Seth Godin is an entrepreneur and blogger who thinks about the marketing of ideas in the digital age.

While his story looks to his concept of “tribes” from a marketing point-of-view we think this is also relevant for nurturing knowledge management behavior (see the invitation for discussion at the end).

We apologize if you don’t have sufficient bandwidth to view the video, unfortunately there is not much we can do about that. You can try to download this one on www.ted.com. We’ve listed the most important quotes according to us here below.

“What do we do for a living? What exactly to the people watching this do every day? I want to argue that what we do is we try to change everything. That we try to find a piece of the status quo, something that bothers us, something that needs to be improved, Something that is itching to be changed, and we change it. We try to make big, permanent, important change. But we don’t think about it that way. And we haven’t spent a lot of time talking about what that process is like. And I’ve been studying it for a couple of years. And I want to share a couple of stories with you today.”

“I think about ideas. And I think about the idea that creating an idea, spreading an idea has a lot behind it. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a Jewish wedding. But what they do is they take a light bulb and they smash it. Now there is a bunch of reasons for that, and stories about it. But one reason is because it indicates a change, from before to after. It is a moment in time.’

“And I want to argue that we are living through and are right at the key moment of a change in the way ideas are created and spread and implemented.”

“We started with the factory idea. That you could change the whole world if you had an efficient factory that could churn out change. We then went to the TV idea. That said if you had a big enough mouthpiece, if you could get on TV enough times, if you could buy enough ads, you could win. And now we’re in this new model of leadership.”

“Where the way we make change is not by using money, or power to lever a system. But by leading.”

‘So let me tell you about the three cycles. The first one is the factory cycle. Henry Ford comes up with a really cool idea. It enables him to hire men who used to get paid 50 cents a day and pay them five dollars a day. Because he’s got an efficient enough factory. Well with that sort of advantage you can churn out a lot of cars. You can make a lot of change. You can get roads built. You can change the fabric of an entire country. That the essence of what you’re doing is you need ever cheaper labor,and ever faster machines. And the problem we’ve run into is we’re running out of both. Ever cheaper labor and ever faster machines. ”

“But there is good news around the corner, really good news. I call it the idea of tribes. What tribes are, is a very simple concept that goes back 50 thousand years. It’s about leading and connecting people and ideas. And it’s something that people have wanted forever. Lots of people are used to having a spiritual tribe, or a church tribe, having a work tribe, having a community tribe. But now, thanks to the internet, thanks to the explosion of mass media, thanks to a lot of other things that are bubbling through our society around the world,tribes are everywhere.”

“You know the pirate tribe is a fascinating one.They’ve got their own flag. They’ve got the eyepatches. You can tell when you’re running into someone in a tribe. And it turns out that it’s tribes,not money, not factories, that can change our world, that can change politics, that can align large numbers of people. Not because you force them to do something against their will. But because they wanted to connect.”

“That what we do for a living now, all of us, I think, is find something worth changing, and then assemble tribes that assemble tribes that spread the idea and spread the idea. And it becomes something far bigger than ourselves. It becomes a movement. So when Al Gore set out to change the world again, he didn’t do it by himself. And he didn’t do it by buying a lot of ads. He did it by creating a movement. Thousands of people around the country who could give his presentation for him.Because he can’t be in 100 or 200 or 500 cities in each night.”

“You don’t need everyone. What Kevin Kelley has taught us is you just need, I don’t know, a thousand true fans. A thousand people who care enough that they will get you the next round and the next round and the next round. And that means that the idea you create, the product you create, the movement you create isn’t for everyone. It’s not a mass thing. That’s not what this is about. What it’s about instead is finding the true believers. It’s easy to look at what I’ve said so far, and say, “Wait a minute, I don’t have what it takes to be that kind of leader.”

“So three questions I’d offer you. The first one is, who exactly are you upsetting? Because if you’re not upsetting anyone, you’re not changing the status quo. The second question is, who are you connecting? Because for a lot of people, that’s what they’re in it for. The connections that are being made, one to the other. And the third one is, who are you leading? Because focusing on that part of it, not the mechanics of what you’re building,but the who, and the leading part is where change comes.”

