Monday, January 20, 2003

Preliminary Heuristics for the Design and Evaluation of Online Communities of Practice Systems, by Mark Notess, Usability Specialist, Indiana University, and Josh Plaskoff, Knowledge Management Consultant, Eli Lilly and Company For some time now, companies have believed that they can be more effective--and more profitable--if they could only get their people to talk to each other and share what they know. Globalization, acquisitions, and diversification have led to workforces that are more spread out and more varied. In addition to creating the need for a flexible, agile workforce, the evolving and sometime volatile business climate has reduced the ability of companies to rely on stable groups of people who slowly grow their expertise over many years. To address this need, companies have built or bought knowledge management portals, tools for growing communities of practice, and other expensive, often complex software systems. As with other software systems, however, utilization is not guaranteed, and the return on investment may never materialize. What functionality should such systems provide to increase the probability of payback? How can product specifications be evaluated? By what benchmarks can existing implementations be inspected? This article offers a set of heuristics drawn from published academic research into online communities of practice. These heuristics may be used to inform design, or they can be used as heuristics in an evaluation process. These heuristics are preliminary—we have successfully applied them informally to evaluate an existing system at a large corporation. During this evaluation, the issues uncovered matched well with the issues raised by users of the system. The heuristics also uncovered additional issues previously unrecognized. At the same time, we recognize that more testing needs to be conducted. (thanks, Nancy!) 10:51:44 AM    comment []

Steppe by step. "It's a small world, as the saying goes, when you find out that the Swede sitting next to you on the plane is friends with the only person that you know in Stockholm. Nearly everyone I know has had a "small world" experience. There's even a theory, called six degrees of separation, that says there are just six steps between any two people on earth. In other words, you can get to anyone in the world through a chain of acquaintances. So someone knows someone who knows someone else, and so on - and in six of these steps, you can get to anyone." [Purportal.com Headlines] 10:03:39 AM    comment []

Every time I post a comment on a weblog I have to remember to go back and see if anyone followed up. We have to figure a way to automate this. Agree or disagree? [Scripting News] I agree. And I don't think this is a problem best solved by subscribing to another flow -- or at any rate not one that would be in my face. A flag ("Schmoo has followed your comment at Andrew Bayer is Dreaming of China") notifying me would do. 10:01:56 AM    comment []

Every time I post a comment on a weblog I have to remember to go back and see if anyone followed up. We have to figure a way to automate this. Agree or disagree? [Scripting News] I agree. And I don't think this is a problem best solved by subscribing to another flow. 10:00:42 AM    comment []

Coppola adapting On the Road [bOing bOing] 9:53:49 AM    comment []

Development ’s False Divide, by Charles Kenny (economist at the World Bank), in Foreign Policy. The best of motives may drive a concern to equalize global Internet access, but not the strongest of logic. True, tools of communication are important to the world’s poorest, and one can also find many examples of effective Internet use in developing countries. For instance, the Internet has been used to inform farmers of crop prices in Argentina, to register deeds in India, to educate children in rural Uganda, and to sell woodcarvings and sandals in Kenya. But it is a large leap to conclude that global Internet access is a sensible goal. Uplifting anecdotes are not enough to justify the high costs of universal Internet access, costs that would be at their highest in the least developed countries. . . . Lack of education is a major barrier to productive Internet use, for example. In Ethiopia, 98 percent of Internet users in 1998 had a university degree, yet 64.5 percent of the overall population is illiterate. Worldwide, most people living on $1 a day are illiterate. Further, they usually speak a minority language in their own country—few speak a major global language. For example, about 17 million people in Nigeria speak Igbo. My search for Web pages in Igbo turned up only five sites: a translation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a translation of a document called “The Four Spiritual Laws” (theological provenance undetermined), a translation of the food pyramid, a two-page Igbo phrase book, and a prayer manual. There isn’t an Igbo translation service on the Web, so an Igbo speaker would be limited to these five. None involved sound or video, so the illiterate Igbo speaker would gain nothing. Bridging the gaps in language and technical skills as well as basic literacy will be difficult, considering the small per-student spending available in the poorest countries’ primary schools, where the discretionary budget per student is as little as $5 a year. Even if poor people are lucky enough to be literate and conversant in a major world language, their use of the Web for activities such as e-commerce is likely to be limited by their lack of credit cards, not to mention the challenge of persuading FedEx and UPS to start delivery services in their neighborhoods. 4:50:31 AM    comment []