The Significance of Online Social Networking for Knowledge Management

In the middle of all the enthusiasm about the use of Social Networking and Web 2.0 in knowledge management (in particular in UN organizations), it is of course important to keep in mind that Online Social Networking applications are not the final panacea to all our KM or other problems. Nothing really is. However, it is important to note that Online Social Networking has certainly gone beyond the experimentation stage of IT geeks. And it has proven to do one thing extraordinary well: Connecting people which otherwise would not be connected, and facilitating sharing of exchange which otherwise would not occur.

I’m stressing this, because if the KM community learned one thing during the last decade, then it was the insight that Knowledge Management is most of all about people. We learned that knowledge sharing in an organization (whether working development or other things) doesn’t happen when a paper is written or a file is stored in a database, but most of all when people talk to each other. That is why Knowledge Cafes, Knowledge Fairs, Peer Assists, After Action Reviews and even brownbag lunches are awesome non-technical KM tools, and why email and phone are still the greatest electronic KM tools ever. Facebook & Co. fit the same purpose. It facilitates people talking to each other (both in terms of non-substantive chatter, but often enough in terms of substantive knowledge exchange) in ways and across boundaries we’ve never seen before, which is at the core of what we want to achieve when we do KM. Personal Social Networks have always been the basis of knowledge exchange. That is why in an internet-penetrated organizational environment, I believe we cannot think KM anymore without online social networking. I’m even willing to go as far as to say that it will be together with traditional email the “operating system” on which we will do most of our virtual knowledge sharing beyond face-to-face interactions in the time to come.

It's not about Technology, but about a Culture Change - But which one is driving the other?

In a recent discussion with KM colleagues on KM4Dev whether Facebook could be a useful tool for a professional context, a good friend of mine stated that “we tend focus too much on technology” (even though he happily agrees that he is always fascinated by new technology and trying to find ways to use it, just because he likes it). His view was however that “the primary question is: What is it that we want to achieve and how do we acquire the skills needed to achieve that? Only then the question of the tool arises.”

This made me thinking quite a bit. On one hand I agree that tools should never dominate the discussion about KM, and that they should be seen as a means to an end rather than a purpose in itself. However, I’m also skeptic about the absolutistic dogma that we always have to identify the need first before talking about tools. Yes, in general and from an organizational development point of view I believe this is often true. But at the same time we’re losing sight of the fact that we only realize most of the possible applications of a new technology once it is in place and we start using it. Here an example. When I started my studies in 1994, I didn’t feel any need and didn’t see any value for myself when a friend of mine tried to convince me that I should get an email address. “Why would I need that? Typing a message into a keyboard instead of talking or writing a letter? When I want to communicate with you I just take the phone”. Well, he insisted, I finally signed up for an account with my university – and it changed the way I studied, worked, learned, advocated, networked and maintained relationships for the coming 16 years. And so did it for all of us. It was not me identifying a need and choosing the tool. The sheer existence of tool was reaching out and offering its not-asked-for benefits to me, and it transformed my world, my culture, my life.

We are often stressing (and rightly so) that KM is not at first about process and technology, but most of all about culture change and people, about the way people interact and share. But at the same time we often forget that technological innovation itself is so often the original cause for societal transformation. This is true for the printing press, the steam engine, electricity, the computer, the world wide web. Clearly not all technology is a blessing per se, and I’d rather wish we never discovered nuclear fission, to give just one example. My point is that we cannot look down at technology and reduce it to just its role as tool when useful. Technology is an expression of who we are as human society, so is arts, music, architecture, politics, science and religion. It is changing us as much as we are producing and shaping it. That is why I don’t think one needs to cut back on experimenting with new technology just because we haven't made a business case yet. Because this is who we are, and this is as much part of our mandate as KM pioneers as is the careful evaluation which of tools and methods and processes might be best for a specific business scenario. And if we see that Facebook, Twitter & Co. are changing the social sphere into a more open, sharing, transparent and collaborative environment across institutional and geographic boundaries, we are as KM people (who are spending our time on promoting exactly this) not mistaken if we explore what this approach could do for us in our organizations.

Facilitation overkill: Give me my classroom back!

I’m back from another workshop and I have enough. I’m through with it. Seriously. When did we reach this point where our fancy facilitation techniques turned adult learning into kindergarten settings and our obsession with participation, combined with a wild proliferation of Web 2.0 tools, made workshops the most stressful things ever? When did we lose sight of the simple, yet wonderful purpose of learning: Learning something useful that I didn’t know before?

Instead, I’m finding myself again sitting with scissors and pens around the table with people I don’t know, cutting shapes out of colorful sheets of paper and pinning them onto flipcharts. A facilitator is soaring around with a Tibetan singing bowl in his hand encouraging people to be creative and have fun. But it’s not fun. It’s a noisy room full of strangers with whom I have to share thoughts and ideas and interact as if they were long-year colleagues, even though I just met them 30 min ago. I am told to work on some artificial make-do exercise around an artificial generic question which of course touches my field of interest, but which has no direct relation to the very real and specific questions I have in my head about my everyday work.

