I’m finishing up a 35,000-word Report for the Ark Group on social networks and knowledge management. It’s a sense-making quilt I’m working on, as I take the threads, ideas, and frameworks I’ve developed or found over the past three years and organize them into a set of Parts and Sections that I hope will help other people get to the sense-making faster. It’s all about relatedness and language: choosing, defining, and relating to each other the distinctions in types of network, types of software, means of intervention.

I have the pile of articles, conversation notes, books, and reports. I have the outline for the report, amply (I hope) fleshed out, and I take on the pile. Read the next item, see where it fits into the outline, decide what’s important, and insert it, context it, and put transitions between it and the material before and after. I’m almost done.

And then, inevitably, along comes a BIG thing to relate to. In this case, a quick “go back and look at Peter Gloor’s stuff” and find that he’s published his draft of Social Patterns of Innovation (previously titled COINS@Tipping Point and reviewed by Bill Ives) on his web site. Oh gosh, what do I do now? Peter has elaborated the term Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) and added its cousins CLN (Collaborative Learning Networks) and CKNs (Collaborative Knowledge Networks).

Do I change my framework? Change my terminology? Cry because Peter’s done such a great job of creating and bringing to life a new distinction, the COIN? Deadline is Tuesday. I just have to sharpen my knitting needles, find the right entry points, and weave.