Content, conversation, context

Three things need to come together to help learning and to assit knowledge work

Content
We need an easy way to capture thoughts, ideas, web links and useful didital fragments, e.g. quotations, pictures, graphics, documents. Once safely stored we have to index, cluster, assign meta-data, search, navigate, annotate, cross-link and collect feedback. Here are some thoughts on designing a living knowledge glossary that are applicable to gathering content too.

Conversation
I'm convinced that guestbooks, comment forms, IM links and chat spaces just do not cut it when you need to engage in deep dialog, practice collaborative thinking, work at a distance, build a corporate memory. After enaging in many KM forums, I've come to the conclusion, "we need a linear scrolling interface" - joining a virtual conversation that has explicit turn taking rather than post insertion to appreciate context, ease into the 'flow' and promote clearer shared meaning.

There are subtle advantages to persistent conversation, intergrated environments for idea management and an emergent social software genre that looks promising.

Context
Is the subtle gost that surrounds any effort to work with knowledge and to enable tacit transfers. Here are some further thoughts

Have been experimenting with knowledge portals from WebAssistant for more than a year, trying to work through these issues of finding technical and social affordances for knowledge work.

If you any ideas to share please jump in

Comments

[denham]

Hi Jeff,

Have you considered a 'bloki'? - a combination of wiki and blog.

I'm experimenting with SocialText. The wiki is for notes and discussions, brainstorming and you can 'scrape' the contents and publish via the blog. a great way to build FAQs, collect patterns, complie best practices and post summaries.

Just a thought to swirl around

SocialText = http://www.socialtext.com

[Jeff]

I'm trying to set up a web-based collaboration tool for my workgroup. As far as I know, it will be the first one in our network engineering department. My first "wall", conceptually, has been this thought: that the requirements of the collaboration tool to stimulate conversation and ideas around a given project or challenge are fundamentally different than the requirements for later archival material.
For instance, it is probably useful to entertain a wide range of ideas during the process of finding a solution to a given challenge. This may include several individual s with conflicting ideas posting thesis, retorts, and analysis. However, when looking back over the material a year later, it would be useful to have immediately available the solution that eventually was implemented and a summary of the reasons why, with the debates, tangents, etc, pushed to the background. I suppose, in a real sense, I want, during the discussion phase, to allow open-ended discussion/posting, but in archival form, I want to limit extraneous search "hits" that can hinder knowledge retrieval.