This is not meant to be offensive, because I know the idea that a soft skill is anything but a hard skill can be hard to swallow for experts in that soft skill, but knowledge (not encyclopedic facts, maps or reels of film) is inherently social. Created by people. Shared among people. Lives in a people house.

Performing a root canal is not a people thing. It’s not something I could share with you or you or you. It’s not social… hence no citizen dentists… and hence no FindYourHighSchoolRootCanalBuddy.com social site.

…Knowledge itself can be specialized. But the way that knowledge is shared or by whom? Not so. It’s a social thing that dies in isolation. So why can’t the people who have the knowledge share it via social media? To me, social technologies seem like a happy compromise between the people with the knowledge and the CKOs who want to capture it and avoid organizational memory leak. No?

~joanna

I just don’t see how KM, if it’s not about the technology, isn’t actually more about social networking, communities of practice and complexity theory — which kinda means the trajectory it might have taken has already been taken by other fields and KM is, actually, irrelevant.

Knowledge Management is an area of study that accredited university programs hire professors to teach to ‘eager’ students, Knowledge Management can and often does entail ‘expert’ research and organization of information packages.
Social Media has opened up the arena so that the dialogue is no longer just one way, however, those involved in Social Media are not and do not claim to be experts – they are often uninformed individuals with opinions. ‘Public Intellectuals’ at best, mis-informed and misguided people at worst.

Citizenship methods of organizing information or professional methods of organizing can be argued using this analogy – we don’t have citizenship dentists or pilots why do we think we can have anyone who is simply interested and has the proper technology be a knowledge management specialist? Who is responsible? Who is accountable?

Interesting topics and I do not claim to have any answers, just lots of questions. However I do fall on the boomers side of the generations so perhaps I am lead astray by my age…..and experience…..and univerisity degrees…..and other groovy stuff!