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.

Comments

[Stefan Weiß]

[learning-to-fly] is a Yahoo group that is worth subscribing (remember the book by Collison and Parcell?). Though it has long periods of silence there are valuable discussions from time to time.

[Dr. Dan Kirsch]

Hi Denham,

Yes, I've also seen the same declines in posting online -- I've seen the same thing in most of the various Yahoo groups that had been around for awhile. I'm not so sure about blogs being "exempt" either as it seems that a lot of KM blogs seem to do little but point users to other blogs.

I think that in many ways the days of the KM web user having the time to simply "drop by for a chat" are gone, and I believe that KM sites need to offer much more in the way of integrated content to provide users what they want. In short, it seems that few users are looking for a place to post online and are looking for something more.

One contributor to the decline in postings on our KMPro site was the changeover from what-was to what-is. We'd been using what our members described as a very non-friendly user set of online tools and it was time to change that. So over the past couple of months we have been slowly converting over to something a lot more user friendly, and with a lot more KM content.

In the past couple of weeks we dropped our web site in favor of a much more comprehensive content management portal (CMS). So KMPro has made some extensive changes by moving to the CMS portal -- with easy to use integrated forums, blogs, event calendars, chat, KM glossary, KM news feed, downloads, integrated search for both Google and Brint, and about 1,500 KM links that feed directly from Open Directory Project (the feed for Google). And Monster is working hard to bring our new Monster.com fed Career Center online soon.

So, we're working hard to give members and users a reason to come to the site, and hopefully while there to engage in some conversation and thoughtful exchange.

Regards,

Dan

[Ed]

.. and another thing (before I was rudely interrupted by my bosses)... with this 'portal' perspective of years of technical and content/interaction history, we're trying to work towards a way we can _collaborate_ with these new forms of communication (and related technology) rather than fight them or leap haphardly across to new groovy platforms (rather tricky).

[Ed]

Hi Denham,

very interesting - thank you :)

KnowledgeBoard is seeing the standard 'month on month increase' in traffic, sessions etc. The discussions figures vary and might be related to our 'Special Interest Group' (SIG) format - which goes through dips and peaks as the SIGs go through their own lifecycles.

We introduced mandatory registration/logging in November 2004. This was for members wanting to make a comment/ask a question _only_ ; reading remained entirely free. We experienced a dip in November but this returned to roughly normal patterns in December and is OK now.

The growth of blogs/rss/folksonomies etc. is definitely a great thing for individuals and offers them huge flexibility which, possibly, the 'portals' cannot contest for many reasons (with four years of 'content' we find ourselves somewhat limited in flexiblility as well as this being tied into the technology)..

gotta run. thanks for this.

[Denham]

Hi Shawn,

Act-km is perhaps the exception that proves the rule!, certainly the brightest star around and the most consistent in terms of diversity and posts. - keep up the good work.

Denham

[Shawn Callahan]

Hi Grey, in your evaluation you say there has been a dramatic drop in KM discussions online but only cite Brint. Act-km has seen a significant increase in discussion. Here are the total number of messages by year: 2000, 591 msgs; 2001, 437 msgs; 2002, 722 msgs; 2003, 1167 msgs; 2004, 1712 msgs.