Last week, two documents that I’ve been working on for years are now available in book form.

First, my dissertation is now available from ProQuest in a lovely academic hardcover edition. I plan to order one for my shelf. Everyone else, please, just download the PDF (it’s creative commons). ProQuest has enough money already.

And second, the iRODS 3.0 microservices book is now available on Amazon. Everything you wanted to know about iRODS.

Neat.

From http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/2011/10/19/flexible-futures/:

If you know something that others want to know, they will find you.

In addition to everything else, we are each a unique set of knowledge, experience and capabilities which, in the right situation, proves uniquely valuable. By sharing what we know, we advertise our expertise. It follows us where ever we go. Because this expertise is mostly hidden from view, it is impossible for us to look at one another and see the depth that each of us carries within us.

Every time we share, we reveal the secret expert within ourselves. Because we constantly share ourselves with our friends, family and co-workers, they come to rely on what we know. But what of our colleagues? We work in organizations with little sense of the expertise that surrounds us.

Before hyperconnectivity, it was difficult to share expertise. You could reach a few people – those closest to you – but unless your skills were particularly renowned or valuable, that’s where it stopped. For good or ill, our experience and knowledge now extend far beyond the circle of those familiar to you, throughout the entire organization. Everyone in it can now have some awareness of the talents that pulse through your organizations – with the right tools in place.

And then:

Every employee in an organization has a specific set of talents, but these talents are not evenly distributed. Someone knows more about sales, someone else knows more about marketing, or customer service, or accounting. That’s why people have roles within an organization; they are the standard-bearers for the organization’s expertise.

Yet an employee’s expertise may lie across several domains. Someone in accounting may also provide excellent customer service. Someone in manufacturing might be gifted with sales support. A salesman might be an accomplished manager. People come into your organization with a wide range of skills, and even if they don’t have an opportunity to share them as part of their normal activities, those skills represent resources of immense value.

If only we knew where to find them.

You see, it isn’t always clear who knows what, who’s had experience where, or who’s been through this before. We do not wear our employment histories on our sleeves. Although we may enter an organization with our c.v. in hand, once hired it gets tucked away until we start scouting around for another job. What we know and what we’ve done remains invisible. Our professional lives look a lot like icebergs, with just a paltry bit of our true capabilities exposed to view.

I gotta build this thing and get it out there…
Contextual Authority Tagging

Congratulations. Your submission has cleared all of the necessary checks and will soon be delivered to UMI.

Hooray!

I’ve posted the entire dissertation online, with supporting materials created along the way.

It is published under Creative Commons with a BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.

Title: Contextual Authority Tagging: Expertise Location via Social Labeling
Author(s): Terrell Russell

Publishing Settings & Copyright
Traditional Publishing
Do not delay release to ProQuest
Allow search engine access.
Do not allow third party sales.
Do not file for copyright – I am requesting that ProQuest/UMI not file for copyright on my behalf.

Degree/Department Information
Year degree awarded: 2011
Degree Awarded: Doctor of Philosophy
Year Manuscript Completed: 2011
Department: Information & Library Science
Advisor/Chair: Deborah Barreau, Gary Marchionini
Committee Members: Barbara M Wildemuth, Sri Kalyanaraman, Phillip J Windley

Subject Categories
Information Science [0723] – primary
Organization Theory [0635]
Social Psychology [0451]

Keywords
cognitive authority
expertise
identity
knowledge management
reputation
tagging

Abstract
This study investigates the possibility of a group of people making explicit their tacit knowledge about one another’s areas of expertise. Through a design consisting of a modified Delphi Study, group members are asked to label both their own and each others’ areas of expertise over the course of five rounds. Statistical analysis and qualitative evaluation of 10 participating organizations suggest they were successful and that, with simple keywords, group members can convey the salient areas of expertise of their colleagues to a degree that is deemed “similar” and of “high quality” by both third parties and those being evaluated. More work needs to be done to make this information directly actionable, but the foundational aspects have been identified.

In a world with a democratization of voices from all around and increasing demands on our time and attention, this study suggests that simple, aggregated third-party expertise evaluations can augment our ongoing struggle for quality information source selection. These evaluations can serve as loose credentials when more expensive or heavyweight reputation cues may not be viable.

Language
en ( English )

Today, Google launched “Me on the Web” as part of their Google Dashboard.

However, your online identity is determined not only by what you post, but also by what others post about you — whether a mention in a blog post, a photo tag or a reply to a public status update. When someone searches for your name on a search engine like Google, the results that appear are a combination of information you’ve posted and information published by others.

Today we’ve released a new tool to help make it easier to monitor your identity on the web and to provide easy access to resources describing ways to control what information is on the web. This tool, Me on the Web, appears as a section of the Google Dashboard right beneath the Account details.

found via http://mashable.com/2011/06/16/google-me-on-the-web/

The idea that reputation matters and will become both more important and transparent are coming of age. Very soon, we’ll start needing better tools to vet the opinions that are being tracked and surfaced across the web.

Now, if only I could publish this dissertation…

Eugene Eric Kim has written a wonderful post on the Blue Oxen Associates blog about his use of my ideas around Contextual Authority Tagging in his work with organizations regarding reproductive health.

