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Social Computing and Knowledge Management: Chat Transcript

Earlier today I moderated a KMers.org TweetChat on the subject of Social Computing and Knowledge Management. We had great participation, and according to TweetReach.com, the last 50 tweets using the #KMers hashtag reached 16,212 people.

Thanks to Liz Williams, Brett Miller, V Mary Abraham, James Monroe, Stan Garfield, Juha Krapinoja, Allison Maguire, Ryan McClead, Ben Hack, Kelly Craft, David Wallace, Joe Raimondo for joining the dialogue.

Here’s the complete transcript:

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If you’ve got a KM-related subject you would like to discuss, get involved! Volunteer to moderate a TweetChat at KMers.org.

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Social Computing and Knowledge Management

Social networking tools have taken off in the past five years. Facebook has over 800 million users, Twitter over 200 million, and even newcomer Google+ with over 50 million. The ubiquity of these tools in our personal lives has spilled over the firewall and into the enterprise, re-labeled as social computing.

Social computing is a broad term that encompasses a range to tools, including blogs, wikis, profiles (with social/professional connections), microblogging and discussion forums.

Are you an advocate for social computing? A knowledge management practitioner? Join me on Tuesday, October 4th for a Twitter Chat I’ll be moderating at KMers.org. To participate in this Twitter-powered discussion you can use your favorite Twitter app with the hashtag #KMers or even easier — just sign in with your Twitter account at the live chat page on KMers.org. The chat will begin at 9am Pacific and run for an hour.

During this chat we will discuss the differences and similarities between the social computing movement and knowledge management, how to reconcile and integrate the two, and the implications for KM over the next five years.

Agenda

  • How do you define social computing, and how does it differ from KM?
  • What social computing tools and approaches are working well for you?
  • Where do informal social computing “communities” or team rooms fit in the context of communities of practice?
  • Should social computing tools be “managed?”
  • When does social computing and collaboration become KM? Is a boundary necessary or even beneficial?

Interested? Join us, and you can follow me @jeffhester and keep the discussion going.

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What is Personal Knowledge Management?

A word cloud generated from my RSS feed

Earlier today I participated in the weekly KMers.org tweet chat. This week’s discussion was hosted by Kate Bower, discussing the role of self management and self regulation in personal knowledge management (PKM). There was some dissent as to whether PKM required a certain level of obsessive compulsive disorder — OCD — or whether there it was possible to use more of a mad scientist approach to PKM.

To answer the question, you must first define personal knowledge management. What exactly is PKM?

Wikipedia defines PKM as: “a collection of processes that an individual carries out to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve, and share knowledge in his/her daily activities and how these processes support work activities.”

In my view, there are three dimensions to personal knowledge management.

First, you need an awareness of your knowledge. You have to know what it is that you know. This is challenging for many people, whether out of modesty or a lack of self-awareness, but technology is helping. Tools like desktop search and word clouds can help surface the subjects that we have a keen interest in — our likely areas of expertise and knowledge.

Next, you need to be open to learning. Equally important to knowing what you know is knowing what you don’t know, and being open to learning and growing. None of us have a monopoly on knowledge. Some might argue that PKM devalues the need for knowledge sharing with others, but the opposite is closer to the truth. As we understand what we know — and do not know — we see where we can contribute to the larger group. At the same time, we see how we can leverage the knowledge and expertise of others in that group where we have gaps in our own knowledge.

Finally, you must be open to sharing. Unless your tacit knowledge is applied, is it really knowledge at all? What is the value of knowledge that goes unused and unshared?  And the beauty of knowledge sharing is that there is an infinite supply. If I give my knowledge to you, I still retain possession. It’s simply multiplied.

As personal knowledge is shared, the entire organization grows and benefits.

During the course of our chat, several members (myself included) described their approach to PKM as that of an mad scientist. I’m not particularly rigorous about folders, hierarchy and information organization. I’d much prefer to leverage technology to help percolate my knowledge to the top.

There are two excellent tools that can help with this.

First, personal search. Simply being able to search my hard drives for the information is often much faster than navigation down a series of folders, especially since search can look beyond file names into the actual content. Search is built into both my Windows 7 PC and my Mac. For email, I use Gmail, which provides super-fast searches through my entire email archive. There are also third-party search tools that will index your hard drive, but I’m quite content with the simplicity of the built-in search.

A word cloud generated from my Delicious bookmarks

Second, word clouds. Wordle.net will take your blog or your Delicious bookmarks and automatically create a word cloud based on the topics that appear most frequently. Word clouds are a great way to visualize the relative importance of topics, as the size of each word is determined by the number of times it appears.

These tools are simply aids that will help you divine your interests (and theoretically areas where you might have some budding expertise). The next steps — growing and sharing — are up to you.

What does PKM mean to you, and what tools and techniques have you found useful?