Stepping Higher - Reflections on the Knowledge Age

In a recent discussion with KM colleagues on KM4Dev whether Facebook could be a useful tool for a professional context, a good friend of mine stated that “we tend focus too much on technology” (even though he happily agrees that he is always fascinated by new technology and trying to find ways to use it, just because he likes it). His view was however that “the primary question is: What is it that we want to achieve and how do we acquire the skills needed to achieve that? Only then the question of the tool arises.” This made me thinking quite a bit. On one hand I agree that tools should never dominate the discussion about KM, and that they should be seen as a means to an end rather than a purpose in itself. However, I’m also skeptic about the absolutistic dogma that we always have to identify the need first before talking about tools. Yes, in general and from an organizational development point of view I believe this is often true. But at the same time we’re losing sight of the fact t...

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...

How can you filter better what kind stuff you want to follow on twitter? Doing some further research on this, I discovered that there are indeed already a few options. First, there's the Twitter Pack Project , a free wiki where you can find users who are only twittering on specific issues. Some people are also automatically feeding their twitter with Twitter Feed , which can then be used to sharpen a twitter profile towards a certain issue. A great way to create a thematic twitter feed within a community has been presented by the Nonprofit Technology Network . By using a combination of a new common community Twitter account, Twitter Feed , Terraminds and a unique keyword like "ConferenceXY", they were able to produce a collaborative feed on an event where every post of users which contains the keyword "ConferenceXY" is published. However, I would still love to have in Twitter the option to define different categories (job, private life, hobby X, interest Y, etc)...

I’m using Twitter now since 4 months. And I’m still note sure whether I should continue using it, whether I should promote it or whether I should just abandon the tool. There are indeed benefits. Like with the status messages in Facebook I can monitor what’s going with people which are important to me and by writing directly to that person through twitter I can hook in on an issue whenever I want to. However, I experienced two very critical flaws which in my view hinder Twitter to be a really excellent application. Some people are sending messages just every other day or once a week while others are twittering twenty times a day. That makes it awfully difficult to identify the valuable contributions from the ones which are only writing rarely within the very “loud” twittering by the frequent users of which only a certain percentage might be useful to me. I wish I had a button where I could “quiet down” certain people without having to kick them out of my contact list totally. Maybe t...