Community-driven knowledge management

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Community-driven knowledge management (CDKM) is based on some very simple principles. Knowledge management (or perhaps more appropriately knowledge stewardship) is a process that is best accomplished with the collective effort of multiple individuals. When these individuals are bound by a common purpose, they can approach this stewardship as members of the same community. And while this community can do much to advance the knowledge that they manage, this advancement can be significantly enriched through a vetting process that engages participants that are outside the member community. This entire process drives the community toward the formulation of wisdom.

It is useful to step back and look at the evolution of knowledge management to really understand the strategic rationale of using community models for collaboration within the organization. Knowledge management as a professional discipline emerged out the organizational need to retain assets that was subject to loss in proportion to movement of staff within professional organizations.

And while there will always be movement of staff within, into, and out of our professional organizations, the ownership of organizational knowledge by an individual ended in the 1980's - and the notion of knowledge stewardship emerged as process that enjoined everyone in the role of retaining intellectual assets.

And so powerful was this concept that organizations dedicated staff to guide its proper formulation so that appropriate priority would be given to this stewardship of knowledge affording competitive advantage. It is now clear that we are entering a new phase of knowledge management and knowledge leadership within the organization.

In this phase of Knowledge Management, the power of the underlying technology infrastructure must truly facilitate the knowledge-based conversations within the enterprise. The technology must be adaptive to change and provide a community framework for knowledge flow and collaboration in which the broadest possible diversity of opinion can be integrated in support of organizational decisions. Communities are only as good as the activity of the members. Communities must meet and evolve the conversations of their members as they work through individual topics.

[edit] Using A CDKM Approach...

We are all witness to the variety of approaches for Knowledge Management and when a community has a role in the stewardship process some interesting ideas emerge. Consider the following protocol for how an individual community can drive from "questions" into "group wisdom."

Within a community a question is used to establish topics within discussions and gather opinions from the community members. In cases where possible, community members submit these opinions for peer review by a general population for further refinement. When geography precludes face-to-face meetings, community members coordinate synchronous conversations within online chat to drive consensus where required. Community members can also evolve the face of the community through the common shared webspace wiki so that members are following the same topics. When knowledge becomes the official position of the community it should be explicitly placed within the institutional repository where it can be referenced and applied to address associated topics, issues, and relevant dialog.