Stepping Higher - Reflections on the Knowledge Age

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...

There is a consensus in KM literature that every knowledge management setup in organizations needs to be based on a corporate knowledge management strategy as a mandatory prerequisite. Dealing with KM strategies myself, I don’t disagree. However, when reflecting on KM approaches with other KM practitioners, I realized that one could also take a different position, which would be the one of the devil’s advocate below: "I don’t believe in corporate Knowledge Management strategies. Since I am exploring possible ways of doing knowledge management in organizations, I increasingly become to think that instead of strategizing, promoting and enforcing top down KM concepts, we should just start doing the things at hand. Because the business needs are already there (and already incorporated in strategic business frameworks). People do projects, people launch initiatives, people communicate and participate in the exchange with each other and their partners. And they are hungry to learn about...

Here's just an add-on to my last post about Facebook . This article of the German journal DIE ZEIT points out the benefits of transparency in a completely other area: taxation. In Sweden, everyone knows what everyone earns and how many taxes they pay for the good of the national community . No hiding and no fear. And as a result more trust into the state and the community.

Privacy concerns have accompanied Facebook since its launch in 2004 , mostly for legitimate reasons. Undoubtedly everyone has a right and - to variing degrees - a need to privacy and any service provider who ingnores these rights and needs should seriously reconsider his strategy. However, I would like to shed a different light onto the scenario. Especially in the German media, more and more articles voice a very critical view on social networking in general. Like e.g. my favourite online journal SPIEGEL ONLINE, which has continuously publishes solely critical articles against Facebook & Co ( http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/0,1518,531000,00.html or http://www.spiegel.de/unispiegel/wunderbar/0,1518,532070,00.html ). The critical voices all go into similar directions: If you use social networking sites, publish rather less about yourself Why should anyone connect to so many people online? Why should anyone just tell stuff about himself? It's better not to use social networkin...

After about 6 months of blogging, it's time to look back and reflect on the outcome of my blogging activities. And I hate to name it, but the first outcome that comes to mind is stress. First it was the stress of finding the right topic. Do I have anything to talk about which would be interesting enough to others? Then it was the stress of being seen. Suddenly friends were mentioning that they have read my blog lately and were commenting on it. Each time then I rushed back to my site to verify that what I had written was really something I could still confirm, desperately hoping that I make somehow sense with what I write. Then it was the stressful urge to get more users. Of course I want to be seen and I want have more readers, so I started to link to other blogs and make comments there, at the same time inviting others to comment on mine. Which of course requires further investment in research and quality check. And increased quality indeed takes time and effort, which in return ...

It's amazing how quickly knowledge management ideas have become a natural part of how I reflect on issues. I just finished an online training on 'Learning Management' and during the training was asked what opportunities I see for United Nations organisations to build capacity through learning. In an instant, I came up with three items most important to me: In my view, most organisations underestimate to a large extent the potential of knowledge management mechanisms for learning on the individual, but especially on the team level and organisational level. Three mechanims could be highlighted which would support organisational learning in any organisation (including UN agencies): 1. Introduction of Peer Assists A Peer Assist is a process where one indivudal or a team which faces a particular problem or is about to start a project, calls a meeting to seek insights from other people or teams on the issue. This is part of the "learning before doing" in a knowledge man...