HBS Working Knowledge is "... a collection of cutting-edge management information that keeps you at the forefront of today's fast-changing business environment. You will find a wealth of resources and data that reflect the intellectual capital of Harvard Business School as well as insights from industry leaders worldwide. We invite you to make it an integral part of your continuing education and career development. (from about HBS Working Knowledge ..."
HBS Working Knowledge: Knowledge & the Information Economy -- Seven Principles for Cultivating Communities of Practice by Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott, and William M. Snyder
"... Although communities of practice develop organically, a carefully crafted design can drive their evolution. In this excerpt from a new book, the authors detail seven design principles. The payoff? Knowledge management that works. ..."
The authors write, "... From our experience we have derived seven principles:
1. Design for evolution.
2. Open a dialogue between inside and outside perspectives.
3. Invite different levels of participation.
4. Develop both public and private community spaces.
5. Focus on value.
6. Combine familiarity and excitement.
7. Create a rhythm for the community. ..."
This past weekend my Father presented me with some papers from my Grandfather. Among them was one of his short snorters, an envelope with a bunch of one and two dollar bills that were signed and had cello tape residue on the ends.
FYI here's background on what a Short Snorter is: Currency serves as notebook: Historical 50th anniversary feature
"... an aircrew member's short snorter was a chain of paper currency, taped together, end-to-end, from various countries they had visited. The longer your short snorter, the more countries you had visited. Long short-snorters also meant free drinks at the bar, since the person with the shortest one had to buy the round... "
Phil Murray's Technology categories (all) of tools for personal knowledge management, knowledge exchanges.
This is courtesy of Denham Grey.
I got some yummy sweets -- Clarnico Mint Creams - Everybody's Favourite Sweets from the SugarBoy in England as a gift from my Daughters for Father's Day. Wow.
These are just like the mints I loved as a kid growing up in the Little Red House at Haskiton near Woodbridge in Suffolk County, England.
Yummy!!
Thanks Ladies!!
Managing the Digital Enterprise | Business Models
"Reading the literature you will find business models categorized in different ways. Presently, there is no single, comprehensive and cogent taxonomy of web business models one can point to. So I am offering my own take on some of the generic forms of business models observable on the web. They include:
Topic maps are a standard for storing metadata (similar to thesauri, or RDF). They can be used to generate navigation for a website, and lots of other metadata tasks.
Ontopia: The Topic Map company
An imaginary world in which knowledge is well organised. II. A company that provides tools for the organisation of knowledge.
Topic Map: Hand-crafted Machine-generated Knowledge Interchange
"Topic maps are a new ISO standard for describing knowledge structures and associating them with information resources. As such they constitute an enabling technology for knowledge management. Dubbed "the GPS of the information universe", topic maps are also destined to provide powerful new ways of navigating large and interconnected corpora."
"This specification provides a model and grammar for representing the structure of information resources used to define topics, and the associations (relationships) between topics. Names, resources, and relationships are said to be characteristics of abstract subjects, which are called topics. Topics have their characteristics within scopes: i.e. the limited contexts within which the names and resources are regarded as their name, resource, and relationship characteristics. One or more interrelated documents employing this grammar is called a 'topic map'".
Lately I find that I am using this notebook as a sORt of scrapbook rather than a journal. While this is not a bad thing, I did want to alert you all that many of the paragraphs that sound descriptive are from the source pages, not from my keyboard. I guess I need to be more generous with quote marks or sum such.
-- geORge
Patterns and Software: Essential Concepts and Terminology by Brad Appleton
Fundamental to any science or engineering discipline is a common vocabulary for expressing its concepts, and a language for relating them together. The goal of patterns within the software community is to create a body of literature to help software developers resolve recurring problems encountered throughout all of software development. Patterns help create a shared language for communicating insight and experience about these problems and their solutions. Formally codifying these solutions and their relationships lets us successfully capture the body of knowledge which defines our understanding of good architectures that meet the needs of their users. Forming a common pattern language for conveying the structures and mechanisms of our architectures allows us to intelligibly reason about them. The primary focus is not so much on technology as it is on creating a culture to document and support sound engineering architecture and design.
"Patterns and Pattern Languages are ways to describe best practices, good designs, and capture experience in a way that it is possible for others to reuse this experience. The Hillside Group takes pleasure in sponsoring many different PLoP conferences that are provided for the betterment of the pattern community. "
This is my look at the strategy, leverage, and practice of pattern language. Pattern Home Page: http://hillside.net/patterns/ AGGS pattern resource page: http://www.agcs.com/patterns/othersources.htm Started by DenhamGrey 05/13/1998
"The Structure of Pattern Languages", by Nikos A. Salingaros
Abstract: Pattern languages help us to tackle the complexity of a wide variety of systems ranging from computer software, to buildings and cities. Each "pattern" represents a rule governing one working piece of a complex system, and the application of pattern languages can be done systematically. Design that wishes to connect to human beings needs the information contained in a pattern language. This paper describes how to validate existing pattern languages, how to develop them, and how they evolve. The connective geometry of urban interfaces is derived from the architectural patterns of Christopher Alexander.
A java version of the Eames' film "Powers of 10
This is a nifty site with a web rendition of the Charles and Ray Eames film of the same name.
Another site Eames Office includes more information and images of their work.
The Wolfram worldview focuses on simple rules that generate counterintuitively complex results, observable in computer-based systems called cellular automata. A two-dimensional CA "grows" one line at a time, and each new cell's state - light or dark - is determined by the cells on the previous line. Three-cell configurations produce eight possible combinations (see top line); Wolfram studied all the rules that result. The experiment illustrated here, using his Rule 30, begins with a single dark cell in the middle of a line. With each line, the rule creates new patterns. The left side seems to grow in a fairly orderly fashion, but the right side is unpredictable. One might expect that a simple rule would lead to a consistent order in the entire output, but the eventual result is still fantastically complex (right). After 20 years of study, Wolfram concluded that the Rule 30 phenomenon - a simple rule generating deep complexity - is widespread in the natural world.