My point exactly... was aiming to get to this answer... if the goal is to
spread the word about KM and improve the quality of contributions in
"general public", wikipedia is the place to start... noone will look at yet
another wwwiki lost in the universe somewhere... people start looking at
wikipedia for answers... so there is the solution as David put it
straightforwardly... ;)

P


On Sun, Jul 27, 2008 at 7:04 AM, David Snowden <snowded@...>
wrote:

Of course there is another solution - contribute to the Wikipedia pages on
Knowledge Management, Community of Practice etc. At the moment only a very
small number of us look after those pages and I seem to spend most of my
time removing commercial promotion and vandalism.

That way the contribution would be to the wider community, of course it
would then be subject to scrutiny by a wider group of editors and might be
less comfortable in consequence.

Martin, I don't see anything you said implied your ego. Actually I am really enlightened by your post :-)

In loose community like this. Most of us interact with each other through
posting a question or thoughts and other response by expressing their
(sometimes very strong) opinions. Unless we collectively have a need to
deliver something that will be less of individual opinion (and ego), we will
probably happy with the mailing-list is the way it is.

Wik is tremendously powerful tool for building a highly networked topics
that can be contributed by many individuals. It is also highly effective in
contextual learning. However It shifts from the individual
contributor's view points towards much more of a collective intelligence of
the participants. If we have to create something together, say a mission
statement of this group, wiki would be a good choice. But lower your ego
first. If we want to stay with causal hall-way conversation, we don't need
wiki.

-Yao
________________________________
From: sikmleaders@... [mailto:sikmleaders@...] On
Behalf Of Martin@...
Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2008 10:04 AM
To: sikmleaders@...
Subject: Re: [sikmleaders] Re: Wiki

When a person collects knowledge to address a purpose, it serves a
purpose, if only to that one person. However, that "knowledge"
collected is most likely just information to others - if it doesn't
serve a specific purpose or general context useful to others.

Most tools don't do anything to help build shared context, in fact,
through their permissioning controls and rigid content boundaries they
actively prevent participants from blending their ideas and words.
These mechanisms block the pursuit of discovering or negotiating a
mutually useful information structure.

I like to think that a wiki has the affordance to collect, refine and
rework knowledge in proportion to the exact amount of effort that
every participant puts in. To me, a wiki allows everyone to collect
what interests them, shows everyone what's collected, and poses the
community with the question "how does the knowledge each of us knows
fit together?".

Through this participants ask "how do we, the community, fit
together?". In this way, it teases out group goals and leaves useful
artifacts (information capital) in its wake.

Martin.
--
Martin Cleaver
Martin@...
+1 416-786-6752 (GMT-5)

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 9:35 AM, Albert Simard <simarda@...>
wrote:

Dale -

You have hit an important KM nail squarely on the head. "I have a
solution;
what's the problem?" I argued this point, to no avail, in my former
department, when a wiki was set up, with no specific objective, just to
see
what would happen.

In the specific SIKM case, there doesn't seem to be much literature on the
subject of life-cycle management of knowledge, scientific or otherwise
(notwithstanding DeLong's book). And there seemed to be interest in the
subject expressed by some SIKM members. A couple of members mentioned a KM
site on wikispace, so I set up a page on that site to see if a group of
"enthusiasts" might be able to collectively construct something on the
subject - a specific and limited objective. To my mind, that's what social
networking is all about.

Returning to my former employer, what happened is that, over the course of
a
year, several hundred people participated in posting and gradually
developing more than 2,000 articles. Peer production represents a
significant cultural change and will take longer. So, I was proven wrong
and somteimes it is true that if you build it (and proactively promote it,
and it is useful), they will come.

Al Simard

Dale -

You have hit an important KM nail squarely on the head. "I have a solution;
what's the problem?" I argued this point, to no avail, in my former
department, when a wiki was set up, with no specific objective, just to see
what would happen.

In the specific SIKM case, there doesn't seem to be much literature on the
subject of life-cycle management of knowledge, scientific or otherwise
(notwithstanding DeLong's book). And there seemed to be interest in the
subject expressed by some SIKM members. A couple of members mentioned a KM
site on wikispace, so I set up a page on that site to see if a group of
"enthusiasts" might be able to collectively construct something on the
subject - a specific and limited objective. To my mind, that's what social
networking is all about.

Returning to my former employer, what happened is that, over the course of a
year, several hundred people participated in posting and gradually
developing more than 2,000 articles. Peer production represents a
significant cultural change and will take longer. So, I was proven wrong
and somteimes it is true that if you build it (and proactively promote it,
and it is useful), they will come.

Al Simard

---

From: sikmleaders@... [mailto:sikmleaders@...] On Behalf Of Dale Arseneault
Sent: 31 July 2008 04:05
To: sikmleaders@...
Subject: [sikmleaders] Re: Wiki

A colleague of mine pointed me to an interesting post titled Resource Fetishism by Jono, who is Ubuntu Community Manager for Canonical, and looks after the world-wide community of Ubuntu contributors and developers. (Ubuntu is a community developed Linux-based operating system).

In his post, Jono paints this common problem:

Its funny how the same approximate process seems to happen for many communities, and sub-communities in projects. It happens a little like this:

• A new team forms from a small group of enthusiasts.
• They create a raft of resources - version control, repositories, mailing lists, IRC channels, bug trackers, councils, forums etc.
• A discussion happens on the new mailing list about which website CMS to use.
• The discussion lasts approximately a month. There are many opinions. Bickering ensues. It turns into a Drupal vs. Wordpress war.
• Two months pass, little has! been achieved other than yet more CMS arguments archived to the Internet.

So, I read the thread that this post triggered, and I can't seem to see the core reason for the sikmleaders wiki in the first place.  We seem to have gotten trapped in our own Resource Fetishism.

Can anyone enlighten me - what would we do with a wiki?  why do we need one ? (regardless of the technology)

Dale Arseneault
http://reflectionskmoi.blogspot.com/