Personal Knowledge Publishing for Sharing Across Communities

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Personal Knowledge Publishing for Sharing Across
Communities

• Esma Aïmeur, Gilles Brassard,
• Sébastien Paquet
• Université de Montréal

2
Overview

• The interdisciplinary knowledge sharing problem
• Related work
• Personal knowledge publishing
• Evaluation of that tool
• Future work

3
Contributions

• Provide a model of the interdisciplinary
  knowledge sharing problem
• Identify tools that can solve it
• Empirically evaluate these tools
• Explain why and how they work

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The interdisciplinary knowledge sharing problem
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Structure of knowledge communities
Strong ties
Weak ties
Individual
(document)
6
Circulation of knowledge
C2
Good
C1
Good
Bad
Good
Bad
Bad
C3
7
Related work
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Related workscholarly communication

• Electronic article / preprint publishing
• Ginsparg 94, Lawrence 01, Hitchcock et al. 02
• New forms of peer review
• Odlyzko 95-03, Smith 97, Rowland 02
• Electronic Transactions on Artificial
  Intelligence
• The British Medical Journal
• The Medical Journal of Australia
• Communication informelle
• Gresham 94 mailing lists and invisible college

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Related workknowledge management andcognitive
science

• Social factors
• Lavé, Wenger, Seely Brown, Duguid 90-02
  communities of practice
• Thomas et al. 01 knowledge socialization
• Communication and learning
• Dewey 33, Vygotsky 62, Piaget et al. 69
• Constructivist approach
• Thomas design and interpretation

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Viable solution a tool that is

• Simple
• Accessible
• Useful-looking
• Useful for interdisciplinary knowledge sharing
• Inclusive
• Scalable
• Evolvable adaptable

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Personal knowledge publishing
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Personal knowledge publishing

• Based on the weblog concept
• Personal communication tool
• Online personal journal with hyperlinks
• In increasing use since 2000

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Weblog an example
2.  Posts  with hyperlinks

• Personal site

3. Frequent updates
5. Archives
4. Free access
Reader comments
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Rich Site Summary (RSS)
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Content aggregation
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News aggregators
Sources
 Posts 
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Personal knowledge publishing

• Weblog used by a researcher (or knowledge
  worker) to put down
• Observations
• Ideas
• Interrogations
• Reactions to others writings (with hyperlinks)

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Question

• Could personal knowledge publishing facilitate
• interdisciplinary knowledge sharing?
• If so, how?

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Personal knowledge publishing evaluation

• Hypothesis 1
• The tool facilitates the establishment of
  meaningful personal relationships with people in
  other disciplines
• Hypothesis 2
• The tool facilitates interdisciplinary knowledge
  sharing

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Personal knowledge publishing evaluation

• Case studies
• Lilia Efimova (Mathemagenic)
• After 7 months
• 5 significant contacts
• 61 links from other weblogs
• 95 public comments
• Sébastien Paquet (Sebs Open Research)
• After 7 months
• 9 significant contacts
• 180 links from other weblogs
• 251 public comments
• Article publicly mentioned more than 80 times
• Three collaboration projects

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Personal knowledge publishing evaluation

• Survey
• via the Web
• 177 respondents
• 25 questions

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Hypothesis 1 interdisciplinary personal contacts
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Hypothesis 1 interdisciplinary personal contacts
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Hypothesis 2The tool facilitates
interdisciplinary knowledge sharing
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Hypothesis 2The tool facilitates
interdisciplinary knowledge sharing

• blog reading has helped me learn quite a bit
  about people of different backgrounds, and
  cultures. In my opinion, it is the best way to
  get an up-close and personal view of the types of
  individuals you would never meet in real life.
  This alone makes the weblog an incredibly
  valuable resource.
• I now feel as if I have found other 'voices'
  with similar concerns... concerns that bridge
  disciplinary and geographic and even cultural
  boundaries.
• having the weblog proved to be a very
  interesting experiment for me and gave me the
  opportunity to connect with people in other
  professional fields

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Personal knowledge publishing mechanics of use

• Exploration (extend ones network)
• Push (publish ideas)
• Pull (attract other participants)
• Regular reading (reinforce links)

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Personal knowledge publishing 1. Exploring the
knowledge network
 Se construire un réseau de sources
Etc.
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Personal knowledge publishing 2. Push
(knowledge distribution)
This is what interests me, what Im looking for

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Personal knowledge publishing3. Pull (attract
and identify ones readers)
 Who has a demonstrated interest in my
ideas? What are they saying? 
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Personal knowledge publishing 3. Pull (attract
and identify ones readers)
 Building a collaborative dialogue network
Etc.
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Personal knowledge publishing 4. Regular reading
 Reinforce mutual trust relationships
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Human bridges betweenknowledge communities
Interpersonal affinity
Better circulation of knowledge
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Future Work
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Future WorkPersonal publishingand group-forming
Topic
Topic
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Future Work Personal publishingand
group-forming
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Personal publishingand group-forming prototype
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Future Work Personal publishingand the
semantic web
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Multimedia-orientedpersonal publishing
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Future WorkEmergent Knowledge Management
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The End