Perhaps it was a symptom of being "cooped up" in the gorgeous but sleepy Blue Mountains on 12 months maternity leave, watching one too many Wiggles videos with the kids, or just being starved of adult company....? Whatever it was, I got the crazy idea in my head of a fun event for the actKM conference this year - created by actKMers, performed by actKMers. Was it possible? We're literally all over the globe, and putting together anything of this kind is nearly always a time consuming, face-to-face process.

I did have a precedent. A number of years ago I had the privilege of working my way through a truly engaging and challenging management development program with about a dozen remarkable people. We'd built up the kind of bond that you do with those whom you've struggled on the tough projects, worked through the conflicts and experienced a taste of truly great teamwork. As we got started on the final 2 day workshop we shared a desire to celebrate our time together and mark its conclusion with a "revue". Having no time to prepare didn't put us off. By adopting a version of the Good News Week TV show, we hived off the content development, called for volunteers, threw in a couple of songs and Hey Presto! .. by evening we had a show! (Seriously - we did all this during our breaks).

One of the nice aspects was while our fantastic trainers, John, Wendy and Ralph had initially been a little "wary" of being the butt of some of our jokes, by putting them on the GNW teams they had a ball, and happily sent themselves up before we got around too :-D The night was a raging success, and a whole lot of fun to boot.

And so I thought....... with the tools we have freely available to us today - what is stopping a clever bunch of people like us (actKM and anyone who even loosely associates with this community) from doing that on a larger scale?

Not much I think!

And so the "Collaboration Cabaret!" was born.

What's the most memorable and fun learning exercise you've ever experienced? What made it "stick"? What made it fun?

I've witnessed a few instances of this. A close fit to the model could be Dave Snowden's (Snowden being a rusty old hand in the KM field, originally married to the "storytelling" concept and sometime backed by serious industry office). He's undeniably sharp and cultured, but he also apparently enjoys playing the loose gun: distractedly elbowing into a conversation and dropping half-cooked disqualifications on one of the parties... then inmensely enjoying the rowd, calling names and trying to bury the contrary views with ethical arguments (i.e. he doesn't just pretend to hold the high ground in knowledge, he's the arbiter of what it is right to think also). Or at least that is how I perceive much of his activity, including these days at ActKM; your own perception may be different.

Such loose wits are common in communities; they usually travel the borders of civility and rules, trying to spark flame wars they delight on, being nimbler than most in the word play. The problem with this "mountain troll" type, though, is that they combine this delight in annoying and an inflated self-esteem with a wide perception of accreditation. Meaning, some members think "well, if he said that, surely he has a point. Don't quite get what he said, but the other guy must have made a mistake". Or "Woof, that was an uncivil and denigratory low blow... but since he wrote it, it's probably high rhetoric that I'm unable to grasp". This saves them from instant community denigration.

There is a fine line between forceful debate and flame-baiting. You can't tell a good troll from his (or her) first conversation, but a pattern eventually emerges: someone who routinely baits, and then abuses, other community members, is not a forceful debater, but a troll.

Even when his (or her) skill at fencing is at the service of an irreproachable ideological background, the community groupthink, or the management's prejudices. And let me tell you, those cases exist.

When a "guru" (someone held in high regard for historical domain competence, who also usually has a school of thought to his -or her- name) indulges in trolling, conversations are disrupted, normal debate becomes impossible, contrarian views are buried in scorn, and the rules of civil engagement become too blurred. More and more members refuse to engage in the conversations thus contaminated, which (being prolific flame wars) nevertheless smother more constructive threads.

Community management that allows such asymmetry of the rules (bending them for the guru, in short) is responsible for the consequences. Often that happens because of fear for the community ("he would leave, and that would lower the level of debate", and he has followers) of even for the image of the manager in the domain: it's a fact that squelching a guru can bring you some bad press :-D. But it's also a fact that making sure all members have to abide by the same code of conduct that precludes baiting and trolling as well as insults... eventually results in a much more vivacious, constructive conversation.

