Mathemagenic

KMSS is almost finished, we are having the evaluation. My feedback: I love the experience, but it could be more (people are always "hungry"). I gave my suggestions to the organisers, so I don't think that it worth writing them once more.

A few follow-up things:

A discussion "What type of business problems can you solve with KM?" is planned on Knowledge Board in October.

There is a bit of self-organisation between KM researchers (PhDs mainly). We are getting the commitment for a on-line interactions and we are planning to meet face-to-face around every three month. First meeting is planned on 13-14 December 2003 in Brussels (see Quaerere Dialog and follow-up posts

KM Summer School 2003 is planned on 7-12 September 2003, I want to make sure that I have funding in my PhD proposal :)

I guess I will have more follow-up thinking and posting. Now I'm getting ready for the final reception, saying "good bye", and for my vacation that starts in one hour...

Today I met Knowledgino, a funny mascot of KMSS. Does anyone have a photo?

Notes referring to the presentation of Rose Dieng-Kuntz:

Once more time I see that I should read Polyani and not to rely on references. Few days back someone noted that he writes about tacit and explicit knowledge as about to sides (characteristics) of knowledge. I have a feeling that something what we call explicit comes with tacit wrapping in any case (this is also something to do with context). Second point was today as a definition of tacit knowledge as something that "known without awareness, difficult to state, formalise and communicate though language". I guess this is the area where I can find some connections with learning as building knowledge.

I don't believe in organisational knowledge. I would rather say shared knowledge.

Metis is one type of knowledge according Baumard. I didn't really get the meaning, but it would be nice to see another meaning for the title of our KM project.

In the presentation corporate memory is defined as a result of collecting and making accessible explicit knowledge or articulating tacit knowledge that is crucial for a company. I'm not sure that memory is a good term to address it, as for me it strongly refers to the memory of human beings (which has a lot of tacit).

Our knowledge map is their competence map

Training design is not considered as a method of building corporate memory. Pity... I'm resisting to accept an approach that pretends to map knowledge in a different forms, but builds only within its own domain. Knowledge do exist in training/learning materials and training designs. Even more, they are available in digital and structured format via all kinds of e-learning systems. Why not to do one more step and include them into a list of systems that are "scanned" to build ontologies and so on... I expect that this is just a matter of some kind of XML bridge (I know that there are more problems around - getting KM and learning people talking to each other is one of them).

(related to the previous one) I also thought about NLP where there is a lot of experience in articulating (in a specific format) and reusing experts' strategies.

Just a concern of Doug - "corporate memory is the way to homogenise minds"

I hope that it doesn't look like I want to through away the presented work. I can see a lot of interesting results in area of knowledge mapping, ontologies, semantic webs and CSCW. I think that a lot of my colleagues would love to see the presentations and to ask more specific questions. I'll try to get proper links or contacts.

I'm trying to understand why existing and proven methods of "next door field" are not considered in KM. Language and mindset barriers? Organisational barriers? Lack of motivation or awareness? May be it's a good topic for a PhD: how to motivate knowledge flow between KM and learning communities :)

Let's do a bit of brainstorming of possible (nice, talking to myself :) I would start from identifying actors (KM/learning practitioners and researchers), then look for their goals and problems. I hope that then we can find some common ground in between and to start from there. I also expect that this could be much easier in practice rather then research. So, probably it's better to start from mapping practical connections and their added value (e.g. reusing KM objects in e-learning system).

The presentation of Fabien Gandon ontologies is brilliant. It provokes some thinking which I can't formalise in words yet. Some comments

• Ontologies are living object
• Ontologies are used to build other things (systems), so if ontology changes, those things have to change as well.
• Would be nice to take a look at ProPer (an ontology to describe skills and competencies) and Reconciler (a tool to develop shared meaning of terms).

Something for my colleagues to look at: CoMMA project (corporate memory through agents). For me as well - it's used for orientation program for new employees.

Just a citation: artificial society [of agents] :)

PROMOTE project - building a tool to describe KM methods and systems.

I don't' understand everything, but I think that the idea is to create a metamodel of models/languages used to describe knowledge. (Note - it's possible to get demo and articles).

It could be interesting to see for our "networked business" people. It adds knowledge processes on the top of business processes.

A couple of people were interested in blogs, so I presented my blog. We had a brief discussion about how and why blogging works and how it can be used in KM. I gave or promised a few links to blog/klog resources, so I hope that more interest will be generated. I'm also planning to finish an introductory story about blogs/klogs and their use for KM.

I'm curious to see if new blogs will appear because of it...