Narrative, Blogs, and Social Knowledge Management

I presented a brief overview of social knowledge management for our online seminar course here at Dakota State University last Friday. Here are the slides, courtesy of SlideShare:

Among the comments submitted after the show:

Good example: One fellow student really appreciated my use of Mike Knutson's Reimagine Rural as an example of SKM. Mike's work may be the best local example I've seen of SKM. His is certainly the most conscious effort in that direction, and it has none of the political spin that I and my friends left and right are prone to. (Remember, there is a difference between knowledge management and message management.)

Corporate Buy-in: Another student suggested I "further explore and define the benefits of SKM within a company -- why do corporations want to do this?" That could be a real kicker: corporations might not want to do SKM. SKM is about sharing across boundaries, with no inherent focus on competitive advantage -- that sentence pretty much disappears any motivation the typical corporation would have to listen further. But Laszlo and Laszlo (2002) believe that the increasingly interconnected world will bring the spheres of corporate self-interest and corporate citizenship closer into greater overlap. In other words, to be a good corporation, you'll have to be a good citizen.

But that feels like a hard sell. The idea of corporate citizenship, of sharing knowledge in the spirit of helping the entire community, feels out of step with the traditional KM talk of knowledge as capital, as a vital resource for competitive advantage.

I wonder if there's a Google answer here. Google is at least providing all the SKM tools we could ask for. Search, blogs, forums, collaboration tools -- anyone who wants to do SKM just needs a browser and signal. Google builds its competitive advantage with all the data we don't notice they're collecting.

The Downside: One student asked for more discussion of the negatives. That comment catches me off guard, as did a question during the seminar about protecting privacy in SKM. Privacy? I thought. What privacy? If social knowledge is knowledge that some of us already share, is there a privacy risk in sharing it more widely, to benefit other communities? Plus, given the perspective I've taken so far, that SKM comes from individuals who are motivated to share their own experiences to help others learn, I've been operating on the assumption that all the knowledge we're capturing and building is voluntarily shared. Under that model, privacy is self-governing. But I feel like there's more to that question.

Likewise other downsides: I've given negatives almost no consideration. Part of me is thinking we have gobs of knowledge scattered about in everybody's heads. SKM builds connections between those heads and their knowledge. What can go wrong with that? On a really abstract level, if you have knowledge, and then someone comes along and adds management, is that ever detrimental to the stock of knowledge and the general welfare? On an SKM level, does a community lose in any way by sharing its knowledge about job creation, economic development, or cultural growth with other communities?

SKM Tech: Someone wants nuts and bolts, asks what technologies might house SKM. See above: Google? Blogs? Special interest wikis?

It's pretty hard to envision doing SKM with any sort of proprietary, in-house software. There is no house, no walls. We need to be able to share social knowledge with anyone, using any machine. SKM needs to be platform-independent and durable. I can go to Widener Library and access the same books John Adams studied 250 years ago, but I can't load the reports I created 15 years ago with Geoworks. KM and SKM are very young; whatever tools we adopt, we need remain mindful that the knowledge we are creating and sharing is meant to last as long as the communities and societies we are building.

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p.s.: Funny thing is, no one on the feedbac sheet mentioned my call for socialist revolution. Вся власть Советам управления знаниями! :-)

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