How Building a Pyramid in Tokyo Bay and Bridging User Communities Relate to Each Other

Tim Hoogenboom Birkholm 34 Hoofddorp +31614576051 [email protected] 0436267 Informatiekunde ii How Building a Pyramid in Tokyo Bay and Bridging User Communities Relate to Each Other. I magine a three-dimensional city that is twelve times higher that the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. It is the largest structure on the world and it floats over Tokyo Bay while being build largely by robots. It houses 750,000 people in skyscrapers that dangle from it like fruit on a tree. It consists of multiple layers of pyramid-shaped exoskeletons that are anchored to massive pillars that rest in the bay (Discovery Channel, 2005). O n a micro-level the pyramidal exoskeleton's main composite are carbon nano tubes. These cylindrical nano tubes are ulta-strong and gossamer light, e.g. it's a hundred times stronger than stainless steel and a square kilometre of the material would only weigh thirty kilograms (Wikipedia, 2006). But regretting all these advantages, the material on its own is isn't malleable. Conversely polymer does inhibit this malleable-property. But a covalent bond direct between both materials isn't sufficient, because when bending it the nano tubes pull out. So to form this bond between their advantageous properties and simultaneously to reconcile their incompatibilities an intermediary chemical is needed, which is carboxylic acid (cooh)(Oak Ridge National Laboratory Review, 2002). This cooh enforces the alignment that is needed in creating flexible structures that have an unrivalled height of almost two kilometres of which its main composite, cylindrical carbon nano tubes, is approximately only 1/10.000 th of a hair thick (Oak Ridge National Laboratory Review, 2002)! 1 O n a macro-level the 55 nodes serve as commuter transfer points and bridge individual exoskeletons of which each inhibits a separate 'community' (Discovery Channel, 2005). This communal node's objective is to support and exchange knowledge as intermediary between its inhabitants from different buildings or pyramids about activities, events or available resources to blur compartmentalization and stimulate transparency. A ltough the above mentioned is still a surrealistic utopia, it's also a metaphor that illustrates the main theme of this thesis, namely knowledge brokering (reified in the second paragraph as cooh's and in the third paragraph as nodes) as the way to bridge various organizational contexts to bring its communities (reified as nano tubes and polymer; and multiple buildings) together and to facilitate internal knowledge transfer. In other words: In order to exploit the combined advantages of individual resources to create the …