Macaw Discussion Board

Those wacky Europeans are at it again! Serge van den Oever has announced a free list template for Windows SharePoint Services, the Macaw Discussion Board... the way SharePoint discussions should work... and now do work!

Discussion boards are a sore point for many SharePoint users that have experienced the richness of more mature discussion/bulletin board user interfaces (e.g. phpBB).

Macaw, a Dutch (in case you hadn't guessed) IT consultancy have produced a really nice list template that solves many of the problems that SharePoint discussion boards have. The list template is documented in Serge's blog post, and is available for free download from Sourceforge.

Thomas Nelson's Corporate Blogging Guidelines

Michael Hyatt, President and COO of Thomas Nelson Publishers recently published a 2nd draft of their new Corporate Blogging Guidelines for public comment. They have worked hard to create a set of guidelines that is easy to understand (i.e. uses plain English) but that also protects their company and employees. I particularly like the fact that they encourage employees to seek blog hosting for themselves - adding credibility to their blogs, and removing a potential issue when employees leave.

The main source of protection is reminding employees that what is expected of them as bloggers is the same as what is expected of them as employees, and setting some ground rules about playing nice in the blogosphere. The incentive to blog is given by their intention to create a blog aggregator page on their main website that links to all employee blogs, and allowing employees to write blog posts during company time. It will be interesting to see how effective this is, but I would imagine that because they are in the publishing industry this form of self-publishing will appeal to many of their employees.

What is nice about this is that Michael was smart enough to elicit comment from the readers of his Working Smart blog to ensure that the guidelines were appropriate. Thanks to their feedback what they ended up with was much more user-friendly than their first effort which was a dismal set of legalistic rules.

The guidelines also set out why Thomas Nelson is looking at encouraging blogging:

At Thomas Nelson, we want to encourage you to blog about our company, our products, and your work. Our goal is three-fold:

• To raise the visibility of our company,


• To make a contribution to our industry, and


• To give the public a look at what goes on within a real live publishing company.

How many of your employees already blog? What guidelines have you given them to protect their jobs and your reputation? What could blogging do for your business?

Ajax: A New Approach To Web Applications

Adaptive Path's Jesse James Garrett has an interesting essay title Ajax: A New Approach To Web Applications. The ideas discussed in it are not as revolutionary as they are presented, developers have been using the XMLHttpRequest object since IE 5 using ActiveX, and Mozilla/Netscape and Safari have recently followed suit using Javascript.

The really interesting point is that we now have a technique that runs across most browsers (not IE only) that can add significant interactivity to our web applications.

We do stuff.

If you like having a laugh at generic marketing copy and consultants in general, then take a look at huh? They do stuff.

3M Security Glass Ad

From the Signal vs. Noise blog comes the 3M Security Glass ad. magine a bunch of US dollars in between two glass panes ... now click on that link and go see them!

I love the fact that they're standing behind their product, but I can't help but suspect that some other security measures are being taken to keep that cash safe (and are those all US$1 bills?).

EDIT: OK, apparently they did have a security guard present, they let people have a go at breaking in - but only with their feet, and the money was fake, except for the top layer. It was a stunt they pulled in Vancouver.

Leadership is Just One Thing

Lisa Haneberg is a writer and management trainer who has an interesting blog called Management Craft

One of her recent posts is about Leadership. She states it is "just one thing", and then defines that through a series of steps as:

So the one thing (leadership) is proactivity with a tinge of charisma that feels compelling, is at the service of others, demonstrates ownership of results, targeted to provide the greatest benefit, and that is delivered by someone we trust.

I like that encapsulation of leadership. It's neat and seems accurate without being generic, but is multi-layered and complex enough to really capture the essence of leadership.

NSW KM Forum - Telling it like it is

I went to the NSW Knowledge Management (KM) Forum for the first time last night. The night's presentation was by Dr Theresa Anderson and was titled "Telling it like it is: using ethnography and storytelling in the workplace".

I was a little worried that it would be highly theoretical and academic, but was pleasantly surprised by both Theresa's down-to-earth style and emphasis on practicality. I think, based on her description and the Q&A sessions we had, that ethnography is a philosophical approach that informs and directs other study, rather than necessarily an end in itself.

Wikipedia defines ethnography as:

Ethnography (from the Greek ethnos = nation and graphe = writing) refers to the qualitative description of human social phenomena, based on months or years of fieldwork. Ethnography may be "holistic", describing a society as a whole, or it may focus on specific problems or situations within a larger social scene. The genre has both formal and historical connections to travel writing and colonial office reports, but several academic traditions claim ethnography as a valid research method that submerges the subjectivity of a researcher in the routines of an alternative social environment to discover its specific and otherwise unpredictable patterns.
(emphasis mine)

We also undertook an interesting activity whereby we were each asked to identify the key challenge we are facing in KM, then with one other person explain to each other out challenges, and then take their challenge and explain it to the next person (a good way of getting you to think about their challenge seriously!). The aim was to develop some real-life situations for the forum to address this year, rather than theoretical topics. Some of the ones that were discussed:
* How do you demonstrate KM's value to senior management?
* How do you locate the right person for a specific topic/task?
* How can KM make my company more competitive?

Since then I've thought of some extra ones that I'd like to see addressed:
* How does an organisation identify what they don't know, but should?
* How can KM help non-Knowledge Workers (e.g. machinists)?
* Should KM be introduced everywhere at first, or just in one part of the organisation at once?
* How do I isolate the effects KM has had on my bottom line, given that we are also re-engineering processes (to help capture knowledge more easily) and introducing new technologies (e.g. intranet portals)?

I've got some ideas about those, but I'd like to see what a diverse group like the NSW KM Forum can do with them!