How can technologies eliminate or greatly alter our activities of PIM? What is eliminated if we eliminate (or greatly change the way we do) “PIM”? — let’s break it down letter by letter.

“P” is for “personal”. That’s us. We’re certainly not going away.

“PI” is for “personal information”. Recall from week one that information can be personal in any of 6 senses: 1. information we own. 2. information about us (that we may not own or control directly). 3. information directed towards us (which is personal since it means to consume our personal resources such as our attention, energy, money and our irreplaceable time). 4. information sent, posted or published by us (e.g., to influence others and to effect changes in our world). 5. Information experienced by us. 6. Information relevant to us and the things we want to do (now and later). Personal information management — in any of these senses — is certainly not going away.

“PIM” adds the word “management”. The word comes from “manage” which derives from the Latin “manus” – hand. PIM is focused on the information we “touch” and manipulate – if not directly, as we do for paper-based forms of information, then at least indirectly through our information tools. Digitization of information has already eliminated some of the tedium involved in a mechanical filing of paper information in metal filing cabinets. What more can we hope for? Consider the question with respect to the 6 primary activities of managing personal information:

1. Finding and re-finding. From need to information. In our efforts to meet a need, we seek. We search, sort and browse. We scan through a search results list or the listing of a folder’s contents in an effort to recognize information items that relate to a need. These activities are all examples of finding activities. Finding is broadly defined to include both acts of new finding where there is no previous memory of having the needed information, and to include acts of re-finding. Finding is a sequence of recall, recognize and repeat. Re-finding also includes another critical step: Remembering to look in the first place. More broadly, the category of finding activities includes efforts to create the needed information as in “finding the right words” or “finding the right ideas”.

“Search” as a constellation of tools and technologies (conventionally referred to as information retrieval) has obvious relevance to finding and re-finding. Can search greatly reduce or even eliminate our need to find and re-find? Suppose we had a search that could anticipate our every need, providing us with information we need, even before we realized we needed it?

2.Keeping: From information to need. Many events of daily life are roughly the converse of finding events. Instead of having a need for which we seek information, we have information in hand and must determine what, if anything, we need to do with this information. In organizations and as individuals we encounter and generate large amounts of information. Decisions and actions are much the same no matter the information or its source. Is the information at all relevant, or potentially useful? Do we have an anticipated need for this information? What are the costs of not having this information? Some information – tax-relevant information for past years, for example — must be kept even though the likelihood that a need for this information will arise is very small since the costs of not having this information, should the need arise, are very high.

Thanks to technologies of storage, some keeping decisions no longer need to be made. Which documents, which photos, which songs should we keep on our palmtop? Why decide? If we have enough storage capacity, keep all of them!

But other keeping decisions may have gotten harder. How to know what to attend to when we’re bombarded by information simultaneously from several channels? Can technology again come to the rescue? Suppose we have an “administrative assistant” who knows us (better than we know ourselves) and who filters all our information so that we see only what we need to see and only when we need to see it? Is this possible? Is this desirable?

3. Maintaining and organizing. How to organize information for repeated use? How to safeguard this information against loss? How insure that information is current and correct? How to update formats to keep pace with changes in standards and in supporting tools? How to insure that old information is deleted, archived or otherwise moved out the way? What about versions? What about duplicates and near-duplicates? These are all questions of maintenance and organization.

Again, some of us might say that the mechanics of organizing information has become much easier with its digitization — filing with a few clicks rather than bending over a paper filing cabinet and pushing folders aside to make room for a new folder. But digitization is a mixed blessing. Consider photographs. When these were the paper prints we got back from a photo developer, they had place and persistence. Even if we forgot about them until years later, we might still run across them (albeit in faded form). But digital photographs could be accidentally wiped out through failure or loss of a device. Also, older formats may not display properly in 20 or 30 years time.

Will tools and technologies eliminate the need to organize? Can these automate the back-up process? Can these help us to find the “right” (most recent, most correct) version of a document? Can these automatically update the formats for information items (such as photographs)?

4. Managing privacy and the flow of information. Information management aims to insure that the right people have the right information at the right time. But steps must also be taken to insure that other people – the wrong people – don’t also have access to this information. And how to insure that the right people aren’t distracted or overwhelmed the information they receive?

Can tools and technologies help us to establish policies of privacy and information flow? Can these learn and generalize from our choices — knowing, for example, that if we mark one “hello dear” email as junk then perhaps others of a similar nature are also junk?

5. Measuring and evaluating. Choices are made in support of all the activities described so far. Schemes of organization are selected; strategies, policies and procedures are adopted; supporting tools are put in place. We then need to ask, periodically or continuously, “is it (the resulting mapping between information and need) working? Can it work even better? If so, what should change?” These questions depend both upon the measurements we’re able to make and also on the evaluations we must make in cases where measurements (and the underlying objectives these measurements reflect) are in competition with one another.

Can tools and technologies help us to “see” our practices of PIM and to decide which tools (techniques, strategies) are working for us and which should change? As we encounter (constantly) new tools (techniques, strategies) that advertise themselves as the “latest and greatest” can these help us to decide which are likely to work and which won’t?

6. Making sense of and using our information. Efforts to make sense are the most “meta” of meta-level activities. “Does it make sense?” The question can be applied to choices made in each of the other meta-level activities. The question has broad application and reaches to deeper levels of understanding concerning ultimate goals and tradeoffs. We might hear ourselves saying something like “I understand what you want to do but it doesn’t make sense”. Choices that make sense with one need in mind may not make sense when other needs are also considered. Making sense of information is what we do prior to “using” the information to make decisions. What does it make sense to do?

