Stepping Higher - Reflections on the Knowledge Age

I recently came across this blog post by a start-up that is developing an Artificial Intelligence that is being trained to read and write at the level of a specialized human analyst and produce briefings in human language based on a set of different information resources. It’s just one example of many different companies that are currently working on this challenge. The obvious clients are intelligence agencies, governments, or news agencies, but eventually this will enter all of our everyday work very soon. I thoroughly believe that this is what knowledge management in large organizations will look like in 10-15 years from now. In my organization, we’re challenged daily to consolidate the key lessons and insights from all our country-level programmes and experiences, lest meaningfully combine them with information, trends and insights from the larger development sector. We complain that we’re overwhelmed by the information overload that social media, Yammer and knowledge network...

Early October I was in Brussels attendeding a workshop of the Knowledge Management for Development Network ( KM4Dev.org ), the leading Community of Practice on KM issues in development. In one of the sessions there were several people with Twitter accounts persent, and we started twittering during the sessions with out laptops. It was really interesting to do this during a normal face-to-face session when one person was presenting and others in the room where adding context and opinions while the resource person spoke. This side communication (a bit like whispering in the classroom, but less disruptive) made the session very rich and added a lot of different perspectives. At one point we even exchanged comments across different sessions which took place in different rooms of the building at the same time. This created a connection and some information flow between events which otherwise would not have been possible. Then in the afternoon we scheduled a discussion session to be held in...

It has been about 13 years ago, that a good friend of mine tried to persuade me to get myself an email account in order to communicate with her in some other part of Europe. It was 1994, I was 20 and I had just started my studies in computer science in multimedia. Even though I signed up for one of the most innovate studies existing in Europe at that time, I had somehow a strong hesitation when it came to new tools which did not immediately reveal their usability to me. So it took my friend about 6 months until I finally approached our university's IT admin to set up my account. Since then roughly about 10,000 emails have left my outbox and today of course I could not live without emails anymore. But somehow, this inner resistance regarding new fancy-but-senseless tools remained to a certain extent. So all the hype about blogs and Web 2.0 left me extraordinary unimpressed. In fact, I considered most of the blogs I have seen in the early days to be stunningly irrelevant, boring and ...