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Much of today's organizational knowledge still exists outside of formal information repositories and often only in people's heads. While organizations are eager to capture this knowledge, existing acquisition methods are not up to the task. Neither traditional artificial intelligence based approaches nor more recent, less-structured knowledge management techniques have overcome the knowledge acquisition challenges. This article investigates knowledge acquisition bottlenecks and proposes the use of collaborative, conversational knowledge management to remove them. The article demonstrates the opportunity for more effective knowledge acquisition through the application of the principles of Bazaar style, open-source development. The article introduces wikis as software that enables this type of knowledge acquisition. It empirically analyzes the Wikipedia to produce evidence for the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Do you know the age profile of your staff and their retirement plans? Can you identify those staff members whose knowledge would be most keenly lost by your organisation should they leave? Who’s responsibility is the retention of knowledge? David DeLong’s book begins with a discussion of current developments and provides examples of the types of impact experienced by companies when senior employees retire. DeLong’s studies appear solely within the USA, but nevertheless they offer examples that are deeply worrying should they be replicated elsewhere.

In recent years online and blended communities have become a popular topic among educationalists. In this paper we present a framework that supports the analysis, development and maintenance of online and blended communities. This is applied to two community case studies that differ along several key dimensions such as type of membership, the purpose of the communities, their policies and size. The analysis draws attention to the differences between the two types of communities. It also highlights the advantages and weaknesses of the framework with respect to these two case studies and suggests areas for future development. In the discussion that follows we highlight some key differences between this framework and Wenger’s work on Communities of Practice (COPs).

The scenarios referred to in this workshop transcript can be found at: http://www.knowledgeboard.com/item/53115Helen Baxter Welcome to the KnowledgeBoard online workshop. Today we are talking about Scenarios for the Knowledge Economy with our guest speaker Jeroen Kemp of the EKMF. Jeroen is senior researcher and consultant at the competence centre R&D management of the German Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering and is one of the founders and co-ordinators of the European Knowledge Management Forum.

Jeroen Kemp Lauri, the way we see it is: single trends, integrated scenarios, visions, implications, ACT & PREPARE...

This project task represents the 'think tank'of the European KM Forum as it defines on one hand the project's direction form the very beginning and on the other hand develops strategic visions for KM in Europe. Baseline for all this is the European Council's objective for Europe to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge - based economy in the world by 2002.The document presents five scenarios for future work in the knowledge economy that have been developed on the basis of a formal scenario planning technique. The scenarios are used as a means for identifying directions for future research in KM in Europe. This work is still in progress and thus no conclusions of direct recommendations for future research are given here yet. However, the knowledge economy scenarios provide stimulating means for baseline of discussion and moreover describe diverse potential future European KM environments.The first document contains an extract from deliverable D1.2 of the IST project European KM Forum - European Knowledge Management Forum. The second is the full version.

DEBRA M. AMIDON is the Chairman and CEO of ENTOVATION International, Ltd. (Wilmington, Massachusetts) - a global innovation research and consulting network linking 90 countries throughout the world. Her Network has evolved into the internationally recognized ENTOVATION 100 of Global Leadership and The ENTOVATION Group – 50 from 30 countries. She’s been featured in notable biographical publications such as The International Book of Honor and the Woman of the Decade.

"I remember going into a room to meet a group and at the sight of the uniform they shrank away and clammed up," he says. "I thought: no, that isn't how we do policing here."Within the week, he was on the internet, checking out Teach Yourself Lithuanian courses. By the end of the month, he took delivery of a set of CDs.

Ellison is not your typical teen, although he modestly says skipping five grades is attainable feat for other kids."It's just easy," said the Lincoln Park teen. "I don't understand why other kids couldn't do the same thing."Ellison found himself in college at age 12 because of boredom and a bet.Unchallenged by middle school, Ellison skipped seventh grade because he was earning straight A's without doing any homework. His father then challenged his son. If he could accomplish the same feat in eighth grade, he'd find a way to get him in college. Ellison quickly won that bet.

