Workshop - MetaKnowledge Mash-up 2.0 - London, 9 October 2008

MetaKnowledge Mash-up 2.0: Making and Organising Knowledge in Communities
A joint ISKOUK/KIDMM Day conference/workshop

London, 9 October 2008
10:00 -17:00 (registration opens 9:15)

VENUE: British Computer Society London rooms, Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HA

FEE: 20 GBP (includes lunch, refreshments and materials)
To book you place, dowload the PDF form and fax it or post it to the British Computer Society. Pre-registration is essential and must be received by end of business Tuesday 7th October. There are no facilities for paying ‘on the door’. Booking queries: Mandy Bauer (mandy.bauer@hq.bcs.org.uk; tel. 01793 417472)


In keeping with the last year's successful event the MetaKnowledge Mash-up 2007, BCS KIDMM and ISKO UK have joined efforts to put up this follow-up event.

Knowledge management professionals know that much of the knowledge which drives a successful organization derives from its communities, both formal and informal; and that knowledge can be used and shared more easily if it is organized.

In many organizational contexts, be they businesses, government departments, professional associations and social enterprises, a lot of the most useful knowledge is not contained in documents and other written forms; it is in peoples' heads. Before knowledge organization can begin, there is already the challenge of eliciting and formulating what people know. What are the methods and tooks that can help in these processes?

Social networking technologies may be part of the answer. They are also causing a re-examination of the role of formal KO and its relationship to less formal approaches such as folksonomy and social tagging. People are asking: In what circumstances should formal KO apply, and where might an informal approach be better?; and: Perhaps they could work together? Arguably, they already do, since we organize as we speak or write, at the very least by constructing comprehensible sentences, but also through our choice of words, of implicit categorization and of metaphor.

So, if KO is at work the instant we open our mouths or tap on a keyboard, how and to what degree should we formalize it in our communities, whether face-to-face or virtual? Perhaps different techniques apply in each circumstance?

These are some of the questions surrounding KM and KO in the Web 2.0 age that we hope will be raised and discussed on October 9th. The speakers have been selected because they have case-study stories to tell, and there will also be participative round-table exercises. If we can also find some answers, that will be a bonus!

Speakers and contributors include: Alan Pollard, Conrad Taylor, Marilyn Leask, Jan Wyllie, Lyndsay Rees-Jones, Christopher Dean, Sabine K McNeill and Susan Payne.

To read more visit the event's website.

Dead KM Walking

For the benefit of those in ISKO UK who are not also members of the BCS-KIDMM mailing list, I reproduce below a posting I have just made to the latter.

While checking my NewsFox portfolio for items suitable for a response to Conrad's recent call for suggested RSS feeds, I came across the video below produced by Patrick Lambe (a UCL alumnus) whom I admire a great deal. If you can find a spare 40 minutes, I recommend you watch/listen to Patrick discussing KM with gurus Larry Prusak and Dave Snowden. It will be food for thought for some, maybe poison for others...

Dead KM Walking

Watch out KM pigeons - here come the cats!

Some ramblings on knowledge, information, thermodynamics and Taoism – Part 1

Conrad Taylor, Project Officer at the BCS KIDMM community and friend of ISKO UK has written a paper Towards making knowledge in communities, which is designed to lay the foundations for an exploration of the topic of ‘knowledge communities’ at a joint KIDMM-ISKOUK event in October 2008. The paper masterfully blends, links and questions the currently predominant memes concerning knowledge and its manifestations, the relationship between information and knowledge, and the role which communities play in the exchange and generation of knowledge.

Why should ISKO UK be interested in such a topic? Well, I have no doubt that knowledge is socially constructed. It might appear to be generated solely by individuals like the Einsteins and Edisons of this world, but it inevitably draws upon the work of others, and to become accepted as ‘justified true belief’, to be propagated and to be put to good use, it must be validated through peer review and put to the test in a social context. All of these processes, from initial conceptualization, through research, validation, testing and exploitation are mediated and facilitated by access to knowledge and information – access which is made possible because geeks like us bother to develop and apply the means of doing so.

At a recent meeting organized by NetIKX which Conrad mentions, he raised a number of points which challenged some of the slick memes propagated by KM consultants and gurus (for an amusing insight into this phenomenon, see Prof. Tom Wilson's infamous guerrilla attack on KM), and which stimulated my own thinking about the issues involved. For example, take the common compound noun ‘knowledge object’. Your understanding of this depends upon your acceptance of the notion that knowledge can be a ‘thing’, i.e. a tangible object. Our current conventional wisdom is thoroughly ambivalent on this, largely owing to popular acceptance of Nonaka and Takeuchi’s mid-1990s description of ‘tacit knowledge’ and ‘explicit knowledge’ and their SECI (Socialization, Externalization, Combination, Internalization) model of how one is transmuted into the other.

It’s not that Nonaka & Takeuchi’s description was invalid; it represented a giant leap forward in our understanding of how knowledge is transferred, absorbed, aggregated and embedded in the social psyche. But their presentation of ‘knowledge’ in tacit and explicit forms hooked-in to our Western way of black-or-white thinking (you’re either with us or against us...) to fool us into assuming that they were separate and separable concepts. They are not.