After that the room turns into a Tunisian cloth market where we look at each others’ humble pieces of colorful art, trying to figure out what important message the many bubbles and arrows and pins and tree leaves and stars are supposed to deliver. Luckily there is always someone standing next to the chart who reveals him or herself responsible, and you try to chip in and listen to what he is right now explaining to another colleague. But because you were coming by the stand two minutes too late you have trouble following the conversation, you soon get bored and go on to the next chart just to face the same dilemma again. At the end the Tibetan singing bowl is activated by an enthused facilitator who shines like a happy child in awe of all the vibrant creativity and knowledge exchange in the room.

If the workshop is really ambitious, we also have participants who were following us online. There are laptops with people connected via Skype or WebX and people are holding them like babies (a delivery which cost us about 1/4 of the workshop’s time when we tried to establish all the audio and video connections) to show them what’s going on in the room and make them feel included. For further interaction we also prepared ourselves with a PBwiki set up, a Yammer and/or Twitter account, a Flickr tag, a YouTube channel and a workshop blog, tools we are supposed to use to document our outputs of this morning. This results in me not having a single break during the entire morning as I find myself busy either running around with a video camera or uploading pictures or writing a blog post or updating an online colleague via Twitter on what’s going on in the room. Considering that the photos are always showing people in conversation around flipcharts which were hard to understand in the first place, and the videos are mostly featuring fragments of conversation out of any context, I’m wondering who the heck gets any value out of these in, let’s say, one month from now? Or at all? At least the facilitator is happy that our knowledge gets documented so well and we all look so engaged.

But I’m just standing there realizing that I spent the last 4 hours not learning a single thing of lasting value, yet am more exhausted than after 4 days of straight work in my regular job.

And a sweet thought comes to my mind. I picture myself, in a classroom, with a bunch of students. And there, in front, is someone who knows something, because he is working in that field on a daily basis, and he prepared himself for a few hours for this lesson. And he is just talking to us. Maybe with scribbling something on a chalkboard, or – oh my God, what heretic thought – even clicking through a few well-dosed PowerPoint slides. And he is explaining something to me which I didn’t know or didn’t understand before. And I am listening, focused and concentrated. And after 90 min a bell rings and I go home, satisfied because I learned something new today. And I am not exhausted.

But that is a distant past. Today we all know that learning without peer-to-peer interaction and participative engagement is evil. So I will never see my old classroom again, but will instead prepare many colorful collaborative flipcharts in the future. Sigh. Can somebody hand me the scissors?

How Twitter can support live events

Early October I was in Brussels attendeding a workshop of the Knowledge Management for Development Network (KM4Dev.org), the leading Community of Practice on KM issues in development.

In one of the sessions there were several people with Twitter accounts persent, and we started twittering during the sessions with out laptops. It was really interesting to do this during a normal face-to-face session when one person was presenting and others in the room where adding context and opinions while the resource person spoke. This side communication (a bit like whispering in the classroom, but less disruptive) made the session very rich and added a lot of different perspectives. At one point we even exchanged comments across different sessions which took place in different rooms of the building at the same time. This created a connection and some information flow between events which otherwise would not have been possible.
Then in the afternoon we scheduled a discussion session to be held in Twitter (marked with a particular #tag so people can find contributions easily), and announced it to other KM colleagues all over the world who couldn't attend the workshop. And even though the announcement was on short notice, we had several external people who were engaging into the live discussion, which really opened up the face-to-face event to a virtual audience.

This was definitely an interesting good practice on how a status update feature can add value to live events, and something which could be easily replicated in any corporate system where a status update feature is included.

Does Web 2.0 save time, or eat up even more of it?

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published an interesting article on Web 2.0: Why Email No Longer Rules… And what that means for the way we communicate. After nicely outlining different implications of the new communication tools, it ends with a critical remark regarding the potentially time consuming aspect of Web 2.0:

"We get lured into wasting time, telling our bosses we are looking into something, instead of just doing it, for example. And we will no doubt waste time communicating stuff that isn't meaningful, maybe at the expense of more meaningful communication."

I've been asked this question many times before, and I realize that it is an particularly important issue for senior management witin organisations. However, I think the question approaches the topic from the right angle.

I would rather look at this from a perspective of an empowered workforce. Unlike in past times, where we had one job for a lifetime and a clearly defined top-down hirarchy would determine and control exactly what a worker has to do, we are as workers today much more in charge and responsible of our performance management, our learning, our networking and our career planning. Anything which doesn't help us becoming better professionals and getting our job done, will not be used. On the other hand, if we use something, that means that there was value for us as professionals and for our work results. And that value is determined individually by each user, not by the organization as such.

