Denham Grey suggests 5 books to get you started in KM. I would add Nancy Dixon’s Common Knowledge. Nancy provides a useful way of thinking about knowledge transfer.

Hi Nancy, thanks for your comment. Here is the abstract for the paper. A new framework for communities of practice is required to unite the disjointed approaches currently employed to understand this organisational form. This paper proposes a framework based on complexity theory and applies a model developed by Axelrod and Cohen. A set of […]

Downloaded Surely you’re joking Mr Feynman from Audible on the weekend. What I’ve heard so far (300 pages retold in 12 hours) is one great story after another. Love the story about Feynman’s radio fixing days at the age of 11. Not what you might expect from a Nobel winning physicist.

“Civilisation advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.” —ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD

We know more than we can say, and we will say more than we can write down. This aphorism might be one of the reasons why podcasting is taking off. Now anyone can create their own radio programme and make it available on the web.

A couple of years ago I developed a simple approach to developing knowledge strategies. The premise was simple–that a strategy should incrememtally enhance the ‘knowledge environment’ and that this could be done by implementing a series of tangible initiatives. Each initiative should be coherent with how people view knowledge (the framework) and how they leverage […]

I just heard today that a chapter Trish Milne and I wrote has been published. The book is called Human Perspectives in the Internet Society and our chapter is entitles ‘ActKM: Variety in a Community of Practice from a Complexity Perspective’.

Matt Moore made a good comment in response to my last blog entry I have recently been trying to link the thinking on Small World Networks http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/June98/smallworld.bs.html to communities. If you see communities of interest as social networks consisting of tight clusters and loose links then you need to apply different strategies to grow the […]

There has been some discussion during November in ActKM about whether tacit knowledge can be captured. Opinion ranged from ‘definitely yes’ to ‘absolutely no’. This discussion reminded me of the distinctions made by Max Boisot between three types of tacit knowledge: Things that are not said because everyone understands them and takes them for granted. […]

It is difficult to build a community of practice from scratch. In fact, the construction metaphor of ‘building’ a community is inappropriate. Rather, it is important to ‘foster’ communities–and the first step is to find the communities that already exist in your organisation. There are many places to search for evidence of existing communities. Like […]