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KM@KSU Webinars Kickoff Event
Dr. Denise Bedford Goodyear Professor of Knowledge
ManagementKent State University
Kent Ohio
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Kickoff Overview Goal of the Webinar Series
Kinds of Events
Knowledge Sciences Discipline as Context
Nourishing the Knowledge Sciences Community
How to Propose an Event
Governance Questions
What’s on the Calendar Now?
Logistics – How to Participate
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Conversations Across the Full KM Community
Support a dialog among any and all members of the knowledge management community – where the community is defined broadly and inclusively
Bridge gaps between academia, private sector, public sector, research and development
Welcome the thought leaders as well as people who are curious about knowledge management, practitioners and academics, researchers and vendors
We have associations within sectors, private communities of practice, informal groups within geographical areas, and within particular economic sectors
We want to give a voice to all of these different groups
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Conversations Across the Full KM Community
Knowledge management professionals can be found at the corporate level, within business operations in the organization, in specialized areas of knowledge management and everyday knowledge workers
We think it is important to provide a place where anyone who wants to learn more about how to become a smarter knowledge worker can do so
We think it is important to provide a place where anyone who wants to learn about the goals and purpose of knowledge management can do so
The webinars will support experts, novices, and any interested individuals
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Continuous Dialog (Not Groundhog Day…)
Each year, the KM community comes together around conferences. This is normal for a well-established professional discipline
However, we’re an evolving and dynamic discipline that needs to have a continuous dialog – we’re still defining and developing this discipline and we think we need to talk about what we’re doing and where our profession is headed
We hope the webinar series will provide a space where we can have that on-going dialog
Conversations may lead to conference topics, and conference conversations can be continued in the webinar space
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Affordable Access to Community Knowledge
• In our economically constrained environments, not everyone can travel to conferences to hear these wonderful presentations or to network with other attendees
• Not everyone can afford to pay membership dues to a professional association
• Despite the economic constraints, they still have a need to learn, and we still have a need to grow the discipline
• We hope the webinars will be a tool that allows everyone to participate in and learn from the professional dialog about knowledge management
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Bring New Members Into the Community
One of the things we’ve observed in the past year through our research is that there are as many people outside of the formal knowledge management discipline doing knowledge management as are inside the formal community
As much as 50% of the knowledge management research may be published in non-KM journals – we want to bring these folks into our conversations. Similarly, they may not be aware of what we’re doing in the field .
The Webinars provide an opportunity for us to invite these people to talk with us and share their work
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Extend Access to Knowledge about KM
• There is a very rich body of published literature on knowledge management topics
• Our research last year suggests that many practitioners are not aware of this literature and in many cases cannot access it
• Lack of access or awareness is an impediment to building out our body of knowledge and advancing our work
• We also need to make sure that good work makes its way into the formal published literature
• The webinars can increase awareness of this aspect of the knowledge management discipline by scheduling discussions around articles and inviting authors to talk about their work, and by encouraging presenters to publish their work
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Linking Across the GlobeAsia, Europe, Africa and Latin America have active
knowledge management communities
We need to make sure that the dialog in the discipline is global
We hope the webinar series will showcase work and ideas from around the globe and help to foster a transnational dialog on knowledge management
There may be some ‘time clock’ issues, but we will do our best to accommodate presentations from speakers and conversations with individuals around the globe
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Kinds of Events Presentations about research and development that
you’re doing
Panels on topics of interest – bringing together experts in an area, bringing together people with different perspectives
“Book or journal clubs” – if you’ve read an interesting book or article about KM and you want to discuss it with others, the webinar series is a place to do that
Student research – the future of the discipline rests with the new professionals in our field. What are they working on?
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Kinds of Events Interviews – would you like to interview a KM
Thought Leader? Interview an author to talk about a book they’ve written.
Report from a meeting or a conference – We can’t all get to the many conferences and seminars that are offered around the world. If you were able to attend, please propose an event to tell us what you learned
Other ideas?
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The Context: Knowledge Sciences Discipline
Or, what is an appropriate topic?
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The Discipline of Knowledge Sciences
As we all know, the idea of a knowledge economy and a knowledge society can be traced back to the 1950s and 1960s
The theory and practice supporting knowledge management has evolved over several generations and there are different perspectives on the focus and timelines for those generations
At Kent, we look at the field broadly and inclusively as knowledge sciences – all those aspects that help us to create an environment in which knowledge is created, mobilized, discovered, used, etc….
The easiest way for us to describe what we see as the discipline is to describe it in terms of facets
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What do each of these facets include?
