Sims Learning Connections

Alas, I have never gotten to attend the KMWorld Conference; although, in the past with my former day-job, I was able to send at least one team member — so at least I got a ‘live’ debrief following the event. This year, without a team or employer, being on the sidelines was tougher yet.

To at least partially fill this void, I used some time today and yesterday trying to catch-up with the just-concluded conference. Here is the process I used (in spirit of my earlier Personal Learning Environment grokking) and some of the resulting conference highlights — from a distance:

First stop, KMWorld’s own conference web page and following a link to the conference wiki — Unfortunately, there is essentially no content there. In particular, I was hoping to make use of the ‘bloggers @ the conference’ page, which is only a heading today. I emailed the wiki content owner to inquire about the situation and in her reply she admitted that they “were kind of late in getting it populated” and “keep your eye on it” as more is to come. A bit ironic since the conference was themed as “KM2.0″ — isn’t it all about user generated content? Similar irony noted in these comments at Stuart Henshall’s Blog, and Stuart’s post regarding the Media Policy, both I discovered later in my journey, as noted below. I do think KMWorld missed some opportunity to “live the theme” here.

Next, try the del.icio.us KMWorld2007 tag

Only two links were there, before started to add many of my own. The first from Jay Cross, which I knew I could count on. I love Jay’s snippet from David Gurteen:

“We just created a KM system. How can we make them use it?” How did you involve the users? “We didn’t. We didn’t have time.” On time, within budget, totally ineffective. Need to work with people rather than do things to them.

So true.

I also note that David Gurteen’s thoughts regarding the impact of rewards for knowledge-sharing parallel another David (Snowden, in the Jon Husband interview):

Rewards punish. Rewards rupture relations – people will conceal problems from their manager. Rewards ignore reason – ignores the complexities. Rewards deter risk-taking… Rewards undermine interest – love what you do. Rewards are controlling (manipulation?)

[12 November update: also see The Corporate Librarian: [kmw07] How Do We Make People Do Things? for some additional notes on this point. I missed this one in my original pass through what was already published. Picked up via David Gurteen’s own post earlier today]

Another great sound-bite from yet another Dave, Pollard, again via Jay:

Of five KM value propositions, the only one that will keep KM out of the dust bin: improve connectivity, collaboration and knowledge transfer (strengthen relationships)

The other del.icio.us KMWorld2007 link was Stuart Henshall’s more in-depth summary of Dave Pollard’s session, which then sent me looking at all the other posts from Stuart — big shout-out for his live-blogging from the conference and also for leaning on the Media Policy (as linked above).

The three most valuable nuggets for me from this series:

• The discussion related to SparTag.us — refueling my interest in alternatives to del.icio.us as I continue to believe social tagging can, and should be, so much more. For another glimpse of tagging thoughts from the conference see Jane McConnell’s post from Jordan Frank session.
• The questions from Jon Husband’s session:

• How do you overcome your job (constraints)? your description? and reconcile with your networks, your relationships and your desire?
• How do we measure flows rather than outputs?
• How do we enable and recognize pointers, engagement, and trust? How do we make it visible?
• How do we evaluate proximity and sharing?
• How do we create an new internal language for metrics, listening, adaptation and learning?

• And from David Snowden’s session, connecting yet another piece for me relative to “why fragments?”:
  

  …if I go for low levels of fragmentation and high level of context interdependence then it’s hard to create much value or stimulate information / knowledge creation. It simply takes too much effort. I think this is the same as saying the codification model is dead. Oh and the replicative model…. create a knowledge object.. well by the time you have created it… it too is obsolete. So if I go to extreme fragmentation and a loose adaptive contextual framework then I can create a more flexible adaptive system… Obviously, a system for pattern recognition.

Next, try del.icio.us kmw07 tag, where I pick-up a few additional blog posts.

Side note: this reminds me of how limited del.icio.us functionality can be. What I want is a wiki-like capability to be able to add an “also see KMWorld2007 tag” note within the kmw07 tag list, along with the inverse coming from the KMWorld2007.

The one significant post that I hadn’t already found is Ross Dawson’s, Successful Enterprise 2.0 and Social Media slides and outline of key points. Ross’s “six lessons on Enterprise 2.0″ make a lot of sense and this is a presentation and post that I plan to come back to more as I work with implementation in my new employment.

Then on to Google blog search with query ‘KMWorld’ and ‘posted within last week’. Surprisingly, I didn’t find anything new from this, and also surprisingly I don’t see search results for Jane McConnell’s summaries, although they do show-up in the general (versus blog) Google search. Strange. Fortunately, via one of my search alerts, I had already found my favorite, the Biogen Idec case study.

Lastly, dive into my Blogbridge to see if I’ve missed anything from my feeds, although I should already be covered by all the previous. First try a search on ‘KMWorld’, which gives the expected result, all ‘been there, read that already’. Then just for yucks, give the new in version 6.0 What’s Hot? feature a test-drive:

KMWorld does come to the top for me; however, as this is looking at what is linked most often from the feeds I subscribe to, it misses (for example) Stuart’s live-blogging series. Bottom-line: useful in general, but in this particular journey, not adding insight.

Whew, short of shelling out money for the DVDs from the conference, I think I’ve found and mostly absorbed what is possible at this point. Again, the gems for me were: Stuart’s live-blogging, Jay’s stream of consciousness, Jane’s summaries, and Ross sharing his own work (and yet more kudos to Dave Snowden for doing same, as always.)

What I was hoping for, and didn’t find, was more from bloggers on their overall impressions, themes and new connections from the conference, — contrast to primarily what are debriefs of particular presentations (although they are also valuable.) Perhaps some new posts will go up as folks make time this weekend for reflection. I hope so. Any one up for the challenge? Is KM2.0 more or less real after attending the conference?

12 November update: The Corporate Librarian came through with [kmw07] Thoughts on the conference. My favorite:

What fascinated me was the tension between people’s discussions – Are communities of practice highly useful or no better than chance would suggest? What’s the balance between organizing and understanding what we already know and looking outside the walls of the organization?