Like many others, I visited KM Europe this week in Amsterdam on Tuesday and Wednesday. Tuesday as participant in the Personal Knowledge Management workshop, organised by Lilia & Ton and supported by Knowledge Board, and Wednesday "just" as visitor of the keynote speakers and other presentations and workshop.
The PKM workshop started with a couple of teasers, for example by Piers Young who said that PKM is not something new, and Lloyd Davis who said something about fears (of discovery, loss of control, making mistakes..).
Through an open-space format, all participants were invited to talk in small groups about topics of interest, and write down on yellow post-its what they think of as striking. Results can be found at the workshop-wiki.
One of the questions that brought me to attending the workshop was: If PKM is the solution, what is the problem? The problem seems to be related with knowledge worker productivity, at least this is one of the things I often heard, but this raises more questions (what is wrong with this productivity?).
I also joined the "fears" discussion. I think what's behind a lot of fears is the fear for change a lot of workers have. Change makes uncertain, and why should we change what we did for a long time and that seems to work. Change management and knowledge management (implementation) are closely related.
The discussion in the end seems to be more related to KM issues in general than personal KM. "We don't want tools" is often said, but we seem to forget how many we use. Try to imagine how our work would look like without any tool at all.
On one of the yellow post-its I saw "Knowledge overload". In my opinion only information overload exists, not knowledge overload. Maybe it depends on the definition of information and knowledge, but for me knowledge is very much related to a person (and what's in his/her head). The brain is very well able to deal with knowledge (by forgetting), but may have trouble with all the information around us.
The next morning I asked Martin Dugage about the dinner that I missed in some Australian restaurant. I'm still not sure if I can believe what he said about cockroches falling from the ceiling on the table but I read in Piers weblog something about it, so I guess it's true (Andy obviously "missed" it).
Later (..) more about Wednesday
Comments