Bonjour,

Pour tous les “visual thinkers”, les “information designers” et les designers des connaissances ça se passait à San Francisco les 27, 28 et 29 janvier dernier … et j’y étais
J’ai rédigé un compte-rendu (pour une fois en français) qui est disponible sur ce blog : http://blog.fabernovel.com/goingout/
Bonne lecture … et à bientôt pour un post sur les labels, les sceaux et autres marques de confiance.

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Just a quick post to share with you some info you may already be aware of … or not.

I am happy to be leaving this week-end for the VizThink conference in San Francisco, where I will have the opportunity to meet and exchange with some leading advocates of knowledge design such as Dave Gray of XPlane (co-host of this event, see his blog), Cliff Atkinson (author of the book Beyond Bullet Points on PowerPoint, featured in my Amazon wishlist … and already in my library ;-)), Nigel Holmes (former Graphics Director at Time Magazine and author of numerous books), Harlan Hugh (CEO and co-founder of TheBrain, probably the first company that create a visual information management system to search and categorize data), some graphic facilitators (Dan Rose, Christine Valenza, …) and some other keynote speakers. I will take some pictures and jot some notes to be shared with you.

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Another conference, this time in France, is scheduled for April 3rd 2008. It is Carto2.0, a conference on information cartography hosted by the ESIEE engineering school in the East of Paris. Papers can be submitted before Jan 25th (see more here). Keynote speakers will include Frédéric LeBihan (co-founder of Petillant, the first "mind mapping school" in France), Claude Aschenbrenner (a blogger I had the pleasure to have lunch with last summer and who directed me to this event), Christophe Tricot (blogger and researcher at Mondeca, a KM solutions editor), Laurent Baleydier (CEO of Kartoo, one of the pioneers of visual search engines), and some more …

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This is the end of August and the agendas are filled with "summer universities" like the French Entrepreneur's Federation MEDEF (see their live / cross blogging initiative I have been invited to take part on the blog Jouer le Jeu, aka Play the Game), and some companies like Capgemini Consulting for which I will host a workshop on some topics I am sharing with you today, going over some of my past year discoveries and learnings.

We live in an information world and the pure volume of information available is increasing exponentially (IDC/EMC 2007 and Berkeley 2003 studies). At the same time the number of interactions (as one-way or two-way ponctual information exchanges) between persons and/or computers is multiplying rapidly, thanks to the internet revolution and the globalization of our economy. Those « connections » (permanent associations or punctual contacts) are creating a number of opportunities to solve the everyday issues we are facing with.

Thanks to new tools (creation) and economical opportunities (incentives) the distinction between information producers and consumers is not static anymore, this is what has been called the revolution of social media (user generated content, folksonomics, wisdom of crowds, …) :

• Brands need to rethink their communication with their consumers, engage in a conversation with them, build and sustain communities of users ;
• Knowledge (long thought to be limited to encyclopedias, academic books, …) does not consist in « one-off », elitist and formal products anymore since Wikipedia democratized it’s creation and sharing ;
• Managers need to take more and more decisions within a shorter time frame, often with too much data to analyze, or too much « noise » and not enough pertinent information ;
• Major undertakings do not necessarily require major investments from one individual organization as « crowd sourcing » or distributed computing solutions have allowed to search for lost individuals or to analyze large quantities of data ;

This is an overview of experimental solutions to this issue, that I have separated in 2 aspects (some products are doing both, but this a minority) :

• Traceability : new tools that keep track of every information exchange in a standardized, searchable and « mashable » format :
• search engines and crawlers such as Google (Search History, Trends, and Co-Op tools like the Tracker and Customized Search Engine), and Technorati,
• social tagging tools such as Del.icio.us, Digg, and Stickis,
• and crowdsourcing tools such as VisiblePath, Amazon’s ACF and Mechanical Turk, and Inkling Prediction Markets ;
• Visualization : new tools that allow easy analysis, interpretation of data to create knowledge and presentation / sharing to an audience :
• data display tools such as IBM’s ManyEyes, GapMinder's Trendalyzer, and Swivel,
• words / tags display tools such as VisualThesaurus, Delicious' Tagclouds,  and Kartoo,
• 3D visualization tools such as Microsoft’s Photosynth, and Google's Sketchup (included in Google Earth),
• social networks visualization tools such as LivePlasma, TouchGraph, Facebook’s FriendWheel, and VisiblePath,
• and online sharing versions of presentation tools such as mind mapping, and Powerpoint SlideShare.

