Bert H. • At my library we organize Knowledge sessions. The sessions are structured round a theme, and presented in a session of max. 2 hours. Goals are knowledge sharing and learning in a face-to-face environment.
Staff members are free to join. However, it seemed difficult to attract staff who aren't directly interested in the subject. How to reach them and make them show up?

Gauri S. • Hi Bert, thanks for the feedback. Are these sessions generic or are they specifically about knowledge sharing? Do you ask people to volunteer to present? We tried something similar with Brown Bag lunches in our group but most of the time either same group of people showed up or only those actually working on the project. There was very little cross-fertilisation. Maybe we should have offered free food or coffee!

Martin F. • Our weekly organisation email newsletter contains news of any new items on the discussion forum and wiki, with links to these items. This promotes these facilities and encourages people to view items they may otherwise not have spotted.

Cory S. • Remembering the wisdom that "KM is all about people," I'm currently in the process of launching a SharePoint blog to develop a social layer to the project. I plan to track project status and discuss goals in an informal way, point to interesting findings or opportunities, give training tips, share inspirations for the project, etc.

Does anyone else do this? If so, maybe you could share your experiences?

Also, re: "BBLs" -- my organization currently sponsors training sessions for sharing technical, product, and process knowledge, and uses free lunch and token incentives to presenters to encourage activity. I think the free food makes a big difference in terms of how many people show up, but I still want to get a better understanding of how many people actually receive value from the sessions, versus just show up for the food. In other words, "more" isn't always "better."

Gauri S. • @Martin - pushing information sometimes works well - I prefer getting weekly summaries like those sent by LinkedIn too. In large organizations like mine - spread over 100+ countries, it’s hard to keep track of who is doing what.

@Cory - we have an internal blog where we are encouraging colleagues to share stories about how they used processes, tools, methods, etc, in their project and if it worked well or not (lessons learned). The hardest part of it all has been to get people to proactively write. Part of it probably due to lack of time but part of the problem is the culture.

Does anyone have any experience with promoting internal communities of practice? If KM is placed outside HR and IT dept, on what topics do you collaborate with these groups?

Thanks all for your very useful feedback!

Avinish M. • Hi Gauri,
I have two suggestions for you.
1. What you want sessions- Send an email to all the employees of a service line and invite them for the session, but don' make it mandatory. Ask them to do some homework on following questions.
1. What are your Knowldge Needs in your day to day work?
2. How do you fulfill your knowledge needs?
I like your idea, make the session lively with some snacks and coffee. It will help in knowing the knowldge gap in the organization and how people fulfill this gap.
within a week of this session, launch another initiative.
2. Thanks for your help: Send an email to all the employees of the same service line and tell about the 'Thanks for your Help' day. This celebration will include gifting the paper smileys to the person whom people look for help. Reward the people who gets maximum smileys. In this way you will help to generate the list of subject matter experts and their expertise.

Hope this Helps!
Avi-Knowledge is for sharing

Bert H. • @Gauri Generic & (asked) volunteers. Themes are determined by a focusgroup. Knowledge sharing is never mentioned as a goal. Free coffee or food helps.

Sam C. • Gauri - my top tips would be:
1. Communicate the process/value - explain how people can share knowledge (what are the channels; what do you want them to share) and how these support broader objectives that are important to people;
2. Get your influencers to set the right example - whose behaviours do people look to learn from? Are these people sharing knowledge and setting the right example? Convince them and you convince a much wider audience.
3. Tackle known barriers.

daniel edwin G. • People here where I work at the UNESCO IHP-HELP Centre (part of a university department here in Dundee) are really mainly interested in sharing knowledge that relates to academic research. They like to see their stuff featured in newsletters and online, e.g. see "Featured Research from our Network" pages, www.dundee.ac.uk/water/fretwork/

There is an almost universal hatred (I don't think that is too strong a word) of Facebook as being a very long way down the food chain in terms of respect. LinkedIn has more respect as it is clearly professional in outlook (we have a LI Group of 400+ members). Academia.edu is popular (& something that promoted itself to academics, came up on my blindside) as it is all about research papers etc. and not related to people's private lives/ personal tastes in music etc. - this seperation is appreciated.

