Social software and SSK

I don't know if I'm actually getting sick; since we're going up to the mountains this weekend, I sure hope not. But after dinner I started feeling-- not achy and feverish, but the way you sometimes feel right before you get that way. I'm now in bed with a cup of tea, a sweater, and a fleece atop the sweater. I finally feel warm.

I've recently been working on an essay on the future of collective intelligence tools, and it's been one of the more elusive yet rewarding subjects I've pursued recently. Collective intelligence is one of those terms that means radically different things to different people, or sometimes means nothing in particular at all: I've been interested in how new technologies like del.icio.us, wikimedia, and folksonomic classification systems may mark the growth of a new understanding of what collective intelligence is, and how in the workplace or organization you go about maintaining and cultivating it.

What I'm coming up with is a sense that these new tools represent something pretty dramatically different from traditional knowledge management tools. Most conventional KM tools have been about the diffusion of best practices, standardization of processes, and formal descriptions of workflows and thought-processes; they've been aimed at existing work groups and teams.

The new tools, in contrast, are far more agnostic about practices; they don't try to change the way people work, or enforce a One Best Way (the updated Weberian/Taylorist regime that my friend Aneesh Aneesh calls "algocratic" management). They value diversity over standardization-- or maybe the better way to put it is that the value of diversity outweighs the problems it creates. They seek to standardize output-- or more often, provide gently standardized descriptions of output. They can be used by existing work groups (there's a common IFTF del.icio.us account, for example), but they also can make disparate individuals who share common interests aware of each other. They tend to eschew formal descriptions for common language ("folksonomies," not taxonomies or controlled vocabularies).

There's one other very big difference between traditional knowledge management and this new flavor (social knowledge management? KM 2.0?). The old one sees knowledge as a thing to be conserved: it's a resource that can be extracted by managers, abstracted into formal rules, and transplanted from one place to another. The new one sees knowledge not as a thing, but as practices; not as formal rules, but as tacit knowledge and culture. In other words, knowledge doesn't exist outside of people and groups. It's constructed, never finished. It's a view of knowledge right out of the sociology of scientific knowledge - science technology studies playbook.

Maybe I'm just pattern-matching on something that's really more inchoate and random, or misreading the evidence, but I suspect this is A Thing To Pay Attention To. For better or worse, the world is becoming more STS-like; or rather, I'm seeing more examples of people behaving and designing things as if they recognized that STS was a pretty good description of the way the world-- the world of knowledge-production, anyway-- works. Who knows if Ross Mayfield and Stewart Butterfield have read Ludwig Fleck's Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact; but their work acts like it.

My tea is cold. Must abandon bed and make some more.

[To the tune of Peter Gabriel, "The Feeling Begins," from the album "Passion: Music For The Last Temptation Of Christ".]