Knowledge-at-work

A blog academy?

Been investigating the viability of establishing a series of f2f courses to learn the  improved practices, emergent tools and tacit skills around social software.

The idea is to host a number of 1-2 day sessions where participants can gather to learn, practice and experience social software skills.

We plan to explore blogs, Wikis, VOIP and related software, expose participants to useful tools, teach basic skills and allow them to experience this genre. At the end of the workshop, each participant will have a strategy for selecting tools, have established their own space and will know the interactions and synergies around these evolving technologies. Our focus will be personal productivity and effectiveness and the ways to increase this using these exciting technologies.

The METS Center has advanced facilities for on-line participation by external experts and a number of gurus in these areas have expressed an interest in being a part of the 'academy'.

 

5 best KM on-line discussions

Where are the most active KM discussions taking place?

Knowledgeboard
The EU maintains an interesting site with reviews, original articles and KM reports. Traffic is moderate and you may subscribe via RSS.

Act-KM
The most active Yahoo group, has seen some heated debates last year, but has settled down to a moderate pace. Recent topics covered forming a KM book club and CoP in the public sector.

AOK
Runs a star series using Yahoo groups, where a well-known KM personality is invited to moderate discussion for a month on a topic of their choice. Daily traffic can be heavy at times. This group is moderated by Jerry Ash.

Brainstorms
This is a closed community run by Howard Rheingold, membership is by invitation only. KM topics are spread over a number of conferences and receive moderate attention.

Knowledge-Management-Systems
Another Yahoo group list with roughly 50 posts per month. This group is moderated and covers a wide range of KM topics.

Evaluation
There has been a dramatic drop in on-line KM conversations over the past year. Brint traffic has almost come to a standstill since they adopted their new board which requires registration. The original KM-forum has ceased operating due to an uncorrected software glitch and many of the KMCI / KMpro groups are languishing with little activity or interest.

We have seen an increase in KM blogs and it now easy to follow blog posts by subscribing to their RSS feeds using an aggregator. Another emergent way to stay in contact with the KM 'community' is to follow the KM related tags in del.icio.us. KM forums on Ryze seem to get the occasional post too.

If you have a favorite KM hangout please let me know.

Tags & tagging

Technorati - the blog search engine, is taking 'tags' to another level

Aggregation
Technorati now gathers and displays tags from del.icio.us, flickr and bog categories, soon it will be possible to subscribe to a RSS feed for a tag.

Weinberger takes a deeper look at tagging in this post  and muses on the emergence of a tag thesaurus as users gather around a particular tag and that tag's popularity grows.

Here is the Technorati page for  knowledge management
this an interesting way to keep up with the fast moving world of blogs and bookmarks and photos.

To make sure your post gets noticed, here is the link you need to include for Technorati to display your KM related post

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/knowledge+management" rel="tag">knowledge management</a>

Makes you wonder where tagging is headed next?

knowledge management

5 key KM concepts

Reflecting on the top 5 KM concepts, which would you choose?

Tacit Knowledge
Understanding the nature, role, importance and value of tacit knowledge, at an individual and group level, is key to formulating KM strategy, deciding on cultural change, picking appropriate tools and finding a suitable measurement system. Without awareness of tacit knowledge any KM program is unlikely to maintain perspective and balance. Here is a link to explore further:

Wikipedia - tacit knowledge

Corporate memory
The justification for building an organizational or group memory comes from "if we only knew what  we already know". There is huge leverage and competitive advantage to be had from capturing insights, recording proven solutions, preventing re-invention of the wheel, learning from errors and sharing experience. Intuitive navigation, individual tags, facile annotation and links to experts are the key affordances here.

Wikipedia - corporate memory

Expertise directory
Connecting people, finding experts and facilitation of dialog are the core ingredients of any KM program. Yellowpages, skills databases, interest or learning profiles, personal blogs and RSS feeds are some approaches to this issue. Finding ways to keep profiles current and incentives to drive the system are thorny issues. Many current systems do not articulate the availability or interest parameters essential to selecting & approaching colleagues.

Yellowpages

Ontologies
Sharing and developing a common language is perhaps the critical knowledge management practice. Describing categories, making distinctions, assigning names, sharing meaning, concepts and experiences, promoting understanding and making sense of the 'world' are fundamental to community inquiry, collaboration, learning, awareness and innovation. Any KM effort needs to devote time and resources to building a lingua franca - shared language

What is an ontology?

Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)
There is a deep chasm within KM between personal and social approaches. PKM is concerned with individual responsibility for learning, connecting, creating, sharing and organizing ideas, thoughts, insights, beliefs and assumptions. Recently technologies to publish on the Internet (blogs) and networking engines have focused attention on individual competencies and practices.

