Starting With Chapter 2: General Company Description

Our two-week review and revision of the SP Business Plan begins today, January 11, 2009. In three-day, overlapping segments, we will discuss, edit, revise, add in a collaborative project to make Smart People truly a community magazine.

Please start by opening the SP Wiki and clicking on "2 General Company Description" on the right hand side of the Wiki page. Up comes that chapter. Review it and either make edits directly or click on the URL to switch to the SP Forum and post a message in the "2 general Company Description" category.

If you have a problem, please send Boris Jaeger a notice since If you send it to me I'll have to ask him.
If you want to occasionally counsel with me back channel, use the SP message centre or send me an email.

Once again, I must emphasize that this is the most critical point in our process. If you want to make a difference in the development of Smart People magazine, NOW's the time.

Jerry

P.S. I don't like the heading 'General COMPANY Description'. I think Ill change it to 'General MAGAZINE Description'.

edited on 12/01/2009 by Boris Jaeger

Hello everyone. First, apologies for disappearing for a while (and it will be a slow return). I just spent time in Santa Barbara for a Fielding University governance retreat, winter session where I oversaw events with Etienne Wenger's involvement for a couple of days, and a string of events relating to my dissertation (defense, graduation, etc.) A light day was about 12 hours and I got home early this morning after a couple of 18-20 hour days.

I plan to dabble in reading and may make occasional comments. I'll say here that I found the knowledge management/hierarchical link very strange. I have been involved with that field since about 1998 and don't think I've ever heard ideas framed that way before. To be honest, I'm just too tired at the moment for an edit, but may come back to this tomorrow.

It's fun to see progress since I last visited the site.

Alice

Thanks Alice.

It's always the busiest poeple who contribute the most time.

The way mixxt works, it indicates you have actually made some edits on Chapter 2. If so, or if you do, please use the Forum to call attention to what you've done. That way we can follow you. Too bad this system doesn't have a tracking system like Microsoft Word.

Jerry

Hello Jerry and all. I made two edits in the overview section with the new text pasted below (not sure if html formatting will hold, so I've not tried to make the phrases stand out).

After knowledge management, I put "(strategic work with knowledge in organizations)" to replace "(hierarchical)" or a similar term. This was for a few reasons:
- I found hierarchical a bit confusing and perhaps too limiting. For example, unless you subscribe to the KM/knowledge processing divide by McElroy and Firestone, a lot of KM work compensates for hierarchies.
- I tried to make the phrase I inserted plain language and
- tried to frame it in a way that was accurate but focused fairly narrowly

Farther down in the text, I deleted the non-hierarchical (see above) and added "The importance of knowledge grows as we work with boundary-spanning challenges ranging from competition in a globalized world through climate change to communication in our families and communities across generations." The purpose here was to
- give a sense of the range of issues with which we might deal, and to which readers might relate and
- bring in "the common man" who may be caring about community development, social entrepreneurship, science, or knowledge sharing and use at a more personal level.

The wording as of 5:30 Pacific on Jan 13 is pasted below:

Knowledge management (strategic work with knowledge in organizations) has enjoyed a high profile for the past two decades among the business world, with a growing adoption of its principles in Fortune 1,000 and other knowledge-driven companies worldwide. Results have been mixed depending on the management model used and the level of commitment.

Recently, observers have reported that KM is migrating from core academic and thought leaders, gurus, consultants and pioneer practitioners to business units within the existing organizational structure such as HR, Library and Information Science, Learning, Research, Project Management and Development. KM is becoming embedded in most every aspect of the business process. Along with that movement, the people who are engaged in some aspect of knowledge work/management multiplies. Whole professional and trade groups are now exploring the meaning of knowledge work and management.
The knowledge phenomenon is growing by leaps and bounds as people take charge of their own lives, doing online research and communication, making business transactions and virtual friends. The importance of knowledge grows as we work with boundary-spanning challenges ranging from competition in a globalized world through climate change to communication in our families and communities across generations. The growth in interest and need to know more about knowledge work grows exponentially.
While early KM had a prospective audience of thousands of professional practitioners, knowledge work (KW) has an untapped market of millions.

Thanks a million, Alice. And good work. A good example of how collaborative thinking improves the product. Thanks not only for the thought and work, but the time spent. I know you (everyone) is very busy. That makes the gift of time and talent even larger in my eyes.

Jerry

Thanks for editing the 'General Description' Avigdor. However, I'm not sure what you did. When you make edits it would be helpful to also post a message in the Forum (there's a link on each page you edit) explaining what you did and why.

But if you don't your edits will either remain or be changed in some way when I do the final edit of the entire business plan.