“… The more you know them, the more you wonder how they could have commited such crimes – these waiters and taxi drivers, teachers and peasants in front of you. And the more you realise that war criminals might be ordinary people, the more afraid you become. Of course, this is because the consequences are more serious than if they were monsters. If ordinary people commited war crimes, it means that any of us could commit them. Now you understand why it is so easy and comfortable to accept that war criminals are monsters, rather than to agree with Erwin Staub that ‘evils that arises out of ordinary thinking and is commited by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception’…”

Simon Dueckert shared his “best practices” on “one day in the life of a knowledge worker” as part of the latest BITKOM KM meeting (unfortunately only in German but I hope that he is going to translate his presentation…). I particularly appreciate his KM objective: “creating knowledge, sharing, and perpetuating it to achieve the preconditions for a sustainable living on Earth” and the way he connects this objective with his knowledge strategy (slides #14 and #15). Simon also explained the way he organizes all the information stuff crossing his desk, desktop, mobile, mind each and every day.

From his presentation I’m curious to test the following tools for my own personal knowledge management:

Zotero (citation and research tool)

yEd (social network analysis tool)

mixxt (social networking platform creator)

Photo from amirjina (Creative Commons License)

So, what’s on in the knowledge management scene for climate change? Who are the “thought leaders” regarding KM for climate change? A first round tour:

WorldChanging is always a good place to start and a top site for sustainable solutions. However, the search shows no hits for “knowledge management”.

Grist is the #1 green website according to the Guardian. Same picture here: no content for “knowledge management”.

RealClimate offers a forum for climate scientists. Also, no content on “knowledge management”.

KMAfrica seems to be an excellent knowledge sharing platform. Going to have a closer look at it during the upcoming weeks.

Climate-L.org is another interesting site from a “team of the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s Reporting Services (IISD RS) brings you news and information on the actions of international organizations in responding to the problem of global climate change.”

I decided to pursue my growing second passion and started as a knowledge management consultant back in 2000. I’ve been with my current employer for nearly three years working as the knowledge manager for the 600-employee business transformation consulting group of SAP consulting.

• Achim Berg’s presentation (CEO Microsoft) introduced nothing new to the audience. I assume that each attendee has followed conversations e.g. on the differences between “digital natives”, “baby boomers” and “generation X”. The focus of his presentation was on technology as an enabler for social networking. A typical sentence was “knowledge gets lost if it’s not supported with IT”. The only thing that stroke my attention was an Economist study of 2008 which has been quoted as “companies which invest in enterprise 2.0 are three times more profitable than the average”. Unfortunately, there is no source for this study in Achim Berg’s slides.
• Dave Snowden (CEO CognitiveEdge) has given the audience a totally other experience. His keynote on “Why Does Social Computing Work?” was excellent “food for thought”, especially for those of us who still believe in KM processes, governance and infrastructure. His speech is available via the website of the institute CognitiveEdge.
• Eventually, Utz Claassen – one of the few ‘enfant terrible’ of the German management scene – presented a very good overview on the value delivered by knowledge management. The interesting point was that he focussed on knowledge management as a value driver and that he used strictly business administration language to argue. Claassen did also a very good job in establishing a clear interrelationship between business strategy and KM. The only weak point of his presentation was the total number of slides and the amount of text on his slides.

• Wikis: 34% said “no, I don’t use them”, 22% said “don’t know”, 18% said “I’m opposed to the usage of this tool”, only 15% said “fully agree”
• Blogs/RSS-feeds: 35% said “no, I don’t use them”, 28% opted for “don’t know”, 25% are opposed to the usage of this tool, and only 5% “fully agree”
• Instant Messaging: 32% don’t use them, 25% don’t know whether their company uses IM, 23% are opponents, and just 13% “fully agree”

These findings have led the magazine to title the article with “Real communities exist only in real life”. Well. that’s certainly just half of the truth. Maybe the real reason for the low adoption of web 2.0 in companies in comparison to their large usage in a privat environment lie in the difference between the norms governing them.
I’m just reading the excellent book of Dan Ariely “Predictably Irrational” and in his chapter 4 he exactly outlines “why we are happy to do things, but not when we are paid to do them”. A study that should be realized is whether the employees of companies which think more in terms of social norms also more easily adopt the social network tools.

Photo from Ricky Romero (Creative Commons License)

Yes, we are happy MacBook users! Me and my wife too: “Why didn’t you already buy this Mac some years ago?” She loves the dock with its program icons, the amazing fast boot time, and the intuitive handling of day-to-day tasks (e.g. including a foto into an e-mail).

The only thing which I’m not satisfied at all is the missing import function from Outlook to Mail. This is a basic feature that I would have expected to be implemented by Apple. Why do I have to buy a 3rd party tool to import properly emails and contacts?

Which are the other pieces of software that are very useful, not part of the Mac software package, and free of charge?

• Cyberduck – the right choice for an FTP client
• Fruux – a good solution to synch your address books, calendars, and favourites between Mac users (even on the same MacBook)
• Gimp – for the more advanced editing of your fotos and graphics
• OpenOffice – good enough for 80% of the tasks I use the MS office package for in the office
• MPEG StreamClip – a converter for MPEG video files
• RadioLover – the right tool to record and split MP3 songs from radio streams (limited to 30 minutes per session for the free version)
• Skype – no need to introduce this one…
• Smultron – an open source text editor (e.g. to edit HTML code on your website)
• XMind- use it for mindmapping
• Zattoo – watch TV via an easy-to-use peer-to-peer system (mostly German channels)