How can our tools and technologies help us to make sense of our information? Can these help us to see connections we might otherwise miss? These might be “smart” in their ability to parse and analyze information. But also to consider are technologies that simply help us to see more information faster. What about a super-sized display screens? Or bigger bandwidth? — William Jones, April, 2012.

The concluding chapter in Part II, titled “To each of us, our own” explores the similarities and differences among us in our efforts to manage our information. As I’ve interviewed people over the years concerning their own practices of PIM, a pattern repeats: People share initially with reluctance and with apologetic comments like “I’m just a little weird that way”. But, once people start talking, they continue of their own accord. People find the sharing to be fun, useful and, even, therapeutic. Yes, maybe we’re all a little “weird” but often we’re weird in similar ways. Blame it on our information. Please post your own thoughts either in your own blog or as comments to this post. I may even ask your permission to share your “tales of PIM” in Part II of the book, “The Future of Personal Information Management”. 

This first post describes my approach to the creation and use of a personal unifiying taxonomy or PUT in support of three essential activities of PIM:

1. Keeping – where to put new information?
2. Finding/Refinding – where to look for existing information?
3. Maintaining & organizing – how to group information together so that the “right, relevant” information is together in one place when I need it, can be shared with others in group projects and, ultimately, can be archived as a unit?

In subsequent posts, I’ll say more about my approach to three other activities of PIM:

1. Managing privacy & the flow of information (incoming & outgoing). This will include an information-centric approach to time & task management through the use of email, web browser tabs, open windows, paper notepads and a Planz prototype developed in the Keeping Found Things Found project.
2. Measuring & evaulting. This is hardest PIM activity for me. How do I (really) know what’s working and what needs to change in my practice of PIM?
3. Making sense of things. What is my information telling me? How do the pieces relate? How I use the information I have to make decisions and to get things done?

I use file system folders for my PUT. Folders give me a sense of ownership and control that I do not feel when I use tool-specific organizing constructs such as the section and page tabs of MS OneNote or the labels (and now folders) of Gmail. Also, file system folders (I’m on Windows currently but may move to the Mac) are more “real” – made more real, for example, because files created through one application can, in principle, be viewed and worked with in other applications. (Try doing the comparable for information sandboxed in the application space of a mobile palmtop device.)

At first glance, my file system looks like a mess. For example, the structure under “My Documents” is not especially either – not really for documents and certainly not created by _my_ direct intention. I see folders such as “Adobe”, “Adobe Captivate Cached Projects”, ‘Adobe Ultra CS3”, “AdobeStockPhotos” and, farther down in the listing, “My Adobe Captivate Projects”. Nearly all of the folders under “My Documents” have  been created “for me” by the applications that have been installed. (I use a system image supported by the very capable IT staff at the Information School, University of Washington). I don’t use many of these applications. And even for those I do use, I suspect some of the subfolders may have been superceded and are no longer active. I can’t tell, don’t have time to find out and don’t dare delete. I’ve abandoned “My Documents” as a place for my information.

The situation is equally messy at the next level up. Immediately under the folder for “me” (my username) I also see mostly subfolders that have been created by various applications. Again I see, for example, for Adobe applications subfolders such as “Adobe Flash Builder 4” and “Adobe Flash Builder 4.5”. (My thoughts on the overall slovenly behavior of Adobe applications is fodder for a later post).

But under my username folder are two essential folders for my PUT: “Projects” and “Life”. Much of the digital information I care about is either “stored” or referenced from the folder structures under one of these two folders.

“Projects” is for projects broadly defined. Each folder under the ‘Projects” folder represents some kind of project (activity, endeavor) that I hope to complete. I give folders a special kind of name according to the format: <date>, <name>. The date is in  ISO date format (ISO 8601) which means that folders sorted by name provide a crude, but effective, timeline of activities, past and planned.

To illustrate, here are some of the project folders under Projects:

• 2012-09, VA ProWatch project
• 2012-09, INFO 320 preparation
• 2012-05-30, MSIM, Zarya, Ali, Ramji
• 2012-05-24, review paper for Bob Mason
• 2012-05-05, CHI 2012
• 2012-05, XooML 2.0
• 2012-05, PIM course proposal
• 2012-04-27, Dub retreat
• 2012-04-20, performance reviews
• 2012-04-19, UW iSchool, activity insight, annual review
• 2012-04-15, taxes 2011
• 2012-04, INFX 571, Future of PIM
• 2012-03-31, 2012-04-08, spring break

Dates are often rough. If I know only the year or year + month of the activity, that’s all I put down for the date portion (e.g., “2012” or “2012-07”). On rare occasion, I may use the date portion of the folder name to represent a date range (e.g., “2012-08-13, 09-15”).

The “name” portion that follows the “date” portion in a project folder’s name is simply something to remind me of what the project is all about. When possible, I try to include words that are likely to appear elsewhere for the associated activity (e.g., in the subject lines of email messages and title or URL of associated web sites).

