C World

Dave Pollard (How to Save the World) gave a terrific talk at KMworld in the track that I moderated. He does such a great job pulling the threads together: knowledge management, what’s happening in Enterprise 2.0 and social software, the changing workforce and in particular the changing role of the information professional (IP).

The title theme of his talk (and a reprise that he did at a later panel session, “Where in the World is KM Going?”) was “From Content to Context and from Collection to Connection.” Using these “C” words, he echoes my own thinking about the transition from one stage of KM to another. I have used a similar model in my work:

(From The Social Network Toolkit, Ark Group 2005.)

Anyway, Dave’s talk  got me thinking about the “C” words again. I posted some time ago about the U.S. military shift from “Command and Control” to “Communicate and Collaborate”.) The first time I saw a list of “C” words was in the early days (1993) of the World Wide Web. I was working at Digital Equipment Corporation and was responsible both for an external site (www.windowsnt.digital.com - don’t bother looking now) and an internal intranet site. There were a lot of smart people bringing the internet to life at Digital; the corporate communications folks worked with us to develop standards for our sites but also a set of principles, all of which were based on “C” words which began with Communication and Content and ended with Certification (I don’t recall all that came in between, but I recall that the corpcom was really big on certifying web pages).

Later, and more relevant to me were Stowe Boyd’s Four C’s, which I first heard him talk about at a Boston conference in 1998 or 1999:

• Communication
• Coordination
• Collaboration
• Community

My 2006 blog augmented these with Connection, Context (yeah!), and Content Management (ok, Content). A commenter added “Collection, Creativity, and Conscience.”

Finally, just a few days ago my friend Andrew Gent blogged about the “alternatives to collaboration” — Conspiring and Competing. He makes an interesting argument about how both alternatives have definite advantages (as well as disadvantages) and should not be ignored. Worth a read.

Maybe we keep turning to these C words because we like the alliteration, but is there something else? Some sense of the relationship among these that might be discoverable when we think about our C-world in all its Complexity?

Dave Pollard’s slides are available on Slideshare.