ILTA Conference 2015

I've been neglecting this blog to some extent in favor of some other channels lately, and also in favor of some other activities.

This year I've been the Team Coordinator for the Information Management "track" at the International Legal Technology Association's annual conference "ILTACON," which starts on Sunday.  The eight members of my team have developed a great slate of 32 sessions addressing knowledge management, information governance, data analytics, social media, innovation in legal services delivery, and related topics.

On the ILTA blog platform, which is somewhat public, I've posted "Find Your Way to the Education You Want" (about how to plan for ILTACON and how to search through conference sessions), and "Knowledge Management Sessions @ILTACON" that has a detailed description of a possible set of sessions of interest to knowledge managers.

I'm also hosting the #tweetup, which is a Community of Interest, Sunday at 4 PM in Genoa.  This year it's hosted by ILTA, and there will be discussion of tweets, tweeps, and tweeting, other social networking, social media sessions, and maybe a little viola playing so we'll have something to tweet about.

Later in the week, if you want to hear me talk about a subject I've been working on a great deal this  year, come to Roman 1 Wednesday at 11 AM for "The Best of Business Intelligence:  Stories of Success", Session #100. I'll be discussing recent experience with the use of visualizations and business intelligence for practice improvement, matter analytics, and  business development.

Lastly, if any readers are at ILTA member organizations and have attended at least one ILTA conference, I hope you'll consider applying for conference committee. I promise that you will learn a lot, meet great colleagues you otherwise would never encounter, and have a great experience.

Taming Twitter: Paper.li and Legal KM-ers

Twitter is a great way to see what people in my and related fields are talking about today.  But above a certain point (which may be as low as 50 or 75 followers), it is simply not possible, nor likely worthwhile, to try to view every tweet from every tweep.  And I'm following over 700 people!  I could simply stay clear and "dip my toe" in the twitter stream every once in a while, but then I get the feeling I'm missing out on my tweeps' collective wisdom.

Twitter has two "native" ways of coping with this situation, search and lists. 

Search allows you to look for mentions of a specific hashtag (I look at #km periodically, for instance) or a specific person.  It works very well, but of course you have to have a topic in mind before you begin. 

Twitter lists allow you to group sets of followers and then watch the stream only from that subgroup.  Among my lists is "legal-kmers", a group of tweeps I especially value because they are legal information professional like myself* and because they periodically post or link to valuable content.

Even at that level of specificity to my work, it's not easy to review the valuable posts that go by.  That's where paper.li comes in.  It allows you to point to a Twitter list and generate a newspaper-like view of all the links posted the previous day.  The URL is simply paper.li plus your Twitter account name plus the name of the list, hence:

http://paper.li/kmhobbie/legal-kmers

If you don't want to leave this page, here's what it looks like on a specific day.

What makes it newspaper-like is that it includes the headline and a small amount of content from the article or other site to which my legal kmer has linked.  That's hugely valuable for helping me identify something that speaks to me.  Paper.li also sorts the articles "below the fold" into somewhat vague categories like Education, Technology, Crime, and Business. It also shows a scrolling version of today's legal-kmers posts.  If you log in with a paper.li or Twitter account, the posts are interactive (i.e., you can easily re-tweet).  Finally, Paper.li includes daily archives, in case you want to go back and look at a previous date's posts. 

All in all, paper.li is a great addition to my collection of tools to "tame the information firehose."   Who are your favorite tweeps?  Who consistently finds the good stuff?  Put them in a list and share them with me!


*not all are formally legal knowledge managers, however.

Turning Down The Information Firehose--ABA Article in Law Practice

Today my article "Personal Knowledge Management: Turning Down the Information Firehose" was published in the Law Practice magazine of the American Bar Association. Much of my work focuses on how attorneys can do a better job handling information. For instance, I have a program targeting litigation partners that specifically focuses on personal knowledge management. So "PKM" has been an interest of mine and I am happy to have had the chance to refine my thoughts on it through the research, drafting and publishing process.

Research for the article was itself an interesting experiment in personal knowledge management. The most valuable resources were probably KM Lawyer Mary Abraham's post "Managing the Firehose", "PKM Professional" Harold Jarche's posts on Sense-Making with Personal Knowledge Management, Patty Anklam on PKM as the "Third KM," and the collection of resources compiled by a number of people on delicious at http://delicious.com/popular/pkm.

What led me to most of those resources was a simple question to peers on Twitter. Thanks twitterverse!