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A study into online forums and the 'conversation' found within them. Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Master of Arts in Information Design"

Nancy Dixon focuses on the people side of knowledge management. Our most effective knowledge sharing tool is conversation. The words we choose, the questions we ask, and the metaphors we use to explain ourselves, are what determine our success in creating new knowledge, as well as sharing that knowledge with each other.

"Today we announce Google Duplex, a new technology for conducting natural conversations to carry out "real world" tasks over the phone. The technology is directed towards completing specific tasks, such as scheduling certain types of appointments."

'Chatbots are the new apps," said Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella earlier this year. "Threads are the new apps," suggested Facebook's head of messaging products David Marcus in January, referring to the threads of conversation in apps such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.

Teaching computers to understand casual, contextual conversation in every language and accent is key to this quest to normalise our interactions with computers and to place Google even more squarely at the centre of our lives.

"Knowledge can only be volunteered it cannot be conscripted. You can't make someone share their knowledge, because you can never measure if they have. You can measure information transfer or process compliance, but you can't determine if a senior partner has truly passed on all their experience or knowledge of a case. We only know what we know when we need to know it. Human knowledge is deeply contextual and requires stimulus for recall. Unlike computers we do not have a list-all function. Small verbal or nonverbal clues can provide those ah-ha moments when a memory or series of memories are suddenly recalled, in context to enable us to act. When we sleep on things we are engaged in a complex organic form of knowledge recall and creation; in contrast a computer would need to be rebooted. In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge. A genuine request for help is not often refused unless there is literally no time or a previous history of distrust. On the other hand ask people to codify all that they know in advance of a contextual enquiry and it will be refused (in practice its impossible anyway). Linking and connecting people is more important than storing their artifacts. Everything is fragmented. We evolved to handle unstructured fragmented fine granularity information objects, not highly structured documents. People will spend hours on the internet, or in casual conversation without any incentive or pressure. However creating and using structured documents requires considerably more effort and time. Our brains evolved to handle fragmented patterns not information. Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success. When my young son burnt his finger on a match he learnt more about the dangers of fire than any amount of parental instruction cold provide. All human cultures have developed forms that allow stories of failure to spread without attribution of blame. Avoidance of failure has greater evolutionary advantage than imitatio

Simplify the big data conversation within your organization. Here are 10 priorities to get you started.

You've probably encountered the usual issues of group decision making… People who dominate the conversation, quiet people whose ideas never get heard and all those post-it notes you have to write up. GroupMap solves this by capturing individual thinking first, then reveal the group perspective, all in real-time. Now that's true collaborative decision making.

"Here we present four specific approaches to the creation of what we call digital "hives"-electronic hubs bristling with collective activity and designed to solve a particular problem or set of problems, to drive new habits, and to encourage organizational change (exhibit). Digital tools to facilitate networking and collaboration propel these "horizontal" cascades, which at their best can weave new patterns of engagement across geographic and other organizational boundaries. In this way, they make it possible to have new conversations around problem solving, unlock previously tacit knowledge, and speed up execution. "

""creative conversations don't happen because of a CEO mandate or a task force charter. A 2005 MIT study found that 80 percent of the breakthrough innovations in products and services did not occur in formal situations or R&D. Rather, dynamic innovation was almost always the result of informal (even chance) encounters"."

""creative conversations don't happen because of a CEO mandate or a task force charter. A 2005 MIT study found that 80 percent of the breakthrough innovations in products and services did not occur in formal situations or R&D. Rather, dynamic innovation was almost always the result of informal (even chance) encounters"."

A well researched and interesting presentation on the power of conversation in contextual knowledge sharing. From Lesley Thomson of the Scottish Centre for Regeneration.

An example of how the different viewpoints can provide the depth to Twitter. This is a squidoo lens that someone has created by collating and organising the tweets around a certain hashtag - in this case #HackEdu - a conference about how education is changing.

The value of bots for the enterprise user is only just becoming clear. Enterprise bots will likely be used to augment intelligence in the context of conversations, push relevant information to employees, and optimize workflows.

Google believes that artificial intelligence (A.I.) virtual assistants (VA) and the conversational user interface (CUI) will largely supplant search engines and mobile apps for many users. We're moving into an "A.I.-first world," according to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

The conversation around AI now is too focused on the question of how AI can replace agent interaction, which is missing the point. The aim of AI shouldn't be to replace human interaction, but to improve human interaction.

"Take Your Surveys To A Whole New Level All the survey features you need plus an array of extra features to turn your regular surveys into engaging conversations."

Although we'll be writing a lot here about the potential of social media to help people tell their stories, share ideas, start and continue conversations, it is seldom enough on its own. In fact, it is still very much a minority medium in the field of local community action - however powerful it can be, as shown by the work of hyperlocal bloggers (examples here, and we'll be mapping more).

"In most group chats, important things get lost in the noise. Also, remember the chat messages and file transfers you missed because you were offline during lunch? Exactly. Not cool. So we built a better chat service. Simple, common-sense stuff."

"The Innovation Maturity Map from Think For A Change, LLC could stimulate some intersting conversations. For example, the progress across each row seems reasonable but are the attributes at each Level consistent?" Christopher Dean

A different sort of maturity model specifically for Innovation