On Monday and Tuesday I took part in the ICKM 2007 in Vienna. I transcribed some of my notes on the best presentations I attended in this weblog. Please feel free to comment my thoughts at the end of the page. I linked some of the terms to wikipedia so the "ICKM Community" can use wikipedia as their knowledge base. I added a number on each presentation so you can easily comment on a specific presentation by referring to the number. I would like to motivate the presenters to upload their presentations to slideshare or upload them as pdf somewhere and send me a notice so I can link the presentation from here.

General Observations

• The Penta Vienna Hotel (and Vienna in general) is a nice, historical place to run a knowledge management conference.
• The energy level of the event was relatively low. It was good in the breaks but the introduction talks and the moderation of the sessions were not very energizing. Perhaps that's also a language problem.
• It was good to have a evening event (gala with classic music, a talk from the major of vienna and a dinner talk by Prof. Hermann Maurer) to share knowledge and build networks.
• The single presentations had no timebox (there were just sessions with 3 to 5 presentation) which made it relatively difficult to jump from one presentation to another.
• The chairs didn't seem very familiar with the papers in their sessions.
• There was NO activity in the virtual space (like wikis, blogs) before the conference (a look at Un-Conferences like BarCamp or LexThink could be helpful).
• It is good to have keynotes at the beginning of every day to have the community together.
• ICKM takes place in different locations and there are different organizing teams. That makes it difficult to transfer experience from one year to the other.
• There is no central website (e.g. www.ickm.org) where all the papers and presentations of all the years are collected and that serves as a virtual meeting place for the ickm community.

My notes on the presentations on 27.08.2007

1.) Leif Edvinsson: Knowledge Navigation and Longitude Leadership (Keynote)

• Linkedin-Profile: Leif Edvinsson
• The presentation Leif gave was an updated version of the one he gave last year at the Knowledge Management Symposium 2006 in karlsruhe/germany organized by the Arbeitskreis Wissensmanagement (AKWM) and the german-based Knowledge Management Society (GfWM).
• You can find some of the slides Leif used in the keynote presentation package of last years 3rd Asia-Pacific International Conference on Knowledge Management.
• Leif raised the question of the dominant logic of the past and the future. For me it was pretty clear that it is all about shifting the mindset from competition to cooperation.
• Citation: China is importing inflation.
• System dynamics model (Nick Bontis).
• 2000 brains per square mile is the optimum.
• Knowledge Politics and Intelligent Regions (Learning Regions).
• Projects he mentioned: Reporting Intellectual Capital to Augment Research, Development and Innovation in SMEs (RICARDIS), Intellectual Capital Statement made in Europe (InCas).
• Weblinks he mentioned: www.theworldcafe.com, www.euintangibles.net, www.gapminder.org, www.bottomline.se, www.mind-lab.dk, www.hihseed.org.

2.) Günther Koch: Knowledge Society and Knowledge Policies

• Günther Koch spoke about the foundation and the goals of the New Club of Paris (NCP) and its manifesto.
• The RICARDIS project was the kick-off for the NCP.
• He spoke about "Integrated Politics" which I understood as a pendant "Integrated Management", "Holistic Management" or "Knowledge-oriented Management".
• The NCP organizes so called "Round Tables" with high level decision makers. One output is for example the document Five Steps for Finland's Future.
• A knowledge city needs to have symbols (like an agora, an e-agora and an ideagora?).
• Austria invented the knowledge partnership model where different stakeholders are involved do co-create a shared knowledge vision.
• Remark: some time ago I wrote a weblog about how a community like the NCP could collaborate using web 2.0 tools called Communities of Practice and the Web 2.0.

3.) Andreas Brandner: Knowledge Politics and IC Report Austria

• XING-Profile: Andreas Brandner
• Andreas Brandner spoke about the idea of the wissensbilanz österreich (wb:ö) which is an approach to make a nationwide austrian intellectual capital statement. They are about to find sponsors for a project.
• The IC-Model for a nationwide IC-Report consists of Politics and Strategy (Vision and Values, International trends, Future opportunities and risks, National strategy), Intellectual Potentials (relationship p., structural p., human and value p.), Core Activities (education and consulting, research and innovation, communication and information), Impact on (Individual, Corporation and Institutions, Nation and Society). The loop in the model is closed by evaluation and learning.

4.) Quizzics on "Knowledge Society and Knowledge Policies" hosted by Leif Edvinsson

The task was to shift thinking from giving the right answers to asking the right questions. My Top 10 (slightly modified, out of about 40 questions):

• Linkedin-Profile: Leif Edvinsson
• Why do we talk about a "knowledge society" and not of a "wisdom society"?
• Is there a need to compete with other cities/regions/nations/cultures or should we co-operate?
• (When) Will politicians understand what we are doing?
• What is the explanatory power of knowledge?
• Does money matter in the knowledge society or is there another currency?
• What is the role of schools (the whole education system) in the knowledge society?
• How do we get (all) people involved? What does "democracy 3.0" look like?
• How do we get beyond the elite approach?
• What is the role of ICT in a knowledge society?
• What knowledge do we need (and how do we apply it) to reduce the social divide?

5.) Michael Olsson: Knowledge is Power - More than a bumper sticker

• Michael Olsson discussed the different epistemology (theory of knowledge) of Kant an Foucault. Kant suggests that there is one truth that needs to be discovered. So he says that there is something like "absolute knowledge".
• Foucault in contrast says that knowledge is relative. That raises the question if there is ONE truth or several "truths".
• Intersubjective meaning might be the better concept than subjective meaning and objective knowledge.
• Knowledge and power are two sides of the same coin!

