Just Bru

First question: Why a pKM management model? Do I really need it?
Well, in short, yes. For a longer argumentation... I could just take a look at my desktop (either the physical one or the one drawn on the TFT in front of my nose) to
understand how deeply I need it.
As I was recently reading on this article on KnowledgeManagementMagazine:

“Over the years we have equipped everyone with PCs and taken these support positions away, but we have neglected to tell the knowledge workers that they have been given new tasks. Worse still, we have since made 95 per cent of work invisible.” McGee notes that it is easy to see a messy, disorganised office, but a messy, disorganised hard drive or e-mail inbox is invisible.

• a way to quickly organize (categorize?) so that people will find what they suppose to find where they suppose to find it.
  
• a way to quickly find what I am looking for (and when I say quickly I mean very fast)
  
• a way to describe (or map) my knowledge network. How do all the things I'm interested in connect? And, even more interesting, which are the point of contact and which the unexplored (enexploited) borders?
  
• a way to make contamination possible by others. even if I'm not there. I mean, everytime I come back to the office after being away, I find post-its, some of them just with messages or "to-do" items, others with ideas. Sometimes I even leave unresolved tasks or "problems" (say, a routine if I'm programming, or a layout, or whatever) written in the form of a question on my huge planner, and some goodhearted fellow often leaves me insights on the solution of the problem, or maybe the solution itself!!!
  
• A way to summarize results of my work, and a way to go back if I make huge mistakes.
  
• A way to describe (both to me and to my co-workers) what's influencing me at the moment, or where I'm finding the best sources of inspiration.
  
• A way to quickly find what's related to this topic around the web, both in knowledge repositories and in evolving repositories (blogs, mailing lists, etc.)
  
• A way to (with less possible hassle) track where in the world I am at the moment, so that nearby friends can show up and have a beer with :)

Second question : How? Wiki? Blog? (was: why not just my pencil and a paper notepad?)
I used to have a diary. I used it to keep track of my moves and actions, at first just to keep record of it and to "not let things go", then I started to feel the need for a more organized structure (i.e. keeping separate entries for memories and ideas).
I switched to blogging a couple of years ago, for three reasons: 1) because I was able to write entries without having a book and a pen always with me 2) because it let me better categorize entries and 3) because I found that sharing my ideas with others was a good motivational thrust (since I got little or no comments, peer review was not to take into account) in order to keep the diary (blog) always up to date.
Now, when it comes to choosing a tool for doing "serious" knowledge management (as I feel the need now), the probem is that each and every tool has its own interesting features, and looks like it's focused on a main, specific, task:
- blogs let you follow the knowledge making process, step by step, from muddy ideas to "distilled" solutions.
- wikis' got the great "refactoring" thing, so that in each moment you (in theory at least) should get the organized snapshot of the whole thing. Moreover, wikis harness the collaboration between users, which is (usually) good (see below).

So, is it Ergonomy versus Completeness?
I definitely don't wanna loose the visibility on the solution-setting process, since I learnt to know that far too often understanding the procedure is the real "precious", while the deliverable is just a consequence.
Yet, since I'm being payed on deliverables (and on meeting deadlines), I wanna be able to constantly and thoroughly monitor the "big picture", and being able to submit the work for peer review, collaborate on it and eventually refactor it.
But I do not want wikis everywhere! For example, blog-like entries shouldn't be subject to wikification (wikification? cool), since, as I wrote earlier, they represent kindof "milestones" in my personal knowledge process, so refactoring it would ruin the emerging definition of the procedure,

So, the better solution seems to be the integration of a blog and a wiki.
The blog will hold the procedure (consisting of entries, comments, trackbacks), while wiki will hold the knowledge state-of-the-art. [...]

There's one more thing that's not being taken into account: the knowledge ecology system: what surrounds me and inspire me at the specific time that made me take that specific choice?
The easier way to handle this (quite naturally) is through a bookmark archive tool like del.icio.us!!!
This can be easily done, and chances are that most blogging engines already supports it.
The same approach could solve the question on how to find related material on the web (through content from google, waypath, and so on).

More to come on the subject, stay tuned!

Edit:

• ups! I see on my aggregator that I'm not the only one to write about personal knowledge management models this night (even if I was thinking of a model as a set of tools and procedures, rather than a formal scientific model as Lilia's :) ...maybe I should give a break to this "duct-tape" behaviour and adopt a more formal approach... :P )
  ...and it also looks like we got similar ideas on wiki + blog architecture... gosh! :)

• These considerations are actually a follow-up to the new codewitch.org, which I posted a couple of weeks ago.
  

• Posted in Knowledge Management,Learning Curve,Social Software
• Tags: blog,pKM,wiki
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