Knowledge-at-work

Library2.0 and KM

The library 2.0 (L2) movement shares many interesting activities with KM as I understand it.

Library 2.0 covers a wide field, from tagging OPAC, IM at the reference desk, to forming virtual communities and encouraging participation in content development, policy formation and asset selection & management.

Library2.0 meme    Library 2.0 in wikipedia   Library2.0 tag in Del.icio.us

The L2 has been branded a 'movement' and passing 'fad' by some of the more traditionalists, but I believe the pioneers like Michael Casey,  Ed Vielmetti and Michael Stephens are bringing a form of knowledge ecology to the library world and doing real world KM stuff.

Here are some of the L2 heresies:

• Users can modify library services, content and policy
• Participation is more than a book on loan
• Libraries should be open source
• L2 changes, authority, strategies, orientation and mission - it is disruptive
• L2 encourages library - library collaboration, co-operation and activities - moving beyond inter-library loans

Libraries need to pay attention to ephemeral content, provide blogs and virtual community, annotation affordances, move into myspace, encourage community and conversation, move into gaming, IM and more.... oh such horror!

What comes next? Recommender systems, Amazon feeds, iPod downloads.....????

If L2 is all about participation, collaboration, community, creative content, changing the context and bringing more people into the conversation - that is core KM stuff. I see the SLA has recently started a new KM division (about time!) and hope they will be embracing much of this L2 excitement.

Do you any L2 thoughts to share?

An ecology behind the firewall

How can business best use web2.0 tools?

The trick in any community is maintaining that delicate balance between diversity, individual opinion (voicing) and collective, reflective insight, finding applicable content, having the freedom to annotate and receiving timely notification.

Encouraging personal views, commentary, opinion, critique and news, helps to ensure diversity, brings in new voices and memes, creates the space for innovative ideas. A RSS enabled blog is the ideal tool for this. Think personal control & ownership, fast learning curve, permanent pointers via unique post URLs, simplified time-based structure, ways to gather feedback via comments and trackback, auto-archiving and more.

The blog allows bottom-up inputs, promotes cross-linking, seeds connections and captures distributed 'conversations'. If the posts are tagged, searchable and available for subscription, these affordances help to promote self-organization.

At another level, we need permanent concept level aggregation, a space where we can get collective information, where current views are synthesized, best practices are made explicit, information is continually updated, sources are referenced and there are pointers to people to contact for help, mentoring, advice and consultation. Here the wiki comes into its own.

Imagine if every business built its own wikipedia!. Authoritative, applicable, crafted, aggregated multimedia content available as text, images, audio files and video.

To tie this ecology together, provide notification, annotation and back-channel links, we will need social bookmarking applications similar to flick'r and Del.icio.us. This will allow cross content notification and referencing, provide the affordance that links items on the wiki with uploaded images, interesting podcasts and points to relevant conent on blogs. The tags allow us to browse related concepts using the tag cloud, giving a broader view than keyword search and avoids the trouble associated with maintaining a strict classification system and taxonomy.

This mix of tools will help promote self-organization, bust functional silos, increase corporate agility, speed decision - action cycles and help to keep employees on the same page.

Now tell me I'm dreaming big time.

'05 Retrospect

A year where KM lay in limbo - poised on a knife-edge, will KM rise with the web2.0 tide or be relegated to the dead fad bucket?

KM bloggers kept the meme alive while new books, conferences and articles wained. I Watch:

• Jack Vinson - his connections to TOC, consistency and KM coverage make this a feed to keep
• Bill Ives - kept me aware of blogging developments and trends
• Lilia Efimova - visited here in January, but faded towards year's end. May '06 bring a revival, always on the leading edge
• Anecdote - Shawn, Andrew and Mark shared their narratives and helped with sense-making
• Joy London - connected me to the world of lawyers
• James Robertson - the oracle on things CMS
• Nancy White - has a keen sense for the balance between tech and personal empathy

2005 was the year:

