Facebook as a Collaborative Knowledge Management System

What is Collaborative Knowledge Management?

To answer this question we need to first look at what is Knowledge and then think about how we as individuals, organizations and communities use and manage knowledge. First lets look at the definition of Knowledge.

Knowledge is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as (i) expertise, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject, (ii) what is known in a particular field or in total; facts and information or (iii) awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation. Philosophical debates in general start with Plato’s formulation of knowledge as “justified true belief”. There is however no single agreed definition of knowledge presently, nor any prospect of one, and there remain numerous competing theories. Wikipedia

From this we can see that knowledge is effectively the information or understanding that has been gained over a period of time by an individual, therefore organizational or community knowledge is the sum of the network of individuals within that group.  The growth of Knowledge Management as a corporate focus has developed software and database structures to deal with data from several sources.

Most of these miss the actual reason and method that most of this information and knowledge is created (through the sharing of ideas and debate), a far more interesting example is to look at social networks and open source projects. There is plenty of information on Wikipedia and its speed of growth proves that the concept works. Lets then look at some social networks like Facebook and Myspace (I am looking more at the software and architecture rather than general perception of Facebook).

Facebook

Information Gathering

The interesting thing about Facebook for example is that it allows for easy gathering of knowledge and the connection of information between text, video and image. The structure allows connections between individuals (nodes) and information from non connected nodes to be displayed in a way that nodes that are connected by the 2^nd degree. An example of this is the individual wall showing messages from unconnected contacts, then this is brought in to a stream through the news feed.

Image of News Feed.

Groups also create knowledge by a community of interest focused round a topic these groups also become nodes in the network, this allows knowledge to be grouped by social or organizational groups (community or company) and subject groups (expert forums for the exchange of knowledge).

For example if you look at the GTD group on Facebook you will see that there is a large amount of information on products and variations to the system that individuals have used to implement their personal system. Why this proves the conversational method for increasing the amount of raw data in a subject related area.

This shows the one area that needs to be looked at if a system like this is to be used in a corporate environment is that there needs to be some form of editorial, this could easily be done by a version of related tagging and user assessment of the content (I like this) but perhaps in to categories a social and subject related category.

Notes

The notes facility is close to individual created articles, this space would be suitable for detailed outlines of individual thought on topics or concepts. The comment facility allows for discussion on points related to the topic of the note which could hopefully be used to create what Goldrat calls the “yes BUT” to hopefully speed the process refining and developing the information.

The Corporate Knowledge

The corporate knowledge could easily be attached to a user that would represent the company and only post accepted knowledge or start conversations to begin to understand the picture.

This is just some of my thoughts as I am in the early stages of designing a knowledge management system.

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