Posted by Rupert Whitehead on April 17, 1998 at 11:03:59:

In Reply to: Re: desert island bookshelf posted by Jay Reay on April 01, 1998 at 07:24:18:

Thankyou for all the suggestions, they are proving to be very useful. In an attempt to evaluate knowledge management and where the IT company for which I work fits in, we have now built a database to capture knowledge management ideas. The task of populating it is bewilderingly vast, but at the same time, is proving to be an interesting process.

Having been to the knowledge management conference last week, I came away with the feeling that too many companies are jumping on the back of the magic words ‘knowledge management’ without fully understanding what they mean. The result was unduly mechanistic offerings that failed to slot them into an appropriate surrounding infrastructure. Having said that, many could prove to be useful cogs, in a virtual knowledge management machine.

Given the proclivities of the industry, the challenge seems to be to find the best methods of setting up communities of practice. There will be a number of different kinds of communities of practice, but have you got any suggestions on how to set them up? What I have in mind is trying to get people together in a way that is not entirely technology driven. Neither the technologies nor the communities are ontologically prior as presumably there will be a feedback effect between the two. The technologies will help act as a catalyst in the creation and interchange within the communities and the communities will dictate the use and type of technologies. The effect will be a dynamic. Instead of approaching the problem as ‘what technology can create a certain community?’ which would be a traditional IT approach, the question becomes ‘how do I create a sense of community?’. This is not to detract from the importance of technology, it’s just that I feel strong enough in this area to put it on a back burner. Now that I’ve thrown down a fairly general gauntlet, it should be interesting to see how the discussion progresses, particularly since the standard of responses has been excellent throughout this thread.

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