Gilles Beauchamp : Gilles' Anglo Corner

The Quebec Experience in Poverty Reduction : case studies

Mon, 03 Nov 2003 23:53:49 GMT

William Ninacs and the Caledon Institute just released 5 case studies describing community experiences in poverty reduction initiatives. Centraide (the United Way) of the Greater Montreal, The Collective for a Poverty-Free Quebec, and three other. With an introduction paper that could be of interest if you want to understand what does Quebec do in social development.

Community as place : conference at Cornell

Thu, 24 Jul 2003 02:54:01 GMT

What a long time of preparation for just a 15 minutes speach ! Anyway, it is done now ! You can read this presentation, entitled Community as place : from a local perspective.

The journey was not only for this short speach... I was able to meet researchers and practitioners in community development, mostly from the USA - members of the Community Development Society. Knowing a bit more on this rich network should open doors and ways of collaborations between the Quebec's network and this one.

It was also my last participation as a member of the board of International Association for Community Development where I was elected in 1999, at the Edinburg Conference. No more a member of the board but still active on different projects : a Digest project; a North-American Conference, for 2004; some help on the 2005 Conference in Yaounde, Cameroun... So, I'll keep in touch with these charming people I met a few times around the Globe during the last five years : Edinburg (Scotland), Montreal (Quebec, Canada), Rotorua (New-Zealand), Cleveland (Mississippi, USA) and Ithacca (N-Y, USA).

Un intérêt critique...

Wed, 02 Apr 2003 03:20:51 GMT

Statistiques d'adoption de la gestion de la connaissance au Canada. Une étude fort intéressante de Statistique Canada: La gestion des connaissances en pratique au Canada, 2001 [AmeliorAction - Le Carnet]

Une parution qui amenait un commentaire critique d'un lecteur canadien

Speaking as a Canadian, it is hard not to feel somewhat dismayed by the
report. Of note is the fact that the word "community" (let alone community
of practice) does not appear once in the document. Further, on page 13,
the study says that "almost every practitioner ascribed the responsibility
for their knowledge management practices to managers or executives", from
which the report intuits the "importance of leadership to KM" rather than
denoting the lack of ownership in KM programs. Leadership was the top KM
practice and Knowledge Codification was second from the top.

For me, this report implies that neither Statistics Canada, nor the
departments they surveyed really *get* next-generation KM. Am I being too
harsh? Do they simply have a different definition of KM? [com-prac]

Community development in Quebec: a personal historical perspective

Thu, 13 Mar 2003 13:41:01 GMT

I finally managed to finish a first draft of the text I wanted to write for the IACD board who have to brush an international landscape of the community development practices, at the end of this month in Hungary.

Made it in English... cause it is easier than write it in French than translate it !

Been a while...

Fri, 24 Jan 2003 02:34:00 GMT

It's been a while since I drop a line here... a real line I mean.

And it is quite amazing to look behind to see where I was a month ago... or two. This is, it was at least, the idea of an english page on this blog : to summerize the last period, have a zoom-out on the production of the last month.. or two.

Already the end (almost) of january ! Last december I was planning some readings in KM for the holiday but, having a friend home from Toronto who is more habilitated than me in the Unix and computers... It gave me the audace to download and install Movable Type on teh Unix server of our ISP.

The installation was so fluent... I could'nt resist the idea of knitting a few directories and hypothetical blogs for friends, as a new year's present ! So I worked (my wife would say like a slave) with enthousiasm to launch a collective blog, with some individual ones... made a PDF How to guide and a webmaster blog to follow the implementation... Four out of some 10-12 propositions were retreived par the proposees... Not a bad record ! Probably I chose the good ones !

I am thinking of a second wave, where I will ask to the 200 subscribers of the RQIIAC list... How many will answer ? We'll see.

Form the moment I am searching for the best "kit" for newcomers : MT blog + newsreader... Been discussing the comparative appeal of different products, most of them being in pretty hot development : Newsgator, Syndirella, Hotsheet, Amphetadesk, Aggie...

And I changed the Radio's stylesheet of my blog... Thanks to Brian Bell ! It gave me a few more hints on CSS.

On another front, I'll be working during next weeks on the mapping of data from the last census in Canada (for my local neighbourhood).

Le fil RSS de Ed Bilodeau

Thu, 23 Jan 2003 01:49:04 GMT

Titles only, though. You'll still have to visit the site to get the full post goodness! RSS feed now available [31 Days - Ed Bilodeau Weblog]

Merci, Thanks Ed... un des pilliers du monde des carnets montréalais. Si je ne me trompe il a été le premier webmestre de YULblog. Mais permets moi, Ed : j'aime vraiment mieux les textes complets... ou encore comme les carnets MT le font, les extraits ! Mais je suis sûr que Ed saura nous attirer sur sa page en produisant des titres bien concentrés !

