Category Archives: Associations

Stewart Brand Quote

Posted on by David

I really like this quote by Stewart Brand from his keynote at the IA Summit 2003 (Boxes and Arrows Wrap-up):

Learning (fast) plus continuity (slow) equals robustness and adaptivity.

That basically describes the approach of the most successful associations that I know of. They have a long history and strong identity (continuity) but are always trying to innovate and adapt themselves to a changing environment (fast). The continuity gives them the ability to overcome and adapt the short-term failures that are part of the innovation process.

More on TrackBack for Meetings

Posted on by David

From Doug Fox:

Let’s say that I’m producing an upcoming conference and tradeshow in six months. I could post each educational session as a separate weblog entry in my weblog. This way any interested participants or prospect could 1) subscribe to these feeds of session and updated session information, and 2) comment on any of the educational sessions before the program started.

That would definitely work.

Another option would be to create a trackback category (only MT offers this currently, as far as I know) for each session and allow anyone to ping it and subscribe to an RSS feed of the pings. The conference organizers could ping that same category for any updates to the session. A category for the entire show should be created to keep meta info out of the specific session channels.

Potential down-side: ping spam. Many people have predicted it as a problem and I would imagine that a conference with TB might be high profile enough to gather a fair amount. KMpings, which I host, has not gotten a lot of ping spam but it may be niche enough to not attract it. A conference where exposure = $ could definitely get some.

Perhaps pings could be moderated somehow in a future version of MT?

Trackback for Live Events

Posted on by David

Doug Fox has been been tracking how bloggers have been interacting at live, f2f, meetings via their blogs. In this post he mentions:

Right now, there is no convenient way for presenters/attendees to reference educational sessions.

I think he is getting at the fact that there is no way with most meeting event web sites to find out who is blogging them live or immediately after the fact.

This sounds like a job for trackback. Attendees could ping individual sessions so that other attendees can see reaction and feedback in a central place. As a matter of fact, Ben and Mena Trott did exactly this for the Mac OS X Conference last year.

Enterprise Information Architecture

Posted on by David

Lou Rosenfeld will be doing a road show about IA design for large organizations.

I’ll be tackling the frustrating challenge of getting a large, multi-departmental and hugely political web environment to behave like a single, unified, user-centric web site.

I wish I could have taken this course about six months ago! We are in the process of finalizing the IA for a redesign of our main web site. Crafting the information architecture for a non-profit membership association web site is as much a political process as it is a design exercise.

Article on Scholarly Publishing and Copyright

Posted on by David

Below is a link and abstract for an article in First Monday that explores the potential paths for scholarly publishing vis-a-vis the Web and copyright.

Coming from the publishing side, it is hard to imagine not extracting subscription income for access to archives of journal content. However, I can definitely see the value of free access for both the authors and the overall research community. When you throw in tenure calculations it becomes a very complex situation.

Whatever your point of view, the article is definitely worth a read if you are involved in academic publishing.

Copyright Contradictions in Scholarly Publishing

This paper examines contradictions in how copyright works with the publishing of scholarly journals. These contradictions have to do with the protection of the authors’ interest and have become apparent with the rise of open access publishing as an alternative to the traditional commercial model of selling journal subscriptions. Authors may well be better served, as may the public which supports research, by open access journals because of its wider readership and early indications of greater scholarly impact. This paper reviews the specifics of publishers’ contracts with editors and authors, as well as the larger spirit of copyright law in seeking to help scholars to better understand the consequences the choices they make between commercial and open access publishing models for the future of academic knowledge.

Why KM Now

Posted on by David

From thought?horizon (via McGee):

I think knowledge management’s prominence has deeper roots in an individual’s need to learn at this point in history. People are finding they need to become more reliant and old ways don’t serve them any more. We are no longer content to take what the boss gives us and seek greater choice. We are starting to see the need to learn again and that is best done in a community. Knowledge sharing/management is a community based activity.

This illustrates the great opportunity that professional societies and associations have right now: to reengage their memberships by facilitating learning and knowledge sharing among the members.

As the rest of the post above goes on to say, this is nothing new. See the quote below from Principles of Association Management, by Henry Ernstthal:

Professional societies can trace their roots back to the late Renaissance, when scientific societies were formed to collect and disseminate knowledge. The earliest of these societies, the Academia Secretorum Naturai of Naples, was organized in 1560. (page 5)

Associations are a manifestation of the desire to share knowledge among individuals within a profession or discipline.

Association Bloggers

Posted on by David

I’ve come across a couple of association-oriented weblogs written by other association types this past week. Woohoo! I’m not alone!

Jeff De Cagna got his blog going recently and Jeffrey Cufaude has been writing for several months. Both were presenters at the Denver Convention talking about leadership, association strategy and KM.

I think I’ll start a list of association bloggers. Let me know if you write one.