Knowledge Management & Manage Knowledgement

Comment by Michele Martin:

Ross Mayfield has an excellent post on using wikis for teambuilding that also has some interesting discussion of what he sees as a dichotomy between “Knowledge Management” and Manage Knowledgement”:

Manage Knowledgement is a way of describing KM that’s backwards but works. With KM, users were supposed to fill out forms as a side activity to extract their tacit knowledge. Then some form of artificial intelligence would extract value. Turns out, users resisted and the algorithms didn’t match reality. With MK, through blogs and wikis, the principle activity is sharing, driven by social incentives. Contribution is simple and unstructured, isn’t a side activity and there is permission to participate. Intelligence is provided by participants, both through the act of sharing and simply leaving behind breadcrumbs of attention.

This is a more organic approach to managing and sharing knowledge that I think is centered in how people really work, as opposed to artificial constructs. That’s not to say that there still isn’t something artificial about blogs and wikis in some sense, but I think they lend themselves to our more social natures, capitalizing on our uses of social currency. I’m not aware of any “knowledge management” systems (with a capital KM) that sprang up on their own, nor am I aware of droves of people wanting to participate in KM systems just for the fun of it. The growth of social media outside of any corporate mandates, the fact that people are using these tools “under the radar,” suggests to me that they are already better-suited in many ways to human interaction than previous KM systems might have been.

Of course, within this new paradigm of sharing knowledge people need to not only learn the specific technology skills associated with these tools, but they also have to learn new processes. For example, as Ross points out, when we begin using social media tools, we have to have conversations about how to make the best uses of them:

Simple conversations occur that lead to simple agreements like “let’s use these four tags, for these four kinds of information — and lets agree to pay attention to pages and posts with this tag on a daily basis.” While it seems mundane at first, the team not only develops a shared language, but a way of working with it.

We can see, then, that we have two very different sets of literacies that need to be developed–the technological skills to be able to edit a wiki or comment on a blog post, but also the people/process skills necessary to negotiate the kinds of tags you’ll share or to write a blog post that effectively summarizes what you learned at a conference. This is what makes developing new work literacies difficult for many people, I think–it’s asking us to combine technology and people skills in ways that can be challenging to those of us who may have tended to specialize in one or the other. There’s an even greater integration of people and technology skills than we may have experienced before