Structure within a project folder varies according to the nature of the project:

• Some projects are instances of a standard activity. The same basic structure applies to each instance. For example, for any project involving vacation or travel planning, I usually have a section called “travel” in which I record information related to confirmations and travel itinerary.
• Some projects involve the completion of several components. For example, completion of an NSF proposal requires the submission of a budget, bios, project summary, project description, data management plan, etc.. These components are often represented as subfolders under the project folder.
• Projects of longer duration often generate a need to complete subprojects which are not easily foreseen at project outset. Often I represent these subprojects as subfolders under the project’s folder and with a folder name that follows the same template (e.g., <date>, <subproject name>).

Two special circumstances to note:

• A larger project may sometimes be contingent upon the outcome of an earlier project. For example, I may attend a conference only if my submission to this conference is accepted. The submission is represented initially as a project in its own right (as a folder directly under the “Projects” folder). Likewise, the reviews I agree to do for this conference are represented by a separate project folder. (The date portion of a folder name in these cases is the due or deadline date). Later, should a submission be accepted, I’ll create another project folder for the conference itself and then I’ll move the submission and review folders to be subfolders of this new folder. “Travel” information is then in another subfolder.
• In cases of groupwork, I want to share project information with teammates. I currently use DropBox which requires that shared folders be placed within a parent “Dropbox” folder. This is not ideal for me (and I may switch to another system that lets me leave my folders where they are). But, for now, I still create a folder representing the project under “Projects” and then, within this folder, I create a shortcut pointing to the shared Dropbox folder.

A project is archived by moving its folder to one of two places:

1. To be a subfolder under a folder for a larger project (e.g., a folder representing the effort to submit a paper is moved to become a subfolder of a larger project folder for the conference).
2. To a folder under the Projects folder which is named “zz archive”.

Ben Benderson similarly uses a subfolder titled “zzz Old Stuff” as a repository for information that is no longer active. In both cases, the intention is to move inactive information out of the way so that it doesn’t clutter and distract but so that the information stays close to its original context. Likewise and for similar intention, I create “zz archive” folders within project and subproject folders.

When project work involves the creation of several versions of the same document, I will often create an additional “zz versions” folder with a slightly different purpose than the “zz archive” folder. The “zz versions” folder contains earlier versions and variations on a document “just in case”. On rare occasion, and esp. for larger documents, I may suspect that I’m not working with the current version of a document or that this version is missing important pieces present in a previous version. In these cases, I can look inside the “zz versions” folder. In many other cases, the “zz versoins” folder for a project is a reassuring place to stash document versions esp. those that come me from co-authors or as generated after a crash of my word processor. At project’s completion I may often delete the “zz versoins” folder but will keep the “zz archive” folder.

Finally, and especially for projects that involve a paper or presentation as the output, I will often create two special files. The first is a “food” (for thought) file as an MS Word document in outline view. The file is named to have the project’s name (e.g., “Submit paper to altchi” followed by “, food”. This file is my place to write down any thoughts I might have about associated paper or presentation – e.g., its content or logistics related to its completion.

The second file has the same name only with “food” replaced by “leftovers”. When editing a document, it is often necessary to make cuts. If I give even a moment’s thought to whether I might like to use the cut material somewhere else (in this or another document), I slam the cut material into the “leftovers” file. I honestly cannot think of a time when I’ve ever gone back to a leftovers file to retrieve cut material. But using the file saves me moments of indecision.

A final (for this post) word on projects. I prefer to view and access my projects using Planz, a prototype developed in our Keeeping Found Things Found project  Planz was desgined to provide document-like/outliner-like overlays to file folder structure or, more generally, to any information structure for which there is a metadata expression in “XooML”. I find the following features to be especially useful:

1. I can order a listing of project “headings” (where headings represent project folders) so that the projects currently most in need of my attention are placed topmost.
2. With a heading expanded, I can type in or paste notes directly for things I’m otherwise likely to forget (such as budget numbers).
3. I can drag and drop an email message into the area under a project heading. As I do so, a special shortcut is created back to the email message. More important, any attachments of the email message become “real” as files placed under the project folder.
4. I can also “promote” a folder shortcut to appear as a subheading under a project heading and then, in the spirit of an outline, I can expand this subheading to view – in-place — the contents of its corresponding folder.

  Life

And now a few words about “Life”, the sibling folder to “Projects”. The Life folder is for information that isn’t associated with a specific project or that I may wish to use repeatedly across projects. Playing with the theme of “roles and goals”, I have two folders immediately under “Life” named “Roles & People” and “Goals & Things”. I almost never use “Roles & Things”.

I do use “Roles & People” infrequently. For example, I have a subfolder for my uncle in which I stash various bits and pieces of digital information related to his WWII war record (scanned articles, email recounting, etc.). More often, however, for most people in my life, pictures and other information are stored in “project” folders under “zz archive”. In some cases, I’ll “tag”  this folder  by placing  a shortcut to this folder in the folder for a person under “Roles & People”. Crude, to be sure, but I”m willing to go to some lengths both to insure the privacy of this information and not to be locked into the use of a particular tool.

In the  “Roles & People” folder,  I also have subfolders to represent my various roles in life – e.g., as “neighbor” (I put contact information for neighbors into this subfolder), “citizen” (with a sub-subfolder representing my involvement in local issues and another sub-subfolder for national and international politics that contains, for example, Web links for how to contact my senators and congress person).

I also have a “Regions” folder immediate under the “Life” folder and under this are folders for various collections including articles with my own highlights that I reference repeatedly across the papers, presentations and books that I have authored over the years.

