Building on the principles that Shawn has put together over at Anecdote (which I came across this afternoon via Jack Vinson), I came up with a little acronym that I think summarizes some of the main points. Overall, I think in order to get people to share knowledge, we want them to be… B-R-I-I-T-T-E-R.

Borrowing: Taking ideas from others (with attribution, as Shawn points out, and which deserves its own letter, as per the next word).

Recognizing: Providing the attribution for ideas that people deserve.

Investigating: Don’t be a bump on a log. Research, investigate, find out what’s going on inside and outside the organization — especially when stuck on a problem.

Inquiring: Don’t just bury your head in books — ask people what they think, how they think, how they work, and what they do.

Trusting: It’s hard to trust people, but they’ll be more willing to trust if you make the first move. Make a point of trying to open up to colleagues about issues and challenges you’re facing in your job.

Teaching: Don’t give up on people that don’t know how to do something as well as you do. Be willing to take the time to teach the things you know well.

Encouraging: Even if you think someone’s idea is the dumbest thing you’ve ever heard, don’t tear people down. You can be critical in a positive, constructive way.

Receptive: Be willing to learn new ways to do things. Don’t always be a teacher — we all need to be a student sometimes as well. And don’t get flustered when someone knows how to do something better than you.

I think if we all worked every day to stick to these 8 ways of being, not only would knowledge sharing increase dramatically, but I think people’s general productivity and happiness would increase. And it’s good to remember that creating a trusting environment where knowledge sharing can happen has to start with a few people who are willing to take a chance.

I’m very happy to announce that the new site I have been a part of is now ready for its days in beta. The site is knowledgecog, has been completely redesigned to provide up-to-the-minute knowledge management news.

I have to admit, I spend a ton of time on the web reading knowledge management news, articles and updates. But I seem to spend even more time checking individual sites for the information I need.

So I thought, why not take the power of RSS, Yahoo Pipes, a domain and Wordpress, and turn it all into a page where I could get instantly-updated news about knowledge management, enterprise search, content management, social networking and competitive intelligence all in one place.

On top of that, I decided that it would make sense to create the knowledgecog forum to either discuss any of these topics, or to request new features for the site (but hey, feel free to even just post a hello in the General Discussion section!).

The site is still brand new, so there may be a bug or two still in there — but overall the site is working great! We’ve already had a few people stumble across the site before it was even launched which was great. So stop by knowledgecog and check it out!

So I’ve decided to try out PayPerPost – with the intent of determining whether I can provide readers with products and services that will be of value.

Before deciding to sign up, I took a look at what kinds of opportunities were available through the site. I noticed that there were quite a few opportunities for social media and social networking sites, which I think would actually be of interest to my readers.

PayPerPost has also come up with their own word of mouth ethics, in order to disclose when a blogger is making a sponsored post. I think this maintains the validity of word-of-mouth marketing as a way to get your message across.

More importantly with word-of-mouth marketing though, is the fact that those conveying an advertiser’s message have to be cognizant of what they provide to their readers. While PayPerPost has a certain responsibility to their advertisers and publisher base, it is really up to each individual blogger to maintain their own honesty of opinion.

PayPerPost is not really much different than any other commitment that people have as individual bloggers – I would imagine for instance, that most bloggers would not want to say something negative about the company they work for.

So all that to say that if I find something cool on PayPerPost, you’ll hear about it. Otherwise, it’s business as usual around here.

Just a brief post to let you all know that there are a few new features that have been added to the site. If you’re reading this in a feed reader, make sure you stop by the site to check out these great new features.

The first new feature is that you can now now see related posts at the end of every post. This will allow you to find other related topics on the site.

The second feature I’m quite excited about — there’s now a tag cloud on the left sidebar that will allow you see what all of the content on the site is tagged with. This way, you can browse information on the site in a completely new way.

Tag clouds provide a great way to not only browse what’s on the site, but they also allow you to see what types of things I usually talk about (and it also allows me to make sure I’m not always talking about the same thing!).

I’ve currently got the 20 most current posts tagged, and I’m hoping to have all posts on the site tagged by the end of the week.  If anyone is interested in how to see set up their own tag cloud or related posts in Wordpress, just leave a comment and I can explain how I did it.

After spending some time categorizing the elements of knowledge management, it became obvious that knowledge management actually consists of many rather disparate components.

While it would be nice to think that these components always complement each other, it also seems apparent from this list that there is certainly an inordinate focus on technologies.

So the obvious question that stems from these observations is: is knowledge management bloated? Have too many other domains, technologies and processes been borrowed by or absorbed into knowledge management, causing practitioners to lose focus on the people side of things?

If we take a look at the basics of knowledge management, we often see information technology listed as an ‘enabler’ of strategic knowledge management initiatives. Yet to look at this another way, it would seem that as more and more technologies are thrown into the ring, it becomes more and more difficult to focus on which technologies should be doing what.

I talked about the obsession with wikis a few weeks ago, and how wikis are often touted as the solution to any particular problem. Yet wikis are often implemented where a simpler solution (a forum, for example) would not only have sufficed, but may have been a better fit.

So if a wiki is part of a knowledge management strategy, and we consider a forum a knowledge sharing tool as well, isn’t pretty much any web or intranet page also a part of that strategy? And by extension, should an organization’s whole information technology infrastructure not be subsumed under knowledge management, since it’s all ‘knowledge-related’?

With knowledge management’s drive at inclusiveness in terms of technologies and processes, there has been very little that has been defined as clearly outside the scope of KM.

I’d be interested to hear people’s thoughts on this — is there anything you can think of that is definitively not part of knowledge management? Is it useful to define terms, processes and technologies as inside or outside the knowledge management sphere?

Last week, I dropped the 59 pieces of knowledge management I had identified into 5 interrelated buckets. While I feel the buckets were certainly representative of what knowledge management is about, they are only one interpretation.

So I am making the Microsoft Visio document available to everyone who wants it, as I promised last week. This way, if you’re so inclined, you can open up Visio and move the boxes around.

Feel free to change colours, resize shapes, add or remove items and generally do whatever you want (I’d appreciate it if you mentioned the origin of the diagram if you’re going to republish it).

If you don’t have a blog or website, and feel you’ve put together something that’s worth showing off, feel free to send it to me (use the contact form to get in touch, and I’ll give you an email address to send it to), and I just may post it here on this site.

Enjoy playing around with the diagram — hopefully we’ll get some interesting takes on the makeup of knowledge management.

After coming up with my own list of 51 potential pieces of the knowledge management puzzle, Jack Vinson made some great suggestions as to other pieces that could be included. Jack also suggested that these disparate elements be categorized somehow — so I took a stab at putting them into broad categories.

These are the groupings I came up with, but I would eventually like to create a better visual representation of what knowledge management actually consists of. I will also be updating this post to include the actual Microsoft Visio diagram that I used to create this image, so that if anyone else wants to move boxes around to create their own categories, they can.