Stepping Higher - Reflections on the Knowledge Age

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend a KM workshop in Bangkok hosted by ENRAP (Knowledge Networking for Rural Development in Asia/Pacific Region), which is a collaboration of IFAD (International Fund for Agricultural Development) and IDRC (International Development Research Center in Canada). The workshop was facilitated by Lucie Lamoureux and Allision Hewitt which I knew from the KM4Dev network . It was very interesting to see how they managed to make the workshop very participatory and interactive (and this is said by me who actually doesn't like to be forced into group discussion on a topic which I couldn't choose myself). I particulary liked the way they consistently mainstreamed the use of Web 2.0 tool as natural mechanism for documenting workshop content in Wordpress , PBwiki , Flickr , YouTube and SlideShare (so "when the workshop's done, the documenting is done"). The good thing was that these tools were not just set up for use during the worksho...

Just discovered this neat online tool called Wordle (thanks to Sarah Cummings for posting it on the KM4Dev.org network !). It's a visualization tool for any kind of text content. You can use it to visualise whole documents, short texts like poems or lyrics, websites and even your del.icio.us tags. As the website of Wordle states, the tools is meant to "generat 'word clouds' from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like." See below an example of the tag cloud that is generated for this blog. You can see, that the prominent "Web" word should actually be "Web 2.0", but apart from that minor flaw, I really like it!

There is an increasing acknowledgement within the organisational development and management sector that Web 2.0 can bring concrete benefits to organisations - labeled under the tag "Enterprise 2.0". If you want so see some examples, Mashable.com published a list of 35 corporate social media examples in action and I was also very happy to see that players like IBM indicate a shift to Web 2.0 in their own organisational development. In addition, as a tool for self-assessment, Brett Bonfield compiled a set of indicators whether your organisation is ready to benefit from Web 2.0 approaches. However, the Web 2.0 community also realizes that something is different, when you want to apply the benefits of Web 2.0 from your personal development to an organisational environment. I found the analogy of the "two tunnels" by Thomas Vander Wal quite striking in this regard. He argues that while Web 2.0 is like building a tunnel through a mountain, where imperfections and leaks ...

As I got the confirmation already 2 weeks ago, it's about time to announce it here formally. Having worked for UN Volunteers for almost 2 years now, I will move on to Bangkok in October where I will take up a one-year position in the Knowledge Services Team of UNDP Regional Center Bangkok. There I will support the KM team in providing knowledge advisory services to UNDP Country Offices in the Asia-Pacific region, promoting knowledge networks, delivering training and consultancy services and - together with Country Offices - developing knowledge management strategies for the region. The environment will surely offer me some opportunities to further develop my skills in applying practical KM approaches and I am looking forward to learn a lot from the team and the new counterparts there. I have already got to see some of the South-East-Asian region last years during training mission and travel in Malaysia, Indonesia and Burma, so I am very excited to spend the next year in Thailand an...

In our organisation, we are currently conducting a Knowledge Management Review (often also called a Knowledge Audit). The objectives of the review are to establish a baseline regarding where the organisation is now with respect to KM practices, to develop a better understanding of existing good practices and perceived needs in regards to knowledge sharing and to identify priority KM initiatives for the future. One component of this review is a quite comprehensive online survey, mostly with multiple choice questions, but also with some fields to state opinions in free text. Even though it was part of the team which developed the survey, as a staff member I was also entitled to fill it in myself. The final question in the survey asks "What are your personal recommendations and expectations regarding the organisation's knowledge management in the future?". So here's my answer to this question: Let's not go for a big bang KM strategy, but rather launch various differe...

On my latest field trip I made an interesting observation with regard to Knowledge Management. First, I visited our field office in Kosovo to learn about volunteer related activities and projects in the brand new nation. After two days, I travelled to Macedonia to visit a UN colleague from a partner agency there. Hanging out with the colleague I also got to know a volunteer who is working in the country office there, highly motivated and enthusiastic about possible opportunities to involve community volunteers in local development projects. However, he felt very disconnected from other volunteers in the surrounding countries and he found it difficult to find partners for possibile joint activities in the region. It hardly took any effort for me to connect this committed individual with the focal point for volunteer activities in Kosovo, once I had seen what both were working on. But none of them would have found out on their own. When we talk about KM and that the focus of KM should be...

This spring, I experienced an unpleasant downside of Web 2.0 tools. During the last 9 month, I had accumulated a wide range of different web information channels and online tools regarding KM and Web 2.0. Everyday I was literally plugging my brain into an accelerating flow of information via RSS, Twitter, email lists, online fora, news websites, online social networking sites and portals, in my professional and my private life, from 9am until 12pm. Plus I was contributing to these channels myself by writing my own blog and twitter posts, as well using email and website applications excessively. I hadn't recognized it at first, but after serveral weeks this spring I felt that I got more and more exchausted. Not physically, but mentally. It wasn't a classic burn-out, as I was still working normal hours, I didn't have immediate deadlines and the social climate at work was excellent. I just couldn't process information properly anymore. The Neurologist later said, that my b...