Ce n'est pas par paresse que je souhaite avoir plus que le titre... C'est pour faciliter la citation : il est rare qu'on cite un billet uniquement par le titre. Il faut alors copier-coller... on échappe des morceaux, qu'il faut ramasser... ;-)

SC, collaborative learning and New Zealand

Tue, 24 Dec 2002 18:53:34 GMT

Found this article titled "The role of social capital in collaborative learning." Isn't that what we do in this crazy space? [Blogging Alone]

Here another page coming from New Zealand. From the same Blogging Alone (Hey, I'm just catching on the blink to Bowling Alone !!) that gave me the pointer toward the Framework for the measurement of the social capital in New Zealand. It's not enough to retreive and store the URL... I should read this paper !

Quelques lectures... entre les jours de fête / Something to read in the next few days

Sun, 22 Dec 2002 05:30:21 GMT

De la part de C. Kimble, un message envoyé à deux listes que je prend la liberté de reproduire ici car il alimente de belle façon le débat sur la nature des réseaux de carnets / From C. Kimble, a message sent to two lists adding to the debate on the nature of the weblogs' network communications

In a previous message to com-prac@yahoogroups.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/com-prac/message/2713

I made some observations about the speed at which an article that Paul Hildreth and I had written
http://informationr.net/ir/8-1/paper142.html
had been picked up by blogs and asked the question:

> Has anybody else noticed this happening before or have I just been
> missing the obvious (or am I simply missing the point of blogs?)
>
> I am really quite surprised at how quickly an idea can spread. Does
> anybody have any thoughts on the role of blogs in communities of
> practice and/or KM?

This prompted a few replies both here and elsewhere, some of which I thought might be of interest. For me, they also raised a new question (see the end of this message).

The first item of interest came from a blog by Gilles Beauchamp:
http://www.gillesenvrac.ca/carnet/categories/gillesEnglishCorner/
This contained a reference to a presentation from Joe Katzman, Queen's
University, Kingston, Canada. http://business.queensu.ca/kbe/docs/blogs.pdf
The presentation deals with the issue of blogs, KM and CoPs directly. It contains an overview of blogs, a review of some of the problems of achieving a successful Knowledge Management implementations, some observations on the requirements for supporting CoPs and blogs and concludes with some interesting comments on "boundary spanners"

The second comes from Lilia Efimova at http://www.knowledgeboard.com/ who suggests an article by John Hiler
http://www.microcontentnews.com/articles/tippingblog.htm called "How Weblogs Can Turn an Idea into an Epidemic". The article describes a similar experience to my own and again makes some observations about how blogs can act as "connectors" between groups of people.

On a personal note, I thought that the observations about the role that blogs play in crossing boundaries were quite interesting and had a number of resonances with the role of boundary objects that Paul and I have observed in some of our previous papers, e.g. Communities of Practice: Going Virtual

http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~kimble/research/13kimble.pdf

Does anybody else have any thoughts on this?

Chris Kimble
Department of Computer Science, University of York,
Home: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/~kimble
MIS group: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/mis/

Oui, sûr Chris ce sont des textes qui portent à penser... Mais là je dois dire que je prend quelque retard dans mes lectures. Dans quelques jours peut-être ? / Yes Chris, these are thoughtfull reflexions I'll read, and comment... in a few days ? Have a nice Holyday Season

Passes de bonnes Fêtes !

Belle pêche !

Sat, 14 Dec 2002 22:43:37 GMT

McGee's Musings is a good finding : the pointer to the Serious Instructional Tech PDF but also other finding on the same topic : Sveiby Knowledge Management, with his Toolkit in addition to his text on Building Horizontal Companies - The Job KM has Come to Finish. Thanks Stephen.

Weblogs along with News Aggregators make my daily browse so much faster. I still spend the same amount of time but have increased the number of sources in my daily browse by what may be a factor of 10.

Weblogs, knowledge management, and communities of practice.

Weblogs and Communities of Practice (pdf). Presentation about weblogs and how they fit into knowledge management and the concept of communities of practice. [Serious Instructional Technology]

This offers a good, executive level overview of what weblogs are, and why they matter in the context of knowledge management. [McGee's Musings] [Blogging Alone]

Quelles formes peut prendre une contribution ?

Fri, 13 Dec 2002 02:43:33 GMT

Is your intranet archival or vital?.

