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A joint event by KIDMM and ISKO-UK
Making and Organising Knowledge
in Communities
BCS London meeting rooms
9th October 2008
[Download Introductory paper: Literature Review]
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December 2008: Recordings and papers from this event are in the
process of being transcribed and organised so as to be able to supply
a comprehensive account.
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At the MetaKnowledge Mashup last year
(full report available
for download), the KIDMM community and guests examined ways of
managing data and information and the role of metadata. In
MetaKnowledge Mashup 2.0, KIDMM joined forces with ISKO UK to
explore how communities of any type or size can improve the way
they gather, organise and share the knowledge that resides within
and around their memberships.
The term ‘knowledge’ means different things to
different people. For some, it refers exclusively to the patterns
of identity, causality and expectation that are particular to an
individual’s mind and experience — inaccessible to any
but the possessor unless externalised. For others, knowledge is
what we write down, what we collectively know, in forms that can
be analysed and organised, exchanged, bartered or sold.
Michael Polanyi said, ‘We know more than we can tell.’
And this is a challenge for organisations keen to fully mobilise
the knowledge possessed by their members or employees.
More often than is generally realised, knowledge-making occurs
in a social context, within a community of some kind, be it a
workgroup, a professional coterie or an academic lecture. The
emerging discipline of Knowledge Management recognises such
communities (‘Communities of Practice’) as the
‘sap’ which generates business vitality, but is struggling to
find ways of nourishing it and tapping into its benefits. After all,
knowledge is personal to people. It includes ‘know-how’
and skills that verge on the instinctive, and things that people know
but struggle to articulate; or knowledge and experience that no-one
has bothered to record. What are the processes for gathering such
knowledge, examining and reconciling opposing ideas, sifting and
categorising what emerges?
In the Web 2.0 age, there are now new ways of building community,
new ways of gathering and sharing what we know. While we cling to the
email discussion lists and online forums we are familiar with, we
are also embracing social networking sites, wikis and interlinked
blogs. Libraries have moved online, offer multimedia alongside
the book, and face the challenge of the e-book. MetaKnowledge
Mashup 2.0: Making and Organising Knowledge in Communities
was planned as a day to hear about and discuss the new tools for
knowledge-making and knowledge organisation.
But this event wasn’t just be about technology. Community is above
all a human social phenomenon, innate to our species. The new Web 2.0
tools make some aspects of community easier, others more difficult.
We listened to some significant case studies, some narratives,
some analyses, and then in the afternoon we put our heads together
in a series of exercises and discussions to pool and record and organise
what we know about pooling and recording and organising knowledge,
using both new methods and old.
Speakers and other contributors
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Alan Pollard
Alan is Deputy President and President-Elect
of the British Computer Society. A feature of Alan’s presidential year
will be a focus on enabling greater communication within and between the
communities inside the BCS. Alan will open the event and chair some of
the sessions.
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Conrad Taylor
Concepts of knowledge-in-communities.
Conrad is Chair of the BCS Electronic Publishing Specialist Group,
and KIDMM’s Web site manager and co-ordinator. In preparation for
this event, Conrad has been conducting a literature review and will
present a framework for understanding knowledge-making in communities,
drawing on ideas from Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger,
John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, Clay Shirky, Michael Polanyi,
Gilbert Ryle and others.
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Professor Marilyn Leask
Learning and sharing knowledge online.
Marilyn Leask is well known for her work in knowledge management
in education, specialising in teacher education and improvement and
development across large systems through online networking and
knowledge sharing. She led the initiative to develop the
Teacher Training Resource Bank
and helped establish Teachernet
and the European SchoolNet.
More recently, she set up online communities for local government
for the Improvement
and Development Agency of the Local Government Association.
Marilyn will tell us of her experiences in getting large-scale
online knowledge communites up and running, focusing on strategy,
development approaches, operation and monitoring.
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Jan Wyllie
RSA Network Views (1993): Back to the Future
of Knowledge Communities?
Jan Wyllie is an intelligence analyst, currently working on a project
to harness the participation of an online community in collecting a
repository of categorised links to articles about world energy trends.
But for this event, Jan will look back at a mid-Nineties project within
the RSA (the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacture
& Commerce) — the Tomorrow’s Company Inquiry
Network — and how in gathering ideas for the report it made use of
‘networking at a distance’ and collaborative writing,
using technologies of post, phone, copier, fax and early email.
Many of the lessons are still relevant today.
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Lyndsay Rees-Jones
CILIP Communities: the lessons learned.
Lyndsay is a senior adviser to the Membership Support Unit at CILIP,
the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals.
She oversaw the introduction of CILIP Communities, the online
system which provides discussion forums and blog space for communities
of practice and communities of interest within CILIP. Lyndsay will
share with us the frank evaluations which CILIP have made of this
experiment in online community within a professional society.
Ed Mitchell will support Lyndsay in telling the CILIP story,
in which he participated as a consultant. Ed’s focus is in the
planning, design and facilitation of networks, communities and events.
Since 2002 he has been immersed in the knowledge aspects of the above,
and he runs the ‘Gurteen Knowledge Cafe’ group for Bristol
and the South West.
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Christopher Dean
Organising around purpose - why bother!?
An engineer by training, Christopher Dean now works to encourage
creative responses to challenging situations arising in product
Research & Development. His coaching and facilitation practice
is centred on the human aspects of these socio-technical endeavours,
where attaining and maintaining coherence of intent amongst diverse
players is an essential ingredient for success. Chris will be
reflecting on a decade’s experience of attracting and
securing engagement.
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Sabine K McNeill
From meetings and Westminster to Politics On-Line.
Sabine is a mathematician who used to diagnose software problems
at CERN in Geneva where the Web was born. In the early 80s she
came to London and organised meetings such as ‘Turning Points
@ St. James’ (today Alternatives), ‘Networking
the Networks’ and ‘NetReach’ to promote computer
communication while reaching out to people. Today she will tell
us why, after organising the Forum
for Stable Currencies at the House of Lords for many years,
she is now creating networks and doing politics on-line.
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Susan Payne
Heading for Know*Ware.
Susan is a mature student in software engineering at De Montfort
University. As her final year project, she is building an online
community system for KIDMM, provisionally called Know*Ware,
which will combine features of social networking, discussion
forums, online libraries, wiki space and other collaborative
authoring facilities. Susan will briefly present about what
she believes are important principles in designing such
systems for and with real user communities.
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