In early 2008 I produced an assignment for a Strategic Technology course at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School that dealt with strategies for tacit and explicit knowledge management in large organizations. The document was designed to provide a set of solutions for how organizations can help their employees stay connected in an increasingly disconnected web conference, phone conference world. As part of my analysis I examined how a communication medium modeled on twitter could be used to transfer and, through indexing, harness tacit knowledge (the kind of knowledge that is passed from one person to the next at the proverbial water cooler).
Here's a brief outtake from the document:
If a strong sense of community takes hold and contributions are frequent and uninhibited, the result will be a running message board with snippets of very valuable information about the health of the respective projects. Contributors will clutter with anecdotes about the work that they’re doing, the successes and failures or small initiatives, and how others around them are reacting to it. I propose that brevity and community will result in a good deal of honesty, particularly over the long term. Taken in the aggregate entries in this system will provide a much better picture of what knowledge is being exchanged and the areas that employees are concentrating their efforts.
Since completing this assignment I have become an avid observer of twitter activity, and recently became a somewhat regular contributor. I've been pleased to discover that part of my assumptions are spot on; the aggregate of tweets does provide a wealth of insight into what people are thinking about, working on, and sometimes arguing over (no I'm not looking at you @CCSeed!).
What I'm less sure of (this being the quite selfish reason for this post) is what the community thinks about the other part of my assertion; namely that "brevity and community will result in a good deal of honesty, particularly over the long term." This has proven true in my somewhat limited experience with meeting new people and exchanging ideas; even so, we need a larger sample to show that it holds water.
Here's where you come in - use the comment section below to share your opinions and/or experiences on the truthfulness of the tweeple you follow with our readers. Feel free to speak to the overall thesis, or to share some example where you've experienced honesty or deceit. I'll pull together the most insightful and explanatory comments into a later entry and share the results with everyone.
Finally, for our purposes it would be a good idea to disregard those false followers who are only there to walk around in their big clown feet peddling the latest in weight loss medicine. My analysis is targeted at internal corporate contributors where, presumably these clowns would have little access to the service.
And leave your twitter handle - we can test your honesty at some later date.
Best,
Sid.
NOTE: The Sponge may have been sidetracked by Rio and it's beautiful...um...view. Stay tuned for the interview to follow on his return in a couple of weeks.