SKM

Laszlo and Laszlo (2002) lay the groundwork for my understanding of and interest in social knowledge management (SKM). They envision social knowledge management as a logical advancement from an organizational focus on information and knowledge (know-what and know-how) supporting internal business goals to broader knowledge and wisdom (know-why) supporting global social goals. While Laszlo and Laszlo acknowledge that social knowledge management can support economic benefits, they focus on moving beyond competitive advantage for individual firms and supporting economic development for entire regions and the global community (p. 409). In the most direct terms, Laszlo and Laszlo’s profoundly democratic research agenda calls for a “big picture” knowledge management that equips all of humanity with greater access to existing knowledge and expands humanity’s ability build new knowledge and meaning in response to economic, environmental, and political problems.

Laszlo and Laszlo mention something about methodology that is relevant to this dissertation. Supporting social knowledge management requires that we access reason, intellect, values, intuition, and love (I still have difficulty mentioning that last term without appending an exclamation, or at least arching an eyebrow), which in turn requires moving away from strictly quantitative research to make room at the methodological table for qualitative, participatory research (Laszlo and Laszlo, 2002, p. 405). This perspective supports my approach to the study of blogs as organic social knowledge management as a researcher who actively participates in the South Dakota blogosphere and writes about that experience in scholarly personal narrative.

Researchers recognize social knowledge management as vital to fostering innovation in local and regional economies (Gertler and Wolfe, 2002). Gertler and Wolfe note further that making SKM work requires a civic culture that develops both from “unplanned and uncoordinated” historical development of “networking and interaction” and by “conscious efforts by civic and business leaders.” SKM requires social capital:

The use of the term capital indicates that it involves an asset; while the term social connotes that the particular asset is attained through involvement with a community. The existence of social capital depends upon the ability of people to associate with each other, and the extent to which their shared norms and values allow them to align their individual interests with the larger interests of the community (Gertler and Wolfe, 2002).

Blogs fit neatly into social knowledge management in the creation of social capital, especially in a rural region like South Dakota, where individuals living in small, dispersed towns can use online technology to discover and associate with others who share their interests and values.

What Does SKM Look Like? Ask the Amish

We can see an example of social knowledge management in The Budget, the weekly national newspaper of America's Amish communities. With volunteer scribes, The Budget has followed a very bloggy publishing model for decades:

The national edition of The Budget, now available in print only, is largely composed of submissions from hundreds of volunteer “scribes” from across the country. Typically, a scribe talks about the weather and segues into the goings-on in the local community. Around 500 scribe letters a week take up roughly 50 pages....

By assembling detailed reports from around the country, Ms. [Jessica] Best said, the editors of The Budget “have been doing for 100 years what we have only been doing recently — looking at news on the hyperlocal scale and asking each person what is on your mind,” she said in an interview from Newport, Wales, where she is a reporter at The South Wales Argus.

“They are looking at the individuals to make a bigger picture. With the Internet, the power has shifted to many hands, but they have done that for a long time.”

There are 843 scribes, Mr. Rathbun said, and they must write 12 times a year to get their subscription free. For others, a subscription costs $42 a year, and the national edition has about 9,000 subscribers. The local edition has about 10,000 and includes the national.

Like bloggers, the scribes have no editor and no limit on how much they write; like Twitter users, the scribes have followers who track their every utterance [Noam Cohen, "Exploring News by the Amish Online," New York Times, 2009.09.20].

This amateur local publishing model also serves as the foundation of a social knowledge management mechanism for Amish communities nationwide:

Another new-media analogy from Ms. Best was how those scribe letters — viewed over the nearly 120-year history of The Budget — represent a database for the Amish, who regularly visit the newspaper’s office to consult its archive of microfilmed pages.

“Basically it is a search engine for them to catalog anything and everything,” she said.

Mr. Rathbun described how the newspaper will “get a call from Illinois, Missouri, from someone who needed to get a birth certificate” to deal with the government but whose home birth was never registered. The government, he said, will say, “If you can get the documentation from The Budget, we can give you a birth certificate.” The caller will tell the staff the date of birth and the scribe who reported on it, and The Budget will send a copy of the report [Cohen, 2008].

This citizen journalism captures knowledge that no other media are archiving and thus becomes an essential knowledge management resource for the dispersed community it serves.

Jessica Best tells more about what she learned during her two-week visit to Amish country on her blog.