Position Paper: Collaborating on the Design and Assessment of Knowledge-Building Environments in the 2000's

Mike Chorost

Knowledge Applications, Scient Corporation, San Francisco

I’m writing this position paper as a member of the Knowledge Management department at Scient, a systems innovation firm in San Francisco. A systems innovation company provides its clients the expertise of building e-commerce solutions from scratch; its competitive edge is based on the technical, creative, and business knowledge it can swiftly bring to bear. Recent clients include Wells Fargo, the Global Education Network, and Chase Manhattan Bank; it has built high-profile sites such as PlanetRx.com and Realtor.com.

I’m also writing this as a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. My dissertation is about how theories of distributed (autopoietic) organization can be employed in undergraduate classrooms, such that student teamwork, creativity, and knowledge-sharing dominate classroom time. As part of my dissertation work, I built and deployed a Web-based collaboratory to facilitate this kind of distributed organization.

Scient employs hundreds of analysts, researchers, programmers, writers, and artists – people whose working lives consist of nearly continuous learning and problem-solving. It is vital that these people not reinvent each others’ wheels. Scient’s competitive edge relies on its ability to represent and reuse its vast base of accumulated knowledge at need.

A great deal of Scient’s knowledge is bound up in its email traffic. Scient’s intranet archives all of the company’s email, and makes most of it available through a Web-based interface. The problem, of course, lies in filtering and searching this archive. Out of thousands of messages a day, what is of lasting value? How does Scient decide which message threads to "keep," how is what is kept then represented, and how can it later be retrieved?

Many innovative design principles have been proposed for KBEs in the CSCL literature and elsewhere (Adelson and Jordan 1992, Marca and Bock 1995, Ciborra 1996, Bereiter and Scardamalia 1997, Bell 1997, Koschmann et al. 1997.) However, the problems of value and scale have rarely if ever been addressed in the literature. How does a knowledge community make judgements about what not to represent and search? Industry has made strong efforts to solve these problems with advanced search engines such as Fulcrum, Autonomy, and grapeVine, but there has not yet been enough cross-talk between the designers of online worlds and the developers of search and representation algorithms. The issues of design and value have not yet met and occupied a common space.

Scient’s researchers and designers are actively grappling with both problems. At the moment we are focusing on value, by exploring approaches such as facilitated human judgement, metatagging, advanced search engines, and information ecologies that reward producers of quality material. I’ll share some of our findings, and look forward to learning in turn.

Works Cited

Adelson, Beth and Troy Jordan. "The Need for Negotiation in Cooperative Work." In Sociomedia: Multimedia, Hypermedia, and the Social Construction of Knowledge. Ed. Edward Barrett. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1992: 469-492.

Bell, Phillip. "Using Argument Representations to Make Thinking Visible for Individuals and Groups." In R. Hall, N. Miyake, & N. Enyedy (Eds.), Proceedings of CSCL '97: The Second International Conference on Computer Support for Collaborative Learning. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997: 10-19.

Bock, Geoffrey E. and David A. Marca. Designing Groupware : A Guidebook for Designers, Implementors, and Users. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995.

Ciborra, Claudio U. "Introduction: What does Groupware Mean for the Institutions Hosting It?" In Groupware and Teamwork: Invisible Aid or Technical Hindrance? West Sussex, England: John Wiley & Sons, 1996. P. 1-19.

Koschmann, Timothy, Ann C. Kelson, Paul J. Feltovich, and Howard S. Barrows. "Computer-Supported Problem-Based Learning: A Principled Approach to the Use of Computers in Collaborative Learning." In CSCL: Theory and Practice of an Emerging Paradigm. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996: 83-124.

Scardamalia, Marlene, and Carl Bereiter. "Computer Support for Knowledge Building Communities." In CSCL: Theory and Practice of an Emerging Paradigm. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996: 249-268.