By chance, I found An Introduction to Radical Constructivism online. This article is part of the excellent book “Die erfundene Wirklichkeit” (edited by Paul Watzlawick) that influenced me a lot during my university studies.

Call constructivism my theoretical mantra It’s the only theory that does not attempt to explain reality and defines truths, but explains why we explain reality the way we explain it - and why we fight for a certain truth. It also serves as a perfect theoretical basis to understand “knowledge” as a social phenomena.

Want to have a deep look inside of major changes in society? This transscript of a discussion on scientific publications in the UK Science and Technology Committee of the House of Commons indicates that the knowledge society is in full swing and that the scientific community is slowly moving towards a more open and free approach towards scientific research and knowledge transfer in general.

This transscript is also a wonderful manifestation of how knowledge mediaries like publishing houses step by step lose power and impact and how the authors of scientific works, the producers of the knowledge goods traded in the scientific community, gain power.

Dave Pollard sketched out a scenario how personal knowledge management could look like - a must read!

I found in his diagram…

… some analogies to the CONESYS architecture:

ZZ/OSS CEO Sandro Zic will present a session about Free Software in the Knowledge Society at the first LOTS event, a kind of Swiss LinuxTag.

Come to Bern at February 18th and hear about the following:

This talk will concentrate on an often neglected aspect that the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community introduced to society: A new organizational form of knowledge work in networks of excellence. Due to the fact that FOSS developers and projects act in distributed and heterogenous knowledge networks and furthermore collaborate in self-organised groups, they serve as the prototype elements of the emerging Knowledge Society.

Sandro has presented this talk at LinuxTag 2003 - but don’t expect it to be the same, because the presentation style is interactive, with Sandro discussing most of the aspects with the audience. Thus, the session itself is a show case of impulsive knowledge work inspired by the spirit of the FOSS community.

Ever wondered why the Web works? Not from a technical, but from a sociologic viewpoint: Why do human beings still invent and use the Web?

Stigmergy is the answer, says Joe Gregorio:

The World-Wide Web is human stigmergy. The web and it’s ability to let anyone read anything and also to write back to that environment allows stigmeric communication between humans. Some of the most powerful forces on the web today, Google and weblogs are fundamentally driven by stigmeric communication and their behaviour follows similar natural systems like Ant Trails and Nest Building that are accomplished using stigmergy. The web is new. In the context of written human history is barely a blink of an eye. Yet as new as the web is, it is already showing it’s ability to support complex human interactions that mimic natural systems use of stigmergy. And were just getting started…

Now you wonder what Stigmergy is? It’s all explained in Joe Gregorios blog entry on Stigmergy.

t’s one of my main interests to create a Web-based application with a WYSIWYG editor that allows working with parts of content, so called microcontent. Imagine integrating text or images from other Web sites into your new content object. This way, knowledge work can become visible online, e.g. showing in a SVG graph the content parts that a document integrated.

Jon Udell has published “Interactive Microcontent” with some thoughts and especially solutions on this aspect.

A growing amount of presentations from SINN03 conference is now available online.

At Sinn03 conference, I’ll be presenting CONESYS at Friday, 12 am.

Sterling will quit using email because it is a great big waste of productivity and energy.

Seraching for alternatives, some believe that RSS will kill email publishing.

Maybe, the personal information manager Chandler will one day allow for more efficient communication. Recently, the XML Format for Chandler’s Data Model Schemas has been published, which reveals on the technological level some of the project’s vision. Interested? Today’s posting on the Chandler developers list says: “We will be releasing Chandler revision 0.2 on Tuesday, September 22nd”.

So do you still email? I do, but it seems that my virtual communication behaviour is outdated, so I should consider alternatives Actually, I recently unsubscribed from most developers mailinglists I actively or passively participated in, because [read Sterling's statement on emails].

In fact, communicating with your friends or like-minded persons can be done in Weblogs if what you are saying is not too private and of relative general interest. At least, blogs keep a friendly community updated in a way that let’s any member of this community decide on his own, when she wants to consume the information aka visit the Weblog. It’s the queue doctrine of email messaging, that makes it often uncomfortable to manage and incorportate into your workflow.

The German weekly newspaper “Die Zeit” published a wonderful article about the always-on generation who email themselves out of life. The article discusses, especially from a psychologic viewpoint, that “email addicts” have a shattered lifestyle. Always-on junkies think that they are more efficient doing a multi-tasking workflow - but in fact, they are 50% slower then persons working sequentially (doing one job in a row).

Urs’ posting on ChangeLog to RSS converter shows that we are moving towards content networks on many levels. Wrapping changelogs or mailinglists onto a RSS interface would allow to relate both types of content to each other. A developer could relate a certain list posting to a changelog entry.

Traceable content linkage, especially between bits and pieces of content, allows for (true) online knowledge management. The inherent experience of informational relationships in the WWW will widen with more and more applications managing the correlation between different information types.