Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities (Book 14 of 30)

Title:  Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities
Authors:  Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, John D. Smith

This is a very nice "how to" book for communities of practice, with a strong focus on how to make the most of technology.  The book was published in 2009, which doesn't seem that long ago and the first question is going to be whether a book almost a decade old with a focus on technology is going to be relevant.

This immediately brings me to a tangent about adaptation and lessons learned.  Lessons learned are at times mistaken with best practices or even rules.  This happened to project X, the lesson is ______, therefore never/always do ____________.   While this formula may occur in some instances, that is not how lessons learned are generally formulated (in my humble experience).

I've started using the term "insight" rather than "lesson learned" when the so-called lesson does not automatically lead to a strong and obvious recommendation for action one way or another. Sometimes it leads to a warning.  It points to something that should be kept in mind as a potential risk.   The person reading this lesson/insight isn't given a straightforward path for action.  That person is asked to think about how this lesson/insight affects them, how it applies to them and their situation. The resulting action (or lack thereof), is a decision made based on an adaptation of the lesson to the unique circumstances being faced rather than a blind application of a recommendation.

Going back to Digital Habitats, to some extent, it does not matter (at least for this book) that the focus is on technology and technology keeps evolving too fast for books to keep up.  The book is not about specific technologies that may have already become outdated.  It is about how to think about different technologies and even more about how to think about communities and how communities can think about technologies to leverage them.  As such, while the technology landscape may have evolved, I think the approach is still valid.

TO DO:

• In the "KM for small organizations research project", make sure to explore the tools/technology landscape.  I have a feeling there are 2-3 dominant technology platforms (SharePoint, Drupal, Jive...?) that have both simplified the landscape and complexified things in some ways.  I don't have good hypotheses at this point.  Plan on writing an article that could serve as an update to the book.

The State of the Economy and Twitter - A Hypothesis

Our individual outreach efforts increase in scope and intensity when we start feeling insecure about our jobs. In the current economic context, feeling some level of stress about job security is natural. My hypothesis is that the fact that Twitter suddenly took off and reached a tipping point is related to the fact that people are reaching out, trying to connect or reconnect, gather job intel, learn about a new field, etc... either because they've already lost their job or because they feel they might be next.

I am not suggesting that Twitter's success would not have happened without the economic crisis. I'm only suggesting that the economic crisis gave it a push over the tipping point. What do you think?

You could also argue that Twitter is the cause of the economic crisis.... (Economist Blames Twitter for Downturn), but I won't do that!

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• Twitter - When was the tipping point and what does it mean? (digital-constructions.com)