Keyword Knowledge
03
JAN
LinkedIn's Challenge to Membership Organisations
03 JAN 2012 | Posted in communities of practice, knowledge, LinkedIn, membership organisation, online communities, social media | Author Alex McLachlanLinkedIn's groups provide the potential for informal communities that can pose a challenge to membership organisations.
What is the best way to respond to this challenge and how can membership organisations give their members the experience they expect?
31
MAY
Challenge of Wikipedia for Charities
31 MAY 2011 | Posted in charity, internet, knowledge, NFP, SEO, social media, Wikipedia | Author Alex McLachlanProviding information to the public is one of the main "charitable objectives" of many charities, particularly medical-related charities. So it was interesting to see the recent announcement by Cancer Research UK of an initiative to tidy up some of the key pages on cancer on Wikipedia.
The challenge is that for typical cancer related searches, Wikipedia comes second, whilst Cancer Research comes around eighth. Wikipedia gets many more visits as a result of the higher search result ranking (3.5m per month over its 1,500 cancer-related pages), but Wikipedia articles are not necessarily accurate or well written.
02
SEP
Institutions as Mobilising Networks
02 SEP 2010 | Posted in innovation, IT, knowledge, membership organisation, online communities, social media, website | Author Alex McLachlanThe book I'm reading at the moment is "The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age". The book links to a number of themes I'm interested in, particularly developing knowledge content and user generated content (and also a number of the drivers identified in the recent NCVO future of membership report).
24
JUN
Cultivating Knowledge through Communities of Practice
24 JUN 2010 | Posted in business strategy, charity, knowledge, membership organisation, NFP, online communities | Author Alex McLachlan |
1 Comment
A very interesting slide set - Cultivating knowledge through Communities of Practice - from Steve Dale, the information architect for the award winning local government "Community Hub" online community. He sets out the fundamentals for setting up and encouraging Communities of Practice and the different ways of sharing and developing knowledge.
The presentation takes is business-focused (rather than IT-focused), looking at the methods and roles to get successful Communities.
29
APR
Imagining Knowledge Technology of the Future
29 APR 2009 | Posted in knowledge, social media | Author Alex McLachlanI went to an interesting evening event at the British Computer Society yesterday - a Gurteen Knowledge Café. The format of the evening was a series of discussions with small groups of attendees based round the topic "How do you imagine the Knowledge Technologies of the Future", with the groups mixing up at intervals. Overall, the discussions were fairly philosophical, with some of them moving too far into the future to have any practical impact. However, there were some interesting points for this blog, mostly around the information and knowledge made available to users of websites and other digital media. The fundamental question is - what are the underlying needs of your audience that you are trying to fulfil? There would seem to be two parts to the answer to this:
- It is about providing the information and knowledge they want (or need, which is subtly different)
- It is also about enabling members of your audience to engage in the conversations they value, and even facilitating those conversations