Several things for today. First, the KMLF now has a new logo (thanks to Andrew Mitchell and one of his team):
Secondly – and further – I presented at the Ark Group: Driving Effective Intranet Delivery in the Public Sector conference today. It’s always a different experience being away from home at conferences. I tend to sit up late in a hotel room catching up on the emails and work I wasn’t able to get to during the day. I also tend to watch more TV than I normally would at home, and it is often interesting how something relevant to the conference will come up…
Did you know that Sunrise have set up a new Web 2.0 site? (I never watch Sunrise at home!) Well, they are calling it Web 2.0. It features forums and blogs, and a new area leveraging Yahoo!’s investment in Flickr – you can now load your photos to the Sunrise Flickr Gallery.
It was also interesting watching Numb3rs tonight – one feature of tonight’s episode was the analysis of groups using SNA – Social Network Analysis. No mention of this tool in a KM context, though…
What’s more on my mind at the moment though is the discussion during the “open floor think tank session” today: Managing tools and technology for efficiency and interoperability. This was straight after my session, where I put a lot of emphasis on the importance of trust in promoting knowledge sharing. Some of the discussion became almost a little heated on this. (And if you were there today and thought that I came on a bit strong, please accept my apologies!)
One interesting questions was asked (and I took it as a challenge): if you see trust as being important, do you lock your house? In fact I do lock my house. However, when I lived in the country during my earlier years, we frequently didn’t lock our house. Also, my Gen Y daughters often forget to lock all the doors now.
Is it a fair question? Is trusting the readers of this blog with shared information related to trusting people not to break into my house? Certainly, the more paranoid a person is about physical security (we only have one lock on each door), the less likely they are to be trusting in other things, but I am not convinced that the connection is that simple.
Whether you lock your doors or not, I believe that we still tend to err on the side of lack of trust in knowledge sharing in far too many organisations today.
Andrew –
Thanks for that comment. Yes, that’s the key point – the strong distinction between sharing physical things and sharing knowledge. Would have been good if I could have thought of that yesterday!
I agree Keith, there’s probably a little relationship between trust in these two domains, but not much. One of the reasons we lock houses is physical security – of ourselves and our possessions – and even to physically secure our private information. However information and knowledge tends to multiply and grow when shared. Being more open brings opportunities to receive additional insights and perspectives that would not be available otherwise.