◆ People. ◆ KM. ◥ University. {q} PhD. {t} Themes. {t} KM. GURTEEN KNOWLEDGE. What is Knowledge Management? , A collection of short video interviews that pose the question "What is KM?" Knowledge Management is an emerging practise. It is broad in its scope and its application is highly context sensitive. So it should really come as no surprise that practitioners, business people, academics and consultants have difficulty agreeing on exactly what it is. To my mind this is not such a serious a problem as it may first seem as there is nothing wrong with multiple complementary perspectives given the multi-disciplinary and open-ended nature of KM. And so I have undertaken a project to capture on video a range of these perspectives by asking a number of people in the KM world.
"What is Knowledge Management? " in September 2006. Keep in mind, the people involved had little time to prepare for the question and I told them they had only 15 seconds! This is the first time I have recorded video interviews so please forgive the quality of some of the video clips but I am learning fast and they will get better. them in your own website or weblog.
Randomised Coffee Trials. A Randomised Coffee Trial or RCT for short is a rather fancy name for an incredibly simple idea. RCTs are used to connect people in an organization at random and give them time to meet to have a coffee and talk about whatever they wish. The original idea was inspired by Pedro Medina and developed by Michael Soto and Jon Kingsbury of Nesta UK in 2013. Nesta is an innovation charity with a mission to help people and organisations bring great ideas to life. An RCT can be run in a wide variety of ways but one way is like this. Anyone interested in taking part, sends an email to a central address and asks to be randomly connected with someone else in the organization. An administrator collects these requests and enters them into a specially designed spreadsheet that matches people at random.
Some organizations use a simpler technique like drawing names from a hat or use more sophisticated software that aotomatically does the matching. It need not be a coffee - it could be tea, lunch or dinner.
Gurteen Knowledge Store. Flickr David Gurteen's Photostream. Collaboration at the Gurteen Knowledge Cafe. The Gurteen Knowledge Community returned to the Westminster Business School to discuss collaboration. This was my second time there and that last was with Gurteen too. Unfortunately that was a few years BB (Before Blog) so I do not know exactly when that was or what we discussed. I do remember enough of the venue though to notice some of the changes that had been made in the intervening years. This time we were in a large room of the main reception area with glass wall on two sides. That made us very visible and apparently that had taken some getting used to by some of the staff but I have worked in open plan offices for many years so the visibility did not matter to me. Our host for the evening was Gurteen Cafe stalwart Keith Patrick, as it had been the last time that we were there.
Keith opened by saying a little about Westminster University and I was surprised to hear that it was celebrating its 175th birthday. We were then given our topic for the evening - collaboration.