“You don’t need permission from people to lead them. But in case you do, here it is. They’re waiting, we’re waiting for you to show us where to go next.So here is what leaders have in common. The first thing is, they challenge the status quo. They challenge what’s currently there. The second thing is, they build a culture. A secret language, a seven second handshake. A way of knowing that you’re in or out. They have curiosity. Curiosity about people in the tribe. Curiosity about outsiders. They’re asking questions. They connect people to one another. Do you know what people want more than anything? They want to be missed. They want to be missed the day they don’t show up. They want to be missed when they’re gone. And tribe leaders can do that. It’s fascinating because all tribe leaders have charisma. But you don’t need charisma to become a leader. Being a leader gives you charisma.

If you look and study the leaders who have succeeded, that’s where charisma comes from, from the leading. Finally, they commit. They commit to the cause. They commit to the tribe. They commit to the people who are there.”

Why do we consider Seth Godin a true guru?

Seth Godin is an extraordinary good speaker with original ideas about the digital world we live in right now. His ideas of tribes intrigued us, especially when looking at it from a knowledge management perspective. Tribes might be effective ‘pseudo-organizational forms’  that facilitate knowledge sharing and that spur possibilities for original thinking and innovation. We have formulated a few questions that we would like to pose to you:

• How do you think knowledge leadership can tap into this concept of tribes most effectively?
• Could knowledge leadership also attract knowledge from other sources than their own organization, supporting their own organizational goals, by using this concept of tribes? And how could leadership do this? What would be the preconditions?

If you have ideas to share with us, please do not hesitate to submit it in a comment.

 

In our social media training sessions we often ask participants whether they are subscribed to a daily newspaper and if so, whether they read it from front to back. Many people still do this offline, but on the Internet, this is no longer possible. You have probably seen those YouTube videos citing enormous figures of the daily information produced by the Internet population. It vastly exceeds what any person can process.

One of the things we do at weknowmore.org is to train people how to deal with that waterfall of information. As the web became more social, people all over the world were empowered to create and curate content and also reach an extensive audience. As an information consumer there’s just so much more to choose from nowadays!

So how do you surf these waves? How do you find the stuff that interests you? How do you sift through all that is not? The answer is actually rather simple: continue doing what you’ve always done but do it harder, better, faster, stronger.

1. Accept big numbers

The Internet is so big and the content produced on it so numerous that you never will read it all. The only way to live peacefully online is to accept that you miss out on 99% of it.

2. Learn to skim

Now that you have accepted that there is too much interesting stuff to handle, skip most of it. There is no point in wasting your precious time. Keep skimming and skipping until you find something that’s really worth it.

3. Manage your time

Because of the sheer vastness of the web it can be quite overwhelming. Especially, once you get better at finding new sources of interesting information, you will notice that there is really, really, really-really a lot of stuff you like. It is important not to get (completely) lost in it. Reserve a specific amount of time a day to get updated and stick to that time frame. You still want to get other stuff done, right?

4. Use tools

How hard would my life be without the Golden Triangle: Google Reader, Hootsuite and Evernote. Tools can help you combine sources of information, save and store the highlights and communicate and collaborate much easier. To stay up to date with interesting websites we use Google Reader. We manage our Twitter accounts with Hootsuite but Seesmic, Brizzly and Whoopaa are also good alternatives. To save and categorize everything we find online, we use Evernote and have a Delicious account where we save and tag links that we shared through our weknowmore Twitter feed. There’s also a wide variety of browser plug-ins that make your life a lot easier.

5. Find good curators

Who knows better what you like than your friends? One of the powers of the social web is that it allows people to curate content within their social environment. If a friend recommends something to you, chances are that you will like it much more than if it were an anonymous recommendation. Sometimes however, strangers have interesting views too and strangers become friends. Interested in knitting? Make knitting friends, follow knitting gurus on Twitter and you will find the hottest knitting news, without ever googling.

There are also many people and organizations that not only produce but also curate content. In order to do our jobs, we at weknowmore.org have to sift through the web on a daily basis. The stuff we find interesting, we share with our followers through Twitter. And while we are at it, why not share the best content with you too? If you want to know what we curate, check out our Twitter feed and the delicious tag cloud below that demonstrates the scope of topics we curate at weknowmore.org.
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We gradually publish results of our research towards the human factor in knowledge management for development. In this post we introduce the knowledge management framework we used to come to the specific questions we used in our research.