On the definition and etymology of innovation and creativity, the differences between information types : click here

A gallery of the largest collection of visualization techniques and use examples : VisualComplexity

For fun : a nice application that links song lyrics to images randomly extracted from Flickr, and another analyzing breakups (called The Dumpster) between people from blog comments.

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As industries get more and more productive (as measured by the increase of EBITDA/employee), we see the emergence of the knowledge worker (see Peter Drucker 1959's paper). This emergence can be measured by the growing importance of tacit interactions between workers, and as a result more and more intellectual capital (employee knowledge and abilities, in the form of information) is exchanged in a non-structured way. Tools like email, instant messenging, collaborative workspaces, allow synchronous and asynchronous exchanges of information and knowledge over a wide area (across different sites and organizational departments). But when the stakes get higher such tools are not enough. This takes place in several cases :

• the information is complex and need to be synthesized / clarified
• the targets (individuals, departments or businesss units) lack a common culture and do not share a common vocabulary
• the communication is massive and/or urgent and/or critical
• a common future vision (a new organization, market, product) existing as concept must be formalized, shared and people adhere to it

In such cases visualization has proven to be a useful approach, and the most widely used tool by managers is PowerPoint, but more recently another one has started to get traction : MindMap, named after Tony Buzan's early 90's work

Both tools have got their fans and their detractors, so let's look at the opposing parties arguments :

1. PowerPoint

• Detractors : the most famous vocal critic is certainly Edward Tufte, a recognized guru in information visualization, and his "PowerPoint is Evil" phrase is widely quoted. His thinking is developed in his book "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" and mainly states that the tool is misused, that information is buried in tons of slides, that the bullet point approach is terrible, … Other critics include the French entrepreneur Rafi Haladjian in his famous 2004 essay "Become beautiful rich and intelligent with PowerPoint", full of irony.
• Pros : Donald Norman, a famous designer who has been the head of Apple Advanced Technology Group, teaches at various universities and co-founded the Nielsen Norman Group, has a strong stance against him (see Cliff Atkinson's interview and D. Norman's own defense piece). Another strong user is entrepreneur turned VC Guy Kawasaki with his 10/20/30 rule for PowerPoint
• Tools & resources : for software there is Microsoft PowerPoint of course, but also Apple's KeyNote, Google's recent acquisition of Tonic, a web-based presentation tool, and open source Impress from the OpenOffice suite. For good references and tips in addition to the ones listed above, see Cliff Atkinson's book "Beyond Bullet Points" and more on my Delicious bookmarks, updated regularly

1. MindMap

• Detractors : some recent research limit its scope and power, such as a 1998 study on college students and metacognition that indicates focusing too much attention to the tool limits content learning
• Pros : of course Tony Buzan's, a British psychologist who started working in the 70's on cognitive abilities such as creativity and memorisation and is often referred to the "inventor" of mind maps (see his 1991 book "Use both sides of your brain:New Mind-Mapping Techniques") but also in France the French Heuristic School (see the scholl website and the Petillant portal, a key node of the mind mapping community in France)
• Tools & resources : commercial softwares include the very good MindManager from Mindjet or Inspiration (more for the teaching/education environment), open source FreeMind and web-based Bubbl.us. Reference books and websites include the good portal Mind-Mapping.org, the book " " and my Delicious bookmarks, plus the following video from Tony Buzan "himself"

This post has only been a brief introduction to those tools … more in a future one !

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