Terrell’s premise is that reputation in context can be extremely valuable, often more valuable than what you say about yourself. For example, suppose you asked me for three words to describe myself. In a work context, I might say, “collaboration, transformation, do-gooder.” That is how I perceive myself, or at least how I want others to perceive me. Those three words have gone through a personal filter, which may be filtering useful information. Maybe I’m too modest to say certain words. Maybe I’m deluded. Or maybe I simply don’t know what others value most about me.

There are three interesting pieces of information here:

* What do others say about you?
* What’s the difference between what others say about you and what you say about yourself?
* If you and everyone else get to see what is said about you, how will what is said evolve over time?

I’m anxious to see what Terrell discovers about these and other questions. If his premise is correct, then there are all sorts of interesting applications of this. For example, many knowledge management tools include some sort of expert finder, which is generally reliant on what people say about themselves in their personal profiles. It may be more valuable to have an expert finder that’s oriented around what others say about you.

He’s included some Wordles of the types of information and interactions that come from having people share stories and talk about one another.

Earlier this year, I facilitated a strategic workshop for Civil Liberties & Public Policy (CLPP), another reproductive health advocacy and leadership organization, and I kicked things off with this exercise. The visualizations from that exercise are particularly instructive. Here is a visualization of all the words that the participants used to describe each other:

This is most rewarding to me – and I look forward to working with Eugene in the next few months on some collaborations. I think we have a lot to offer each other in the ways we see these tools.

Social Web FooCamp

In only a couple weeks (gah, how’d that happen…) I’ll head back to the Social Web FooCamp. This is a great honor to be invited back and I hope to continue providing insight and ideas on the tangle/noisiness/mess of our social Internet.

IIW8

I’ll be at IIW8 again in May. This is a fantastic event and one I hated missing last Fall. I really look forward to seeing everyone in the Identity community again. So much has changed in only a few years – and Doc Searls, Kaliya and Phil Windley always put on a great un-conference.

Progress

And then, back to the library. Also, found two guys in Brazil who simulated my (not finished yet) dissertation. I guess that means I’m officially in a race now. Excellent.

Doctoral Colloquium
I spoke about my ongoing progress towards my dissertation topic of Contextual Authority Tagging and laid out my most recent plan of attack (pdf 736kB). I can see how the pieces are fitting together now and did my best to convey a few years of work into 10 minutes. It’s not an easy thing to do, but I’m getting better at it. Practice definitely helps.

Poster Session
The next day, I shared my newest results concerning Cloudalicio.us and its use for seeing the tags used on a group of items change over time. This was the first time in public for this data and these views, and I received some wonderful feedback regarding periodicity (and the potential predictive power of these graphs) as well as generalizability.

Watching Organizational Opinion via Social Tagging (pdf 424kB)

It turns out, if I can describe the type of data I’m graphing better – others may be able to push their data into Cloudalicio.us and see how their own data is changing over time. This is very exciting as it opens up many potential collaborations – with people and datasets I’d otherwise not have an opportunity to see.

Panel Session
The third day of my whirlwind week was an early-morning presentation of the contribution that may have the most impact on others doing research. Tag Decay (pdf 176kB). I posit that by adding time to the tagging ‘triumvirate’, we add a fourth dimension.

The feedback for this talk was very strong and I have a couple good ideas moving forward, if only I can get some time to get a bit of code working.

Plane Home
One last little note. On the flight home, I was able to get the Cloudalicio.us engine to parse and process data from Connotea in addition to the native del.icio.us tagging sets I’ve been using. This means there’s hope for multiple parsers to be designed/coded in the wild. Cloudy may have its day, yet!

I was in charge of the big schedule board again. We had it up much faster this year with less tape failures. Technique is very important. And having 12 hands.

I learned how to play Bughouse in the first session. Two chess boards, four players, two chess clocks – and it turns you a bit nuts in less than 10 minutes – which proved just enough time for me to recover before the next hour.

I hosted the next session in the Bughouse room on Expertise Location and had a very engaging discussion around the problems of figuring out “who knows what” and how to keep track of that when you’re trying to hire or place people on teams.

I lured them in with an explanation of my thesis work around Contextual Authority Tagging and asked for input from the “real world”. I heard lots of encouraging comments about how my work meshes nicely with the movement in today’s knowledge management circles away from documenting our knowledge into files (separating the knowledge from the person who knows it) to documenting the people, their work, and simply keeping track of who knows what.

The group agreed that my ideas around tagging others’ knowledge is related to the 360° interview process and the Johari window and its concept of a “blind spot”.

“Everything is pointers.” The overwhelming consensus was that the real way people figure things out is by asking other people, and moving up the chain of expertise until the answer is uncovered. If Bill (who knows about X) doesn’t know the answers himself, he’ll point you to Dave. If Dave doesn’t know, he points you to the next person. This is how we solve problems and if I can help companies do that in a more efficient, documented, trackable way – then everyone agreed I’ve got a very marketable project – as soon as I write it all down, show that it works, and then defend it and get out of school.

The most interesting comment to come from the day’s talk was about a “persistent gap” that may prove itself to exist between what a person thinks they know about and what the group around them thinks the person knows about. Identifying if and when that happens would be a very interesting application of this technique and something I hadn’t really considered before. I’ve been working under the very straightforward assumption that there will be convergence between the three “lists” of terms/tags in my experiment:
- What I think I know
- What they think I know
- What I think they think I know

We’ll see.

The current plan gives me a year to write down what those who have come before me have already done (called the Literature Review) and a year to prove and then write down my own work (called the Dissertation).

Then of course, I’ll have to be a part of that “real world”. Hmmm…