The Significance of Online Social Networking for Knowledge Management
In the middle of all the enthusiasm about the use of Social Networking and Web 2.0 in knowledge management (in particular in UN organizations), it is of course important to keep in mind that Online Social Networking applications are not the final panacea to all our KM or other problems. Nothing really is. However, it is important to note that Online Social Networking has certainly gone beyond the experimentation stage of IT geeks. And it has proven to do one thing extraordinary well: Connecting people which otherwise would not be connected, and facilitating sharing of exchange which otherwise would not occur. I’m stressing this, because if the KM community learned one thing during the last decade, then it was the insight that Knowledge Management is most of all about people. We learned that knowledge sharing in an organization (whether working development or other things) doesn’t happen when a paper is written or a file is stored in a database, but most of all when people talk to each ...