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Webinars on Any and All Facets
The point of describing how we understand the discipline is to encourage you to propose events that pertain to any of these facets
Not only do we hope to achieve a cross-community dialog, but a cross-facet dialog as well
There are synergies between work in communities of practice and organizational culture, between organizational learning and intellectual capital management
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Eating Our Own Dogfood The KM@KSU webinar series is like a community of practice
We expect there will be some very active contributors – presenters, discussants, facilitators
We also hope that there will be many more “lurkers” and “listeners”
If you can’t participate during the live sessions, please try to listen to the archived sessions at your convenience
Share the archived presentations with your colleagues
This is an easy way for us to spread the work about what is going on in the discipline
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Proposing an Event To ensure that every idea is logged and gets into the pipeline,
we’ve setup an online form where you can propose an event http://kmatksu.iwiki.kent.edu/Submit+Presentations+Request
We’d like to know – who is the organizer, what kind of an event you’re suggesting, who you’d recommend for speakers, why you think it is an important idea, and contact information so that we can work with you to find a date that works
We will do our best to schedule each event expeditiously
If you’d like to chat about an idea before you propose it, please don’t hesitate to call us or send an email
If we have any questions, we’ll be in touch to discuss
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Open Community This is an environment where we want to share as
openly as possible
The KM@KSU Webinar Series is an open community of practice which is operating in a Creative Commons context
Please keep this in mind when you are proposing events
If you draw ideas from what you learn in the community, we expect that you’ll give credit where credit is due and reference the work of others
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Respectful Dialog We are all passionate about knowledge management but we
need to make sure that the passion is expressed in a positive and respectful way
The KM@KSU Webinars are a respectful professional environment
Knowledge flows and people learn in respectful environments – where we encounter challenges we’ll expect all community members to practice resolutionary thinking
In other words, we will practice what we preach (eat our own dogfood) about creating a knowledge friendly environment
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Governance We have a simple community Charter which you
can find at http://kmatksu.iwiki.kent.edu/Charter
Each event will have an assigned facilitator or moderator whose responsibility it is to ensure everyone’s voices are heard, that everyone who participates is treated in a respectful manner, and that all ideas are welcome
Another way to participate in the events is to volunteer to be a facilitator or moderator
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KM@KSU Calendar of Events
You can find the calendar of events at http://kmatksu.iwiki.kent.edu/Presentations+Calendar
The calendar will be updated as we work through
your suggestions and schedule new events.
We’ve scheduled a few events already to get started.
You’ll also be able to see speaker biographies from the calendar and the Speakers’ Page http://kmatksu.iwiki.kent.edu/About+the+Speakers
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Events on the Calendar Gordon Vala-Webb about Building Smarter Organizations.
Gordon’s most recent engagement was as National Director of KM for PwC Canada where he led the Business Value / Design team as part of the selection and roll out of a global social networking platform across PwC’s network of firms.
Wendi Bukowitz, founder and managing director of RGsquared, will share with us some ideas about learning how to fail – to fail small and to fail often – to facilitate learning and transformational thinking. You can learn more about Wendi’s work in the field of knowledge management, intellectual capital, and crowd sourcing on her speaker page.
Seth Kahan, who is a thought leader from the early days of knowledge management, will talk with us about his new book and Washington Post best seller, Getting Change Right: How Leaders Transform their Organizations from the Inside Out.
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Events in the PipelineWe’re in the process of scheduling a panel discussion on the
value of Unlearning to knowledge management.
Other events in the pipeline:
Nicole Fernandez on the topic of social and organizational network analysis
Dr. Iouri Bairatchnyi on organizational culture
KM Student research presentations
Open discussions of articles published in the latest issues of the Journal of Knowledge Management, the Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management, the Journal of Knowledge Management Practice and KMWorld
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How to Join In Webinars will be offered on Thursdays from 12 noon to
1:30 pm – whenever there is an event scheduled
The Webinars are hosted by Kent State University using their Webex license.
Each week you’ll find the url to the webex session on the Calendar. We’ll also try to send out announcements early in the week. http://kmatksu.iwiki.kent.edu/How+to+Connect+with+the+Webinars
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How to Join In We can welcome up to 200 people into the live session
each week.
If you cannot participate in the live event, the presentations will be archived - you can find the link to the archive on the left navigation panel of the wiki
Wherever we’re using powerpoint presentations, we’ll also make the presentations available
Each session will build in open participation with chat support. For after event discussions, we suggest some of the existing LinkedIn groups.
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Webinar Support This community is supported entirely through volunteer efforts
The Kent State team contribute their time to supporting this event – there is not a formal budget assigned to the series
Your volunteer efforts and contributed knowledge are also very much appreciated – they will contribute to the success of the community
We will improve as we go forward and hopefully establish some new best practices and lessons learned
If the community succeeds, it is one more example of the value of the field and the viability of the practice of knowledge management!
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Thank you! Questions, Comments, Open Discussion