Looks like a fistfull of excellent advice, Eugene, but still, I can't help but
think that a visit to Rod to see what he actually has to show might be quite
enlightening. Never mind rhe jargon, just look at the results.
Why not try to arrange for a gang of half a dozen or so to visit Rod for a
demonstration? All it costs is a couple of hours and some gas for a trip to
S.F. There are worse ways of burning up time...
Henry
Eugene Eric Kim wrote:
> The essence of Rod's proposal is great: Let's learn about KM by doing KM,
> starting with the tools we currently have available. I'd be very
> interested to see the reported results of a team doing KM using SDS.
>
> Here's my proposal: How about studying and doing KM using the tools
> already at our disposal, specifically this mailing list?
>
> We already have one component of a DKR: the automatic archiving of this
> list into a rudimentary, hierarchical structure. The question now is,
> are there human methods that we can practice to further improve the
> building and maintenance of this DKR?
>
> I'll propose several, in no particular order. The first is a simple
> one: format your messages intelligently and readably. Poor mail clients
> seem to be the biggest culprit here, but a little human awareness goes a
> long way in fixing this problem. In my opinion, e-mail should be
> formatted for at most 70 character lines with hard-returns at the end of
> each line. MIME messages should be avoided for standard, 7-bit ASCII
> messages. This provides maximum readability for the majority of mail
> clients, and also makes it easier to write translation tools that
> automatically infer structure from unstructured text messages.
>
> Second, someone should do a periodic summary of this mailing list, with
> links to the appropriate threads and messages. As I mentioned earlier,
> this is already practiced to good effect by several open source
> development communities.
>
> (As a brief aside, I'd like to dispute Rod's earlier comment that
> engineers don't seem to be anxious to practice KM. On the contrary, I
> think that engineers are among the best practitioners of KM, and that many
> of the more interesting innovations in KM have sprung specifically from
> the open source community.)
>
> Third, link to messages rather than quote them. This is one that Doug is
> constantly promoting, and one that is nontrivial to do with the tools we
> have at our disposal. It's one of those areas that immediately arises as
> a necessary tool feature. Not surprisingly, the only two people who seem
> to practice this -- Doug and Rod -- are people who have tools that support
> this feature by providing granular addressability and some linking
> capability.
>
> Fourth, change the subject lines of e-mail to reflect the content of the
> message, not the title of the thread. Lack of foresight has rendered the
> subject header irrelevant. Most subject lines tell me nothing except the
> subject of the first message in the thread and the fact that a message is
> part of a thread. This latter feature is mostly unnecessary today, as
> decent mail clients will use the In-Reply-To header.
>
> Fifth, develop a charter for this mailing list. This is tremendously
> challenging, especially for a list that has traditionally been broad in
> scope, but I think it is vital for bringing focus to a forum.
>
> Sixth, highlight significant points in messages by resending them
> (preferably with a link to the original message) in new messages. Eric
> has already been practicing this, where he will take a particularly
> interesting paragraph in a long message, and resend it with a different
> subject and some brief commentary.
>
> These are just a few suggestions off the top of my head. I would
> definitely like to see those interested in practicing good KM attempt to
> incorporate some of these suggestions. I'd also love to see comments on
> the above as well as new suggestions for practicing KM using existing
> tools.
>
> -Eugene
>
> --
> +=== Eugene Eric Kim ===== eekim@eekim.com ===== http://www.eekim.com/ ===+
> | "Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they |
> +===== can have an excuse to drink alcohol." --Steve Martin ===========+
>
>
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