There is much more to say about the “Life” folder and my conventions for naming folders and files within this folder. But I’ll save this for another post.

There is no management of knowledge except through a management of information.

Note to reader: this is the 3rd of 5 posts beginning with the post titled, ““No Knowledge but through Information”

“Management” comes from “manage” which derives from the Latin “manus” – hand. ([1] Soucres used for definitions are the on-line services, Merriam-Webster OnLine (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/) and Wiktionary (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki).)

The management practiced by our many of forbearers, those with no staff to order, was necessarily hands on. My grandfather was a dairy farmer. His management of his livestock and his crops was literally “hands on”. The same could be said for my grandmother as she managed the household. Or of the grocer who managed his store in town.

In our time, the expression “hands-on style of management” is not a redundancy nor even meant to be taken literally. Managers who are “hands-on” are more directly involved with their staff and with day-to-day details. Managers who literally manage their staff with the use of their hands risk run the serious risk of being sued for harassment.

But we are still quite literally hands-on in many of our efforts to manage information. We compose an email message with finger presses to the keyboard and then we send the email with a click of the mouse button. Likewise, we use our hands on keyboard and mouse to work with electronic documents and with web pages. We make printouts for an even more direct interaction with our information. Paper forms of information endure (Sellen & Harper, 2002) in large measure for their hands-on affordances. Paper and the means to write on paper with pencil or pen are nearly always at hand. Paper can be folded, torn and thrown away. Writing, sketching or doodling on paper is easy and satisfying. There is a “feel” to paper that we may never achieve with digital forms of information.

Knowledge as “no thing” cannot be managed directly. If we think we have knowledge “at our fingertips” we are most likely touching information in some form instead. This is not to say that knowledge management is not possible. But we do so through its expression in information. There is no management of knowledge except through the management of information.

What are we doing when we manage information? What must we do to manage knowledge? These questions are each considered in turn.

What are we doing when we manage information?

Information as data – as bits – is a resource to be managed. The DAMA International Foundation in a pamphlet provided for download from their web site states that “The basic premise of Data Management (DRM) is that information and data is like any other business resource – and should be managed as such.” (DAMA International Foundation, 2005, p. 5). The pamphlet goes on to say that “the amount must be optimized. In other words, the company should always have enough–but also minimize excess and redundancy” and “resource should be shared and leveraged in as many ways as possible, in order to maximize its value while diminishing its overall costs”

These are sensible steps for a company to take with data, information or any other resource. Steps must be taken, for example, to insure that information is properly maintained. Information should be securely stored. Access to information should be controlled. Its use should be monitored. For information or data, viewed as a resource, considerations apply that aren’t that different from those that might apply to money or laptops or employee time.

But for information as “data in motion” additional considerations arise. Information can be copied and communicated. Information is sent and received with purpose or intention mind. Is information getting to the right people? Is it having a desired effect? Depending upon context, depending upon the recipient, the same information may save valuable time and money or be a waste of it.

One of the neater definitions of management[1] is “the judicious use of means to accomplish an end”. Mary Parker Follett , writing a the turn of the last century defined management (of people) as “the art of getting things done through people”. Substitute “information” for people and we have a nice definition for information management – the art of getting things done through information.

An ideal in information management is to have “have the right information (in the right place, in the right form, enough, not too much, etc.) to meet our current need” (Jones, 2007, p. 7). We come closer to this ideal to the extent that we’re able to create and maintain a mapping between information and need.

A simple, stylized mapping between information and need is depicted in Chapter 3 of the book, Keeping Found Things Found”  (see also, excerpt on this site: http://www.keepingfoundthingsfound.com/chapter_three.html). Only small portions of the mapping have an observable external representation. In a company or as individuals, for example, we maintain folder structure or a tagging scheme which is visible in our filing systems, digital and paper-based. However, much of a mapping has only hypothesized existence in the memories of individuals and perhaps also in the policies, procedures and daily workflows of an organization. Large portions of the mapping are potential and not realized in any form, external or internal. A sort function or a search facility, for example, has the potential to guide from a need to desired information.

With respect to the mapping, we have two basic kinds of information management activity corresponding to the two directions in which the mapping can be traversed: Keeping activities attempt to take us from information encountered to anticipated need. Finding activities attempt to go in the other direction – from need to information.

Finding: From need to information. In their efforts to meet a need, people seek. People search, sort and browse. People scan through a results list or the listing of a folder’s contents in an effort to recognize information items that relate to a need. These activities are all examples of finding activities. Finding is broadly defined to include both acts of new finding where there is no previous memory of having the needed information, and to include acts of re-finding. More broadly still, finding includes efforts to create the needed information as in “finding the right words” or “finding the right ideas.”

Keeping: From information to need. Many events of daily life are roughly the converse of finding events. Instead of having a need for which we seek information, we have information in hand and must determine what, if anything, we need to do with this information. In organizations and as individuals we encounter and generate large amounts of information. Decisions and actions are much the same no matter the information or its source. Is the information at all relevant, or potentially useful? Do we have an anticipated need for this information? What are the costs of not having this information? Some information – tax-relevant information for past years, for example — must be kept even though the likelihood that a need for this information will arise is very small since the costs of not having this information, should the need arise, are very high (Jones, 2004).

