The article below provides very important point to consider when it comes to business strategy , decision making and leadership. It looks at how open source initiatives demand for a change in the leadership and decision making is done from profit or stakeholders gain to votes and views from contributors or in my own view those people who actually had contributed in the development of open source projects.

In my experience, some projects that I had worked with failed to achieve its goal simply because the views of those who had worked hard in the project had been ignored by managers that only focused to feel the stakeholders view.

Taking some of the learning point in the article below, open collaboration must be guided with clear intention to achieve the success of the project. And not to succumb to pressure from a small group of stakeholders.

I shall not dwindle too long... the article below explains it all.

The Promise (and Perils) of Open Collaboration

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Yup, never stop learning. In the case of Malaysia, we simply don't learn. Fed Government spent a lot of time, resources and money simply yo make our roads safer. Deaths on the road is just another news and seems to be a daily phenomenon, as if that our country is at war. For this year's Ops Sikap, a total of 241 deaths (NST, 2009). Hmm, within a short span of time, the deaths is almost as much as in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Can we do something about it? Well, you tell me or better still let's see this vide and reflect... oh ya, ignore the insurance add... see, do and act...

This is a video from Australia about road safety. I know that road accidents in Australia is not as bad in Malaysia. Remember the recent Ops Sikap... duh!

Watch and reflect

Knowledge and power has a direct co-relation as with knowledge one has power over other with lesser knowledge.

However, it may also work to the one's disadvantage, especially when the knowledge is used negatively. For example when ones missues ones knowledge for the wrong reason.

This is a reflection from a meeting I had today. My goal for the meeting was to justify for an IT project for my department. My proposal was about implementing a collaboration tool for my organisation.

One of many points and concern raised by the evaluation committee was whether existing collaboration tools is frequently used by the staff and that by adding a new tool would be of any value. So, he asked members of the meeting with intent to acquire their view on the existing collaboration tool usage.

To my surprise, a few young managers who are of generation 'x' mentioned that they rarely use any of the organisation's collaboration tool. Not only that, one of them openly said that he's lost his desire to attend training due to the organisation's learning management system. Another young officer who claimed that she is from an IT brackground finds little value of the collaboration tools in her work.

In my view, the knowledge from the young managers are valueable to me and my team. From one perspective, theses young managers seems to have power over me and my team as they raised the visibility on the flaws and weakness of the systems under my purview.

However, the point of time when the knowledge was conveyed was very untimely and adds little value to the cause of the meeting. Perhaps it would be of more value if the young managers can share their view and knowledge with me and my team before this meeting or in another time or forum. In this situation, little they realise that their knowledge could be of more value if they had used or leverage on correctly. In this case, it is a reflection of their own ignorance to the greater cause of a knowledge based organisation.

I'm no generation 'y', just happen to be there...

One of my deliverable for this year is to revisit the e-learning strategy that my department had come up with a few years back. I agree that revisiting the strategy is important. One should step back and reflect whether the strategy is valid or not.

the e-learning strategy that my org has was introduced in 2004. The strategy not only covers e-learning but the holistic view of learning through the use of technology. I don't have any argument about the strategy's breadth nor depth of the strategy. i'm concerned that to date, its implementation and adherence to the strategy was not as it should have been.

Perhaps, for this year's deliverable, I should just give my opinion and and stance on the strategy plus a reflection to what has been done so far...sort of a reality check...

I'll share the strategy doocument is slide share soon.

The LMS has many capabilities. In my case, the organisation is using Sumtotal TotalLMS.  So, I'll be sharing bit by bit on how we can do a learning course design on the LMS itself.  Watch this space... I'll be back

Last year, I heard one of my colleague asked me about transferring a video tape, a mini DV actually, in to a DVD. Immediately I reflected upon my days in Melbourne. I actually did that with my mini DV Camcoder after me and the family went out for an outing to the scenic Melbourne and outer Melbourne.

It was a tedious process and requires specific hardware and tools in order to do so. During that time, I used a firewire cable to connect the camcorder with my notebook. I was lucky to have a built in firewire port so I can straight away transfer the video. The transfer process also demands a lot of memory resources and a large disk space. So, RAM is at least 1 GB and free space of at least 40GB. For a PC, a firewire card is required, if not, the video cannot be transferred to the PC.

As for software, Pinnacle Studio is the best! Easy to use and the output is almost professional! The only challenge is that the video transfer will take as long as the video it self. If it is a 60 minutes video, then the transfer will take the same time to be transferred to the disk.

Now, one does not need to have a firewire card. Thanks to USB, we cannow use a USB video capture device. Just like the one that we have in the office. The model name is Pinnacle DVC 150. This is an older model that we have. By using this device, we just need to connect the camcorder to the DVC, then the DVC can be connected directly to a computer or to a VCR or a DVR. One prevalent advantage of using the USB DVC is that the conversion is done in the device it self and not one of our office. Therefore, the computer's resources will not be affected too much during the conversion stage. So, the risk of PC to crash or simply frozen is now reduced.

There are now a lot of USB devices like the Pinnacle DVC. In Lelong.com.my, the termed as usb video grabber.

Wanna know more, I'd be glad to show you how to do it :)