AIESEC is a worldwide association of college students. They work like a business, selling economics and commerce student exchanges to employers.

Knowledge loss is a constant problem. Because of graduation, they have 50% personnel turnover. They evolved clear procedures each part of their operations, including recruiting and socializing replacement members.

Dody Gunawinata set up an AIESEC blogging community. Dody:   

Weblogs allow us to channel our creative energy into issues that we care about as individuals. When you do the work in the organization, the focus is exchange. Other things you care about might not fit in that. Weblogs allow you to find other people inside the organization that care about the issues. You don't need AIESEC to give you x forum or x committee to try working addressing your y concern. What AIESEC gives you is the network. You wade through the networks to find those people. Weblogs are making it easier to do so.

Why is this important to AIESEC?

1. Continuity. It helps with Local Committee (the campus AIESEC branch) turnover. Knowledge problems are severe. Blogs help collect and share it, improving LC continuity. Most locally-specific knowledge evaporates with every graduation. Every semester the new members start almost from scratch. An hour or two summarizing blogs from last year's crew can be worth a month of mistakes.   
2. Community. It gives AIESECers voices that persist even when they are in another country. The RCS opens a window to discover like-minded colleagues around the world.
3. Productivity. RSS and newsreaders will help always busy students work more as a team, producing more paid internships each year.

Why is this important to klogging and Radio?

• Virality. AIESEC interns wind up in enterprises around the world, bringing their tools along.
• Laboratory. AIESEC will put Radio and the RCS through its paces. The rapid turnover, transnational and multicultural demands will stress the tools, pointing to the next capabilities we need.
• Evidence. We should be able to observe KM effects in dozens of locations, over multiple generations. Measures of productivity, quality, and satisfaction are already part of the AIESEC culture so this shoud be easy.  

Vertical Hold:

Can we trust this policy. Bush, Citing Fire Hazards, Wants Logging Rules Eased. President Bush will ask Congress to relax environmental laws so that the...

Burning down the forest is bad. Let's cut it down instead. And the Interior Department while we're at it.    

[more shrubbery.]

Where are weblogs going? How will they adapt to the workplace?

1. Blogging platforms are quickly growing smarter.

Blogs are document centric (the post is at the core) so they can evolve toward what you think of as project / process / knowledge management tools. XML, SOAP, databases, and content management services are part of the blogging toolkit. Content syndication and RSS news readers are part of it too.

2. Blogspace is joining the infrastructure.

We can build bridges to existing systems and processes. I can blog a hiring process, integrated with an human capital system. I can annotate a mySAP Engineering Change Order, linking to the transaction and to other materials. I can comment on project progress, tailoring it for different stakeholders. Some of these may happen by year end. http://www.hrxml.org/, http://www.pmxml.org/xml

3. Community tools are improving too.

Social capital is getting easier to observe and measure in blogspace; no reason it shouldn't happen in your enterprise's blogspace. Every week we see new tools that help users identify what's new, what's relevant, who's the expert. We see people forming communities of interest/practice, project teams, spreading memes and tools; evidence that people are reading as much or more than they're writing. 

4. Knowledge extraction is coming.

Weblogs leave a trail that can be mined by social network analyzers, text miners, taxonomy and categorizers, and search engines. All of this is work that today's KM systems ask the poster to do at the time of the post. Blogs lower the effort hurdle; they're easier, so they get used. And their trail of time-stamped posts, citations and cross references, traffic logs, and syndication feeds (in XML) mean that other tools can be added when you get to it.

5. Blogs compete with MS Word and email as a writing tool.

The five minute post is no substitute for the five day essay and knowledge interview. But blogs encourage lots of the former and don't prevent the latter.

6. Blogs of other content.

Audio blogs. One-two minute posts. Aggregated, they make a newsradio channel. I heard a prototype this spring where one blogger aggregated the syndicated audio posts of other bloggers.

Video blogs. Documenting processes, quality programs, customer presentations, class projects, slices of life. 

CAD blogs. Syndicating components for peer review and comment.

XML envelope blogs. Drag and drop an event, syndicated from someone's blog, to your Microsoft Outlook or Project. Drag an RFP from a blog to your CRM system.

7. Secure blogs.

Create private spaces, a la Groove, but using your weblog tool. Authenticate some users, be public with others. I do this to a limited degree now, with private categories shared with engineering partners.

8. Mobile blogging.

I've seen people posting from AOL IM, phones, pagers, Palms, RIMs, and 80211'd notebooks. When you have an experience worth sharing, a snapshot of that Kodak moment, you want to blog it then and there. Watch blogging capabilities migrate to the tools you carry.

One last prediction.

In the tradition of Coke machines with web sites, I expect my 2006 Camry to come with a blog.

[aka klogs]

Dubya is in Stockton, California, speaking at the Memorial Civic Auditorium.

Doesn't want the pre-recession Bush tax cut to expire in ten years. "We need to be able to plan."

• Sunset laws are a reality check on changed situations, political cover to do necessary but unpleasant things.

We need to insure business against losses in the war on terror.

• But no mention of the government services that'll be cut to pay for it.
• Have we insured business in any other war?

Wants more support for faith based institutions.

• And he doesn't mean NASDAQ.

Wants executive power to kill civil service rules in the new Department of Homeland Security.

• Rules created to stop nepotism.
• Rules to halt political patronage.
• Rules that fixed non-merit staffing and empire building. 
• Rules that protect workers from career and employment discrimination based on their beliefs, sex, ethnicity, age.
• Rules that enabled congressional oversight.
• Rules that kept government excess in check through the Freedom of Information Act.

Wants the Senate to pass the House version of the Homeland Security authorization.

Makes people fighting from caves sound furtive and cowardly.

• I think of the Maccabees. The French Resistance. Harriet Tubman.

He says the word "evil" a dozen times.

• Needs to be more specific. He could be talking about gluttony or greed for all we know.  Speechwriters, can you find vocabularywords for this man?
• Ignores the truth that we all have elements of good and evil within us. So a military war on evil is a Pogo definition of your enemy. 

Medea Benjamin was ejected for heckling: no war in Iraq.

[aka shrubbery]

Best wishes to Peter Fahlman and Roland Tanglao as they warm up their new business blog hosting and consulting service. Manila and Radio. How do Canadian's pronounce Blogue?

Sometime between December 10-13, 2002, I'm moderating a session on the use of weblogs in projects at ProjectWorld Santa Clara. Come on down, share your experiences.

Proposed blurb:

"Blogging offers the ease of email and the community, connectedness, and access of the web. This fast and cheap toolset can help you manage project scope and risk, motivate your teams, and make better espresso. When was the last time you wrote a communications plan that worked? Project blogging offers hope for directed, continuous stakeholder communications. Map blogs into the project life cycle (should weblogs be in the PMBOK?). Pick up your project blogging checklist and resource directory in this open conversation."

[aka project management]

A salute to a departed Friend: David Miller, recently of Passau, Germany. He passed away August 12, 2002 after several decades of health challenges.

David and I attended Kindergarten in Freeport, Long Island in the '50's. I will miss him, his humor, and sparkling intelligence.

[aka obituaries a la blog]