Finding and keeping activities traverse the mapping in complementary directions. Four kinds of information management activity focus on the mapping itself. Elsewhere, I refer to these collectively referred to as meta-level activities or, simply, “m-level” activities (Jones, 2007):

Maintaining and organizing. How to … organize information for repeated use? … safeguard this information against loss? … insure that information is current and correct? .. update formats to keep pace with changes in standards and in supporting tools?.. insure that old information is deleted, archived or otherwise moved out the way? What about versions? What about duplicates and near-duplicates? These are all questions of maintenance and organization.

Managing privacy and the flow of information. Information management aims to insure that the right people have the right information at the right time. But steps must also be taken to insure that other people – the wrong people – don’t also have access to this information. And how to insure that the right people aren’t distracted or overwhelmed the information they receive?

Measuring and evaluating. Choices are made in support of all the activities described so far. Schemes of organization are selected; strategies, policies and procedures are adopted; supporting tools are put in place. We then need to ask, periodically or continuously, “is it (the resulting mapping between information and need) working? Can it work even better? If so, what should change?” These questions depend both upon the measurements we’re able to make and also on the evaluations we must make in cases where measurements (and the underlying objectives these measurements reflect) are in competition with one another.

Making sense of our information. Efforts to make sense are the most “meta” of meta-level activities. “Does it make sense?” The question can be applied to choices made in each of the other meta-level activities. The question has broad application and reaches to deeper levels of understanding concerning ultimate goals and tradeoffs. We might hear ourselves saying something like “I understand what you want to do but it doesn’t make sense”. Choices that make sense with one need in mind, may not make sense when other needs are also considered. Does the mapping make sense? Our information is now totally secure against unauthorized access but we can’t easily access the information either. Does this make sense? We make sense of information. We use our senses. We also “make” and manipulate. Information is a thing to be piled and sorted, arranged and re-arranged. Information is a thing to be touched. Information is in the mapping. Information is also how we represent the needs of a mapping (including goals and constraints). Information, perhaps in the form of graphs, is how we represent a hierarchy of need. Information is how we represent the synergies and conflicts between needs. Information is how we represent the mapping itself. It’s all information.

What must we do to manage knowledge?

To make a variation an old joke, ask any three people involved in “knowledge management” for a definition of same and you’ll likely get three different definitions. Wait a few more minutes and you’ll get three more.

In his blog post, “43 knowledge management definitions – and counting…”[3], Ray Sims documents a diversity of definitions for knowledge management. Many of the definitions seem to have little in common with each other save for the repeated use of the word “knowledge”.

One of the better, more forthright, of the definitions comes from the CIO Magazine Tutorial[4]: “Unfortunately, there’s no universal definition of knowledge management (KM), just as there’s no agreement as to what constitutes knowledge in the first place. For this reason, it’s best to think of KM in the broadest context. Succinctly put, KM is the process through which organizations generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets. Most often, generating value from such assets involves codifying what employees, partners and customers know, and sharing that information among employees, departments and even with other companies in an effort to devise best practices.”

The definition notes that “generating value” (from knowledge-based assets) involves information – the “codifying” of what people know and “sharing that information”. We can consider KM to require two essential transformations: From knowledge to information and then, to complete the transfer of knowledge, from information back to knowledge. The first transformation is often referred to as knowledge elicitation. We need a name for the second transformation as well. Call it knowledge instillation.

Knowledge elicitation[5]. Each of us knows a lot about matters big and small. We know, for example, how to spot and move away from erratic, potentially dangerous people on a street or subway platform. We may know (not I) how to use the buttons on a video game controller. Some of this knowledge is relatively easy to express. We know to stay clear of people who are shouting and screaming. But the more knowledge is integrated into our beliefs, our judgments and our actions, the less easy it is for us to give expression to this knowledge. Polanyi (1967) makes the distinction between explicit knowledge – knowledge readily expressed – and tacit knowledge – knowledge not easily expressed. Polanyi offers, as an aphorism, that “we know more than we can tell”.

We can never tell all of what we know but methods of knowledge elicitation can help us to tell more of what we know. A review of all the various techniques of or with potential application to knowledge elicitation is beyond the scope of this paper. Techniques involve the use of repertory grids (Kelly, 1955), concept maps (Novak, 1998), affinity diagramming (Bondarenko & Janssen, 2005) , interviews – free-form or structured and observations (e.g., as an expert works through a selection of problems or cases) (Hoffman, 1989) . The person whose knowledge is being targeted may be asked to think aloud and a transcription of the recording of this think-aloud may later be subjected to a protocol analysis (Newell & Simon, 1972).

A point to make is that these methods are as much, if not more, about information as about knowledge. Each method involves several forms of information. Included, to be sure, are eponymous forms of information such as concept maps, affinity diagrams and repertory grids. Information in other forms is used to set the stage for a session with the expert . And the results of this session are recorded using other forms. In sessions with an expert underwriter in which I participated, for example, the underwriter worked through, one by one, a paper stack of applications for life insurance, thinking aloud as he did so. His utterances were recorded and later transcribed. Paper -based applications, cassette recordings (this was in the 80’s) and electronic transcription were each used in knowledge elicitation.

Knowledge instillation.”Instillation” comes from “instill” as in “to cause to become part of someone’s nature”. Instillation neatly contrasts with “installation”. Much as we might like to, we can’t simply “install” a new body of knowledge in our brains or in an organization as we might install a new software program on our computers. Knowledge elicitation is only step one. Knowledge instillation is often the more difficult step in the transfer of knowledge. Popular books on knowledge management write of the barriers to transfer and change (e.g., Argyris, 1994). We read of the importance of creating a culture to promote knowledge transfer (e.g., O’Dell, Grayson & Essaides, 1998) and of creating communities for the sharing of knowledge (e.g., Snyder & McDermott, 2002).

