Monday 10 December 2007

Day 2 - 5th December 2007

The Age of Knowledge Management: Cafes and Communities

David Gurteen
The Emergence of Social KM

Provided a very interesting overview of the history of Knowledge Management and a frank assessment of why KM didn’t fulfil its potential, largely it could be argued, because people were being asked to perform extra tasks, which didn’t become embedded as normal work practices. David suggested that “KM 2.0” a softer, people-centric social phenomena, has the potential to work because people want to engage with it - back to The Muppet Wikia again?

(Abstract available in the conference proceedings)

Lilia Efimova
Getting Value from employee weblogs: a knowledge management approach

Her blog: mathemagenic

Lilia’s presentation highlighted how staff blogs can change, and improve the public perception of a company - in this case Microsoft. Lilia argued that the blogs of individual Microsoft staff have helped to positively promote the work of Microsoft and reduce misunderstandings about how the system works.

(Abstract available in the conference proceedings)

Lee Bryant - Headshift
Informal Knowledge Sharing with Social Tools
This presentation looked at how social networking tools are changing communication channels and the potential for further change in the future. For example, will it reduce e-mail traffic overtime? Will general information (communications between one person to many) move from being e-mail based to RSS based, and e-mail remain for one-to-one communication?

Bryant suggests that the social network tools can be thought of in layers or as a “social tack” (with personal tools at the top and Public feeds at the bottom).

Personal Tools (netvibes, IGoogle)
Group Collaboration (wikis)
Blogs and networks
Bookmarks and tags (del.ici.ous, connotea)
Public Feeds and Flows (via RSS)

1 comment:

Unknown said...

The dilemma with evolving communication channels is that very few will use all of them, even if their uses can be delineated as clearly as the speaker laid out. Adding new tools potentially splinters the user population and limits communication. Interoperability between communication channels (such as comments to this blog interoperating with my Gmail account) is necessary to allow user choice as to their preferred channel.