Wikipedia - PKM

Other contenders?
Intellectual capital, organizational learning, data mining, knowledge harvesting, knowledge mapping

The humble FAQ

A question at the KnowledgeBoard set me thinking on how to leverage and work with the FAQ and Q&A as knowledge practices.

New tools:
My first surprise came when I realized there were many more FAQ specific tools than what I imagined. Had assumed the main area for FAQ application was web self-service - reducing the phone time and providing cost savings by shifting the burden to the end-user.

Wiki page on FaqTools

A closer look shows FAQs as a versatile knowledge representation, a growing genre with a focus on providing solutions, helping with self-learning and capturing 'smarts'.

Similarities to problems
We have well-defined objects for dealing with 'problems' , templates that have established fields, e.g. name, description, context, solution, author, related issues, root causes, work-a-rounds, escalation workflow and more. Many of these have been adopted for FAQ entries.

Pattern processes
FAQ systems now also follow the paths for compiling, publishing and ensuring pattern adoption. There is often an (informal) 'community' that vets solutions and monitors the list for applicability and usefulness (often helped by tracking metrics from the web). FAQ entries now focus on issue definition, and provide more explicit context, give examples and include pointers to deeper stuff to encourage learning and promote understanding.

Versatile FAQs

With careful construction and thought, the FAQ can:

• capture common heuristics
• help with self-education & learning
• lead to experts and deeper content
• show gaps in corporate / group knowledge
• provide feedback on product and service defects (if tracked)

The FAQ is certainly growing up

Social bookmarking - more than meets the eye

>Recently I've been exploring social bookmarks and pondering the implications for KM.

Introducing Del.icio.us

A simple and easy way to get to grips with this powerful social bookmarking tool.

Blog tutorial

It is hard to articulate my excitement / gut feel that this going to be something important to knowledge workers - I just feel it!!

Here are some thoughts:

Advantages of social bookmarks

* storing key links on the net vs. on a local computer - allows access from any machine at any time, e.g. the local library (old hat, Backflip did this too)

* a fast and very effective way to keep track of stuff - this means you are not waiting for the Google spider to visit any longer. You can get a RSS ping as soon as a link is added.

* examining tags per link, gives you a feel for how the rest of the world sees things vs. your private ontology.

* using a 'secret' group tag allows group members to alert each other of key links - a pull rather than e-mail push mechanism.

* applying 'flat' tags (single words) is far more flexible than operating within a hierarchy of folders (facetted classification).

* monitoring 'new' links on the delicious 'front page' or 'popular' page gives a feel for breaking news.

On a more speculative note:

1. The tags used by an individual provide an emergent interest profile as the frequency is tabulated you get a semi-quantitative way to characterize their current domain focus - provided they are using Delicious for dumping most of their important links.

2. The tag 'profile' for any URL provides a way to appreciate the relationships between that object and an aggregate of world views. This helps with evaluation and clarification of meaning - kind of 'how others see this'.

As this genre develops I'm sure we will see tags being used in very interesting ways, e.g. 'toberead', 'project_abc', 'great stuff' and other personal or group categories. These are early days - Delicious only started in mid November '04 !! I expect to see flat tags used in many applications in the year ahead, with some very surprising results.

Collecting thoughts - please contribute.

Self-guided KM tours

If you wished to learn about KM on the web, where would you go?

KM is a difficult and complex domain. Here are some places to visit to get to grips with this exciting area.

Glossaries, FAQs and dictionaries

If you are new to the terrain, it helps to know the language, understand the key concepts and to have a feel for the boundaries. These sites are incomplete - they do not provide adequate coverage, there are conflicting and different meanings are given the same names, and each space is targeted at a separate audience.

NHS
Fairly comprehensive, provides cross-links to related topics, largely self-contained - few external links.

Sveiby's FAQ
Provides good coverage - a personal Q&A format.

Context Machines - FAQ
A good place to start

Gotcha
Seemed to be dated 1999? related links did not load.

KM metazine
More than a simple glossary, this covers KM roles, technologies, key concepts and more.

ICASIT
Sparse coverage.

KM for beginners

KM map
A visual picture of the field

KMRC - KM intro page
A solid compendium of starter links.

KnowledgeBoard
Discrete topics, lead article and commentary. Uneven coverage.

KM overview - KnowledgeBoard pdf
Useful entry piece.

KM for beginners - J Pierce
Another useful entry point

KM is a huge field with many on-line resources from KM homepages to mega-portals. An easy way to gain entry to KM coversations is to join a KM community or subscribe to RSS feeds from KM bloggers.

If you need further guidance, feel free to drop me an e-mail, IM or Skype me.

Any suggestions or additions to this list would be very welcome.