Share your publications

Sharing is scary. What if somebody steals your publication or makes a heavy criticism on it? However, the only way to create a bidirectional communication with your citizens is to publicly publish your publications. For your public!

Most agencies upload a PDF version in the website. This could be printed and read. However, statistics show that download numbers are quite small. Furthermore, the number of feedback received through this model is insufficient. Sometimes, a public or limited forum has been created but I never saw one of those successfully populated.

I propose something braver. You take your text and publish it in Wikipedia or alike. You allow readers to edit your text, add, update and discuss. You benefit from their knowledge, their ideas and their effort.

You keep the ownership of the text. You provide a Creative Commons (CC) licence. CC is an organization that fights to increase the amount of artistic work available in the Internet, shared and used to build on top.

You have several types of licences, where the copyright owner gives some rights while retains others through open content licenses. CC offers some licenses that owners can freely use to share their work. RDF/XML metadata is added to always maintain the name of the owner, the type of license and other data you can choose.

For example, if you have a report that you will share, you can use a license called "Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike (by-nc-sa)", which allows:

• to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
• to Remix — to adapt the work

under the following conditions:

• Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
• Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
• Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.

It is as easy as following these instructions and give up fear.

Would have Michelangelo created this Tondo Pitt without sharing and collaboration?

Resilience

All organizations show resilience against external changes. As arches, organizations have the capacity to absorb energy and deform elastically before unloading back the energy. Knowledge Management is about creation, capture and application of organization-critical knowledge and this knowledge is usually in the hands of colleagues who were there for ages and perceive most ownership. They fight very hard against changes.

In many, if not most, organizations sharing knowledge is an unnatural act. Employees may fear losing power, status and control when they share what they know. They may not be able to find knowledge that is already available in an explicit manner or in the mind of other colleagues. They may not have time to learn from others or to teach their experiences. They may perceive they would be punished if they do it.

Colleagues are scared of changing model to a knowledge management one with higher uncertainty. If resilience is not managed, such employees may stop the change.

A deeper analysis of roles shows there are more people affected and they need to understand and to contribute, they need to learn new skills and behaviours. There are pockets of resistance that need special attention and handholding. Firstly there are targets who will have to change behaviours. Secondly, there are agents involved in planning and executing. Thirdly, there are sponsors among directors.

A communication plan is a necessary tool. It should include the change state with present, delta and future; communications "events" such as announcing the change prior to actually beginning to change things, after starting changes and once reached the target; target audience; delivery method; responsibility; schedule and feedback.

Resilience is natural and even good in some cases, but too much resilience blocks change. Some conservative organizations become winners in blocking change and vetoing new initiatives and sometimes do not survive. This must be considered structural and not personal and a determined workload and effort must be planned for this issue.

Organizations need to be gardened as poppy fields, as Gustav Klimt painted it in 1907.

Assumption number one: We are in the economy of attention

Workers live today in an environment where attention is a scarce resource. The problem is not anymore to have information available, but to decide how to effectively use their attention. I believe Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize in Economics 1978, was the first to say "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information."

Some directors still represent their problem as information scarcity rather than attention scarcity. Herbert Simon also said "and as a result they built systems that excelled at providing more and more information to people, when what was really needed were systems that excelled at filtering out unimportant or irrelevant information."

Directors who understand this, change their perspective and the way they understand knowledge management. They start thinking about personal knowledge management. They start asking for tools and habits that help each individual do his or her work in the most productive manner, wasting the least possible time in finding knowledge and creating the maximum impact out of his or her knowledge work. I will introduce syndication in a different post.

In other terms, maximizing the outcome of his or her most scarce resource: the attention.

The players at the global level

Who are the players at the global level? Most people would claim the G8 (seven most industrialized countries plus Rusia).

Since they do not represent the developing countries, other people would claim the World Bank and IMF are important players.

In terms of CSOs, maybe OXFAM and other NGOs.

The United Nations also plays a role. For example, since 1972, every June 5th, they organize the World Day of the Environment. During this day, some negotiations and conversations take place that trigger new initiatives. Something similar happens with Microfinance for Development (Year 2005), Climate Change and others.

It would be indeed interesting to start a forum on opinions about who are the players at the global level.

Thanks.

Knowledge Management and International Organizations

This is a new blog. It inherits from the two others but shows a different perspective. It will deal with changing organizations. The objective is having people making stories on what they do and what they know, and at the same time, having others reading and reusing the lessons learned. People may share not only stories, but used bibliography, related articles and interesting material. Finally, people may work together in teams, collaborate, cooperate physically or virtually using Internet based applications.