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The summary of the Blogwalk discussion on the Knowledge Board provides a rather definitive statement of how communities of practice have certain advantages over weblogs as a knowledge management tool:

Communities are better social structures for problem-solving, knowledge stewarding and innovation

Part of the justification for this is as follows:

A weblog is usually very poor in content structure… In order to be reuseable, a body of knowledge geared towards action typically has more structure: description, keywords, type of information, type of content, type of data, type of document, summary, domain of knowledge, subdomain, attributes, etc.

I’m somewhat sceptical about this. Much of my involvement with our projects is in technical areas – in fact sometimes, it seems that all I do is solve technical glitches that prevent our solutions from working. One of the main tools for this is the collective knowledge of people who have been there, done that with the particular problem I’m facing – and increasingly, their knowledge is expressed in the form of a blog entry. “I’ve been wrestling with problem x, and here’s what I did to resolve it’ is a typical style of entry that will be thrown up when you Google a ‘how do I fix this kind of problem’-type question.

And occasionally, that’s something I contribute back to the world at large, relating a tale of how I tamed the recalcitrant beast of PHP – or whatever – through breathtaking feats of daring-do. (Or more prosaically, fixing typos in the code

But if I had to structure that knowledge, by codifying it and entering into some kind of knowledge base, it’s probably something that I wouldn’t bother with. Firstly, publicly-accessible formal knowledge bases of this kind are few and far between in the types of areas I find myself working in; and secondly because the knowledge is dispersed around a community of involved individuals, it’s unlikely that there would be any grand coming-together to agree such a codification structure in the first place. In that respect, dealing with open source developers is somewhat akin to herding cats.

So perhaps the issue here is not about the codification and classification of the knowledge in the first place, and more about the ease of search and retrieval afterwards. One of the frustrations I encounter daily is knowing how to phrase searches so that they will bring back the hits that I’m after – there are broad similarities in the way that problems are referred to and explained, but ultimately every description is personal. Formal codification would solve this problem, but it would be at the cost of much of the knowledge not being expressed in the first place – so perhaps here is a situation where it’s more a question of quantity, than quality?

There’s an interesting article at Knowledge Board focussing on the use of blogs within communities of practice – and in particular, how they compare with other “online community tools” like forums and mailing lists.

“the reader has no obligation to read, comment, trackback, blogroll, or subscribe to the RSS feeds. “Online communities” on the other hand often include some form of social obligation on behalf of its members and typically push entries in a central location were everybody can (and often must) read them. Thus, they are much more invasive and time-consuming.”

For me, this is one of the key advantages of blogs (and particularly of webfeeds). I maintain control of my interactions with the community – while I’m kept aware of what’s going on through the flow of webfeeds, I can respond in my own time and asynchronously. Forums and bulletin boards, on the other hand, demand that I make a point of visiting, even if there’s nothing updated to view. So you could argue that one of the major advantages of webfeeds is avoiding the cognitive dissonance that occurs when you visit a forum only to find there’s nothing of interest there.

A network of weblogs is open and self-organizing. New ideas and information can circulate freely across the planet through referrals and trackbacks.

An interesting observation – although there was nothing stopping me linking to, or quoting from, forums or mailing lists. the advantage for an individual as a content creator is that you can be aware of how people are reacting to, and linking with, your postings. It’s a form of feedback loop – if I utter something controversial, the pings and the trackbacks will keep me in touch with the reactions of others.

There’s a downside to this of course, which the more contemplative bloggers refer to as the “echo chamber” – from an outside perspective the ‘blogosphere’ (a term I loathe, personally, but it’s a useful shorthand for ‘the blogging community’ which doesn’t sound much better) often seems like a inbred clique of individuals who’s only obsession is commenting on what A said about B. Which is exactly what this post is, of course, but you get my drift…