I know, I've done the experiment a few times... and yes, while 90% of community members enjoy the new environment, 10% sulked for about two days (and complained vocally in the near and far abroad) before returning. And many more in the domain felt newly welcome.

A community's forum is their own, of course. But having a mountain troll (TM) trying to disenfranchise members from a right to their own opinion is no way to build it.

IMHO, of course. Your mileage may vary, and your moderation options too.

And yes, I'm aware that using a real person's name to illustrate a destructive behaviour is not nice. But then, that is my own personal and fallible opinion... and I don't believe in being nice to trolls, even when they hold some sway in the industry.

Com-pracs: General communities conversation. Some very interesting members, prone to theoretical discussions (although they have migrated to ActKM of late), currently low activity. My favourite for a long time.

On-fac: General online facilitation conversation. Some very relevant tidbits from time to time. Low to medium activity.

ActKM: General knowledge management with an Asian-Australian slant (they even hold conferences down under). Some serious solid messages, many interesting participants, lots of theoretical discussion (of a rather high level and a rather low impact on actual work). High to frantic activity.

SIKMleaders: Originally built around monthly conference calls and presentations (tremendously interesting) and actual senior KM practitioners (wide perspective, serious experience, more in-house managers than consultants), it had low but very relevant activity. These last few months it seems to be morphing into a more theoretical outfit (or at least a suspicious interest in wikifying).

e-Mint: Just joined, due to peer pressure :-). Community management with an Anglo-saxon bent (meaning most members are either British or from the US). I'm still amazed at the relevance and quality of the conversation (quite a bit of it too), and the practical baggage of some members.

Curiously (or not) all but one of the above are hosted on Yahoo Groups. I know a couple more lists (including two Spanish ones) running on different services, but they're not as good as these.

Any reccomendations? Resources I shouldn't miss?

Update: Stan Garfield sent in his collection of KM community links, worth a read.

The wisdom of clouds: John Millner doing a panegyric of social-tagging folksonomies. Not bad for a sales pitch. And he's right (Socialtext's shared tagging got me to find his post, for instance). An interesting blog on learning, too.

The 3 stages of CMS: Boris Mann of Raincity Studios made a presentation on mid-February that just got posted on DigitalAssetManagementOrgUK (lots of nice educational links there, and some tools), and it does set out very clearly some principles and ideas, aimed at independent web developers, that are not just right but (for me) becoming articles of faith. It's about the evolution of web sites ;-) into complex interconnected bits, and how best to make them. Sage, too.

Knowledge energies: Luke Naismith trying to get some sense out of a recent Act-KM mailing list discussion about complexity and chaos. It was way beyond my depth. Luke's perspective is more understandable and original (he says "eccentric"). Also nice, the couple of links reflected here remembering the link between any technology and some business model.

Explaining KM: Michelle Laurie (first featured here for her on-the-job pictures of African life while doing soft-edged asessments of KM programmes for a big institution) ploughs on as an independent KM consultant up on the mountains. She keeps using simple terms instead of the usual fodder, or so it seems. Inspirational :-).

Make and sell: OK, so it's not a blog, but after reading about it in Wired I came across it again today... and it's worth having a look at the operating model. Ponoko builds things to specification (which is innovative), but has also harnessed crowdsourcing to get itself more orders: it acts as a hub for product designs and specifications, so people can either hire or share bits of each other's designs... and then get them built.

On hiring and attrition. Paul Ritchie's ongoing series of comments gets especially practical here, IMHO. As I'm right now in the process of renewing (nor just reinforcing) the collaborator team of Macuarium, which is hard to juggle as we need to find, recruit, train and slowly incorporate into the mix a lot of new personalities while balancing a growing work load; and also part of the building of a new business unit at my employer, which is proceeding in fits and starts, I can agree with both his comment: don't delay, and don't hope for magical tool solutions. You may not agree on everything but the blog's a mine for project managers (and most likely a very effective management tool): the most recent favourite on getting bad news out of the way.

