Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge  reminded the 300+ audience that knowledge managment (KM) has really only been around for 10 years or so, the same as the Internet — so early days still.  Fundamentally, we only know what we know when we need to know it — something triggers a memory.  The way people know things in the field is different from how they describe it in an interview.  As Dave always says, “We know more than we can tell, we can tell more than we can write.  Knoweldge has three focuses — experience and practice, stuff that we can tell (engineers through stories), stuff we can write down which is limited and takes time and effort to do.  The bulk of knowedge  is in experience and narrative.  Social computing tools are now available to  support.

Aside, stopping smoking has stopped a number of natural story telling, narrative, pathways for sharing knoweldge.

Dave talked about:  sense-making — How do we make sense of the world so we can act in it?; complex adaptive systems (order systems constrains agent behavior and innovation; chaotic systems are unconstrained)   — are likely constrains the system and the agents co-evolve to create another system which is unpredictable.  He then told his wonderful amusing stories about childrens birthday parties (12 year old boys and 15 year old girls) which are great metaphors for his points around early signal detection, disrupting patterns, distributed cognitiion, etc.

And congrats Dave on receiving the Academy of Management’s Award for the best article by practitioners — and article which Dave wrote with Mary Boone which was published in Harvard Business Review, Nov 2007, Leader’s Framework for Decision Making.  To hear more about this join their workshop at KMWorld & Intranets 2008, Monday September 22nd in San Jose.

IFLA, International Federation of Library Associations, is hosting it’s 74th World Library & Information Congress and IFLA conference in Quebec City, August 10-14.  It’s an exciting time in Quebec City — celebrations are going on for it’s 400th anniversary.  A great time to visit.

Knowledge Management Workshop & Programs
The following info will be available online shortly.
The KM Section has a free pre-conference workshop scheduled for Friday June 8 in Quebec City:Knowledge Sharing Strategies & Initiatives
IFLA KM Section Workshop
Friday August 8, 2008
Laval University, Quebec City
Registration required (email jane at dysartjones.com), No cost.  Buy your own lunch with colleagues in university cafeteria.
 
Start networking with your colleagues over breakfast.
Enjoy an interactive morning discussing social tools and knowledge sharing with KM thought leader, Dave Pollard, VP, Knowledge Development, CICA, author of the “How  to Save the World” weblog , and former CKO, Ernst & Young Canada.  Pollard shares success stories of how organizations have introduced Weblogs, wikis, instant messaging, desktop videoconferencing, just-in-time canvassing, RSS aggregators, ‘know-who’ directories, and other social networking methods and tools to their budget-conscious organizations; the practical approaches used; and the secrets of their success.  Pollard looks at tools that improve work productivity, decision-making and innovation; and tools that increase capacity, understanding of risk, as well as connectivity, collaboration and knowledge transfer.  He focuses on social networking tools: people connectors that find and strengthen relationships, social publishing and information sharing tools that publish, subscribe, discuss and link what you know, collaboration and communication allowing people to connect and work together more powerfully, and other interesting leading edge tools.  Join Pollard and colleagues in an interactive discussion about the tools and their use in libraries and knowledge organizations.l
 
The afternoon focuses on international knowledge sharing initiatives.  Frank Tulus, Senior Program Officer, IDRC, International Development Research Centre, and global partners lead the discussion about the Joint Gates Foundation/IDRC global research project that is investigating the social and economic impact o f public access to information and communication technologies.  Good knowledge of why people use various computer and information services and the usage rates of these services has been acquired over the last several years. Little is known, though, about the actual connection of use to benefits, especially in transitioning and developing countries, and the magnitude of the social and economic benefits from this use.   The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has invested in a number of public access to information and communication technology (ICT) initiatives through its global libraries program. IDRC has explored the use of telecentres in many developing countries.  Researchers are undertaking longitudinal and comparative research on the impact of different models of public access (libraries, telecentres, cyber cafe shared access mobiles, etc.). The research looks at both positive and negative impacts in areas such as employment and income, education level, civic engagement, government transparency, democracy, culture and language preservation, and public health. The idea is to inform future investment and advance overall understanding of public access to ICT.  As funders and interested stakeholders across the world, we need hard evidence to help us design and implement better programs and to help partner governments and other local players understand the value of continued investments and how they can make a difference in people?s lives. Hear about this large-scale research study covering every region of the world over a five-year period and the preliminary research results looking at the social and economic impacts of these programs.  A methodology for measuring impact will also be shared.
 
