It's been weeks since I've been able to get any sort of post up here, but it hasn't been for lack of things to write about. In that time we've been to the ICKM Conference in Charlotte, NC, and UNC CAUSE in Wilmington. The time in between these events has been busy as well, with us catching up on editing concerns and trainings.

The ICKM was truly international – we met people from all over the world, and most of them were academics. We met people working on ways to share agricultural knowledge among farmers in India, and others trying to find ways to use KM to develop collaborative online communities. The approach at this conference was often less than practical ("is it 'Strategic Knowledge Management', or 'Knowledge Strategic Management'? Hmm…"), yet I heard many good ideas over that week.

While ICKM was international, CAUSE was completely local- many of the folks there were from our own school, and all of them were from the UNC system. Our interactions with them felt familiar; these were our counterparts from all over the state, dealing with the same needs and barriers that we do, and eager to share solutions. Our presentation on our 'Information Commons' project and the 'Knowledge Base Suite' was very well received, and I think we have a lot of interest in our plans to develop a collaborative KM solution.

Although it's too much effort to try to report on everything we heard and did during those conferences, I've tried to list some of the highlights below. Ultimately, I think the most substantial benefit from going to them is that we've learned that we're far from the only people working on these sorts of problems (managing institutional knowledge), and in many cases, we're ahead of the game. It's good to see the many ways in which these ideas and technologies are being put to use, and that our ideas of the best way to do KM (open-source technologies, standards compliance, structured information, collaboration) are turning out to be considered 'best practices' from professionals from all over the field.

Some (somewhat random) highlights from the two conferences:

  • unlike the UNC environment, rural Indian farmers aren't resistant to the idea of documentation and knowledge management; they need to stay competitive with the world market, so they're hungry for knowledge that will help them.
  • a variation on something I heard a lot at ICKM – "Intuitive user interface and novel metaphors helps to cross barriers";
  • Feedback from the users is essential, as the "experts" aren't always aware that the information has become out of date
  • There is a strong emotional component to KM, in terms of frustration, panic, etc. Therefore, we don't need greater capacity, but rather more simplicity (a fundamentally user-centered architecture).
  • Peter Morville, the "father of information architecture" pointed out that good "usability" isn't simply another way to say quality- it means a select combination of elements such as findability, desirability, and usefulness, as best suited for your users and context.
  • Tools do not equal Collaboration; collaboration requires strategy; everyone should be involved, it should be integral to the process (not simply an option) and it must be quickly put to use (the ideas finshed and put to work); in addition, it must have support from above and be rewarded.
  • Training documents are the same at every institution; we need to find/develop a common body of documents to share across UNC
  • Many of the UNC schools are using Remedy in one form or another; continuing our efforts to tie our KM system to Remedy might help to promote our Information Commons project across the state.