Communicating and (Working Out Loud) WOL-ing in as public a space as possible

In response to the following tweets today:

Enterprise Social Network groups: Can there be too many, and should they be public or private? https://t.co/HfYziJHg9d #ESN #KM #KMers #Yammer pic.twitter.com/xMYXTy30Tn

— Stan Garfield (@stangarfield) December 4, 2017

A classic debate especially re: public vs. private, now growing urgent as more + more strategic work is done in #ESN.
My take: Private groups fragment discussion + hide knowledge.
Discourage them if at all possible; save them for when only absolutely necessary.#socbiz #cmgr https://t.co/AJMgvdI9zG

— Dion Hinchcliffe (@dhinchcliffe) 4 December 2017

I was reminded of a recent Rachel Happe LinkedIn post “Working Out Loud and Community Management” and her follow-on question in the WOL FB group:

“Happy #WOLweek all!

A few of us were chatting over on The Twitter about how WOL and community management work together - and Simon Terry had a great description of it. I consolidated my thoughts here.

I would love to hear about how you think about the context/channels where you work out loud, and how you change how you work out loud based on that context. I obviously have a bias about community but I also have been 'working out loud' for a decade or more, in many different channels.”

and then my response, that ironically I have “rescued” from the WOL FB group and published here …

... loving the reference to "The Twitter" ...

Many thanks for your question, Rachel. The subject of content consumption, creation, publishing and sharing is probably the closest to the core of who I am as a person. Early on in my life I lived as different people in the different roles of my life e.g. keeping work as completely separate from my personal home life, keeping my church life separate from work life and so on.

Increasingly over time these compartments started to break down and I became truly Simon (my story here: https://goo.gl/s0q6UY) in all parts of my life. I was given a language to this via this video (https://youtu.be/pCYRc4u79yM) that speaks about not living your life as an orange - compartments. segments - and instead living your life as a peach - everything as a whole around a core you. I am now seeking to do this to the maximum in all that I do.

The subject of working out loud and sharing your work has become increasingly fundamental to how I operate since first hearing about them in May last year.

There is very little content that I produce that cannot and should not be published publicly for anyone who wants to to read. This can include quite personal stuff like my work view and life view (https://goo.gl/BL7JZX) from the Designing Your Life virtual book club that I ran in the summer.

I have an increasing issue with the proliferation of communities and technical publishing platforms and the impact that that has on content management.

I have content management hell. Even comments I make on people's FB/blog posts may be "gold" and need retrieving and sharing again later. I am trying to create all my content in Evernote so at least it is somewhere that I own and manage.

This file (https://goo.gl/fSqjxE) is a listing and a summary profile of all (that I could think of!) communities that I am part of in real life and virtually. I updated it for this answer as it grows over time. Arguably, I get content ideas from, and could work out loud in, all of these groups but ideally I would not work out loud and publish content only in those groups because usually that content is of interest to others in the other groups. However, one of the reasons for me getting sucked into using Facebook for non-personal-life posts was the arrival of book groups and John's Working Out Loud group and more recently LinkedIn as content gets published and groups start forming there. Ideally, I would only publish content to my blog as that is the only single platform that is accessible by all. But then the issue would be how do people know to go there and look so arguably I would still need to be in all these groups to point people to the content via the links.

Turning to work, I have yet to work out loud on the details of my job. Some of this is due to the nature of my work (IT professional services) and the clients I deliver services and solutions to. But I know I need to and simply de-sensitise/ obfuscate the details. As and when I get stuck into doing this, we currently do not have an enterprise social network nor a live/current intranet so I would have to publish this content elsewhere in any case.

So there is a huge challenge for those of us creating content prolifically and publishing it widely on a multiplicity of platforms. This will increasingly be the case for those who e.g. have posted a bank of work on a company ESN and then move jobs and thereby "lose" the content if they do not archive it or copy it etc. I am now into my 34th year of working in IT and still use data and process modelling methods that I was taught by IBM consultants in the mid-1980s which are still standing the test of time.

I am increasingly conscious that I need to harvest and retain my content wherever I post it so I can marshal and reuse it as appropriate. On the early MOOCs I did, I deliberately set up a Google+ community for each one to try to get the discussions and shared resources on the open internet for me to have that as a public resource and to link to articles later (e.g. this FutureLearn community for their Web Science course: https://goo.gl/bjOZBO). In 2015, I won the Inspiration on FutureLearn award for this sort of activity in their first set of awards.

The speed with which some of us respond to triggers to create content like me responding to you now often means that I can create so much content in such a short space of time that it is hard to remember where it all is and how to find it.

So in summary, I am committed to continuing to work out loud and share my work as publicly as possible and minimising putting master copies of anything in any closed platform.

I am well aware that I need to get far sharper at my personal knowledge management skills and I see these being key for all of us moving forward.

** wondering whether I have answered your question? ... but as always it was good for me to reflect on these issues **