Khaled Fourati, Program Officer, IDRC ACACIA Initiative (Communities and the Information Society in Africa),  and global partners discuss the second initiative focuses on access to knowledge in Southern African universities and open approaches to research in the Internet age.  Southern African universities face several constraints to access published knowledge for research and teaching whether in print or digital forms. Removing these constraints is essential for the effective participation of universities in the knowledge economy and for the development of research centres in Africa.  It explores approaches to open access for research and how they can facilitate the availability of academic and other relevant research publications to the benefit of students and researchers. The project is a collaboration between the Southern African Regional Universities Association (SARUA) and the LINK Centre looks at new approaches to knowledge production and dissemination in the Internet age, elucidates insights on the meaning of open access for scientific collaboration, and investigates the value of creating a SARUA regional open access network based on an ‘Open Knowledge Charter’.  WLIC & IFLA Conference Opening ceremonies are Sun am, June 10.  Always spectacular!

The KM section programs are as follows –

Wednesday, Aug 13, 10.45-12.45
Moderator: Xuemao Wang, Head, Systems, Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University
 
Keynote
Knowledge Management: Towards Understanding in the Multi-Cultural World
Donna Scheeder, Director, Library Services, Law Library of Congress
 Q & A
Knowledge Sharing and Practice
Mary Lee Kennedy, Executive Director, Knowledge and Library Services (KLS) Harvard Business School
Linda Stoddart, Dag Hammarskjold Library and Knowledge Sharing Centre & Chair, UN Knowledge Sharing Task Force, United Nations
Ratna Bandyopadhyay, Department of Library and Information Science, University of Calcutta
Kennedy focuses on the strategic and organizational work that is currently being done by KLS and the importance of linking up global knowledge assets and experts in the pursuit of addressing research puzzles and developing leaders who will make a difference.  She discusses the Institutional Memory program for collecting, packaging, and enabling the exchange of experiences among past and present members of the HBS, the Scholarly Communications program to manage, disseminate and measure the impact of scholarly research, and the development of a global research sharing program.
Stoddart highlights shares some new ways of working that have had an impact on the use of information and decision-making in the UN.  She shares learnings from the rethinking library services and skills sets, the new roles, and partnerships to accomplish this. 
The last presentation discusses how public libraries are helping the preserving and sharing traditional knowledge and culture in an oral community — the state of West Bengal in India which has a multi-cultural and multi-lingual population of 80 million where about 40 tribes form 5.5% of the population.
 
KM Tools in Practice
Lynnette Simpson, Information/Knowledge Architect, Robbins-Gioia, LLC
Kathyrn Breininger, Manager, Boeing Reports Management Services & Mary S. Whittaker, Librarian, The Boeing Company
Louis Rene Dessureault, CEDROM-SNi & TBD, Caisse Desjardins
Simpson discusses the learnings from developing a Knowledge Center (an intranet using enterprise portal framework based on Microsoft SharePoint) that enables personnel to effectively collaborate, share best practices, and access critical business data from within a business management consulting firm with 700 employees dispersed globally.
Boeing practitioners focus best practices and practical tips on how to determine business requirements for a taxonomy, how to identify concepts and methods for developing a draft taxonomy as well as techniques for validating a taxonomy, processes for incorporating changes, applying a taxonomy to content, and methods for maintaining a taxonomy over time.
The last presentation discusses content management in a multi-lingual environment within the knowledge management framework with emphasis on the challenges and learnings from developing a bilingual interface, managing a bilingual taxonomy to support a multi-lingual content database, and implementing it in a financial institution.
 
Thursday, Aug 14, 10.445-12.45
Co-sponsored program by the following sections: Library and Research Services for Parliaments, Information Technology, and Knowledge Management
Social Computing Tools and Knowledge Sharing
Social computing is having a huge impact on the sharing of knowledge in all types of organizations.  The social tools (blogs, wikis, social tagging, social networks, etc.) are much different than traditional knowledge sharing tools and put knowledge sharing power in the hands of the users themselves.  As a consequence, enterprises are changing from traditional top down command and control, hierarchical organizations built around traditional centralised IT systems into flatter, more fluid networked organizations built around social tools.  Hear how our expert discusses social tools and their impact on knowledge sharing and then hear how libraries are utilizing these tools in their environments to share knowledge with staff and customers.
David Gurteen, Knowledge Advisor, Educator, Coach, and Leader of the Gurteen Knowledge Community
Panel: Mary Lee Kennedy, Executive Director, Knowledge and Library Services (KLS)
Harvard Business School; Moira Fraser, Parliamentary Librarian & Group Manager,  Information & Knowledge, New Zealand Parliament & others

So the Special Libraries Association annual conference is being held this year in Seattle and the Seattle chapter of SLA has created a great wiki for attendees and those who want to see what’s going on at the event.  Lots of great stuff there and Daniel Lee, President of the Toronto Chaper, has created a great piece on using Twitter at the conference.  It is part of the Innovation Lab  that current preseident, Stephen Abram, is pushing to get our members our try new technologies and techniques for communicating.  Good going guys!