A relevant workshop: Luca Servo's work with a recent "strategic" workshop with rural radio workers from old Congo looks (and reads) just like the good old ones we used to pull for G2E customers. His work for the knowledge management arm of FAO looks impressive (not least because he seems to be actually applying his masters' dissertation), but - going practical - the blog's chronicle of the workshop is relevant in itself as a portrait of methodology. Don't miss previous episodes.

A perspective of KM: Lee Gaddis is getting to grips with KM in his marketing firm. What I like about his view is that he clearly separates the means (technologies) and the skills (education and training) from the will (mindset and motivation). You can put any tools in place, you can design processes and write them down and train people... but unless it makes sense to them (it's practical, efficient and worth their while), you will get nothing lasting or practical out of the effort. IMHO, while it's a very superficial view yet, he's got that part right. Which is more than most do: so many KM efforst prefer to navigate around incentives and recognition and then fail to reap real change.

Action learning and water management: S. McIntosh, N. Leotaud and D. Macqueen published on the KM4Dev journal a piece on an "action learning" project to examine the ways water is used and managed in several Caribbean islands: through hands-on reasearch and the participation of the stakeholders at every level. The piece is interesting. The link with knowledge management, tenuous but still there. Seeing instances where sharing experience is literally vital helps clear the fog. Found it through the WASH Lessons Learned blog.

The book "We think": Penny Edward's recounts the experience of listening to the author of a book on the web’s effect on mass creativity, innovation and collaboration. Which is huge, and growing. Her site is more than interesting (mixing wikis, KM and project management). And since her takeaways are ideas I'm curious about (having close experience with them, I want to analyze them better) it seems I might have a new book on the shopping list.

On participation: Brad Hinton's got a nice piece on the role of mass participation in business decision making. Based on a specific example, he goes on to elaborate how the involvement of workers will not just be requested, but actually inevitable. Not to be a spoilsport, but I think the kind of involvement people enjoy is not the kind that allows for long-term, thoughtful and differentiating management decisions... but it does form a very fertile ground for managers to make them.

The Facebook business model: as explained by themselves in their site (came in looking for something different; I don't actually like the place). That is what they really, actually offer. A bit of food for thought, if not many news, in there.

Qué es una Comunidad de Práctica: Carlos Merino at the Departament de Justicia of the Generalitat posted this presentation for a meeting in December 2007, in Spanish. The nature and the keys of success. I find a sore lack of involvement and motivation aspects, but the rest of it is worth reading. Jordi Graells posted another interesting presentation (about collective intelligence and "wiki-administration" in government), in Catalan. The rest of the blog is also full of links to more news and presentations from one of the most active "knowledge administrations" I'm aware of (there's hope for the rest).

More Spanish knowledge blogging at Comunisfera by Daniel Martí. No, there's no recent pick to show (mostly links to outside resources: Morgan Stanley's report on Internet trends, PDF here; Universal McCann's report on social media use and impact here, PDF here; Cristobal Cobo's presentation about the Knowledge Economy on Issuu, parts in Spanish, look out for the Issuu machinery also; and I think the link to Planeta 2.0 came from here also), but I've been enjoying the perusal. Very relevant selection of themes.

Tangentially, there is Foro de Internet 2008, acongress aimed at internet content entrepreneurs next week (on the 10th) in Madrid. I might attend, since there may be useful ideas about traffic monetization floating around. With the hope of a new member of the family, comes the responsibility of feeding it ;-). And even further away is Barcelona's UrbanLabs, which sounds interesting.

Reasons to participate in social media. At Groundswell, and also commented at Furilo, there's a nice useful list. Useful why? Useful because the ends pursued by people when participating in sharing environments are quite more complex (and sometimes much more banal) that some think. If you want participation, look into these. If you're designing for it, you'd better be creative.

And now, to do some (paying) work.

All in all, something to look at if you're into KM research. If you do, please consider posting the results too :-).

According to the attendants, this was the best conference organised by the Australian association yet. They sound impressed, and they're a good reference.

And now they've posted the presentations and materials. Specifically, here. They had so much traffic that their site went down for a while, so you can see just how eager they were to get their hands on them :-). I'm downloading right now. Food for the mind over the long weeked ("World without end" is nice but just not the same).