Highlights Fom a Legal KM Conference in Sydney

I attended the Janders Dean Law Firm Management Leaders Conference earlier this May. There were a lot of great speakers that day. The following people had the most impact on me:

David Fitch, Director of Knowledge Management Simmons & Simmons , who commented on Global Trends & Challenges for the Modern KM Directors--

• Uses several outsourcing companies for a number of KM/IS/BD related functions.
  David supervises quite a large team for a law firm with 1,000 lawyers. 25 PSL (Professional Support Lawyers) and 20 Information Professionals
• Doing more for less was apparent throughout his talk. Simmons & Simmons spend around $5,500.00 (pounds) per lawyer for KM/IS related resources
• Currently working with 2 additional law firms KM/IS and have collectively established a secure extranet for a banking client that works with all three firms. The extranet is currently hosted externally and does not contain strict and confidential documents. It is used more for current awareness content.
• Mentioned the IT challenges that come from being a global firm (looking for sophisticated systems that cover several languages)
  

Livio Hughes, Co-Founder, Headshift, Global Innovations in KM and Collaboration Focused Technologies--

• Stressed that firms work in an email centric atmosphere which has damaging consequences (bad for peripheral vision. We have in-box overload and are mechanically working through all the messages).
• Firms have been too focused on information storage rather than find-ability. Users often feel they are missing something when searching internal DMS systems
• Challenges- Users are fed up w/clunky desktop tools and expect more. (Why can they go home and use easy and intuitive apps like Google Search, Flickr for photo sharing and the like and not have similar applications at work?)
• Near Future- Internet has become the application environment with open source and personalisation
• "Simple Actions Tend to Create Networked Environments"
• Self interest drives up intake and growth of specific applications. Create networked individualisms, not centralised!
• What's the next big think in Collaborative Technologies? Attention metadata, social reading, writing and search.
• What firms are currently using collaborative technologies? Allen & Overy; Dewey & LeBeuf
  

Common themes throughout the day:

• Search and retrieval in many systems need to be intuitive and non-invasive . We're currently not meeting this requirement in many of our DMS and even web content management systems
• Make it simple!
• Collaboration is coming! How will we get our users to participate? We need to make it worth their while! (My thoughts- A presentation given by the Freehills Director of KM mentioned they rewarded their attorneys with extra bonuses and champagne for participating in their KM project, but what happens afterward? Will they have the momentum from the attorneys to maintain the knowledge work product?)
  

Links to products and consultants worth noting:

• XM Law - Was founded in 2003 by technologists and professionals with expertise in the legal and professional services industries
  
• Headshift- Take the best ideas and innovative tools and apply them to solving the real world needs of organisations
  
• Recommind- Solutions for e-discovery, KM, Enterprise Search
  Links to Web gadgets mentioned:
  
• Berry Bloglines- Open Source RSS Reader for a BB that works with a Bloglines account.
  
• Flickr- Photo Sharing
  
• Twitter- IM to SMS and chat. "To communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?"

Which Wiki Software Meets Your Requirements???

I was recently asked to investigate wiki software offerings, specifically focusing on the following features:

1. Free vs. Commercial
2. Hosted vs. Locally Supported
3. Work flow Integration
4. Security
5. Used by Corporate and Legal Sectors.

After no success at locating a relevant article on Lexis Nexis, I stumbled upon the WikiMatrix web site through a blog posting search. WikiMatrix is a super resource that offers a comprehensive comparison database of the major wiki software products currently on the market. It also includes a Wiki Choice Wizard where users can select requirements needed for wiki software at their firm or organisation.

Tops Blogs List from Aussie QWeekend

Okay, I admit it, I'm a QWeekend hornbag. This weekend's edition (April 19-20th- '08) features a nice round up of the top 40 blogs on the web. Gee, would you believe the folks at QWeekend decided to not post this article online yet? Hum, an article about online blogs not available online, how helpful! :O I'm not sure where their ratings came from, nevertheless, there are several that prove worthy as an addition to your RSS reader. The article also includes the 10 top Australian Blogs.

Here's a recap: Huffington, Boing Boing. TechCrunch, Kottke, Doce, PerezH, Icanhasacheezburger, Xu Jinglei, Tree Hugger, TMZ, Engadget, Chez Pim, Student for a Free Tibet, Gigazine, Girl w/ a One Track Mind, Mashable, Greek Tragedy, Cranky Flier, Go Fug Yourself, Beansprouts, The Offside, Petite Anglaise, Chocolate for Zucchini and Jonny B's Private Secret Diary, Popjustice, Waiter Rant, WoWinsider, Style Bubble, AfterEllen, and CopyBlogger.

In AUS: Gizmodo, Club Troppo, Tim Blair, Reasons You Will Hate Me, Skelliewag, Defamer Australia, Car Advice, The Chaser, Zan's Blog and Grab Your Fork.

My favorites from the list:

Huffington Post
TechCrunch
Mashable

From their AU picks:

Gizmodo

How could they miss these Australia selections though?

Crikey
Google Australia Blog

For more on popular Aussie Blogs see the Top 100 Australian Blogs Index.