That is why not everyone is using all Web 2.0 tools & techniques, but only those which provide value for a certain user in a certain situation. Providing these tools from a corporate perspective is therefore not a matter of telling people what to do, what not to do, and how to do it, but rather creating an enabling environment for users who are free to use whatever helps them (according to their own judgement) to achieve results and improve in their jobs.

Moved on to New York, implementing Social Networking and Web 2.0 for UNDP

Being here in New York for already 1 month, it is high time to give an update on this site, which has been painfully abandoned by the author due to major stress caused by a change job and location. I've concluded my assignment as JPO with UNDP in Bangkok, funded by the German government, and moved on to a full staff contract with UNDP headquarters in New York. Since mid June I'm now with the Knowledge Management Group of UNDP's Bureau for Policy Development as Knowledge Services Specialist.

My main area of work is the implementation of UNDP's new Knowledge Strategy, which entails as a major component the development and roll-out of a UNDP-wide Social Networking Platform, similar to Facebook. This is indeed something I was wishing for since I'm with the UN, as networking across countries and units is a critical factor not only for UNDP's work, but also for my own professional development. After having been able to comment on first concept stages of the project during last year, I'm now very happy to be at the heart of its conceptual development. And I'm looking forward to all the change that the introduction of Web 2.0 in a bureaucroacy like UNDP can bring to teams, project, relations with partners and finally development results.

My major responsibility will be the liaison with users, both from internal teams and external partners, as well as partnership building with organization which might be interested to connect to the Social Networking Platform and engage in collaboration with UNDP entities. Although the scope of my work now seems a bit more technical than my work on Communities of Practices in Asia-Pacific, it's major part will actually be change management, advocacy and partnership liaison. Exciting new tasks, and I'm very much looking forward to the next months and the new services and business cases that will emerge out of this project.

Key ingredients for the success of a Community of Practice

Lately I was asked what I would propose as major key ingredients to ensure the success of a Community of Practice (CoPs) in a United Nations environment. It made me think a little bit about the issue, as I've never pinned that down explicitely for my self before. Three items which immediately came to my mind (although these are surely not the only success factors) are "Needs monitoring", "Use of Web 2.0 opportunities" and "Linkage to Knowledge Products".

Needs monitoring

Communities of Practice are dynamic and sensitive animals which evolve, develop and change over time, both due to developments in the fields they are focusing on, as well as due to the constitution of its membership. They need to be carefully taken care of and require capacity to adapt to new developments. So, to ensure long term success of a CoP I think one should on one hand emphasize careful monitoring of the CoP in light of an organization’s business challenges and strategic objectives. The needs of practitioners need to be regularly monitored in order to identify:

• What substantive issues are of interest to members;
• Which topics require special attention through featured e-discussions;
• What are knowledge gaps within the community for which external knowledge might need to be tapped and new knowledge needs to be generated;
• What are CoP outputs that members need, both in terms of services and knowledge products. Maybe new challenges require adjustment of existing services (e.g. expert referrals) or new partners call for the introduction of a new type of knowledge product;
• What activities beyond the email network could increase impact of community interactions and knowledge generated (e.g. knowledge fairs, specific training activities, etc)
• And most importantly: How can the activities and outputs of the community be further aligned with activities and developments in context of the organizations results.

Adequate mechanisms to ensure the CoP’s success in context of the above questions are regular CoP audits (at least yearly) through surveys and interviews with CoP members, but also UNDP clients and partners.

Use of Web 2.0 opportunities

On the other hand an organization should foster the use of Web 2.0 and social networking tools within the CoP as they can provide powerful mechanisms to increase further a sense of belonging among community members. They also help to capture community knowledge in a more dynamic way (e.g. through wikis or blogs), to add value to community interactions by contextualization (commenting on each other's links, status messages or content) and to broaden the audience and therefore the impact of knowledge generated within the community by disseminating knowledge though additional channels.

Linkage to Knowledge Products

Finally, the link between the CoP and the development of knowledge products (KPs) needs to be strengthened. UN organizations in particular produce a wide range of KPs and invest significant resources into their development and dissemination. The question whether these products actually respond to a critical need of the community which should apply them often remains open. The UNDP Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery published an excellent Knowlede Management Toolkit including guidelines which encourage the consultation of their Community of Practice as a peer review instance during the development of a KP, by posting a query on the respective knowledge network asking for feedback on a first draft. Such CoP peer review approaches need to be strengthened and may be expanded by introducing a “Virtual Peer Assist” (to learn more about Peer Assists see this video from Ottawa University). This would mean that an author is expected to get community feedback already before embarking on developing the new product by submitting the concept note in a query on the network.