This year’s KM Europe Conference was re-branded Knowledge, Content and Collaboration (KCC). Why? Possibly because the organisers feel that KM is losing its shine. There was some criticism of last year’s conference and a certain polarisation between the systems centric KM and people centric KM camps (or as Dave Snowden calls them the techno-fethishits and the fluffy bunnies). This year’s conference was also reduced to two days rather than three and a new charging structure introduced. Like some others I had decided that maybe the trip across to Amsterdam wasn’t quite worth the effort this year but once the Knowledge Board team came up with the idea of a ‘fringe’ track to the conference I was intrigued. I joined the debate on Knowledge Board and agreed to present a session with Piers Young on ‘The Effective Knowledge Worker Handbook’.
The fringe idea worked really well – the fringe track comprised a wide variety of interactive sessions with only a few bullet points delivered via PowerPoint. Full reports of all the sessions are available at Knowledge Board but here are some of my high points:
Paolo Martinez kicked off Day 1 with a workshop on ‘Open Source KM’. Paolo works for Firenze Technologica in Florence and my lasting memory is his wonderful comment about the difficulties of ‘doing innovation in a city with such deep roots in the past’. This seems paradoxical since Florence was one of the centres of innovative thought during the renaissance. I’m currently reading a book entitled ‘Renaissance e-Learning’, maybe Florence should re-assess its role in 21st Century Europe and start an e-renaissance. Paolo also got us started on the ‘holding big sheets of paper at the front’ mode which was continued throughout the two days.
Later in the morning Hank Kune and Ron Dvir gave us a whirlwind tour of ‘future centres’ and ‘joy zones’ – Skandia’s Future Centre near Stockholm was featured and not unsurprisingly was joined by others in Scandinavia. Even the UK had one - courtesy of our fast modernising postal service, The Royal Mail. One of my favourites was the one run by the Dutch Tax Office which used the metaphor of a ship to explore the structure of their organisation. Actually the ship metaphor came up a few times during the two days, and is something worth exploring, especially for an ex navy guy like myself!
In the afternoon Edna Pasher hosted a Knowledge Café on ‘KM and Sustainability’. I think it’s the first ‘Café’ event I’ve done (are these based on World Cafe?) – the format is pretty interactive and has been used extensively in the public and not for profit sector. The main focus of the discussion was on sustainable development – a term which for me has a strong philosophical dimension. Like 'knowledge management' isn’t 'sustainable development' an oxymoron? Development implies continuous improvement and it’s hard to place limits on that process. Maybe the developed world has developed enough? Why do we need to keep ahead of the less developed world – forget sustainability let’s pull over onto the hard shoulder and let the rest of the world catch up? But when they do catch up will they pull over too? Big questions – and beyond the scope of this blog but here are some interesting links on sustainable development:
World Bank, Wikipedia , and UK Government.
The last session of Day 1 was a networking session hosted by Patricia Wolf and Peter Troxler. Based on some key details we gave earlier in the day it sought to connect participants by identifying common interests – nothing new in that then! Patricia though facilitated a session where she place our profiles on the wall then drew interconnections between us. After a while we had created a very low tech social network diagram with many interconnections – so many in fact that the picture looked chaotic (see artistic rendition of this on the left). This is the nature of networks and networking – on a superficial level it appears chaotic – it’s only when you work harder and encourage a deeper understanding of the connections that you begin to uncover value in those connections. For me it’s not just about the people you know but what you know about what they know. It’s this tacit knowledge that enables us to build real value from networks. This actually links in well with a social networking analysis tool (called Antelect) that was demonstrated to some of the Fringers on Day 2 by Simon Lague.
The first session on Day 2 was an Open Space session run by Ton Zilstra. Numbers were low probably because of the 'Dave Snowden effect' – he was delivering a session on Narrative Technologies in the room next door! However I joined a group that decided to explore the concept of 'slowness' - is it good or bad and what can we learn from going slowly?
Martyn Laycock ran the London Knowledge Network session on The Employee Knowledge Lifecycle later in the morning. This is an informal project that is being championed by two KM experts in two UK public sector organisations. Martyn used a couple of Cynefin techniques (but maybe they come from elsewhere) including one of my favourites ‘Future Backwards’ to explore some issues around the future of knowledge work.
Later in the afternoon I ran a session with Piers Young on The Effective Knowledge Worker Handbook. It was a useful session and we are hoping to build on it via a wiki – but it looks pretty quiet there at the moment! I will definitely be following up on the session in future blog articles though and also via the wiki.
The final session on Day 2 was more of a traditional presentation – and it was actually a welcome relief to just sit back and listen to Peter Kreig’s approach to ‘knowledge and assimilation’. Broadly he talked about new approaches to modelling intelligence using technology – so as expected AI is on it’s way back! I’ve always been interested in AI and expert systems and I’d like to follow-up on this in later articles in this blog.
Well that’s pretty much it for the Fringe. What did I enjoy most? The buzz, the interactivity, the sweets, the champagne, Ron Dvir’s brilliant KM art gallery and last but certainly not least the Fringers themselves.