Australians & Americans Unite and Help Free Tibet

I normally don't comment about political issues on my blog unless it deals with the 1st amendment, privacy issues and freedom of information. I do want to spread a message of advocacy for Tibet. Tibet's struggle for freedom and China's blatant physical and psychological oppression to restrain the Tibetan people continues to be an outrage. Aussie PM Rudd will be visiting China soon, so don't delay in telling K Rudd that he needs to publicly engage the Chinese Communist government and stand up for the human rights of Tibetans. Sign the petition and pass it on!

For Americans, see the International Campaign for Tibet's call to action items.

Additional Resources:

International Campaign for Tibet

Petition to the United Nations

Students for a Free Tibet

Tibetan Information Office- Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Australia

Social Networking Sites and the Liability Factors

QWeekend, the Courier Mail's Saturday rag, reprinted an article that reports on the potential harm in the active participation of social networking sites. The original piece was published last month in the Independent, a U.K. paper. The authors highlight recent litigation involving harassment charges, defamation, privacy issues and even insurance claim legitimacy. The most disturbing for me is the American insurance company's (Blue Cross/Blue Shield) refusing to honour several claimants' policies, going so far as to use the claimants' personal postings on social networking sites to argue the individuals were not emotionally stable. More on this case here. I have reached the following conclusions that deal directly with information and knowledge professionals after I finished the article:

1. Companies and organisations will be increasing their scrutiny of both potential and current employees, trying to monitor and locate inappropriate online behaviour from their workforce. This task will be overwhelming given the vast amount of both social networking and media sites that now engage online users in public commentary. Companies will be invoking help from both their IT and information professional (librarians, researchers, KM practitioners) staff in the online monitoring and retrieval of personal employee information on the web.


2. Informational professionals need to educate their patrons/clients on the practical do's and don'ts of social networking participation. They should also work closely with their HR and legal departments, reviewing current company policy concerning online activity both at work and during hours away from the job. This is tough one, considering many of us bring our work home and don't set boundaries between our personal and professional online time.


3. Educating company executives and management on the relevance of online social networking participation in the corporate environment is also equally important for information and knowledge professionals. Sharing stories, best practices, personal "on the job" experiences, helpful contacts and the like are all beneficial exercises in the realm of online community interaction while at work. The key is understanding and knowing the difference between appropriate and inappropriate behaviour.

Some further reading on social networking in the workplace:

Can Social Networking Coexist with the Workplace?

Learn to Love Social Network Sites

How Much Time do we Spend on MySpace at Work?

Heard of Booktagger Yet?

Booktagger is another book sharing site on the web that was developed in Australia by a nice bloke named Jeremy LeBard. Jeremy designed Booktagger with the help of a biblio aficionado who was searching for an interactive place to share books with family and friends, without having to rely on the regular book o sphere sites (Amazon, Boarders, half.com, LibraryThing). It offers the familiar web 2.0 features seen on social sharing web sites such as bookmarking, forums, personalisation (my bookshelf) and an online book club. The main function in Booktagger is tagging, which is easy enough to do.

Users can choose to include quite a bit of detail in their Booktagger profile, or keep it fairly brief. Overall I found Booktagger quite simple to navigate through. I hope it catches on, especially in Australia.

KEEPVID for Downloading Loaded Videos on the Web

Looking for a free killer application on the web that enables you to download streaming videos directly from YouTube, Google Video and many media based sites and save them to your own PC? Check out KEEPVID. This nifty service also helps users convert Flash files to adaptable WMV and AVI. KEEPVID was masterly crafted by two media IT geniuses in Australia. For a review of the site, see this news piece from June 2006.

VALA Highlights

I attended the VALA Conference last week in Melbourne, Australia and was really impressed with the program offerings and the calibre of professional speakers that were represented. The conference planners did an exceptional job on selecting the most timely issues and trends facing both the Australian library & information management profession, and the solutions companies that continue to develop systems to support the industry at large.

Noteworthy events that I found most relevant during the week were:

• Andy Powell's key note speech on the current state of repositories. Andy has posted a great summary of the speech called Repositories thru the looking glass, available on his EFoundations Blog.



• Michael Geist's Presentation on Unlocking access: in support of a hands-on Internet policy. For a nice overview of Michael's key issues regarding the current legal challenges (copyright, fair use) facing open access publishing in the internet sphere, check out the Connecting Librarian's post here. The University of Melbourne also hosted Michael as a speaker at their Information Futures forum prior to VALA. A video of the forum is available online.



• Ex Libris' hosted an invitation event and the key speaker was Oren Beit Arie, Chief Strategy Officer and one of the primary developers of the OpenURL. Meeting Users Needs discussed the current major challenges in meeting library users' expectations in the present internet world. How do we get our users excited and interested in our libraries' virtual spaces? We need to capture the best assets of popular sites such as Google (which offers much more than search) and social networking places and integrate them throughout all the libraries' web pages.

-Make the UI easy and include enrichment on your pages (service descriptions, feedback templates)

-Include facets and clustering in search results

-Meet users needs wherever they are

-Highlight access to immediate full text sources (Get it now!)

Please email me with your details if you would like a copy of the presentation (robynrebollo@yahoo.com or robyn.rebollo@exlibris.com.au).