• I came to use and really appreciate the power of Del.icio.us & Flick'r, when I purchased an iPod, subscribed to iTunes and found songs from way back, made my first podcast, explored the emerging world of social software and made an aggregator my first port of call.
• Attended my first blogwalk, met many bloggers f2f for the first time, followed the folksonomy and tagging memes, became interested in e-learning2.0 and the library2.0 tags / movements.
• My KmWiki died after 6 years and then refactored as a wikispaces repository
• Finally got the chance to present in the AOK star series on "Knowledge sharing and social software"
• Continued to post to Brainstorms, KnowledgeBoard, Brint and KMforum
• Made 66 posts to this blog

Looking ahead

There is an under-current in business that respects the KM basics of relationship, trust, community, networking and connections. Not sure if the web2.0 meme will be strong enough to revive commercial interest in KM - certainly it will not be called knowledge management - but I sense business folks are seeing value in new affordances for web collaboration, are more aware of the possible benefits of virtual knowledge work, need improved business intelligence services and see the younger generations so 'at home' on the net.

I'm looking forward to learning more of the art of collaborative concept mapping with Barbara Bowen as my mentor. There is something very powerful about knowledge elicitation, visual representation and working almost synchronously on a diagram.

Working with CPSquare colleagues, I'm wanting to clarify the role of web2.0 in CoP work, sharpen my grip on these new genre, understand more about mashups, playlists and dig deeper into tagging. Purchased my first mobile phone and will be experimenting with the strange thumbbed world of texting and SMS.

Hope to launch a series of participatory gatherings at the METS center with my partner Patrick Hindert, bringing (draging?) the Structured Settlement industry into the Internet age.

What then are your plans & thoughts for KM in '06 ??

CoP2.0 - January 2006

That is not the official title, but it is the tag that grabs me most.

http://www.cpsquare.org/News/

Decided to participate in this mini-conference with past colleagues at CPSquare. I belonged to this meta-community for a year then quit when the on-line dialog faded.

This conference with regular telephone conferences and asynchronous web conferencing using webcrossing seems to be a strange mix. For me, phone conferencing always seems to be too much introduction, way too little about the real subject, too difficult to reflect upon, even if there is a 'record'. This has been my experience with the KnowledgeBoard phone gigs - note the next one is with Dorothy Leonard - a favorite KM author.

Plenty going on in web2.0 that will be useful to CoPs - my hope is this conference concentrates on the practices rather than the tools. The intention is to cover developments in this blog as the dialog unfolds.

Tags worth tracking via a RSS feed:

• http://del.icio.us/tag/cop2.0
• http://del.icio.us/tag/e-learning2.0
• http://del.icio.us/tag/library2.0

Any related tags to share?

Learning & web2.0

How will emergent web2.0 applications influence KM, learning and relationships?

Been presenting at AOK these past two weeks, looking at the links between social knowledge and social software. Things are moving ever faster - making it difficult for me to keep up with the exciting new services, applications and enhancements.

Knowledge sharing and social software - an open wiki

Web feeds are driving ways to connect, notify, and offer novel, useful ways to keep you informed. New cultures are coming such as rip, mix, burn, learn that promise to speed creativity, re-purpose content and distribute via different channels are on the rise. Podcasts offer a neat way to access JIT information while 'on-the-go', when combined with synchronization (iTunes, Odeo, iPodder), this is a powerful way to subscribe to very directed content and news.

Collaborative concept mapping is a powerful knowledge practice that encourages alternative ways to make connections and uses visual and spatial reasoning to convey deeper meaning.

Learning is an ecology and depends on your network

Mashups promise to integrate content sources and result in new genre.

Textologies from UBC is a useful place for keeping abreast of developments associated with learning2.0.

Please feel free to add, anneal, refactor and rehash this open wiki.

The pull of podcasting

Trying my hand at podcasting for the AOK series on Social Software.

This is a 6 minute MP3 file explaining the reasons and benefits of podcasting.

Download pod_pull.mp3