Tweetboard of a community of practice

Despite the severe growth problems that Twitter encounters today the die hards keep their optimism about it's potential as a collaborative tool for microblogging. Notice the KM4DevWiki on Twitter and read the Twitter collaboration stories that Nancy White collected.

Some users see it as their external memory and trust google for a perfect index service. Others prefer to see Twitter as a convenient way to stay in touch with peers in their field of practice. This blog item is meant to illustrate how twitter can be used for knowledge sharing in a community of practice.

In a tweetboard I have put up some examples of tweet streams by members of the KM4Dev network. This way I follow (among others) the tweets of twitter friend Christian Kreutz. A close look gives you a pretty good idea of how Chris makes it work for him.

If you like to look at the tweets of more early adopters go to my start4all page that is set up with links to background info and good practices on Twitter.

Still hesitant about the practical use of Twitter? Try it yourself, for what it is is up to us .... Do realize that the generated content in those short messages differ as widely as the users.

You are welcome at http://twitter.com/gervis if you want to see how the blogger of this item twitters privately.

KM4Dev 2008 in Portugal

Km4dev is an international community of development practitioners who are interested in knowledge management and knowledge sharing.

80+ participants from all over the world gathered 18-21 June for KM4Dev 2008 at the Pousada de Juventude Hostel in Almada, Portugal (just outside Lisbon) for an open space event on knowledge management for development. The faces of the participants and other gathering pictures are geotagged here on a Flickr map.

One of the participants was ICCO's Maarten Boers. Maarten will give you later a more extensive report of the experiences. You may have a little foretaste by taking a sneak preview at the KM4Dev 2008 Annual Gathering Blog , look at the tagged links on Deli.ci.us or enjoy the group pool and Peter J. Bury's pictures on Flickr.

Learning to Fly / Geoff Parcell

Zo ongeveer drie a vier keer per jaar houden de KM-ers in Nederland een borrel. Het gaat dus om de mensen die bij OS organisaties werken en zich met o.a. kennis-management bezig houden. Dat is altijd een plezierige manier om wat ervaringen uit te wisselen en nieuwtjes te vergaren. Afgelopen donderdag werd die borrel bij en door de Van Leer Foundation georganiseerd. Zij hadden nl. Geoff Parcell – een van de auteurs van het “moet-je-gelezen-hebben” boek: Learning to Fly -uitgenodigd om hen te ondersteunen bij het opzetten van de interne Kennis Management en Geoff was bereid om ook met de “borrelgangers” wat ideeën en ervaringen uit te wisselen. Al was het maar erg kort het was wel een heel interessant gesprek. Hier laat ik het even tot een paar uitspraken van Geoff die we bij het opzetten van de leernetwerken en het hele CDP ter harte kunnen nemen:
- KM is a way of thinking and doing.
- KM is all about a flip of attitude.
- The only way to do it is to live and breathe it.
- On KM-issues there is more in common between the private sector and the development sector than one would think [Geoff heeft zijn KM ervaring met name bij de BP opgebouwd, maar is nu ook in de OS-wereld actief]
- Self-assessment is important, also to develop a real common language
- Storytelling is most powerful [i.v.m. meetbaar maken van de effecten van KM/KS]
- It is not enough to stay within your own network, there are people out there who probably know what you want to know”.
- KM is about having everybody responsible for it and NOT leaving it to the “KM-team”
- The book is called “Learning to Fly” because KM is just a question of doing it; now I consider it as my job pushing people “out of the nest” as eagles do with their young.

Voor meer informatie over het boek en de lopende discussies naar aanleiding van het boek verwijs ik naar de site van Learning to Fly

KM4dev workshop 2007

KM4dev is a community of practice about Knowledge Management for Development. It has about 800 members from all over the world, although mainly form the US/Canada and Europe. Since I joined this community somewhere in 2005 I really learnt very much from all discussions and information generated on the list and its wiki .

Creativity in presentations

Once a year the community organises a face to face workshop. In 2006 I participated for the first time and really got thrilled. It is so inspiring to talk and share experiences with peers and work together on developing new insights and learning new ways of working. That was the reason that I joined the ad-hoc organising committee for the 2007 workshop which was held the past days in Zeist, The Netherlands (sponsored by ETC, PSO, IICD, IRC, Hivos and ICCO). Also this time it was a very inspiring meeting in which again I learnt a lot, I met many interesting people and I received an overwhelming quantity of useful information. I am sure all these lessons and wise advices will be useful for our work, and you can be sure I will use them and try to make them accessible to all of you as far as you are interested. But as an overall impression I really got the impression that we are “on the right way” with our CDP within the ICCO-Alliance, and for me that is really motivating.

You can find more information on the workshop on its blog and on the KM4dev-wiki mentioned above. Although I must admit this wiki is not a very good example because it is not very accessible ;-), plans to improve the wiki have been made though! Therefore here the direct links to two concrete examples of the results on Benchmarking and on Graffic Facilitation.