A good thread on intranets and klogging. Matt Mower has two posts, too long to repost: Contributing to an intranet and More like a gallery than a factory. And Spike Hall's Workshop or Trophy case: Strangers are Shown Trophies. I think their comments bear on the whole knowledge as object artifacts, as things, vs. knowledge as communication shared.

[a klog apart] [Blogging Alone]

I knew I had seen Maslow...

Wed, 11 Dec 2002 21:58:28 GMT

I kew I'd seen Maslow recently cited somewhere... but could'nt find it. It's Stephen Dulaney's Blogging Alone that posted it.

Incidently, the Google search on Stephen's page on the topic of Social Influence Network and Maslow is pointing toward Sociosite wich seems to be rich !

Wed, 27 Nov 2002 15:32:55 GMT

Just enabling comments and titles...

A monthly review ? Why not !

Thu, 21 Nov 2002 03:09:31 GMT

It's been a month since ' wrote a line in this Anglo corner. Maybe I should begin by a monthly review ! and progress eventually toward a weekly synthesis ?

I've been working, between other things, on a presentation of the works of Wenger (mostly Cultivating communities of practice) in the context of a CoP where I have been involved since 15 years, without knowing we were doing a CoP !

Presentation of the concepts, some of the principles, and the changing context of the CLSC where some kind of professional structures have been implemented a few years ago that could be taken as a kind of CoP... but without the voluntary element that is essential, in the words of Wenger, to define a real CoP.

In conclusion, I was suggesting my peers that we should migrate from the marginal position of our professional voluntary association and define ourselve more as a CoP, asking for more substantial means (that would not be difficult : we have'nt received any !) and support from the instutional network where we're working. See Communautés de pratique et gestion de savoirs

Another conclusion of this work have been a proposition I intend to push : make an experimental implementation of a dozen of Radio copies, something like what Rick Klau made and commented recently, and try the tool 'multiAuthorWeblog'.

One of the most interesting piece of information from the last month : Xerox research show that those who are more in a sharing knowledge attitude are those who are high performer. "(E)mployees rated as 'low performers' tend to be hoarders who avoid contributing to the knowledge pool". It seems confirmed a contrario by another article (french) where the worker in a static (bureaucratic) organisation is not inclined to share knowledge.

I don't know yet what I'll do with that but... it's simmering !

What's that a "CLSC" ?

Fri, 25 Oct 2002 18:44:41 GMT

I wrote this paper in preparation of a Conference we organised in Montréal, in 2000. The theme was "Building civil society with community development".

The paper is titled : Civil Society, CLSCs and the community development movement. Here are the two first paragraphs.

The place of the CLSC (Centre local de services communautaires - Local Community Services Centre) in civil society: an academic or Byzantine debate perhaps, but a significant one for those involved in CLSC resource management and allocation, or for those interested in the relationship between a local provider of primary-level healthcare and social services, and the community it serves.

A network of CLSCs was created in Québec, a daring and original idea combining individual and collective social services with healthcare and nursing. But who, exactly, "created" it? In fact, it took local communities fifteen years of battles with the Ministry for the very idea of the CLSC to be accepted; for fifteen years, the Federation of CLSCs fought to counter the Ministry’s reductionistic vision of these centres as simply a network of home care and local health clinics. (.... more)

This is one of the few papers I ever wrote in english. Thought it would be a good place to post it !

Gilles' English Corner

Thu, 24 Oct 2002 23:32:46 GMT

I just opened this new category of posts in English, as I said in the first description (who happened not to fit in the reserved space): to open a dialogue with those who just speak Italian, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Portugese... and English.

In fact, all those who don't understand French. Wich is, certainly, a magnificient language... that I love to write, sing and speak. I wish I could speak to everybody in my own language... it's so difficult to speak, at first. Some of my friends ( and some who are not) would say "The difficulty is not evident, seeing all the paper and screen you are blackening"...

I persist and sign : it is difficult. It is a discipline you have to acquire and master, by practicing, often. To prove my point : what else would explain the minuscule part of the whole who are taking the pen or the keyboard and express their own part of the collective experience. I'm talking of a group of 300 community organisers in which I've been involved for 20-25 years...

So, it's a bit harder and I'd ask for your comprehensive support : I'll probably be making some BIG mistakes from time to time. Please, don't forget forgive me: correct me !

Trust within and between organizations

Thu, 24 Oct 2002 22:52:20 GMT

From the proceedings of EURAM 2002 (European Academy of Management), with lots fo papers on Managing Knowledge, Expressive Management... with some on the critical question of Trust Within and Between Organizations wich have been classified, for some reason, in the Technology and New Economy section.

A cue from George Por, in the Communities of Practice Yahoo list.