Resource Library

Presentation: Cognitive Edge, Making Sense of Complexity

On December 7, 2006 Michael Cheveldave (Castlegar’s NuOptiks Consulting) brought a lively presentation by Dave Snowden back** to Vancouver.

Event Description:
Information: marketing communicators spin it, technical writers document it, content management systems transport it, librarians categorize it, and knowledge management stream it - but how effective are our existing methods of communicating it? The knowledge-intensive, networked economy we work in, with its accelerated change and rapidly-changing workforce demographic, demands new approaches to strategic thinking and strategic communication.

Sense making, the human side of knowledge management, is the process of making sense of the world so we know how to act in it. Through sense making, we reveal how things are, how we perceive things, and how we know things, which collectively provide new insights for managing complexity. Drawing on both theoretical work and over seven years experience in the application of methods derived from cognitive science, social complexity, and anthropology, this presentation introduced some new approaches for:

Effective knowledge transfer to offset impacts of an aging workforce

Social network analysis and stimulation for community building, knowledge sharing, and innovation

The role of narrative and storytelling for effective communication and measurement

Speaker:
Dave Snowden is an acknowledged founder of ‘organic knowledge management’ and acclaimed expert on narrative patterns. Snowden is Director of the Cynefin Centre for Organizational Complexity based at the University of Wales, which focuses on the application of complexity theory to organizational issues. A native of Wales, he was formerly a Director of the Institute for Knowledge Management at IBM, where he led programs on complexity and narrative. To learn more about Dave Snowden’s philosophies and ideas, read some of his blog posts at www.cognitive-edge.com.

* This was a joint event of CM Pros, STC, KMCOP, and SLA.

View the video recording (PDF) of a KMCOP-sponsored presentation originally given by Dave Snowden in person, on Jan 31, 2006, in Vancouver.

Presentation: Intro to DITA

DITA is a rapidly emerging standard for authoring technical information in XML. It enables companies to more easily create, reuse, and exchange structured content, while minimizing the total cost of ownership of tools.

Attached are slides from our Sept ‘05 program meeting: Intro_to_DITA_v4.pdf. The meeting presenters included Paul Prescod and Su-Laine Yeo. Paul Prescod is the Group Program Manager for XMetaL at Blast Radius. As such, he describes the requirements for upcoming products in the XMetaL family. Paul has been very involved in the development and promotion of new standards. He worked within the XML Working Group of the World Wide Web consortium to develop the XML family of standards and co-wrote the most popular book on that family of standards: The XML Handbook. Today, Paul is an active member of the DITA Technical Committee. Paul holds a Bachelor of Math and Computer Science from the University of Waterloo. Su-Laine Yeo, Interaction Design Specialist, Blast Radius XMetaL, works with writers to define excellence in professional authoring tools. Since joining Blast Radius, Su-Laine has designed user interfaces for the XMetaL Reviewer product and for the XMetaL DITA implementation. She has worked in the software development industry since 1996 as a technical communicator, usability specialist, and interaction designer.

Page 1 of 1 pages