Challenges remain even when recipients are willing. Of potential relevance is wealth of education research on methods of teaching and learning (see, for example, Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000). Of direct relevance, for example, is an ongoing debate concerning the extent to which – putting it plainly – people can be taught or need to learn for themselves (see, for example, Duffy, Lowyck, & Jonassen, 1993; Schwartz & Bransford, 1998).

Person-to-person contact remains one of the most effective ways to transfer knowledge. In educational contexts, for example, students working with individual human tutors test at levels of performance as much as two standard deviations higher than students in a conventional classroom (Bloom, 1984). Identifying expertise and locating experts is an area of research in its own right (e.g., McDonald and Ackerman, 2000). Now the Web provides a basis for a transfer of knowledge on a variety of topics ranging from home repair to cancer treatment[6].

We can also recognize that instances KE and KI are commonplace and by no means limited to companies and classrooms. If someone asks you for directions or if you try to teach someone skill that you have and they don’t (e.g., driving a car or driving a golf ball), you are doing KE. You may imagine the route or the way you drive in your “mind’s eye”. Or you may actually do the thing you mean to tell or teach. You may go to the destination or you may take the golf swing – observing your actions as you do so. In these examples, your objective is to render your skill, your knowledge, into forms of information (spoken instructions, hand gestures, reenactments) that can be communicated to someone else. But acts of KE are only a step one. Step two is for the other person to really understand, to “get it”, and not just to nod as if he or she does. The ultimate proof is in the action but by then the costs of failure may be too high. Managers and parents alike often apply techniques to test for transfer such as having the intended recipient repeat the instructions or testing for choice points (“what will you do if..”).

Whether or not the ordering is correct, information would appear to play a pivotal role in efforts to understand both data and knowledge. In the Zins report, definitions for “data” and “information”, though distinct, frequently overlap. Likewise, definitions for “information” and “knowledge” overlap. For no participant, however, is there any evidence for an overlap between or confusion among the terms “data” and “knowledge”.

What is information? This question has been a repeated topic of discussion in its own right (Braman, 1989; Buckland, 1991, 1997; Capurro. R & Hjørland, 2003; Cornelius, 2002; Machlup, 1983). Buckland (1991), after an analysis of the many senses in which the word is used, concludes that “we are unable to say confidently of anything that it could not be information” (p 256).

Indeed, the efforts people make to understand their world are usefully characterized as acts of information processing (e.g., Broadbent, 1958). According to this view, our intelligence comes from our ability to process the raw data received through our senses into concepts, patterns, and implications. Everything “out there” that we are able to perceive is potential information.

Whether sensory data actually yields information depends. The seminal work of Shannon (Shannon, 1948) and Shannon and Weaver (Shannon & Weaver, 1949) introduced the notion that the information content of a message or event can be measured according to its impact on a recipient’s uncertainty. The message that “Bob is coming to the meeting” has no information value, for example, if its intended recipient knows this already or if the message is given to the recipient in a language she does not understand. In neither case does the message do anything to reduce the recipient’s “uncertainty” concerning who will be attending the meeting.

But making information exclusively about the reduction of uncertainty has come to be seen as overly restrictive (see  Aftab, Cheung, Kim, Thakkar, & Yeddanapudi, 2001; Capurro. R & Hjørland, 2003; Cornelius, 2002). An exchange of information has a sender as well as a recipient, for example, and the exchange is not always collaborative. The sender  may intend to “clarify the situation” and so reduce the recipient’s uncertainty. But of course the sender may have many other intentions. The sender may want to impress or persuade. The sender may want to increase the recipient’s uncertainty (“have you considered these other possibilities…”). The sender may even want to confuse or deceive.

Expressions of Intention  occur  often in the definitions of information provided by participants in the study described by Zins. Intention provides us with one way to distinguish information from data. Information is “ the intentional composition of data by a sender with the goal of modifying the knowledge state of an interpreter or receiver” (p 485). Information is “data arranged or interpreted … to provide meaning.” (p. 486).

A thing can be information or informative from the standpoint of the sender and gibberish or a non-event from the standpoint of intended recipient. I click the “OK” button on a Web site with the intention of making a hotel reservation. As far as I’m concerned the choices I’ve made as summarized on the Web page are information. But there is no information on the recipient’s side if the transmission doesn’t arrive, arrives garbled or is overlooked. To take another example, depending upon our life philosophy or religious conviction, we may or may not see nature as an intentional agent in the transmission of information. Regardless, we express the intention to treat sensory data as information when we say things like “What is my body/this tree/the sky/etc. trying to tell me?”

Just as the context-dependent notions of intention, uncertainty and meaning can be used to distinguish information from data, information as “out there” can be distinguished from  knowledge as “in here”.  Participants in the Zins report describe knowledge as “embodied in humans”, “assimilated” (p. 480), “in the mind of the knower” (p. 481), “held in human brains” (p. 483), “the interiorized content of information” (p. 485), “internalized or understood information” (p. 486).

