All Life Is Problem Solving

Joe Firestone’s Blog on Knowledge and Knowledge Management

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Entries from March 2009

“Leakage:” Changing Distributed Organizational Knowledge Bases

March 31st, 2009 · Comments Off on “Leakage:” Changing Distributed Organizational Knowledge Bases

Last week, during a talk I gave on National Governmental Knowledge Management to George Washington University’s University Seminar on Complex Systems, one of the members of the Seminar, asked a question about the Distributed Organizational Knowledge Base (DOKB), an important aspect of the Knowledge Life Cycle Framework. Specifically, she asked how the KLC and the […]

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Tags: Epistemology/Ontology/Value Theory · Knowledge Integration · Knowledge Making · Knowledge Management

Stunning

March 29th, 2009 · 2 Comments

A stunning analysis of the economic crisis by James K. Galbraith just appeared in the Washington Monthly. What’s stunning about it is its wide-ranging analysis of the present economic crisis; its historical perspective; its properly skeptical remarks about CBO and other projections based on standard economic models and available historical data; its very clear-eyed view […]

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Tags: Knowledge Integration · Knowledge Management · Politics

He Just Did It Again

March 28th, 2009 · Comments Off on He Just Did It Again

In “Democracy and Spreading Knowledge Transparently,” I wrote about President Obama’s tendency to exclude certain policy alternatives in explaining his thinking to us. In his world-wide Town Hall event, he showed another variant on the theme of lack of knowledge transparency in his public communications. This time the subject was Marijuana Prohibition and his reply […]

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Tags: Knowledge Integration · Politics

National Governmental Knowledge Management: KM, Adaptation, and Complexity: Part Fifteen, Series Finale

March 27th, 2009 · Comments Off on National Governmental Knowledge Management: KM, Adaptation, and Complexity: Part Fifteen, Series Finale

It’s time to end this blog series. I’ll begin with a brief guide and links to each of the fourteen previous blogs and end by repeating my proposal for a National KM Center, or Knowledge Accountability Office (KAO) responsible to the Congress of the United States. The Guide — Part One dealt with the context […]

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Tags: KM Methodology · Knowledge Integration · Knowledge Making · Knowledge Management · Politics

Democracy and Spreading Knowledge Transparently

March 26th, 2009 · 1 Comment

President Obama, both in his campaign, and in his Administration, has emphasized the importance of transparency in Government. This very day, as I write, he’s running “a world wide” on-line town hall to give people a chance to answer questions, hear his unrehearsed replies, and understand at least some of the thinking behind his views […]

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Tags: Knowledge Integration · Knowledge Making · Knowledge Management · Politics

“Fuhrer’s Law”

March 25th, 2009 · Comments Off on “Fuhrer’s Law”

Today Naomi Wolf posted an important blog reporting on an interview with Michael Ratner, a well-known US constitutional scholar, at the Center for Constitutional Rights and Columbia Law School. Wolf interviewed Ratner, seeking his opinion on the significance of the John Yoo memos released by the Obama Administration. He replied, in part:

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Tags: Politics

That “Awkward Straddle”

March 23rd, 2009 · Comments Off on That “Awkward Straddle”

I owe the title of this blog to William Greider who, in talking about the present upsurge in populism in the US, said: “At the center of this story is Obama, who inherited the Democratic Party’s awkward straddle between monied interests and working people.”

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Tags: Politics

More Lemon Socialism

March 22nd, 2009 · Comments Off on More Lemon Socialism

The notion behind the idea of “Lemon Socialism” is that government policy creates arrangements that largely privatize the gain from economic activity if there are profits, while socializing losses, if they result. The just leaked Obama Administration plan for coping with the financial system’s “toxic assets” is another creation of the Lemon Socialists. This weekend […]

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Tags: Politics

How About a Little Knowledge Management for Congress?

March 20th, 2009 · Comments Off on How About a Little Knowledge Management for Congress?

Maxine Waters (D-CA), in reply to a hectoring interview from Nora O’Donnell of MSNBC, related to the AIG bonus fiasco, spoke her version of the truth about how the sausage is finished in the US House of Representatives. Rep. Waters made it clear that no representative can read, or does read, all of a major […]

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Tags: KM Software Tools · KM Techniques · Knowledge Integration · Knowledge Management · Politics

Phony Outrage or Politicians Scorned

March 19th, 2009 · Comments Off on Phony Outrage or Politicians Scorned

In the aftermath of the inquisition of Edward Liddy of AIG yesterday, the commentariat is offering one of their favorite narratives, hypocrisy; and Claude Rains saying that he’s “shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in this establishment,” to describe the utterances of the various Congresspersons who vented all over Mr. Liddy yesterday. […]

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Tags: Politics