I have had conversations many times before on this topic. The most recent and most interesting was with a colleague, Christopher Dean, who deals with knowledge and change issues at Airbus in Bristol. He makes reference to a rather interesting (although dense) paper by Crofts which theorizes about knowledge and information in thermodynamic terms and links them with Darwinism and the development of phenotypes and of civilization itself. I am sure my colleague won’t mind if I quote him briefly here, since he makes his points far better than I ever could.

“This paper by Crofts provides a theoretically sound basis to distinguish knowledge without substance from information embodied in the structure of a thermodynamic carrier. As you suggest, knowledge and information are both distinct yet inseparable. However, for me this drives a stake through the notions of explicit knowledge and collective knowledge. Explicit information certainly, but knowledge - no.”

“To illustrate: an author translates meaning into physical acts, such as writing or typing, to produce an explicit record. A (symbolic) representation of that meaning is externalised and stored & transmitted for future reference by the author and others. Reading that recorded representation demands translation and interpretation to reproduce the original meaning. What's important about this sequence is that the knowledge enacted by the author through writing, the storage & transmission medium, and the reader are parts of a thermodynamic system that propagates meaning from one mind to another's mind. Hence, knowledge only exists in the mind of each individual. The word "communicate" literally means "to make common", that is to reproduce the same sense of meaning in another person's mind.”

Why is this significant to Conrad’s theme? Well, because Conrad’s paper and the quotation above are both concerned with the same issues, like ‘explicit knowledge’ actually being ‘information’, and the role of ‘information objects’ as a transmission medium. And by extension, because to ‘make knowledge in communities’, knowledge has to be transferred as information (or information objects?) through some kind of medium. The medium can be one (or several) of many possible types, and may itself be carried by different kinds of channels. Channels have a finite capacity, which in digital technology is called ‘bandwidth’. Does a book have a bandwidth? And what is the relationship between an information object, its medium of transmission, the channel used to convey it and its form (or format)? There is a whole set of intertwined conundra here ripe for the unravelling.

Part 2 to follow...

New DCMI Knowledge Management Community

A new Knowledge Management Community has been formed under the auspices of DCMI (the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative) to replace the old DCMI Global Corporate Circle. The aim is to apply a "more general focus on Knowledge Management" in place of the old community's charter which was restricted to the application of Dublin Core metadata in corporate environments.

More...

Invasion of the Knowledge Organizers

London, England, 22 August 2007.

The authorities in London have issued a warning that the city is likely to be hit by several swarms of Knowledge Organizers next month. The first swarm will make landfall on 4 September, when the UK Chapter of ISKO hold their half-day seminar Tools for knowledge organization today.

Disorganized knowledge workers are advised to take extra care on 12 September, when mixed swarms of knowledge managers and data managers are forecast to hit the Charing Cross area. First to arrive will be those attending the afternoon seminar of NetIKX - the Network for Information and Knowledge Exchange - at the DWP in John Adam St., where Stella Dextre Clarke will be speaking on Standardising the language of information and knowledge management – the Agony and the Ecstasy.

Following in the early evening of the 12th., another swarm is expected to descend upon the British Computer Society's premises in Southampton Street for a meeting entitled Information, data and metadata: why they need to be managed. The meeting marks the launch of Keith Gordon's new book Principles of Data Management: Facilitating Information Sharing.

After a brief respite, we are warned that a further swarm is due to hit the Covent Garden area on 17 September in the form of the BCS KIDMM (Knowledge, Information, Data and Metadata Management) day conference KIDMM: MetaKnowledge Mash-up 2007. Since this gathering comprises a number of different species which do not normally swarm together, visitors to the area are advised to be on their guard against unpredictable behaviour.

So, make sure you get these in your diary:

04 September: Tools for knowledge organization today
12 September: Standardising the language of information and knowledge management – the Agony and the Ecstasy
12 September: Information, data and metadata: why they need to be managed
17 September: KIDMM: MetaKnowledge Mash-up 2007

Knowledge Cafes in Liverpool

Peter Bond, an expert on communities of practice, is organising regular Knowledge Cafes in central Liverpool at the Ship and Mitre pub, which is situated at the museum end of Dale Street, near John Moores University. The first KCafe is on Tuesday 26th June (6pm for a 6.30pm start, until 9pm).

(From Talking KM, which also has more details)

CFP Knowledge Society: new spaces for its construction, Habana, Cuba

Courtesy of María López-Huertas:

Call for papers for
"The international conference on Information "Knowledge Society: new spaces for its construction"" - INFO' 2008
21-25 April 2008
Palacio de Convenciones de La Habana, Cuba

The conference has two main purposes: an international meeting on information and an
international workshop on business intelligence and knowledge management in companies.
Organizers: El Instituto de Información Científica y Tecnológica (IDICT) del Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología y Medio Ambiente de la República de Cuba.