Dweck’s next question: what makes students focus on different goals in the first place? During a sabbatical at Harvard, she was discussing this with doctoral student Mary Bandura (daughter of legendary Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura), and the answer hit them: if some students want to show off their ability, while others want to increase their ability, “ability” means different things to the two groups. “If you want to demonstrate something over and over, it feels like something static that lives inside of you—whereas if you want to increase your ability, it feels dynamic and malleable,” Dweck explains. People with performance goals, she reasoned, think intelligence is fixed from birth. People with learning goals have a growth mind-set about intelligence, believing it can be developed. (Among themselves, psychologists call the growth mind-set an “incremental theory,” and use the term “entity theory” for the fixed mind-set.)

Much of the current web 2.0 vibe was born by the folks who started the Whole Earth Catalog, the WELL (first online community), and Wired magazine. Well, here in this panel interview are the founders of all three: Kevin Kelly, Stewart Brand, and Howard Rheingold, talking about how it started, why they did what they did, and what they think of where we are today. 80 minutes long in Realvideo format. Skip to ~15 minutes in to bypass the various intros.

Gapminder and Google share an enthusiasm for technology that makes data easily accessible and understandable to the world. Gapminder’s Trendalyzer software unveils the beauty of statistics by converting boring numbers into enjoyable interactive animations. We believe that Google’s acquisition of Trendalyzer will speed up the achievement of this noble goal. Trendalyzer’s developers have left Gapminder to join Google in Mountain View, where Google intends to improve and scale up Trendalyzer, and make it freely available to those who seek access to statistics. The Stockholm-based Gapminder Foundation will continue to spearhead the use of new technology for data animations. The goal is to promote a fact-based worldview by bringing statistical story-telling to new levels. In collaboration with producers of accurate statistics that are eager to give the public free access to databases, Gapminder hopes to recruit and inspire many users of public statistics.

Working via networking Dear Helen, thank you! Yes, it's actually amazing! Currently our company is in some projects and we are responsible for a lot of things. I'm practically alone in my office for days on end, at the same time virtually I'm extremely busy networking with project partners and my employees constantly. We interact via Skype, email, wiki and phone, and sometimes it amuse me with how much people from different countries I contact at once. But what's become clear to me after all - an idea that virtual collaboration could be effective only when it is supported by periodical face-to-face (or at least, vocal via phone/Skype) conversation. Otherwise, a level of trust and mutual responsibilities is reduced even you were a good partner earlier. Helen Baxter, 10-Oct-06 @ 03:41AM Networking = Happiness & Higher Productivity I now run two networked companies, a record label and 3D/TV production house. We have studios interconnected with a combination of free Google Tools and the wonderful Basecamp PM system. Innovators & Creatives don't keep office hours and tend to work on a results not time basis. Overall I think my crew are much happier and far more productive than if we all tried to work out of the same office. This way I never feel like I'm herding cats ;)

The demand for IT professionals has grown rapidly since 2001. The number of employed IT professionals has increased from approximately 8,400 in June 2001 to over 28,000 in June 2006. Employment growth of IT professionals of 27.3% per annum was well above 2.8% growth for all occupations. On average, about 4,000 new IT jobs were created each year between June 2001 and June 2006. About 1,300 degrees and postgraduate diplomas with an IT major were awarded in 2005. This was 24% lower than in 2003, when qualification achievements peaked. A comparison of the number of degree and postgraduate diplomas awarded, with the number of employed IT professionals yields a training rate of 5.1% in 2005. This has declined from 12.4% in 2000. The number of students enrolled for IT degrees declined by 44% between 2001 and 2005. This indicates that the number of IT graduates is likely to continue declining in the next few years. Since 2002 permanent and long-term migratory flows of IT professionals have made a small but positive contribution to the supply of IT professionals in New Zealand.