New Geek magazine from Pragmatic Programmers

Publisher Pragmatic Programmers has launched sort of an agile published magazine called PragPub distributed for free in pdf, epub and mobi format. Consequentially the first issue is called first iteration. Editor of the magazine is Michael Swaine, former editor-in-chief at Dr. Dobb’s Journal.
The magazine features high quality articles expressly for the magazine. Attached to each article is list of directly linked useful links. The main articles are:

• The Layoffs Are Coming!
  How to Keep Your Tech Job by Andy Lester


• Why Clojure?
  Rich Hickey interviewd by Michael Swaine


• When Things Go Wrong
  Clojure’s Exceptional Handling of Exceptions by Stuart Halloway


• Pragmatic Publishing
  Dave Thomas (one of the owners of Pragmatic Programmer) interviewd by Michael Swaine

The set is completed by Welcome to Prag Pub (intro to the magazine), Up Front (Editorial), Choice Bits (tweets, posts and chatter on every topic in the world), How Do We…? (have a look behind the curtain how PragProg does business), Swaine’s World (in which Michael Swaine loses his job and offers you career advice), The Quiz (geeky quiz about lesser known programming languages), Shady Illuminations (column by John Shade on Microsofts Bing) and Calendar (geeky events).
Its well written, informative, high quality and just fun reading. And by the way Michael Swaine is one of my early computer science heroes from his time with Dr. Dobb’s Journal.

From Knowledge Management to Competence Management - Part I

Introduction

This will be the start of a series of articles dealing with the transition of knowledge management to competence networking. Planned topics are (at least) the nature of knowledge, classical knowledge management, the idea of competence management and which current developments in technology are able to support the realization of a competence network site.

The nature of knowledge

Most of the following ideas can be found in Managing Flow: A Process Theory of the Knowledge-Based Firm by I. Nonaka et al. We will use it only as a short introduction to advance quickly to the more practical topics.

First we have to make a distinction between knowledge and information. The german translation "Wissen" mixes the meaning of the two terms a bit so I would like to explain the probably obvious: information are facts, which can be collected, written down and transmitted. Knowledge can be divided in explicit knowledge which can be written down and transmitted and implicit or tacid knowledge, which can be described as "knowing how to do something". Tacid knowledge is not readily transferable from one person to another.

Explicit knowledge seems to be strongly related to information but knowledge is subjective while information is not. Knowledge is an attribute acquired by a human being and therefore according to cognitive science filtered by personal views and experiences. A different person could come to different results when put into the same situation.

This leads directly to the next feature: knowledge is process-related which means that it is acquired in a process of interaction between one or more human beings and its or their environment. Different process of acquisition may result in different outcome.

The process of knowledge acquisition normally ends with the subject identifying an acceptable outcome. What one views as acceptable has to obey our rules of aesthetics. So acceptable knowledge normally means aesthetic knowledge.

Knowledge is an external value which means its value (for a company) depends on the number of people possessing the knowledge while its exact value is uncertain since its subjective.

Its non-physical since it's not used up when consumed. That also means that its transfer or publication can not be undone - just like information.

Conclusion

All this means that knowledge can only be acquired in practice. Its created in the process of human beings interacting with each other and their environment. It's not static, it's completely dynamic. Storing it is like cutting a twig from a tree.

The next posting will deal with classical knowledge management and the relation of firms to knowledge, also known as the the knowledge-based view of the firm. Stay curious and leave a comment!

Book review: Managing Humans by Michael Lopp

Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager is a book written by software manager Michael Lopp to help IT managers do a better job and coworkers to better understand what their boss dows and why he does it that way.
The book consists of three parts. In part one Michael Lopp figures out some general means or capabilities for managers to survive more or less critical situations. His writing style is sometimes a bit rough or direct but nevers lacks respect for the people he's talking about. A common pattern in his book, is that he tries to identify roles or types of persons and gives them a name and face. So you will learn in part one about Fez, the old warhorse who made himself indispensable by writing code only he understands. You also read about when to say no to someone and when to use a mandate that was given to you by the senior management.
Part two deals with thw pros and cons of processes in software development and some events that can constrain or enhance the process of creating high quality software. Especially enlightening for me was the chapter about "Malcolm Events", small details of issues or specification which probably never get documented but can lead to great damage or delay in late phases of the release process because nobody paid attention to those things.
The last part of "Managing Humans" is titled "Versions of You" and describes some more personal aspects of working as a manager in software development. Especially insightful is his description, how he scans job applications and what he reads and what not.
My conclusion is that this book is worth reading for anyone working in software development, not only managers. One small drawback is, that some of his social situations depict american company culture and are not that simple to translate to work life in Europe. But that doesn't impair the entertaining inside out look you get on those strange human beings called managers.
PS: To read more of Michael Lopp try his Blog or follow @rands on Twitter.

Does Twitter need a categorizing system?

Last week there was one of those "for what the hell should I use Twitter?" discussions going on a mailinglist. One guy proposed that Twitter is due to its broad scope of messages and topics not interesting enough for him. So does Twitter need a categorizing system?

I instantly answered this question from my point of view on Twitter with “No, please never do that!”. My background in messaging and chat systems is IRC. There you have so called channels (something like a discussion room) you can join and which normally deals with some more or less specific topic. So I know systems categorizing messages on different topics. And thats why I like Twitter: I can read stuff from people from very different cutural or business background. I’m a complete dumb ass in photography but I follow professional photographer doing architectural shootings. I like his photos. I’m also following one of the sneaker girls although I’m not very much into sneakers (OK, into shoes, but not esp. sneakers . I’m just interested in in many kinds of stuff and I don’t want the system limiting me in embracing all those interesting topics.

Some time ago I read David Wineberger’s brilliant book Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder or the german translation Das Ende der Schublade: Die Macht der neuen digitalen Unordnung. Now I see a practical example for his thesis that future systems will allow you to grab, gather and sort things just as you like them avoiding prebuilt categories.

Sometimes the categorizing system is overstrained (how many categories and subcategories does “the world” need?), in other cases “looking into a category” just isn’t what the users want to do. On the other hand: having a category system you can estanlish and fill by yourself is something very different and might be useful for people thinking in such categories.

The good aspects of a crisis?

Dutch management magazine Management Team features in the current issue an article about Ben Verwaayen who recently reorganized BT British Telecom and is now responsible for restructuring the french Alcatel-Lucent. Verwaayen pleads that an economic crisis is good to realign the path a company and the views of its employees. When not experiencing the extraordinary pressure of an economic crisis he states people tend to preserve their belongings and try to reclaim assets lost. Thus a crisis provides the momentum needed to make unpopular changes needed.

Verwaayen proposes the zero-based budgeting process as a means to control expenses spend in times of crisis. Zero-based budgeting questions the complete amount of budget supplied to a department for every administrational period. Standard budgeting in contrast only discusses the delta amounts from period to period, not taking into account the basic allowance.

Cutting old habits should create room for talented and imaginative future generations working in other social structures and business environments. Verwaayen advovcates for the investment in education (knowledge industry) instead of subsidies for stagnating physical industries.

Once accrued rights don't seem to be granted any more. The only thing that Verwaayen takes for shure is that things have to change which might be painful. But if nothing changes the situation won't improve. Investment in education may pay off but Verwaayen claims there's no proof for that. I would love to prove he was right.