KM on-line discourse

Finding places and spaces where knowledge management is the focus of on-line conversation is becoming very difficult.

Act-KM discussion list, which has moved from Yahoo Groups to its own listserv, dominates current KM conversation. Recent topics include 'the essence of KM', 'current trends in KM', 'Knowledge sharing literature and a lengthy thread on moderation policy. The Act-KM forum seems to be languishing and lacks activity.

AOK continues to host interesting topics in its star series, although I would be lying if I said that measurement - the most recent topic, was one of my favorites.

 KnowledgeBoard has all but folded since it's latest redesign and there are few conversations around the document / article dominated interface. This is a shame as KB had a robust community supported with many f2f activities.

Brint is but a Shadow of it's former self - another victim of redesign, forced registration and no user control over topics. This is in stark contrast to the days 1997-2002? when this board was clearly the hub of KM on-line life.

KM forum - the original KM watering hole from 1994, now lingers without a single post in a week.

Gurteen lists other forums, but their traffic is sparse.

Just as activity and opportunity for forum dialog has diminished, so we have seen the rise of KM blogs. These individual (and some group) voices are now the dominant place to gather opinion, offer comments and lead KM awareness. If you have not done so already, I strongly advise you to grab an aggregator (e.g. Bloglines) and subscribe to RSS feeds from the growing band of KM bloggers.

If you are looking for bookmarks and references to KM related stuff, you may wish to subscribe to a Del.icio.us tag feed using some of these keywords:

• KM
• PKM
• knowledge_management
• knowledge-management

Some of the attention has shifted to related topics such as: social software, web2.0, library2.0 or to emergent software genre like wikis, pod- and videocasts - example.

As the on-line KM discourse becomes distributed, diffuse and distracted, we have to adopt new ways to stay connected. Perhaps we will see a regular Skypecast become the next KM watering hole? - If you do start one give me a ping please.

Comments

[Patrick Lambe]

Hi Denham, thanks for this, your periodic reviews of the KM discussion space are always interesting. I recently posted a question on ACT-KM about the influence of blogging on forums, but got minimal response - even from bloggers! I echo Marnix's question, any idea why this shift?

[tyelmene]

Knowledge management (as in the managerial identification & control of information which was somehow supposed to have been greater than mere information) is dead. I, for one, am very glad it is gone.

Historically, I view KM as the ill-concieved response to its ill-concived predecessor; BPR (another top-down managerial control notion that proved to mechanical to be "real"). Even worse, when Mike Hammer/Index was finally seen as a fraud, KM was the "next wave" for the entire industry of BPR "huckster/consultants" and "business expert/pundants" to flock too and over hype/sell their "intellectual capital" snake oil. KM was a full blown business practice movement that was conceived, developed, and delivered without the most basic understanding of its basis; knowledge. Knowledge is our "design of meaning" from the conceptual relationships we form and are derived from the social network where we reside. Everything else is information. There is no way that a simple identification and control metaphor would have any effect on knowledge as it truly exists. There are many emerging outcomes in both social settings and even technology that will leverage this better/deeper understanding and the future looks bright for knowledge practices such as communities of practice, action research, and organizational learning as well as social interaction/web2.0 technologies.

I am quite pleased that the KM notion has finally run its course into oblivion, despite the continued best efforts of the Aussies and David Gurteen. KM is dead and rightfully so.

[Ben Tremblay]

Discourse ... indeed.

I just read a peculiar paper called "Topophobia" ... it beckoned to me; the term "topoi" has a special meaning since it came into usage in our advanced PoliSci course on "regime". Anyhow the paper brings up some interesting material concerning Vico contra Descartes. I had never thought of "topic" in contrast to "reason" before. But the more I think about it ... you know, the way we value narrative ... what makes discourse qualitatively distinct from, say, debate. *With a nod to Habermas.*

Anyhow, I recommend the paper to you. (I linked to the HTML version.)

Oh-wooops, almost forgot my point: my "participatory deliberation" project is based on the notion that we will either have far more and far better discourse or we will have far less ... the times are not enlightened.

[Marnix Catteeuw]

Any reason why ??
Is it a technology hype which is followed (one must blog and RSS) or are we shifting from dialogue to monologues ?

[Mike Riversdale]

Cracking start - hope the list grows and grows