Curiouser and Curiouser!

Wikis described in Plain English. Lee LeFever has made an excellent effort to describe wikis in plain terms. To quote: Ultimately, a wiki is a specific type of website. A wiki is special because it allows a group of people to build, edit and modify... [Column Two]

I wish Lee had posted this before my PCKM presentation earlier this week - it would have saved me some time. I gave a very brief description and there was definitely some interest from the audience at the time and, later, in discussions.  Whilst I mentioned that there were many free packages available I referred people to SocialText because I think the challenge is not buying or installing the software but to find the right partners to help you use & sell it internally.

The Event Share Framework seemed to have some buzz a little while back.  I posted a question about implementation (we really wanted to do something like this in K-Collector) to the ESF list but got zero response and can't say I've seen anyone talking about it since.  Did it disappear off the radar?  Has it gone underground?  Does anyone know?  Or care?

Quick thought about nested facets while I was in the shower.  Paolo and I have chatted numerous times about typed RSS feeds.  The idea being that when s don't come from blogs we may get different information about them.  For example an item corresponding to an event will have useful metadata which might correspond to some nested facet.  An item from a database feed of helpdesk tickets could have different (or possibility similar) metadata.

Hmmm...

I've been thinking about how topics are organized in K-Collector. As of my writing the largest K-Collector site is W4 which currently has 726 topics defined in 3 classifications.

• What - 410 topics
  
• Who - 227 topics
  
• Where - 89 topics
  

This is beginning to present some challenges. For example current interfaces in K-Collector clients for selecting topics highlite suggested topics but also display all available topics (under their classifications) for you to choose from. The problem is that, with this number of topics, it's all rather unwieldy.

I already think that it would be advantageous to allow a further subdivision of the classifications to form a 3-level hierarchy. For example What could subdivide into things like products, protoocols, principles, patterns and so on (sort of modelled after Denham Grays Information Gathering Template). But this is not a complete answer.

First I do not want to grow arbitrarily nested taxonomies. If you think about your own experience with menu bars, how often do you look more than 3 levels deep? And how irritating is it to have to poke around like that? Also the deeper the taxonomy the more effort has to be put into designing it and this is the domain of experts and to be avoided

Second faceted classifications only work when they narrow things. As you descend the hierarchy you become more precise about the term you are talking about (Anything => any person => a member of a group => an individual). But for example, when I am writing a post about politics and economics I am really only interested in topics related to those subjects, i.e. I have cross-cutting concerns (like Aspects w.r.t. OOP)

I've been thinking a little bit about Peter Van Dijck's suggestion for nested facets. As Travis Wilson described it in a post to the facetedclassification list:

For example, Peter's article poses a "Product Type" facet where "Cameras" 
is a heading down in the taxonomy somewhere. Cameras have certain 
properties like "Resolution" and "Lens Type" that just aren't relevant to, 
say, hubcaps. So "Resolution" and "Lens Type" are facets with a scope of 
"Product Type = Camera". A faceted navigation interface would expose them 
whenever a search was already restricted to "Camera". Otherwise, they're 
structured like every other facet you've ever seen.

to see whether there is a role for nested facets. I'm still thinking about that.

It's also possible that we could also use the many relations (thousands and thousands of them) that K-Collector builds up to create dynamic cross-cutting hierarchies. The idea here would be to take one or two dominant topics and then order all other topics according to how relevant they were. This should, in theory, put more relevant topics closer to your attention.

No solutions yet, just questions & ideas.

Can you imagine this? Here are a bunch of commies who are offering sweetheart tax breaks to Western companies. Low taxes benefit business. Aren’t commies supposed to be anti-business? I mean, what kind of crummy Marxism is this?

Other executives complained bitterly that the Department of Homeland Security is making it so hard for legitimate foreigners to get visas to study or work in America that many have given up the age-old dream of coming here. Instead, they are studying in England and other Western European nations, and even China. This is leading to a twofold disaster.

First, one of America’s greatest assets – its ability to skim the cream off the first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world and bring them to our shores to innovate – will be diminished, and that in turn will shrink our talent pool. And second, we could lose a whole generation of foreigners who would normally come here to study, and then would take American ideas and American relationships back home. In a decade we will feel that loss in America’s standing around the world.