Introduction

There are many books written on knowledge management and the authors have come up with an enormous amount of knowledge management frameworks [Browse through examples here]. Some are deceptively simple, others extremely difficult to grasp. The one we find most useful is the very practical model of Collison and Parcell taken from their great book “Learning to Fly”.

Adapted from Collison and Parcell (2004)

We recommend reading this book to fully understand this generative model. There is a summary available through their via their website.

The knowledge management process

A very short outline of the KM model by Collison and Parcell

• People and teams agree on certain objectives. Organization-wide this is the mission and strategy, but on a smaller scale they could be developing a certain policy or building a specific house for instance.
• When people start performing the activities needed to attain the goals they set, they should enter the “knowledge circle”.  Before the team starts a task they could search for experiences with others that did the same assignment once. This promotes learning and prevents people from reinventing the wheel in certain circumstances. During and after the activities reflection on the attained results thusfar and checking with other sources of knowledge might lead to valuable learning opportunities.
• All these learning activities should be connected to some sort of knowledge bank. If you want to learn before you act, you can withdraw knowledge from this source. If you want to contribute, you will have to submit your knowledge somewhere.
• However, it is not possible to capture all knowledge necesarry and available. Therefore it is important to let your team connect with some sort of network of people that have the required knowledge and experience ready to be tapped.
• Finally the environment or culture of the organization surrounds the model, which is critical to strat and support behavior in knowledge processes.

How to apply this knowledge management framework

• Preventing wheel reinvention, praticularly in large international organizations
• Accelerating the integration process following an aquisition or merger
• Identifying, capturing and sharing good practice in organizations
• Dealing with cultural barriers that hold back organizations
• To build, nurture and support networks and CoPs
• Creating a culture of continuous improvement and learning
• Involving leadership in the right behaviors to reinforce knowledge-sharing

We have used this model as a framework for our research, since we think it is practical, simple and complete.

Measuring behavior in knowledge processes

In our research we used the following questions to measure behavior in knowledge processes, extracted from the above mentioned model:

• How often do you actively search for prior experiences within your organization before you start a new assignment?
• When you start a new assignment, how often do you actively search for relevant information from outside your organization?
• How often do you thoroughly reflect on your goals, results, and the process when you finish an assignment?
• How often do you formulate learned lessons into a document that is shared within your organization?
• How often are you active in sharing and discussing lessons learned with people from other organizations?
• How often do you actively participate in a group which is focused at sharing work experiences?

All questions where preceded with a short elaboration of the decribed situation.

Results of the knowledge management research

The research showed the following results:

As you can see in this graph, there is no significant difference between men and women.  Women tend to score a little bit higher on searching for information prior to their tasks, while men score a bit higher on the other four activities, but the differences are very small.

It is interesting to look at the reported frequencies of the knowledge management behavior. When searching for knowledge prior to an assignment searching outside of the organization scored higher than searching inside the organization. We currently analyzing this difference further.

According to the research people do reflect on their activities, but formulating them into a document, and thus contributing to the above mentioned knowledge bank, scores a bit lower.

The same counts for sharing and discussing lessons learned with other organizations. Not surprisingly the non-profit staff scored higher here than the group of people from the private sector.

Finally, though the amount of communication methods have vastly increased over the last years, the participants of the research are not yet using them to the fullest. Futher research is needed what methods and instruments they use and how they use them.

Conclusion

Looking at the reported frequencies there is no significant difference between women and men when it comes to behavior in knowledge processes. Searching outside the organization scores a little bit higher than search for knowledge inside the organization prior to an assignment.

People often reflect after their assignment, but the lessons they learn get captured less frequent into a knowlege bank. Despite of the emergence of social media, being part of a community of practice within the professional context is not yet the common standard.

These are very general outcomes that we presented to share how we developed our questions. A more detailed analysis can be found in other blogposts and the research itself.

 

In under 18 minutes David Christian summarizes the entire history of the universe and everything that exists today. He elaborates the role of language in the collective learning of humanity; and explains why that’s what makes us different. A very insightful talk that provides an elaborate historical foundation to think about when contextualizing learning and knowledge management.

