Posts Tagged ‘knowledge’

Institutions as Mobilising Networks

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

The book I’m reading at the moment is “The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age“. The book links to a number of themes I’m interested in, particularly developing knowledge content and user generated content (and also a number of the drivers indentified in the recent NCVO future of membership report).

The book looks at how new technology such as social networks and virtual environments will change how people learn. And although the book is aimed mainly at higher education, there is plenty of read across into the membership organisations as many are knowledge-based and/or educational.

I’ve just finished the chapter titled “Institutions as Mobilising Networks” which contrasts how institutions are often viewed - as rule-driven, centralised, old fashioned and slow moving - with how they could be - trend setting, dynamic, agile and innovative.

The key opportunity (or challenge, depending on how you look at it) is: to use social media and learning environments to aggregate, coordinate and disseminate knowledge and facilitate learning - to mobilise the network of members and other potential participants.

Taking up this challenge could dramatically improve engagement and knowledge development in an institution’s area of interest.

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Cultivating Knowledge through Communities of Practice

Thursday, June 24th, 2010

A very interesting slide set - Cultivating knowledge through Communities of Practice - from Steve Dale, the information architect for the award winning local government “Community Hub” online community. He sets out the fundamentals for setting up and encouraging Communities of Practice and the different ways of sharing and developing knowledge.

The presentation takes is business-focused (rather than IT-focused), looking at the methods and roles to get successful Communities.

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Imagining Knowledge Technology of the Future

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

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:

  • It is about providing the information and knowledge they want  (or need, which is subtly different)
  • It is also about enabling members of your audience to engage in the conversations they value, and even facilitating those conversations

    • 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:

  • Listing the number of friends someone has drives people to want to acquire more
  • The question mark Facebook had for people without a photo drove people to add a photo
  • There is a trend for particularly younger Facebook users to be much more open and less concerned with privacy

    • 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.

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