Strategy to improve internal & external knowledge sharing with social bookmarking

This message is also posted on richardlalleman.com and highlights why organisations (or knowledge sharing initiatives such as the Focuss.Info Initiative) should adapt to social bookmarking

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Last couple of months I have been working on rolling out social bookmarking in an organisation. You would probably think: why social bookmarking? Luis Suarezonce labelled social bookmarking in his post The Business Case for Enterprise Social Bookmarking: $4.6 Million a Year in Cost Savings as "one of the fundamental pillars from Enterprise 2.0". And I believe that it is a powerful tool which organisations can use to enhance both internal and external knowledge sharing.

After rolling out a start-up programme in using Delicious as social bookmarking platform for a couple of the client's staff members, I moved to a part in which I offered them a way or strategy how they should re-use personal social bookmark collections in order to enhance internal and external knowledge sharing.

To me social bookmark tools - together with all the other social media tools - can only become a success when staff members are using these tools from a personal point of view. If the staff member can answer the question:"what is it in for me?", it could become a big success.

So, will a staff member answers the question 'what is it in for me' positively when an organisation imposes many rules and restrictions on the use of social bookmarking (like you need to include this tag, or you cannot add stuff that is related to things outside working hours). No, the adaptation to social bookmarking will not be embraced and therefore organisations should give staff members to social bookmark what they want.

Another issue why organisations should not impose rules & regulations on the use of social bookmarking, is that it will then become fun to social bookmark, but also messy and fragmented. In particular these two elements are crucial for a learning culture. Dave Snowden once listed the 7 principles on rendering knowledgeand three of them relate to the messiness and fragmentation. He argues that:

1. Knowledge can only be volunteered, it cannot be conscripted;
2. we only know what we know when we need to know it, and;
3. everything is fragmented

So this means that organisations should let staff members do what they want to do with their PERSONAL social bookmark accounts. With regard to Delicious, this means that organisations should not ...:

1. ... ask staff to add a unique tag when it is organisational-related;
2. ... ask staff to forward the specific social bookmark directly to someone in charge of keeping organisational bookmark accounts clean;
3. ... ask staff to mark bookmarks as private if not related to the organisation
4. ... ask staff to social bookmark in a common social bookmark account (i.e.just one account for the whole organisation)

It is clear that all of the four potential strategies are harming a learning culture in which internal and external knowledge sharing improves. Because how nice would it be to find out that somebody in the organisation is also bookmarking about fishing and you like this too. By letting staff bookmark what they want an organisation is certainly improving internal knowledge sharing / communication. Social bookmarking is then becoming the organisational water cooler where conversations flow. But on the other hand, when you let everybody bookmark what they want, an organisation cannot automatically re-use and re-mix it on, for example, the organisational website or publish it on Twitter through whichFlipboard can make a content-specific magazine uniquely to the organisation. Ways that improve the external communication and knowledge sharing

To make sure that social bookmarking is helping on both sides (internal and external knowledge sharing) I propose a social bookmarking adaptation strategy.

Not surprisingly I argue that there should be a moderator. This could be someone who already made his or her living to filter information. In organisations they are often known as librarians, or in modern times they are called information professionals or brokers. These people should moderate the accounts of colleagues and filter the ones interested to the organisation into an organisational account. This is how an organisation can maintain a clean list of high-valuable resources.

This strategy is about that the organisation is pulling the content from staff instead of that staff is pushing content to the organisation. 

Why institutes and NGOs should promote the latest information sharing and collaboration tools?

What is the Focuss.Info Initiative and what is its objective?

The Focuss.Info Initiative aims at improving the exchange and access to information and knowledge, a fundamental human right that strengthens democracy. In order to improve the exchange and access to information and knowledge in the domain of global development research and studies successfully, the Initiative assists individuals and institutes in the developed as well as developing countries in advancing an information infrastructure by inducing skills and abilities to create and share information and knowledge in a cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural and cross-border network. 

To keep it more simple: the workshops cover social networking approaches, strategies and tools in general and induce students, researchers and practitioners in the field of global development studies and research how they can best use the latest information sharing and collaboration tools specifically. There are many reasons why this is needed. One of the arguments is that these tools let us form social networks in which individuals act, but the network of individuals also provides resources such as social memory that individuals and groups can exploit. However, there is also another less-known argument which is, according to the Australian political scientist John Keane, a development-in-the-make.

He argues that there are experiments going on in the age of the Internet- and he believes that China is at the cutting-edge -where governments cleverly are developing tools for using the Internet, to control the Internet for undemocratic ends. For example, through the recruitment of - what he calls - Internet debaters, or 50 cents bloggers. If on the Internet a firestorm develops - a protest - against the authorities, the communist authorities, then one way of dealing with it is to recruit a million of two who respond and who swamp the protest with their own pro-government views. It is a very 21st century cutting edge development.