“Humans appears about 200,000 years ago. And I believe we count as a threshold in this great story. Let me explain why. We’ve seen that DNA learns in a sense, it accumulates information. But it is so slow.

DNA accumulates information through random errors, some of which just happen to work. But DNA had actually generated a faster way of learning; it had produced organisms with brains, and those organisms can learn in real time. They accumulate information, they learn. The sad thing is, when they die, the information dies with them.

Now what makes humans different is human language.

We are blessed with a language, a system of communication, so powerful and so precise that we can share what we’ve learned with such precision that it can accumulate in the collective memory. And that means it can outlast the individuals who learned that information, and it can accumulate from generation to generation. And that’s why, as a species, we’re so creative and so powerful, and that’s why we have a history. We seem to be the only species in four billion years to have this gift.”

“I call this ability collective learning. It’s what makes us different. We can see it at work in the earliest stages of human history. We evolved as a species in the savanna lands of Africa, but then you see humans migrating into new environments — into desert lands, into jungles, into the ice age tundra of Siberia — tough, tough environment — into the Americas, into Australasia. Each migration involved learning — learning new ways of exploiting the environment, new ways of dealing with their surroundings.“

“Then 10,000 years ago, exploiting a sudden change in global climate with the end of the last ice age, human’s learned to farm. Farming was an energy bonanza. And exploiting that energy, human populations multiplied. Human societies got larger, denser, more interconnected. And then from about 500 years ago, humans began to link up globally through shipping, through trains, through telegraph, through the Internet, until now we seem to form a single global brain of almost seven billion individuals. And that brain is learning at warp speed.

And in the last 200 years, something else has happened: we’ve stumbled on another energy bonanza in fossil fuels. So fossil fuels and collective learning together explain the staggering complexity we see around us.”

 

We curate content ourselves and know what a time-consuming job it is, so we have great respect for others that curate content too! This post is filled with content curation kings! It is a collection of some of the best and biggest collections of social media for education and learning.

Nobody can introduce these posts better than the person that collected them, so we have left the introduction of the posts up to them. We strongly recommend you visiting the great websites where these posts can be found, since there is much more interesting content to discover on them!

100 Amazing How-To Sites to Teach Yourself Anything

“Learning new skills and expanding your knowledge doesn’t have to cost you an arm and a leg. There are loads of free resources on the Web that can help you find instructional videos, tutorials and classes to learn a wide variety of skills from fixing basic car problems to speaking another language. With 100 sites to choose from, you’re bound to find something here that will help you learn just about anything you could want.”

100 Online Resources That Are Transforming Education

“Education technology has become a busy space in recent years. Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates continue to push the envelope with enormous philanthropic gifts toward education reform; Blackboard.com was traded at a $1 billion plus valuation; and Google is putting millions into education tech sites like KhanAcademy. At Mashable, you’ve read about social campaigns for education, gaming in education and free educational resources. With so many startups on the scene, it is easy to get lost. Fortunately, most innovation is centered around a short list of fundamental ideas. In this post, we’ll walk through nine clusters of education tech companies.”

100 Free Tools To Make Your Teaching More Entertaining

“Most educators hope that their teaching touches students in exciting ways so that the information conveyed makes an impact. One sure way to engage students is to make their educational experience fun. New teachers just starting out as well as experienced teachers who could use a breath of fresh air in their curriculum will love all the great tools available on the Internet to help make their teaching more entertaining. Some of the following tools will have teachers and students exploring wikis, open courseware, Twitter, blogging, comics, videos, and incorporating plenty of other tools that will help make learning fun.”

50 Must-Have Educational Apps

“Many of these apps were found by The Teaching Palette, be sure to check out their fantastic site for more helpful resources! From learning the ABCs to doodling, there’s plenty of terrific apps out there that will pass the time but also educate. If you have other apps you want added to this list, just add them in the comments.”

50 Best Blogs for Education Leaders

“Whether you want to be a teacher, principal or even an educational policy-maker, learning all you can about the field and how to be a more powerful leader while you’re still in college is essential. These blogs will fill you in on the latest news, provide inspiration, and ensure that you are up-to-date with the latest educational technologies so you can be the best education leader you can be.”

