Ronald Maier and Andreas Schmidt together with Christine Kunzmann organized the special track Social Knowledge Management at I-KNOW 2015. With the advent of social media, knowledge management had to rethink its conceptual foundations on how knowledge develops on a collective level.
Andreas Schmidt opened the session with a look back on how the field has evolved. Ten years ago, at I-KNOW 2005, the very first version of the knowledge maturing model was presented, aiming at integrating diverse perspectives on knowledge, and since then, numerous cross-disciplinary research activities have contributed to the extension and refinement of the model. At the heart is the insight that knowledge develops along distinct phases in which its characteristics and thus requirements for support change. It brings together different perspectives and provides a framework for analysis and design of interventions.
Together with Christine Kunzmann, Andreas Schmidt continued to present recent research from the EmployID project. It concentrated on the use of patterns as structured description of experiential knowledge intended for reuse. They presented a tool-chain in which socio-technical patterns can be developed from peer coaching activities in which eliciting of motivational and affective aspects becomes possible, via a collaborative editing system Living Documents to social learning programmes to disseminate to and engage with a wider audience. The track concluded after several interesting perspectives on the topic of social knowledge management with a discussion on remaining challenges in the field. It became apparent that although social media in knowledge management seems to be well established, there are still considerable issues ahead which are well worth exploring. While there are also challenges in the fields of technology, such as detecting relevant documents or support in a specific context (which has been an issue for more than 10 years), a lot has concentrated on more social and organizational issues, such as the trade-offs between formal and informal processes and structures, the conflicts with corporate cultures and the conflicts between different institutional logics and whether tools transform culture or should adapt to the culture. Finally, measurement, indicators and what is considered successful social knowledge management was agreed to be a hot topic.
This reinforces the topic area of EmployID and the concentration on socio-technical patterns as a major outcome of the project.
