A little over a year ago I wrote a blog post on KM 2.0. In it I wrote:
“… has KM evolved to KM 2.0? No, not at all. KM is still about people and sharing knowledge. It’s always been about ensuring a supporting environment in which this can be best achieved. It’s never been about the technology because good KM can exist without it!”
Well, I’m about to change my mind, but not in the way you might first think.
I’ve been listenning to David Weinberger’s talks on “Everything is Miscelaneous” for a while now and have even shared it inside my own organisation in my role as practice lead for Web and Information Management. I particularly like the one he gave to the National Library of Congress way back in 2004 where he talks of the way in which our attitudes toward knowledge as a society has changed. And this got me thinking.
For about 2000 years we’ve treated knowledge as the province of experts, those who in Aristotle’s mind could help us define what something was and what it was not. What we then did with that knowledge was store it in the most accessible place we could — libraries like those in Alexandria and Ephesus. Unfortunately, this movement started our modern scientific philosophy of valuing fact, logic and reason over the personal and subjective as one was equated to the processes that produced and refined knowledge while the other was not.
Today, the process of validating knowledge is about peer review, but in terms described as modern Taylorism by the likes of Jon Husband, Dave Snowden and Dave Pollard, it means knowledge becomes the product of a careful, measured process in the same way we manufacture cars or cans of fruit.
Only 10 years ago, if John Citizen wanted to share his knowledge with the world, he would have to write a book or publish a journal article. Then, reviewers, editors and established experts, would vet the work and based on their positions of power, and accepted logic of the time, refute or accept what he had to say BEFORE it saw the light of day. And if it didn’t appear in trusted, knowledge repositories like Encyclopedia Britannica, no one would believe it to be the truth.
Fortunately, the web has changed our ways of producing knowledge by giving us social computing tools that reduce the barrier for participation in sharing knowledge so that anyone with a computer (or a mobile phone) can make a contribution. It means that John Citizen can contribute what he knows — even his personal and subjective experiences — to the world in a way that hasn’t been possible for the last two thousand years.
For me, this suggests that knowledge management is changing because the way the world views knowledge and creates it is changing. People are more trusting of John Citizen’s personal views on his blog than they are of CEOs and their company. If John writes an article on his experiences with a washing machine on a community forum because people can more easily identify with John and his ‘human voice’ they will trust him. If John is a friend of your friend Sue then you’re more likely to trust John and what he says.
That’s why at the upcoming ACTKM08 conference I’m about to go out on a limb and say I’ve changed my mind about KM 2.0. Sure, KM is about storytelling, I think we’re in the midst of a global paradigm shift because of web 2.0 and social computing about what constitutes knowledge, the processes we undertake to produce it, and value we place on mythos versus logos …and I think it’s about to change the discipline of knowledge management.
Hope to see you there
M
Posted by magia3e 
