I travelled to Zurich for a workshop on social media. It was a requirements gathering exercise and I originally published two articles, on the sun/oracle blog, one on Zurich and one on some ideas which became the social graph.
These ideas were presented by Bertolt Meyer of Humbolt University, Berlin, who had then recently published research into the fact that Knowledge Repositories don’t work. Once he said it, it becomes obvious, have you ever found one that did. The key insight I took away was that we want to use knowledge management systems to discover authors and experts. Sun had also been struggling towards some of these ideas, I came across Joan Dimicco’s work, her publication record is extensive, last year which I originally reported on my sun/oracle blog, and I point to from this article, but for various reasons, didn’t bring forward to this blog.
Meyer and his collaborators insight goes beyond the view that the central data model consists of documents, activities, topics and most importantly people. It is necessary to transform the knowledge management system into a knowledge network consisting of people and their connections and reasons for connection. They have built an application proving these insights which seems to have gone at ioe-skillmap.hu-berlin.de.
