Abstract as advertised:The locus of knowledge has shifted over the past 15 years of “KM” – from being in “stuff” (artifacts, content management systems), to being in people (communities of practice, collaboration systems), to being in the network (constantly alive and moving around us, available directly and peripherally from our friends, colleagues, co-workers, and those we following on Twitter). How we maintain and grow our personal networks – our personal net work – is a critical part of “personal knowledge management.” Patti will put personal networks in context and then review practical techniques for maintaining personal networks.
Before talking about personal networks and knowledge management, I need to share my personal perspectives and on both of these so you can understand my language.
In my book, Net Work, I describe a framework for thinking about and talking about networks.http://www.athenryac.com/time-set-goals
In one sense I’ve been interested in and creating networks throughout my career, but it wasn’t’ until I was introduced to science of network in the fall of 2000 that may things started to click with me. The fact that there is a tool that lets us map the relationships among people is not novel, but the research that is coming forward that tells us how the structure of a network can predict outcomes and behaviors, that is what is revolutionary. That is what is changing our thinking.
Before talking about personal networks and knowledge management, I need to share my personal perspectives and on both of these so you can understand my language.
“Everything is fragmented” says Dave Weinberger, and right he is. I don’t know about you, but I leave pieces of myself and what I’m thinking about and collecting all over the place. What Dave, and others who are at the front wave of social media research, are onto is that in this new place, everything hinges on discoverability.If it’s out there, and those who created it made sufficient tracks to enable others to find it, we can find it and put it together in a way that makes sense for us.Meanwhile, it’s just way too much. So what do we do? We rely on our personal networks.
http://www.freeplaynetwork.org.uk/playlink/exhibition/Earlier, I said that we can generally identify a network as having a particular core purpose. We participate in these as individuals, and people in these networks make up our personal network. When work is fun, some of those people whom we know from work become our closest personal friends. (I had lunch yesterday with 2 friends I worked with at Digital. We’ve been having lunch together for over 30 years. These are good friends, and we now we just play together.)Now I am going to launch into how we maintain our personal networks in the age of digital networks, but I don’t want to leave you thinking that what I am going to talk about applies only to work networks.