Check out what our friends from the Netherlands are doing in Jamaica.  Erik is a great guide, so enthusiastic and curious – watching him on YouTube is almost as good as seeing him in person!  Join us at Internet Librarian 2008 in Monterey CA for another exciting Shanachie adventure.

Sat in on this session at Streaming Meida East  yesterday with a bunch of cool speakers in a session moderated by Kevin Nalts, Product Manager & Industry Blogger, WillvideoForFood.com.  Paul Kontonis, CEO, For Your Imagination talked about making videos interesting, and getting people to talk about them so they keep coming back to view them. He gave an example of a viral video campaign with individuals doing things with a new beer can from Coors which didn’t do week until they found a popular YouTuber to respond to video to help drive views – Sexy Coors Light Girls. He also refered to Word of Mouth amplifiers who help to make videos go viral. J. Crowley, Black20.com talked about talking to your audience, and making it transparent for them so that they know a video is sponsored.  For ad money, he said, you really need serialized content, it is not enough to be popular on YouTube.  He also said that humor, paradies, and nostalgia works for helping videos go viral, his example was a trailer he created for a fake move that brought in a Tetris like environment.  Ben Relles, CEO, BarelyPolitical.com, talked about his political satire site and some of their videos.  He emphasized that you want videos that people talk and blog about (like Obama Girl), a topic that is being talked about online a lot, and using that to create a popular video (Bill O’Reilly, Hilary in Bosnia).  Kip Kedersha, Viral Video Producer and Metacage Top Producer,  who makes instructional videos and makes money at it, says his secret is producing short, compelling videos which for him, has developed a large  fan base.  He used his “turning a maglite into a laser pionter” video as an example with the audience.

This morning Enterprise Search Summit got underway with keynote Martin White, Intranet Focus, and I liked his quote even though he can’t remember where it came from.  If you know, let me know!

The fire of progress is lit by innovation, fuelled by information, and sustained by hope and hard work.

Liked the way Brad Allen, CEO, Siderean, summed up the panel discussion and talked about how search is now trying to focus on finding other information objects, not just traditional text — so true.

Although Computers in Libraries 2009 anticipated going back to the Hilton Washington  in March 2009, the hotel is now scheduled for renovation during that time.  So save the dates, March 30-April 1 2009, for another exciting conference at the Crystal City Hyatt, a short shuttle ride from Regan National Airport.  The call for speakers should be up on the conference website in July, so start thinking about how you’d like to participate CIL2009! 

My business partner, Rebecca, taught me long ago that feedback is a gift.  Thank you Ccomputers in Libraries 2008 attendees for your feedback —  in the conference surveys (of which I have only had a chance to read about 150 out of a very very large pile! and I know there will more online at the conference website as well), in person (I do appreciate all your thoughts, ideas, and praise), in blogs (I’ve only had a chance to read a few but check out the fabulous coverage by Sarah Houghton-Jan or the feed on the conference wiki), and in moderated conversations — Greg Schwartz hosted a call-in session,Uncontrolled Vocabulary #37, on the topic of CIL wrap-up.  Lots of good discussion and ideas.   Love the idea about less paper/no presentation booklet.  I have been trying for a few years to do something different with the presentations and perhaps ITI is ready to go green, we’ll see, but I can definitely work on the speaker forms for next year.  A suggestion for those of you who receive multiple copies of the preliminary conference program — share them with all your friends, colleagues, and others who may not receive any!  Greg, I did hear you and your group compliment me as an “excellent conference organizer” — much appreciated, and I agree with you, we should all toot our own horn more – “vicious or shameless self-promotion” never hurt a librarian as our voices do need to be heard.  Another great suggestion on your call during the discussions as stories as a theme of the conference — helping our clients/patrons tell their story about the library so that others hear what a great job we do.   Also love the “It’s like Candyland, only nerdier” comment – that’s how I’ll think about CIL from now on!  Thanks all for the feedback — suggestions, ideas, improvements — gifts for sure.

The 12th Internet Librarian will once again be in Monterey CA, October 20-22 with workshops on the preceding two days.  This year’s theme is Beyond 2.0: User-Focused Tools & Practices.  The call for speakers is online and we look forward to speaking proposals. 

Preparations are underway for TBC 2008, September 25-6, San Jose.  This year’s conference will be chaired by Rebecca Jones, Dysart & Jones Associates.  We’re looking for speakers.  So if you are a practitioner, taxonomy expert, and are interestedin participating, please send in a proposal.