Information as external is also  “information as thing” Buckland (1991). With reference to this slant on information, one participant in the Zins study referred to knowledge as “no thing” (p. 481). Blair (2002) explores the “thingness” of data, information and knowledge through their substitution for one another in sentences such as “Put the data on the desk” or “Get the data and fax it to New York” (p. 1020). “information” substitutes readily for “data. But “knowledge” does not.

We acquire information quickly; we acquire knowledge only gradually. We can, for example, quickly acquire a book of German grammar and a German-English dictionary. But we acquire the ability to speak German only over time. We might say “I had the book of German grammar last week but seem to have lost it”. But we would not, unless as an aftermath of a serious stroke, say thing like “I knew how to speak German last week, but seem to have lost this ability”.  But just as knowledge is acquired gradually, we can also speak of its gradual loss. We might say, for example, “I knew how to speak German in college but seem to have lost this knowledge over the years…”.

Knowledge is everywhere within us but nowhere in particular. Knowledge is distributed. Knowledge is internal. We have knowledge. But rats too acquire a kind of knowledge as they learn to complete a maze. As Lashley (1950) made apparent in a famous series of experiments, this knowledge is not a thing that can be excised from the hapless rat through surgery. Performance on the maze degrades only gradually as a function the amount of brain tissue removed.  The knowledge is apparently  distributed throughout the cortex of an animal.

Larger assemblies of organisms, organizations of people and whole societies can also be seen to embody various kinds of knowledge. In his careful study of navigational activities on a carrier ship, for example, Hutchins (1994) described an organic process in which different abilities and responsibilities were distributed among the crew in a redundant fashion. This overlap in responsibilities and training procedures gave the ship as a whole an ability to repair and recover from loses in individual personnel.

Knowledge is clearly a good thing and worthy of our efforts to acquire and transfer. But knowledge is not a thing to be managed directly. Knowledge is managed only indirectly through information.  As one participant writes “Knowledge is not transferable, but through information we can communicate about it” (p. 486). Another participant writes “represented knowledge is information” (p. 481).

Consider the example of a manager who wishes to instill in her staff the knowledge of a new procedure of cost accounting. Her objective is that her staff follow this new procedure. She might wish there were a simple “neural plug-in” that could be applied to each member of her staff to accomplish the desired change. But this is not possible. Instead, the manager must use various forms of information. She communicates the new procedure in a meeting. She reinforces this procedure through email reminders and through diagrams posted around the office. She might even place sticky notes on the sides of display screens that her staff use. 

Speeches in meetings, email messages, paper notes that stick — the manager uses these and other forms of  information as part of her intention to communicate new procedures and to effect a change that is eventually internalized in her staff.

She’ll judge her efforts a success when staff observe changes of procedure as a matter of course. Knowledge is as O’Dell et al. say “information in action” (1998, p. 5). Similarly, we might say that information is “data in motion” – data communicated, data sent or received with intention.

Alas, notwithstanding the manager’s intentions as she sends her directives, to some of her staff, these may be better described as data – ignored or not understood and certainly having no impact on their behavior or ways of thinking.

Will a message have a desired impact on its intended recipients? Obviously, the answer depends upon the content of a message. Some changes in office procedure are much easier to communicate and instill than others. But messages of roughly the same content can have very different impact depending upon attributes of their packaging and delivery.

Elsewhere, I define two terms that are useful in this chapter’s discussion:

An information item is a packaging of information as a thing. Examples of information items include: 1.paper documents, 2. electronic documents, digital photographs, digital music, digital film and other files, 3. email messages, 4. web pages or 5. references (e.g., shortcuts, aliases) to any of the above. Items encapsulate information in a persistent form that can be created, modified, stored, retrieved, given a name, tags and other properties, moved, copied, distributed, deleted and otherwise manipulated. An information item has an associated information form which is determined by the tools and applications that support these operations. Common forms of information include paper documents, e-documents and other files, email messages and web bookmarks.(Jones, 2007, p. 37).

The office manager uses at least three forms of information to communicate a change in office procedure: 1. The spoken words of a meeting.  2. An email announcement. 3. Sticky notes. The second and third are information items. The first is not (though its digital recording would be).

The ways in which an item is manipulated will vary depending upon its form and the tools available for this form. The tools used for interaction with paper-based information items include, for example, paper clips, staplers, filing cabinets and the flat surfaces of a desktop. In interactions with digital information items, we depend upon the support of various computer-based tools and applications such as email applications, file managers, web browsers, etc. The ways we delete a paper document differ from the ways we delete an electronic document (e.g., tossing in the trash or shredding vs. using “Cut” or “Delete”) but some notion of deleting applies to each (a similarity the Macintosh reinforces through its metaphorical “trash can”).

The information item establishes a manageable level of abstraction for discussions of information and knowledge management. There are, for example, many essential similarities in the way people interact with information items, regardless of their form. Whether people are looking at a new email message in their inbox, a newly discovered web site or the business card they have just been handed at a conference, many of the same basic decisions must be made: “Is this relevant (to me)? To what does it relate? Do I need to act now or can I wait? If I wait, can I get back to this item later? Where should I put it? Will I remember to look?”

But also a person’s interactions with information vary greatly depending upon its form. Interactions with incoming email messages, for example, are often driven by the expectation of a timely response and perhaps also by the awareness that, when an email message scrolls out of view without some processing, it is apt to be quickly forgotten. A paper printout of the same message may be easier to read at a opportune moment (e.g., while stuck in traffic or standing in subway) but the printout is also more difficult to retrieve later if misplaced.