6.) Fuchs, Blachfellner, Bichler: The urgent need for change: rethinking knowledge and management

• The authors presented a analytical framework model consisting of two triangles: "Individual - Organization - Society" and "Cognition - Communication - Co-operating".
• There are two major problems: "Organizational goals without individual and societal goals" and "Societal goals without individual and organizational goals".
• The first generation of knowledge management was strictly focussed on economic goals and did not take individual or societal goals into account.
• The authors introduced the concept of "sustainable knowledge management".

7.) Franz Hörmann: Knowledge Management in Society - The VONDOBONA Project to Reinvent Universities

• Linkedin-Profile: Franz Hörmann
• Franz Hörmann presented problems in the current educational (e.g. measuring students workload instead of results, learning for exams not for progress, repetition results in very strong belief systems, practitioners working as university professors) and economic system (e.g. illusion of accounting measurement).
• Aspects of the theory of self-organizing networks were presented (socratic dialog as learning method, "greed&fear" vs. "empathy&curiosity".
• VONDOBONA project to reinvent universities. Some of the ideas for that kind of university were quite similiar to what FUNDAEC is doing in columbian schools.

8.) Sara Oyarce: Adding the Personal Touches to KM

• I took not very many notes but this was a very inspiring presentation on the soft factors of knowledge management.
• The last picture of a gardener reminded of the book "Knowledge Gardening" (german) by the GfWM-member Gabi Vollmar.

My notes on the presentations on 27.08.2007

9.) Harry Collins: What is Expertise?

• Cardiff School of Social Sciences - Center for the Study of Knowledge Expertise Science (KES)
• Sociology of Knowledge
• Historical development: 1940-1950: age of authority, 1960-2000 attack on authority, 2000 third wave - problem of extension (public vs. experts)
• Citation of Wittgenstein: Knowledge as the property of social groups.
• All@SEE project (Studies of Expertise and Experience).
• Harry Collins spoke about the Periodic Table of Expertises (PToE). What I found interesting was the differentiation between interactional expertise and contributory expertise. When we conduct expert debriefings (knowledge retentions when experts are leaving) we use a model described in the book "Deep Smarts: How to cultivate and transfer enduring business wisdom" which is pretty close to that idea.
• Book "Rethinking Expertise" will be published in autumn 2007. The chapters 1 and 2 are available for download (contains also the PToE).
• Article in Nature in 2006: Sociologist fools physics judges ($$$)

10.) Margit Noll: An Analysis of the Implementation Process of Communities of Practice in and Expert Organization

• XING-Profile: Margit Noll
• The objectives for the Communities of Practice were experience exchange, identification of key players and establishment of organizational learning processes.
• After one year 4 CoPs are up and running and are still in the building phase.
• The 5 main challenges are: missing informal relationships between the business units and CoPs, competition between business units, participants with different knowledge level or objectives, few social contacts and time pressure.
• Papers mentioned: Identifying Challenges for Facilitation in Communities of Practice, Evolving communities. of practice: IBM Global. Services experience

11.) Kimberly Stauss, Tommy Milford: Developing a CoP within a Non-Technical and a Non-Profit Organization

• The presenters spoke about the implementation of Communities of Practice in a School of Social Work. One requirement was: NO budget.
• They based their approach on theories of situated learning, communities of practice, autopoesis, complex adaptice systems and self-organization.
• They used a combination of freely available tools: Mediawiki (as wiki engine), SpringGraph (for knowledge vizualization) and Flex (for the mashup).
• The goal is to have a self-organizing curriculum (CurWiki) in the school.

12.) Siegfried Neubauer, Stefan Marolt: The Quester Story - how to become a "learning organisation"

• The presenters told the story of Quester and the journey towards a learning organization.
• They presented the house of the learning organization (why must every "model" with 3-5 boxes have a trademark and not a creative commons license on it???).
• The paper is available for download.

Trends I observed at the ICKM 2007

• There seems to be a common understanding that KM needs to be reframed and that a more holistic approach is needed.
• ICT-Tools are not the determinants of successful knowledge management, PEOPLE are.
• Philosophy, sociology and organizational development are showing up in (mainstream) KM (good!). There were questions raised about epistemology, social sciences and the big questions of life and death.
• Besides organizational goals (productivity and profit) individual (self-determined living) and societal (sustainable development) goals are getting more important in KM.
• KM ist getting to complex. There is a trend to use a vocabulary that nobody outside the KM community will understand. We need to bring simplicity to KM.
• Soft factors like assumptions, values, mental models and happiness of the workforce are entering the field of KM.
• Communities of Practice seems to be a or THE central method in KM. We should see "organizations as communities", "cities as communities", "regions as communities", "nations as communities" and also the "global community".

Outlook

The ICKM 2008 will be October 23-24 2008, Columbus, Ohio, USA. Important dates:

• May 30, 2008: Full Papers and Posters Submission
• May 30, 2008: Abstracts of Oral and Practitioner Presentations Submission
• July 10, 2008: Notification of Acceptance of Papers and Presentations
• July 30, 2008: Final Submission (Camera Ready)

I hope to see a lot of the participants of the ICKM at the Global Knowledge Development Week in Mexico to let a real Global KM Community emerge.