Stephen Downes comments on Jim McGee's recent post on "Weblogs and passion", saying:
"Weblog tools are just another input device. Great. With a lousy search and user interface. Weblogs get data into the system, but that's never been the problem with knowledge management: no, the problem is in using the data in any meaningful way."
Jim responds with:
"While I agree that the current generation of weblog tools have some serious limits in terms of search and user interface, I disagree with his contention about where the problems lie in knowledge management systems. In the organizations where I've struggled to make knowledge management work, one of the fatal flaws has been the notion that knowledge management is somebody else's problem."
A major barrier to effective KM is encouraging widespread active participation, in particular contribution to a KM system. Once the knowledge has been captured, the problems of organising, presenting, searching and using it are all manageable - but getting people to start sharing their knowledge is an uphill struggle.
Sure, there are a whole host of cultural issues that most organisations have to face. But providing people with an easy way to get into knowledge sharing is also important. I'm not currently using weblogs as a KM tool and I don't know whether they're a good solution in all cases. I do know that anything which allows people to be comfortable with writing down some of what they know, some of the way they work and why, is beneficial.
The informality of weblogs is one of their strengths. There's no clever interface, there's no complex classification, no-one bugs you about keywords or taxonomies or metadata or any other jargon that will paralyse the unsuspecting mind with fear. There's a box - I type into it - I click post - my words appear. What could be easier?
The presentation is also friendly to the uninitiated. There's no drill down or power search, just a list of stuff that I wrote. You want to see what I wrote yesterday, you scroll down - you want to see what I wrote last week, you click on the calendar. It's easy to understand and there's precious little structure to intimidate.
And that's the attraction. Simple tools are liberating. There's nothing much to come between me and my thoughts. There's nothing to give me pause and worry me that I'm not sure how my comments or insights or experiences fit into the bigger picture. So if I overcome that initial barrier of getting something, anything down in writing and into the KM system then the path of more structured and (maybe) more effective knowledge sharing and collaboration becomes easier to follow.
12:03:37 AM 
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