100 Serious Twitter Tips for Academics

“Twitter’s popularity has soared recently, and for good reason. What started as a simple way to update friends about daily life has grown into a powerful tool for business, communication, and education. While many campuses are just picking up on the educational rewards possible with Twitter, there is still plenty of room to create new and exciting ways to use Twitter on campus. The following tips will help you know just how to get started using Twitter in academia, teach you etiquette, offer strategies and benefits, provide suggestions for specific ways to use Twitter, list tools to use with Twitter, and more.”

100 Ways You Should Be Using Facebook in Your Classroom

“Facebook isn’t just a great way for you to find old friends or learn about what’s happening this weekend, it is also an incredible learning tool. Teachers can utilize Facebook for class projects, for enhancing communication, and for engaging students in a manner that might not be entirely possible in traditional classroom settings. Read on to learn how you can be using Facebook in your classroom, no matter if you are a professor, student, working online, or showing up in person for class.”

 

An alumnus (pl. alumni) is “a graduate of a school, college, or university.”  An alumnus can also be a former member, employee, contributor or inmate as well as a former student.

Social media provide effective ways and opportunities for alumni networks to strengthen the bonds between the alumni; and between the alumni and former institution, sporting club, college, university, and soforth.

We have collected some good articles on how to use social media and some of the main networks to engage alumni. They can provide inspiration for your own alumni network!

Alumni and Social Media [General]

• 5 Tips for Encouraging Young Alumni Engagement Through the Web & Social Media
• Engaging Alumni Through Social Media on blog.inigral.com
• [Presentation] Social Media + Alumni: Strengthening Alumni Relations on SlideShare
• 3 Steps to Network with Alumni on Career Rocketeer
• [Dutch] Presentatie: Succesvolle Alumni Netwerken on Broekman Marketing Advies

Alumni and Social Media [Education]

• 10 Ways Universities Are Engaging Alumni Using Social Media on Mashable
• Top 5 Ways Universities Can Use Twitter to Connect with Alumni on SocialTimes.com
• Social Media in Higher Education on Social Media Prism

Alumni and LinkedIn

• LinkedIn Alumni Group: A Walkthrough with Marketing, Measurement, and Goals in Mind on .eduGuru
• Alumni Groups and LinkedIn: 7 Additional Considerations on Alumni Futures

Alumni and Twitter

• Top 93 Alumni Twitter Users on WeFollow
• [PDF] Alumni Networks and Twitter: An Update on Alumni Futures
• Is Twitter a Tool for Alumni Relations? The Potential of Intentionally Weak Ties on alumni futures
• List of Alumni Associations on Twitter on AlmaMatters.org

Alumni and Facebook

• A Guide to Managing your Alumni through Facebook on SlideShare
• [PDF] Using Facebook to Engage Young Alumni on iModules

 

In this post we focus on the Big Five Theory of Personality. This model is considered to be the most comprehensive empirical or data-driven inquiry into personality in the Western hemisphere.

Introduction

The Big Five Model of Personality consists of a cluster of more specific traits that correlate together.
The factors and their constituent traits can be summarized as follows:

• Openness – appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, curiosity, and variety of experience.
• Conscientiousness – a tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; planned rather than spontaneous behavior.
• Extraversion – energy, positive emotions, surgency, and the tendency to seek stimulation and the company of others.
• Agreeableness – a tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather than suspicious and antagonistic towards others.
• Neuroticism – a tendency to experience unpleasant emotions easily, such as anger, anxiety, depression, or vulnerability; sometimes called emotional instability.

There has been a lot of research focused at looking at the effects of these traits on organizational performance, and also more specifically to knowledge management. This research has shown that two of the five factors influenced knowledge behavior: Openness and Extraversion.

Openness and Knowledge Behavior

Openness involves active imagination, aesthetic sensitivity, attentiveness to inner feelings, preference for variety, and intellectual curiosity. People who score low on openness are considered closed to experience. They tend to be conventional and traditional in their outlook and behavior. They prefer familiar routines to new experiences, and generally have a narrower range of interests. They could be considered practical and down to earth (Costa & McCrae, 1992).

Openness to Experience was found to have a significant relationship with individual engagement to share knowledge in organizations (Cabrera, Collins & Salgado, 2006). In other studies its also associated with training proficiency, and the capacity to better cope with change (Barrick & Mount, 1991). Both these characteristics are also of influence when implementing something new like a knowledge management strategy.

