A note on Pat
Langford excellent paper: The development of Communities of Practice within
our overall approach to Knowledge Management - A Practitioner's viewpoint
See: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/com-prac/message/1241
Note by Paul Stephen Prueitt, PhD
6/8/2001
The role of sharing knowledge within a community is commonly assumed to occur by a type of transmission of information. In fact, the transmission of information occurs in conversation and by reading. Whereas this is clearly an important process, one can miss an important source of knowledge sharing. This is the knowledge that is created in real-time by the human’s experience of the situation. For example, human daydreaming, meditative experience and prayer are part of the support for human knowledge sharing.
The role of individual human experience of situation is not often discussed in knowledge management books. A technical understanding of what IS individual human experience has yet to be part of our cultural ambience. Some of the scholars, in various academic disciplines, understand a great deal about the phenomenon of individual human experience of situation. But this comprehension of the science of perception is not influencing Information Technology paradigms.
What does hold-the-stage in IT paradigms is the Strong AI paradigm. In the Artificial Intelligence paradigm, human knowledge is thought of as if knowledge could always be reduced to informational tokens and these tokens moved around is if human knowledge were separate-able from the private experience of individuals in situations.
Sometimes knowledge is separable, and sometimes knowledge is not separable from private experience of situationedness.
An understanding of human memory and human anticipation must be part of a framework for understanding the content of individual human experience of mental events. A complete model of human knowledge sharing in communities of practice is possible within this framework.
Section 1: Stratified complexity as a proper paradigm for Knowledge Management Technology.
I have held that an extension of the Santa Fe Institute’s notions of “complex adaptive systems” (the so called CAS paradigm) is necessary to a framework that is anticipatory and has the phenomenon of human memory properly represented.
Memory is not memory of situations but the re-member-ment (or the aggregation of) the invariances that are experienced across many instances. It is a memory of the color red, or of a texture. The context is gone. Meaning is gone. There is no semantic description of the elements of the memory store. The elements of the human memory store have no context. There is a good reason why content has been removed. These elements must be associated together again in new contexts and this only occurs during the experience of situationedness.
http://www.bcngroup.org/area3/pprueitt/kmbook/Chapter5.htm is a concise and readable elaboration of an extensive experimental literature – at least as I have come to interpret this literature. My work, expressed in this chapter, has a context. This context is in creating a framework for machine intelligence that accounts for the experience of situation by a human.
Just so that I am clear. The projection of information cannot be pulled within the current information portal type systems such as Autonomy, Semio or Tacit Knowledge Systems. The reason is that individual humans, in a situationed context, must pull information in exactly the way that the brain has evolved to pull information. There must be anticipation that is not so well defined as is assumed by IT paradigms such as XML with RDF, or rule following based KIF systems, or Expert Systems. Human anticipation reaches out and feels the situation. This feeling of the situation pulls the invariances of the memory store into aggregated coherences (via frontal lobe neuro-transmitter mediation of limbic system neural processes).
It has been my contention that the minimal technical framework that has anticipatory structure is the tri-level architecture. I have published the tri-level architecture into the open literature. First, I did this because it has been and continues to be of no economic value to me personally – because it is not understood within a marketplace. Second, I have published this because it is a conceptual structure. This conceptual structure can be reduced to practice in many different ways.
One of these ways is in a simple voting procedure:
http://www.bcngroup.org/area3/pprueitt/kmbook/Appendix.htm.
This voting procedure can be equipped with inference engines of a new category by using the work of logicians C. S. Peirce and James Mill, as extended and completed by the Soviet (then classified (1930 – 1994)) projects on situational control.
http://www.bcngroup.org/area3/pprueitt/kmbook/Chapter9.htm
I apologize again for talking over the heads of everyone. I hope that each person here realizes that I do the best that I can. I am just looking for some way to help extend the information science so that a pull technology can be added to the push technologies that we now have in abundance.
http://www.ontologystream.com/forums/Acappella/keco.htm
Any assistance for, or work contract to, my small group of scientists would be appreciated. Specifically, the deployment of Acappella Software’s decision productivity technology
http://www.ontologystream.com/OS/AcappellaSolution_files/frame.htm
goes to the object expressed in Pat Langford’s paper.
Pat said:
“we are not looking to say to people "we want you to write down what you know so that we can put it into a database or produce an Instruction Manual".”
The projection of information involves both a push and a pull. The push is what we have now, but because situationed individuals are not pulling in a natural fashion, the flow of information is not as rich as what occurs in the good face-to-face meeting.
Human facilitation of a community of practice is the best way to overcome our cultural problem. We have no true knowledge-pull technology.
Creating “knowledge-of-processes” (encoded in XML as Topic Maps with Resource Description Framework (RDF) flow rules) is helping organization like Reuter’s, and Shell Oil. But a knowledge-pull technology is also possible. (sigh…)
Dr. Paul Prueitt
President, OntologyStream Inc.
Director, BCNGroup.org Inc.
P.S. The issues are complex and my need to communicate often feels like a shell game. The communication can be opened up and attacked by a reductionist or someone who simply does not spend the time to see the whole concept. There is a ‘structural holonomy” and in a structural holonomy deleting one part of the structure is not possible.
See: http://www.ontologystream.com/OS/PMIM.htm
Let me say one additional thing to try to hold the new thought together.
Pat said:
“But no amount of IT wizardry will get people to share their knowledge if no-one has convinced them of the value of doing so.”
The problem is that Pat’s statement, while true; might lead companies and government departments to embark on a costly and wrong-minded effort.
IT should NOT be considered as a means to convince people to share knowledge. The convincing must come from within the individual’s experience of situationedness. The fascinator, whether it is a conference facilitator or a meeting facilitator, is the best means we have to enhance the experience of situations – in a goal oriented fashion.
Such facilitation must not be self-serving – but rather serving of the group. Pat’s Objectives for Communities of Practice is consistent with this notion.
We are so close, and yet so far away.