I am also keen to share with the general public what we do (after all we are state funded!); however, this has proven far more difficult. Joe Public is far more likely to be on Facebook than LinkedIn, for instance, and seems to need a far different sort of message to entive her/his interest than our usual audiences. I think we are all guilty (!) of failing to prioritise sharing with 'Joe' and instead talking to people we find it easier to communicate with - i.e. people in our industry and academic subject area.

Bill P. • Hong Kong University (I'm not associated with HKU in anyway) has The HKU Scholars Hub, http://hub.hku.hk/, which is a way of connecting scholars work with the greater community primarily in Hong Kong. Search for "knowledge management" and see what you get back.

Chinese society may be a bit reticent to open-up and share with the larger group. At least, that is the stereotype we talk about here in KM circles in south-east China all the time. This initiative has made it much easier for the non-academic community to know and have access to the knowledge artifacts being produced by the HKU academic staff.

Here is PDF presentation that describes how it was set-up:
http://www.berlin8.org/userfiles/file/KE%20OA%20strategy.pdf

Nick M. • What do you mean by "a culture of KS and KM?"

How would you know if that culture had been acheived?

Bill P. • Ah, the 'culture' chestnut. Management studies likes to talk about 'culture' but most of the time they are only talking about 'the way we do it here'. For me, here 'culture' simply means a process that people follow, 'the way we do it here'. I suppose that is 'culture' in a way but its not one that most anthropologists would feel very comfortable with using.

Tim W. • Hey Gauri

I like you suggestions and many of the other commenters. All these suggested activities are directed to the employees / the end users.

In our experience to change the employees' behaviour to engage in knowledge sharing activities, we also engage the management. We want to ensure that they don't prevent KM activities (e.g. "Why are you wasting time with KM?") and rather support knowledge sharing (e.g. "did you share the project report on the intranet?").

We are doing that with monthly activity updates, implementing KPIs for managers, involve top managers in the knowledge sharing activities (e.g. lunch talks), etc.

I would see these points as an addition to everything mentioned above; in my experience, the one doesn't work with the other.

Cheers

Nick M. • My suggestion for answering "activities that support you in promoting a culture of KS and KM within your organizations" would be to look at activities that support promoting any positive existing culture in your organisation.

How do you promote a culture of Safety?

How do you promoote a culture of Quality?

How do you promote a culture of Diversity?

Learn from previous cultural initiatives in your organisation. Learn the lessons from their success or failure. Learn how behaviours are changed, set, and embedded.

Then apply that knowledge to your KM initiative.

Michael L. • I have used a workshop approach for communities of practice (CoP) which contain the following activities: 1) How to use the CoP technology, 2) describing roles and responsibilities in a CoP, 3) a knowledge inventory, 4) CoP configuration w/taxonomy development, and 5) communication plan for the CoP.

This workshop can be a half a day or 2-3 days, depending on the readiness of the community and overall size. Best done in person, but can be accomplished virtually. Good luck!

Rob K. • At Fluor we have following promotional events:
***CEO (and management) support. (most important)
***Make sure that the KM/KS system works and is easy accessable for all at very location.
***Easy to operate user interface
***Company wide
***Relevant number of CoP's
***A yearly "KM month" were we give out prizes for the best Success Stories, do a TV-quiz type events on offcie level were we try to make people think about KM and KS. Have Ask-The-Experts" sessions and more. Get people to share more knowledge than they do already.
***Publicly recognize (peer recognition) employees who are very active in KM/KS. This is year round and a once a year selection and publication of winners. (it is sort of a contest)
***Active and visible knowledge managers.
***Getting questions answered adequately and in the shortest possible time.
***Try to have the personal touch. No automated messages (or as few as possible)