Extraversion and Knowledge Management Behavior

Extraversion is “the act, state, or habit of being predominantly concerned with and obtaining gratification from what is outside the self”. Costa & McCrae (1992) found that ‘People who are extraverted enjoy being around and interacting with others…’. Extraverts tend to enjoy human interactions and to be enthusiastic, talkative, assertive, and gregarious. They take pleasure in activities that involve large social gatherings, such as parties, community activities, public demonstrations, and business or political groups.

An extraverted person is likely to enjoy time spent with people and find less reward in time spent alone. Extraversion has been found to be related to job performance in occupations where interactions with others are a significant portion of the job (Ashton, 1998). Furthermore, if working in a team, higher scores on extraversion would be expected to be related to more effective teamwork (Barrick & Mount, 1991). It also seemed to have a positive effect on performance levels in knowledge sharing and performance in training (Cabrera, Collins & Salgado, 2006).

Focus on Personality in Knowledge Management Processes

The awareness that the amount of activity in knowledge behavior can partly be explained by a person’s personality is important for knowledge leadership. If someone has a closed to experience outlook in life, they might not be as active as those that are more open in searching for new knowledge or experiences for example. That does not mean that this person find it more difficult or less valuable.

It’s just the way they do it.

The same counts for extraversion. An introverted personality might have a hard time sharing knowledge face-to-face or in group discussions.  That does not mean that they don’t think knowledge sharing is important or that they don’t have anything useful to say. In both cases it’s the personality setup of the individual that partly explains their (lack of) behavior.

Conclusion

The psychological make-up of the staff in your organizations  has shown to influence knowledge behavior. Awareness of this influence can help in making the right attribution and taking the right approach in stimulating knowledge management behavior.

Changing someone’s personality is one of the most difficult things to do, if not impossible. So forget that. But take those that work with you into account, and try to understand their actions, wishes and needs that stem from their personalities. This is the first and most important step towards a constructive dialogue and effective knowledge-sharing collaboration.

 

Open research is research conducted in the spirit of free and open source software. The central theme of open research is to make clear accounts of the methodology, along with data and results extracted therefrom, freely available via the internet.

This permits a massively distributed collaboration.

If the research is scientific in nature it is frequently referred to as open science.

This stands in line with:

Open Educational Resources [OER]: “digitized materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research”. OER includes learning content, software tools to develop, use and distribute content, and implementation resources such as open licenses. “Open educational resources” refers to accumulated digital assets that can be adjusted and which provide benefits without restricting the possibilities for others to enjoy them.

Most open research is conducted in existing research groups. Primary research data are posted which can interpreted by anybody. Thus the ‘end product’ of the project arises from many contributions rather than the effort of one group. Open research is therefore distinct from open access in that the output of open research is mutable. Issues of copyright are dealt with by either standard copyright or by releasing the content under licenses such as one of the Creative Commons or one of the GNU General Public Licenses. [source: wikipedia]

The Open Access Debate

In the Open Access debate, there is a collision between the interests of large and powerful collective actors: the academic world, the publishing industry, the public, and the community.

When it comes to access to knowledge, scientists and scholars aim at maximum dissemination, and emphasize the new possibilities Controversial Issues in the Context of Open Access offered by the Internet with regard to immediacy, affordability and superiority. What unites academia in all this is the feeling of living in what may be a revolutionary period in which more and more paths for further improvement of the effectiveness of research are opening up.

This suggests that academics’ discomfort with the traditional publishing system and its current allocation of resources will increase.

This situation seems quite different from the point of view of commercial information providers. Publishers argue that it is part of their remit and their culture-historical achievement to contribute to the dissemination of knowledge. Many publishers see themselves explicitly as partners of academia, highlighting their massive investment in academic quality assurance and in electronic distribution platforms, and stressing the fact that never before has so much content been available to scientists and scholars as today.

Publishers counter the complaints of academics about qualitative restriction by pointing to vast quantitative growth in the form of constantly increasing contents and user numbers. They underscore their competence and experience in ensuring the quality and integrity of the content of articles, warning against underestimating the costs and organization demands of electronic publication and distribution processes, and insisting that there is no alternative to the current subscription model. They counter the brave new world promised by the Internet with warnings about the danger of loss of quality in academic communication.

