Dave Pollard’s up … his introduction covers his vast and deep professional background.

I’ve followed Dave’s thinking and writing for years now .. he promises to delve into the socio-dynamics of how people are sharing information and constructing and using knowledge.

His agenda covers a retrospective on where we’ve been, how Digital Natives (Dave uses an alternative term, Millenials) share and use information and work together, and then moves to a look at the ways we act in virtual worlds will evolve.

Dave is going over his KM 1.0 model (1994 – 2003), wherein the decisions taken about how to enable capturing and re-using information and knowledge just tended to confuse people and create “arguments” about who was responsible for what, and why.

As a result (he notes) the term “knowledge management” is in long-term decline .. the use of the term in Google has just recorded it’s fifth straight year of less search requests than the year before.

He introduces KM 2.0, a lot of which is about Personal Knowledge Management (Dave has written a great deal about this over the years), or the personalization of how one goes about their knowledge work (I have called this the “mass customization of knowledge work“).  He notes that communities of practice are being supplemented and / or replaced by “communities of passion” … communities which you join only if you care enough about an issue to get involved with it.

Other trends … visualisation of information, and most information put into the public (everything is there for everyone to see; unless constrained by legal or secrecy needs).

KM 2.0 – scan, publish, connect & canvas … Know-who, Connection, Context, Just -in-time

The big question – could Information professionals do this ?

Role of IP’s changing in 3 important ways

1. Improving personal productivity

- facilitiating to help people self-find, self-filter, self-publish, etc.

- teaching research skills

2. Improving Connection

- facilitation conversation 

- facilitating JIT Canvassing

3. Improving Context

- Storyteaching / recording

- Environmental scanning

- Sensemaking

Generation Millenium using IM, not email.  Dave tells the story of his conversation with Luis Suarez about reducing the use of email, resulting in Luis adopting a challenge to not use email whatsoever … which launched Luis into a “No email” policy.

Dave is now showing a screen shot of VYEW.com .. desktop videoconferencing (Simple Virtual Conferencing, Real Time Anywhere, 7 / 24 and Free).

Don’t pitch .. just show them how it works.

Generation Millennium:

Dave worked with a bunch of them in the Ontario Ministry of Health re: SARS … he worked with a group of people whose average age was 24 (and with the same restrictions on the use of “consumer” web applications.

Dave says he was shy when he started working (so was I, you COULD NOT afford to be assertive or 9 times out of 10 you’d be out of a job or on a shit list).  This generation is impatient, won’t wait for things, view search and research as the same thing, and will move on if they cannot work the way they want to, whioch is how they can be effective.

Important Limitations to Generation Millenium

1. Many of them will never “know” their employers’ business.

2. They thing research is the same as search (which Dave says is wrong).

Other Possibilities:

Blogs as courseware

The use of cultural anthropology

The use of simulations and scenarios

The use of proximity locators

The use of affinity detectors

Peer-to-Peer sharing of / in education

The use of mind-mapping

GPS / Google Mashups

Open Space Problem-solving

Virtual World Collaborations

Here we go.  KMWorld 2008 is kicking off tomorrow morning.

There’s a great roster of sessions and speakers this year, coming at a time of massive and rapid changes coming thick and fast to the knowledge -based workplace of this first decade  of the 21st century.  Web 2.0. Enterprise 2.0, SaaS, Cloud Computing, advances in algorithm-based contextual enterprise search, a growing understanding of social computing and the ways people share and exchange information to build effective and flexible responses on a dynamic basis to demanding customers and markets.

Last year at KMWorld 2007 several bloggers kicked out a few posts that helped highlight and spread awareness of some of the thought leaders on offer at this major conference.  This year we’re kicking it up a notch … we’ve asked a number of key contributors in the KM domain to offer up one or more blog posts, either on sessions they are attending or offering, or that offer a glimpse of an interesting session they’ve attended.

We’ve asked leading lights Dave Snowden and Dave Pollard to offer up some of their thoughts.  We’ve asked Jenny Ambrozek and Patti Anklam to weigh in.  Stuart Henshall will, we hope, bring his considerable blogging skills to bear in a couple of posts.  Learning maven and guru Jay Cross of the Internettime blog has agreed to weigh in, conference organizer Jane Dysart (also an active blogger in her own right) will pitch in, and I’m going to do my best to provide you with an over view of some of the interesting sessions I attend.

We also have a Twiiter account that these bloggers will use to “tweet” issues of interest and once Stuart helps us make sure we know how to use it correctly, we’ll have the Twitter channel Phweet-enabled so that people can connect and talk easily.

The conference opens up first thing tomorrow morning with a keynote speech by John Kao, the author of Innovation Nation and a serial innovator who is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s leading authority on the future of business. He will explore the intersection of innovation and transformation to help define the landscape for enterprise—and knowledge workers—in the years ahead.  John has a proven record of identifying circumstances long before they coalesce into trends and is a highly qualified voice to help us set a course for the next decade.  

You’re welcome to check on, give us feedback and ask questions – we will do our best to respond quickly in a useful way.