Mathemagenic

We had several goals for the day one. First, we wanted to explore multidisciplinary of KM. And second, we wanted to create conditions for meaningful (also topic-based) discussion. I've got a feeling that this worked well.

We started from KM mapping game, asking each participant to draw his interests on the "draft" knowledge map (prepared by Gerald Prast). When this maps were compared in random groups and finally participants had to form for their "own" group, finding people with similar interests. It seemed to work well generating discussions that are hard to stop. I was especially happy to see meaningful conversations and involvement so early.

The second round was more challenging: after few presentations we moved to "research agenda" sessions. Based on their interests each group had to come up with research proposal and present it. When groups could "fund" proposals they liked with our own currency, KM$$.

During these sessions we found out that some of our intentions came into a conflict: from one side we wanted to get a good overview of research questions I the field, but also a bit of competitive element to keep the work of groups focused. We ended up with interesting research proposal, but not an overview :)

To give you an overview if topics that participants considered interesting to study:

• Multidisciplinary communities
• Storytelling
• Leadership in communities
• Virtual coffee-table
• Community measurement
• Recycling innovation
• Customer knowledge management

I won’t write about all of them – some may end up published at the Knowledge Board (we left the decision about going public or not to participants). Nice that in my blog I can be subjective. I liked two ideas.

Recycling innovation proposal focused on finding the way to reuse "dead ends", knowledge what have not end up being part of the new idea/ product.

Virtual coffee-table proposal was a bit unfocused, but with really interesting underling idea: funding the limitations of technology use for informal knowledge exchange and socialisation. As many others I believe that technology can not substitute real life communication, but I also see that it can contribute to developing trust, shared understanding and sense of coffee-table discussion even in cases of no face-to-face contact. Weblogs provide a good example of such a case.

I didn’t manage to write in time – I was one of the people responsible for KMSS day 1… I’ve got a disappointing finding: being one of the organisers means not much learning and no time for networking. Hope it will be better on other days.

So, I couldn’t write participant notes, but I can share some organiser’s observations :)