do kids need to remember this kind of information nowadays? Isnt it far simpler to just google it? Or, better still, with wikipedia, you could find the GDP of India here. Which is why it got me thinking ... what were they thinking! Between the content and the conversation which is around in the virtual world, this is not even required.

The Destination ...

I was talking to my Sister in Law the other day ... Being the elder one, i was trying to be the "in the know" guy, dishing out pearls of wisdom, otherwise known as gyaan to anyone who liked to listen ... So, i was asking her what she wants to do in her career. She has some ideas, and i was trying to encourage her to ask the standard questions ... where do you want to see yourself ten years down the line?

When she was able to give me a vague answer to this one, i prodded on ... little knowing i was prodding on to stuff even i didnt understand. So, i asked her where she sees herself twenty years down the line, and then thirty. And, then, at retirement. And then it struck me. Whats this all about? When we are in the rat race, is there a specific destination which we can achieve, and rest on it? Not at all. In fact, the destination for all is the same ... departure. So, why run faster, when all of us are going to reach the same place? Rather, shouldnt we treat life just as a journey of sight-seeing, without any specific destination in mind? Not only would it remove a lot of heartburn, it would also help us see life for what she is ... Beautiful!

Whereas today, we treat life basically as a set of events, tied up with a set of targets, which we achieve, and then move on to the next set of achievements. But, life is to be lived, isnt it? Whats the point of achieving life, when we fail to live it?

About Twitter ...

I have logged onto twitter ... finally! OK ... so i was trying out facebook all this while. And, for all the cool things that twitter gives, i somehow find the functionality at facebook way too cool. Actually, this is early days yet, but from what i am seeing, one thing which is really like about facebook, which i am missing at twitter is the way i can see all the applications my friends are installing, all the groups they are joining, etc., etc. ... this, to my mind, is a wonderful way of easing the process of discovery. These were my thoughts when i had joined facebook. And not much which is changing here.

Though, the thing i really like about twitter is the way short, sweet, quick messages can just be shot out. This is an interesting thing to do, especially because this enables me to capture the "thought of the moment". Rather than writing a long blog, i can write a series of short snippets, which could basically become the source for my blog. Its akin to something i have been thinking of doing for some time now (since i started writing my book ... yes, more about that soon!), that is, carrying a dictaphone and just recording whatever thought occurs right at the moment when it occurs. Its this kind of functionality that i find quite interesting. More so, in the organizational context, this could be really nice, because with this, rather than asking folks to write their experiences in a blog which could be quite lengthy for people to write, or worse still, asking them to write documents, people can simple capture this "thought of the moment", and share this with whoever wants to see what they are reading ... especially with their social networks!

Education Tales ...

Sitarampur (and i am impressed when i find an entry for the town in wikipedia) is a town in the coal belt of West Bengal, in the Asansol sub-division of Bardhaman (Borddhomaan, if you are a purist). Last night, there was a story run on one of the news channels (it was either NDTV, or CNN-IBN) ...

There is a school in Sitarampur. You can read about this school in this article. What is most interesting is the attitude of the powers that be. Delays are understandable. By all means, there are delays in the best executed of projects, no doubt. But, 44 years? Makes the mind boggle. What is also so interesting about the entire episode is the fact that the powers that be dont really care whether the money is actually being put to good use or not. As one can make out, in this example, it is not.

Another story which came out in the paper today ... Nirjharani Chakraborty ... this, a story of human grit and perseverance. Of a person who decides that she has much more to attain than has been hers till now. And, has the courage to reach out, and achieve. This is a story both touching and encouraging.