Ramblemuse Touch Points

This is one of those bits and pieces posts. Being almost two months out from being sacked in the LLNL layoffs has added both to my learning curve and to my lists of tasks done. Last Sunday marked the fourth of four weekly required newspaper publications of my filed fictitious business name “Ramblemuse Associates”. What remains on that front is to receive the notification from the newspaper that publication is complete and then file it with the county registrar. What started the process was to file the name with the county and to get their notice of filing to give to the newspaper. Along with that was another copy to use with banks for opening a business account.

Taking a concept from John McWade’s graphic design book, Before & After Page Design, I put together a one-page flyer-style web-résumé. McWade had done this is page publishing software while I used some ideas picked up from the CSS Zen Garden to play with it in CSS.

I’ve slowly been building my connections on LinkedIn. Part of this has been reestablishing contact with former colleagues. Part has been expanding in new areas, including a few people I’ve met via the National Association of Science Writers. A LinkedIn connection places the responsibility for updating contact information on the person who owns it which is useful enough in its own right. The other ways of using the system to increase connections are by joining interest groups and by asking or answering questions. Interest groups often come with discussion forums on other group-based networking facilities such as Ning or CollectiveX. Using the LinkedIn question capability increases visibility and can be used to show expertise — both useful outcomes for freelancers.

The paper on massage therapy guidelines that I’d posted on earlier, came back from the reviewers in mid-June with a new deadline of 30 June. That took a lot of editing and reformatting on my part, but we got it back to the journal and into their online system by the deadline. I also, in writing more about the creation of guidelines as a knowledge management function, came across a quote in Gary Klein’s Sources of Power (p. 170) that brought me back to the LLNL diaspora.

In organizations, much of the knowledge is held within the heads of the workers and is never shared. This is tacit knowledge. In most organizations, the culture seems to ignore the expertise that already exists, to take it for granted. If a skilled worker retired after thirty years on the job and tried to leave with a favorite personal computer, some programs, or a set of tools, he or she would be stopped. The organization knows the value of the equipment. But the organization lets the worker walk out with all of that expertise, which is worth far more than some minor equipment, and never says a word, never even notices the loss. Yet in an organization, knowledge is a resource and should be treated as such.