I went to an interesting evening event at the British Computer Society yesterday - a Gurteen Knowledge Café. The format of the evening was a series of discussions with small groups of attendees based round the topic “How do you imagine the Knowledge Technologies of the Future”, with the groups mixing up at intervals.
Overall, the discussions were fairly philosophical, with some of them moving too far into the future to have any practical impact.
However, there were some interesting points for this blog, mostly around the information and knowledge made available to users of websites and other digital media.
The fundamental question is - what are the underlying needs of your audience that you are trying to fulfil? There would seem to be two parts to the answer to this:
I’m using the term “audience” here to mean the members of your organisation, or supporters of your charity and even going wider to include people who might be visiting your website for the first time … which poses the further question - have you assessed the needs of wider stakeholders?
There were also some interesting comments on the way that Facebook is driving user behaviour:
We are hosting a seminar with the RSA - “Engaging the Community - the challenges and opportunities for the third sector” on 11th June 2009 where these issues will be discussed in more detail.
Tags: knowledge, social media