We are more and more moving to this development, because governments cannot censor people anymore. One reason is because they want to pretend that they are good leaders and when they arrest someone on the Internet, for example Han Han from Shanghai who only in 2009 had 330 million visitors, it will create a revolution. That’s why China - and perhaps other countries - are looking for other ways to influence the public opinion.

 At the same time, the Internet is a crucial way for individuals to share information globally in an instant. This is a pressure that those regimes have been confronted with before. So these regimes are investing a lot of resources to come up with ways to tackle this problem. And these regimes are very capable in also using the latest technologies. For example, even though individuals or a protester can document a violation of human right with a cell phone, the same cell phone is also leaving a finger print, your whereabouts, your contacts, your social network, and that can be used against you by these regimes. That’s why I believe that indivuals should become better to use the latest information sharing and networking tools by making them: 

• information literate (how can individuals evaluate information so that they can judge their decisions on qualitative information);
• computer literate (how to use device and tools which are connected to the Internet and which are connecting the world as a whole)
• network literate (a crucial competence of individuals is that they should occupy roles such as brokers and/or facilitators and therefore they should also have networking competences).

How should we roll-out global KM initiatives?

This blog post is a part of a presentation I gave at the 76th World Library and Information Congress and has already been published on www.richardlalleman.com.

After mentioning in the previous weblog post that there are two incentives in global development aid why they should embrace global KM initiatives, I will now continue to explain how institutes, NGOs and many more of these clubs should roll-out a global KM initiative. It will be a bit of theoretical background to the third and final weblog post in this collection, which is about the Focuss.Info Initiative and will be submitted at the end of this week.

Moving from knowledge stocks to knowledge flows

By focussing on knowledge flows we manage to get the latest information and knowledge that is available. Let me give you an example.

Think about the old fashioned KM way. We work on a project and at the end of this project we write a report that describes the process. After writing such a report it is often stocked in a database, and will be made retrievable to others who might be interested in this specific knowledge about running a project.

A year later, a colleague is starting a new project. She accesses the database and uses some time to find and evaluate documents that could help her to manage her project in a good way. She finds the document from this colleague, but it is already one year old, and what was the context of that particular project? Is it applicable to this project, because in a year time some things could have changed a lot.

So, in this so-called old-fashioned KM way, people are creating stocks of knowledge which is time-consuming. We need to make knowledge explicit, phrase language so that it can be understood by others, and eventually others should retrieve the knowledge in a database.

And by making knowledge explicit we also lose a lot of context: the context we need to know in order to judge whether it is applicable in an other situation. Dave Snowden, one of the major KM thinkers of this time, argues in one of his most-cited weblog posts that "we always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down". So, he argues that the process of taking things from our heads, to our mouths to our hands involves loss of content and context.

Therefore it is important to focus on knowledge flows. Get in contact with the person who managed the project, follow her, and tap into her current knowledge base. And by starting conversations, we can create a stimulus for recall, because we only know what we know when we need to know it. Small verbal or non-verbal clues can provide these ah-ha moments when a memory is recalled.

Cultural impact on knowledge flows

Snowden also argues that knowledge can only be volunteered and it cannot be conscripted. We cannot go to someone - virtually or physically - and ask him or her to share knowledge. We cannot make someone share their knowledge. We first need trust someone fully before this person will share his or her knowledge. Therefore KM initiatives should create a culture of trust and transparency.

And when we start to embrace the latest information sharing and collaboration technologies, we often do not know each other because we can be someone from the other side of the world, and by using these technologies we are often missing the physical contact.

We therefore need to obtain new skills or conditions in order to be trusted in networks and to be successful in knowledge sharing initiatives. We need to change our culture where we are working in, because for decennia we created trusted bonds by looking straight in the eyes. By using these new information sharing and collaboration tools we often cannot do this, and this can give an uncomfortable feeling (sharing something without knowing the other person). In order to make sure that people are not becoming uncomfortable with these situation - situations which will be more common than rare - we should also focus on the cultural issues when launching a KM initiative.

2-folded strategy to roll-out global KM initiatives

Working in a network-based environment is indeed requiring new cultural abilities. KM initiatives should therefore focus on two abilities. I describe these abilities as promoting structural knowledge and cultural knowledge. 

Structural knowledge means that people should have the ability - or the knowledge so to speak - to use the new information sharing and collaboration tools. This ability helps people to benefit the ease to connect, which eventually helps them better to collaborate and tap into ongoing conversations.

But what are technologies that improve the ease to connect worth when there is no willingness to connect? Therefore, people should also have the ability to work in these new cross-border and cross-cultural collaborative environments. And in my view this kind of culture should feel real and enhances transparency.

This two-folded approach of structural and cultural knowledge has successfully been adopted in the field of global development cooperation with the Focuss.Info Initiative. The third, and final, weblog post will describe more about this