Cognitive Edge: Hubert’s error February 10, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Community, blogs and community, COP, tools, Wiki , trackbackDave Snowden provides a strong response to two comments made by Hubert St Onge ( one of the authors of an important modern book about communities of practice 
1. That Blogs and Wikis are publishing tools not collaboration tools, and in the case of blogs the publishing is individualistic/egotistical.
2. That an organisation should mandate one tool for collaboration, rather than allowing diversity; but that participation in the use of those tools should be voluntary.
I can see exactly why Dave would need to take to his blog and strongly oppose these ideas, but on the other hand I can also imagine possible contexts in which the comments can be valid.
Certainly blogs tend to be individualistic, and the much vaunted “conversations” which they may faciliate can tend towards the networking type of interaction rather than the many-2-many model which I believe to be more powerful in some ways.
Whilst Dave’s experience of blogging has been something to enthuse about:
Cognitive Edge: Hubert’s error
In over 15 years of taking part in collaborative spaces I have seen less intimacy, less exchange and less learning than in the six months that I have been writing this blog.
he still likes to invest a fair amount of thought and time into taking people to task in the various “listserves” (email groups), and develops the practice which I do a bit of myself, namely finding inspiration through conversation in groups, and then working the content up into a blog post, or sometimes the other way around.
The second point, about standardising on one tool, could also make some sense in terms of avoiding the draining effect of dissipation of conversation through the proliferation of channels, but it really depends again on the context or organisation concerned.
I think my own views about this have been evolving and I no longer see the opportunity presented by blogs for anybody to self publish as being something which may threaten to supersede or diminish the established format of online communities, in fact the boundary crossing nature of the tools is just as likely to pull new people in to them.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
You’re last point Andy is why I reckon Hubert’s second point is wrong.
People learn that the different tools are good for different things and rather than a mess what you get is really easy hyperlinks between different levels of communication - sometimes about the same topic.
A spontaneous idea on a forum can be moved to a wiki for further work and people can use their blogs to provide their own personal gloss on what is happening - and they all interlink easily.
Andy - thanks for this reflection. However I want to take issue with you on a couple of things. Firstly, the list serve issue. Yes I take part in them (less since the blog) and take a provacative stance. I also suggest that people use list serves, along with blogs and wikis to get started with km. I am not arguing that blogs replace collaboration per se, but I am arguing that they are a form of collaboration. List serves are also to my mind a half way house between the formal collaboration environments that Hubert is advocating and tools such as blogs and wikis. Secondly - I agree with Euan.
Thanks very much for the comments so far. I don’t believe I have any significant difference with either Dave or Euan here, so it’s hard to see where to go without the authentic voice of Hubert St Onge himself. The half way house is an interesting description, to me suggesting a temporary unidirectional role, whereas I feel the simple focus and reach of unmoderated peer to peer newsgroups or lightly facilitated listserves will persist more centrally as environments in which collaboration can thrive, more so than was originally envisaged when the new web tools came along.
But I suspect the context of St Onge’s comment is related entirely to corporate driven projects to implement tools behind the firewall, where control may be more of a concern than dilution to those wanting to restrict the proliferation of communication channels. That’s not to say that dissipation isn’t a threat to critical mass, because hyperlinks only work when people are motivated to click on them and risk becoming side tracked, which is a different type of behaviour to the more linear “read next unread”.