Still others pointed out that the percentage of Americans graduating with bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering is less than half of the comparable percentage in China and Japan, and that U.S. government investments are flagging in basic research in physics, chemistry and engineering. Anyone who thinks that all the Indian and Chinese techies are doing is answering call-center phones or solving tech problems for Dell customers is sadly mistaken. U.S. firms are moving serious research and development to India and China.

Friedman concludes: "We have got to get our focus back in balance, not to mention our budget. We can’t wage war on income taxes and terrorism and a war for innovation at the same time." Call this "the education of Thomas Friedman." Who knows? Maybe this perspective will actually have some influence on the editorial page of the New York Times. But don’t bet your pension money on this possibility. [Gary North via LewRockwell.com]

A snippet from Gary North's latest piece on the developing relationship between Eastern and Western economies.  I usually enjoy his perspectives as well as his prose.

More and more my view is that our conservative governments are a millstone around our necks.  They don't understand the flow of events around them and yet they seek to control them, grabbing whatever powers they need to do it.  In the process they are damaging us all and we are letting them.

You don't have to look to hard to see the consequences.

If It's Urgent, Ignore It.

Differentiating between urgent and important is the trick though isn't it? After the fact, it may be easy but in the moment it can be devilishly hard, especially in a world that treasures action over reflection.

Perhaps one heuristic would be to simply ignore any decision (excepting immediate threat to life and limb) that claimed a need to be made immediately.

If It's Urgent, Ignore It. If It's Urgent, Ignore It -- From Seth Godin at Fast Comany...

"Smart organizations ignore the urgent. Smart organizations understand that important issues are the ones to deal with. If you focus on the important stuff, the urgent will take care of itself.

"A key corollary to this principle is the idea that if you don't have the time to do it right, there's no way in the world you'll find the time to do it over. Too often, we use the urgent as an excuse for shoddy work or sloppy decision making. [...] Urgent is not an excuse. In fact, urgent is often an indictment--a sure sign that you've been putting off the important stuff until it mushrooms out of control."

Obvious, but worth repeating from time to time. [Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Blog]

[McGee's Musings]

Hmm... I don't think this works because what is important changes. When the plane dives into a tail spin, what's important ceases to be "arriving on time" and becomes "saving our asses." At that moment I don't want the pilot looking at MBA programmes!

For me urgency and importance are independent qualities which can apply to any task or decision. If Stephen Covey were here I think he would be jumping up and down and shouting "Quadrant 2! Quadrant 2!" at the top of his voice.

This is probably the thing that sticks most in my mind from my attempts to practice the 7 Habits. Covey has a particular approach to how to prioritize and handle what is important in your life. If you haven't come across it before goes something like this:

Draw a square on a piece of paper, then divide it into 4 smaller squares, labelled as per this example.

Quadrant 1 Important Urgent	Quandrant 2 Important Not Urgent
Quadrant 3 Not Imporant Urgent	Quandrant 4 Not Important Not Urgent

Now write down each of your current tasks, projects, activities, ideas and so forth into the appropriate quadrant (your open loops in AllenSpeak.) You should include business, home life, everything you do.

• Quadrant 1 : is the fire-fighting quadrant. It pressurizes you and you need to get it under control or else you're going to go under.
• Quadrant 2 : is everything of long-term importance to you (which is why you need to be careful that tasks relating to important relationships with others don't inadvertently end up as Quadrant 3 or 4 activities.).
• Quadrant 3 : is what's important to others, but not to you (otherwise it would be in Q1)
• Quadrant 4 : is what's important to nobody.

The idea is to steal as much time as possible from Quadrants 3 and 4 to invest in Quadrant 2 since it is that quadrant which will have the most life changing effects. If you end up with a huge Q1 & Q2 and empty Q3 & Q4 you probably have a problem and need to start simplifying your life (or start buying ulcer medicine in bulk!)

The trick, of course, is to work out what's really important to you and I think this is what is missing from the "If it's urgent ignore it!" creed. You can ignore urgent things but only if they are not important to you. To ignore what is both urgent & important may be slitting your own throat.