I think we managed to recover about 95% of the contents, but I have to admit that the Binder will never return to its former glory – I can’t decide if it is the above realizations or the tire marks that are to blame!

I, for one, am glad that the knowledge environment is changing. It increases the competition to produce a quality product and results in a diversification of skills that can only serve to enhance each outcome.

Unfortunately, though, many of the decision makers in the engineering profession are also staunch title-bearers (like Lacy from the article). It will be getting them to see the value in open-source and crowd-sourced solutions that really allows the knowledge exchange trend to flourish.

Just because someone has been certified doesn’t necessarily mean they are competent — just that they were prepared to jump through whatever hoops the certification group presented. Accreditation and certification are specific forms of monopoly-making, and in our rapidly evolving “open information” society all monopolies are under sustained attack.

For example, as a business owner, I may want to engage someone who is passionate about writing great software — I am getting much less interested in whether they have a formal computer engineering/science degree from a notable university/college than whether they can demonstrate their passion & capabilities. In the “old” days I may have had to use a notable “brand” from a university as a proxy for competence — now a days I’d first turn to the open source community to check out how well this individual is regarded by his peers and what his actual track record is of real software production.

There are so many contributing factors for credibility, and you are right that affiliation (to yourself, someone you know or a brand you ‘trust’) can all be instrumental in developing a level of understanding regarding someone’s intellectual context.

The thing I constantly have to remind myself is that affiliation isn’t everything, and re-evaluation of the mental context I’ve built for someone, as a result of their affiliations, is critical (I write about that here: http://bit.ly/gynkRY).

I’ve enjoyed reading your posts, and I’ll be watching to see what else you come out with!

The “credibility” factor is key to ultimately engaging someone to work with or for us. My take is that in the absence of personal knowledge (eg: I worked with this person for some period…) we resort to others’ knowledge (the referral) and ultimately the “brand” — which might be a company brand, an educational institution, etc.

This is come of the stuff I blog about at my site (http://timragan.wordpress.com) as it specifically relates to career management (www.ccinternational.ca).

Regards,
Tim