Some forms of information favor the sender; others the receiver (see Grudin, 1988).  For example, we usually speak more quickly and easily than we write so that as senders of information, we may prefer the spoken to the written word. But as recipients of information, we generally read faster than we listen. Moreover, we can skim and skip through written information – something not easily done with an oral recording. Asymmetries between sender and recipient in the costs and benefits of different forms of information have implications for both information and knowledge management, which are explored further in the next section.

To elaborate:

1.       Information is a thing ; knowledge is not. Information as thing (Buckland, 1991) can be pointed to and experienced (or ignored). Information can take form in information items such documents or email messages, which can be modified, stored, retrieved, send, received, deleted and otherwise manipulated (Jones, 2007). Knowledge as “no thing” (Zins, 2007) cannot be experienced directly. Knowledge cannot be examined. Knowledge is imbedded. distributed. Knowledge is hidden. Knowledge is inferred through its impact on observable behaviors (information). Knowledge cannot be represented directly. All attempts to represent knowledge give us information in one form or another.

2.       There is no management of knowledge except through the management of information. If knowledge lies hidden not to be experienced directly but rather to be inferred, then knowledge management must, to a large extent, be about its elicitation as information which can then be managed directly. Knowledge management also encompasses efforts to move in the other direction – from information to knowledge. For example, A company develops a new set of “best practices”. Knowledge management includes various uses of information aimed at effecting a change the attitudes and behavior of people within the company. Best practices are expressed not only in a formal document (which few will ever read) but also in posters displayed on cubicle dividers, in broadcast email announcements and in a film that employees are required to see as a group and discuss afterwards.

3.       PKM is a very useful subset of PIM. Personal information management is a large area. How does a person – any of us – make use of information to accomplish a life’s goals, fulfill la life’s roles and meet a life’s challenges? How – with better tools, techniques, training, policies, procedures, strategies, organizational schemes, etc. – might we do this better? Personal knowledge management as a subset of PIM gives additional focus. What do we know? Do we know what we think we know? Are we under-selling or over-selling ourselves? What should we be learning? How should we be learning so that the knowledge we need is integrated into our everyday lives? At the same time, PIM, as a superset of PKM,  provides additional grounding. All of our feats of PKM will be accomplished, necessarily, through the use of information.

More on each point to follow. Do people want references too?

The topic of conversation shifted throughout the evening – first the weather (the Seattle area had an unusual two week plus period of cold and snow before Christmas), then eating disorders, then a discussion of teachers and parents at the elementary school that our children attend. And so on.

There were six of us sitting around the table. Each of us told one or more stories, in turn, for each of the topics. 

Take us back in time… say, ten thousand years. Many things would be different. We might be gathered around a campfire instead of a dining room table. There might be very different rules for who sat where and who participated. And, aside from possibly the weather, topics would certainly be different!

But it’s likely that we’d still be telling stories.

Much has been written of the what, how and why of storytelling. For starters, try the Wikipedia article on “Storytelling”.  (I also enjoyed a recent article, “The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn”, http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secrets-of-storytelling). We tell stories to get attention, sympathy, recognition and praise. We tell stories to establish and reinforce life values and principles. We tell stories to understand and make sense of our lives. We tell stories to exchange information with and establish connections to other people.

It’s no surprise, then, that we love to tell stories. We get so much out of our storytelling.

But we often avoid organizing. Think of your office or the basement or that closet in the back room. Think of the documents on your  computer’s hard drive or the email messages in your inbox.

Suppose there were a way to combine storytelling and organizing? No matter how many stories we tell, our offices, basements and closets will be just as messy as before. But the story, as it were, for our digital information is different.

Here are two stories of how digital story-telling can also organize:

·         Jill posts a series of photos to Flickr taken from a summer vacation to Italy. She writes captions. The sequence of pictures and their captions tell a story of her summer vacation. Her travel companions comment. Other friends comment. Jill comments on these comments. As this happens the story is told in greater detail. In this way, storytelling is a social interaction that happens over time and, potentially, across great distances.

What gets organized? For one thing, the pictures. The pictures on Jill’s camera or on her hard drive are a source of guilt and foreboding (“I really should do something with these pictures before I forget… “  “What if I lose them or delete them???!!”). The pictures on the Web set the stage for an enjoyable interaction between Jill and her friends.  Text from Jill and her friends is part of the dialog – part of storytelling. Later on – next year, 20 years from now – this same text can be used to index, document and organize the pictures.

·         Bob blogs to describe his project to re-model his house.  Bob wants to do most of the work himself. He’ll contract out only for specialty work such as for the plumbing and electrical. He’s done small repairs around the house before but nothing approaching the current re-model.  Like Jill with her photos, Bob blogs mostly for the social interaction. Bob wants his friends and family to know what’s going on.  He wants to tell his story about all the work he is doing and all the hurdles he is clearing along the way. In response, friends and family post comments with words of encouragement and sometimes even with useful advice.

What gets organized?  Lots of information concerning the what and why of various decisions. Bob may find these notes useful years later when there is a need to repair or replace various systems that are part of the re-model (like the sound system).  And, since blog entries include web references for information related to the re-model, Bob looks back to these entries even now while the re-model is ongoing.

In these examples, the primary motivation is social. People want to tell their story. But the information is usefully organized as a side effect.  Are there other examples?