The Core of Community Knowledge's Strategy

Human networks are hugely complex phenomena. We are only just beginning to understand the implications of how we use them. In our ‘small world’, individuals and groups are as likely to reach out around the globe for knowledge as they are to visit their next door neighbour in search of information. Given this complexity, how do we provide a platform for community knowledge sharing?

While face-to-face contact is often considered paramount within organisations and often cannot be replicated in electronic systems, the constraint of time and space on active individuals has led to organisational networks accepting that the ‘community’ is not necessarily located in a fixed space. The idea of community being with you wherever you are is a welcome and re-assuring idea associated with the trust, strengths and connections needed for effective networking. As a result, organisations have begun to use information and communication technologies to add value to human systems in a personalised manner often referred to as personalised networking.

Research into personalised networking has shown that knowledge transfer and the idea of communities of practice (groups of people that create, share and exchange knowledge) is relative to situated learning (how useful the knowledge is within a particular situation or towards a particular end). This requires multi-faceted means of creating ‘dialogue’ where meaning flows through individuals and groups. Initially, however, the quality of the dialogue may not be as important as the process of democratic engagement as it is often about allowing people to explore new ideas and discarding those that are not ‘fit for purpose’. Evidence also suggests that network identity can also emerge through consensual agreement on what is community knowledge in the emerging dialogue.

Personalised networks appear to vary not only with regard to the skills and experience of capacity-builders, mentors and learners but also in relation to where the networker is located within community space. It would be relatively easy to map personalized networks if community spaces were mutually exclusive and static. However, such spaces are mutually reliant and dynamic, as such, they are capable of potentially highly complex topologies of personalised networks. Social network analysis tools prove difficult to deploy in such a complex context. A high reliance on subjective and qualitative analysis is needed to understand the complexity of personalised networks within networks and meta-networks (networks of networks).

What is needed is a dynamic, multi-dimensional and holistic approach to community knowledge sharing which integrates face-to-face and electronic networks. Community Knowledge aims to facilitate such integration within organisations.

"Communication is human nature; knowledge sharing is human nurture." 

© Alison Tucker, Buckman Laboratories