In the eyes of publishers, Open Access threatens not just the academic journal as a cultural good, but also substantial investments in information infrastructures, jobs, and ultimately a whole industry. Optimum access to knowledge, according to the publishers, will continue to lie in the goods and services offered by commercial information providers (Ralf Schimmer, 2008).

Why should governments adopt a open access approach?

• They expand access to learning for everyone but most of all for nontraditional groups of students and thus widen participation in higher education.
• They can be an efficient way of promoting lifelong learning for both the individual and the government.
• They can bridge the gap between non-formal, informal and formal learning.

Why should institutions adopt a open access approach?

• The altruistic argument that sharing knowledge is in line with academic traditions and a good thing to do.
• Educational institutions (particularly those publicly financed) should leverage taxpayers’ money by allowing free sharing and reuse of resources.
• Quality can be improved and the cost of content development reduced by sharing and reusing.
• It is good for the institution’s public relations to have an OER project as a showcase for attracting new students.
• There is a need to look for new cost recovery models as institutions experience growing competition.
• Open sharing will speed up the development of new learning resources, stimulate internal improvement, innovation and reuse and help the institution to keep good records of materials and their internal and external use.

A further motivation, mentioned by some major distance teaching institutions, is the risk of doing nothing in a rapidly changing environment.

Why should you adopt a open access approach?

• The altruistic motivation of sharing (as for institutions), which again is supported by traditional academic values.
• Personal non-monetary gain, such as publicity, reputation within the open community or “egoboo” as it is sometimes called.
• Free sharing can be good for economic or commercial reasons, as a way of getting publicity, reaching the market more quickly, gaining the first-mover advantage, etc.
• Sometimes it is not worth the effort to keep the resource closed. If it can be of value to other people one might just as well share it for free.

[Source: OECD, 2006]

Join the fight for Open Access!

If you support open access research, you can sign the “Petition for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results”

To ensure maximum dissemination and collaboration, but to still include certain restrictions you can publish your work under a Creative Commons License here.

Together: we know more!

Sources:

OECD (2006) “Giving Knowledge for Free – The Emergence of Open Educational Resources” Center for Educational Research and Innovation Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development

Ralf Schimmer (2008) ”Controversial Issues in the Context of Open Access” Chapter 4 of “Open Access – Opportunities and challenges – A handbook” by the European Commission and the German Commission for UNESCO, 2008, translated from the original German edition published by the German Commission for UNESCO.

 

They have also released the infographic below. The report consists of more information, this is the only the social media part of it. To see the full-length version of the infographic, click here to get a copy of the research.

This report is very insightful! It provides hard numbers to compare your nonprofit to.

Main Findings of the 2011 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study

• The 2010 fundraising response rate was 0.08%. From 2009 to 2010, fundraising response rates declined 19% on average.
• The 2010 advocacy response rate was 3.3%. From 2009 to 2010, advocacy response rates declined 7% on average.
• Annual email list churn was 18%.
• The average study participant sent 3.6 emails per subscriber per month, and sent 6 emails per subscriber in December.
• Online fundraising revenue grew overall by 14% between 2009 and 2010. This rebound was led by an enormous 163% increase in the International sector due to emergencies like the earthquake in Haiti and flooding in Pakistan. However, all sectors saw an increase of some size in overall revenue from 2009, driven by an increase in the number of online gifts.
• On average, an organization’s text messaging list size was 1.9% of its email list size.
• Annual mobile list churn was 14% in 2010.

But there is lot more to discover in the complete report! Non-profit marketeers can use this for inspiration and evaluation of their own e-efforts.

Via: allfacebook.com and Visual Loop

 

As part of our endorsement and awareness-raising for open-access research, we will share free knowledge management journals on our website. First up: the Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management.

The Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management (EJKM) publishes research on topics relevant to the study, implementation and management of knowledge management and intellectual capital and other related fields of study.

The journal contributes to the development of both theory and practice in the field of knowledge management. The journal accepts academically robust papers, topical articles, communications, book reviews and case studies that contribute to the area of research in, and practice of knowledge management. All papers a double blind reviewed.

There is a lot of great content in the different editions of this journal. To give you an idea on what kind of articles are published we’ve shared a selection below.

But be sure to check out the complete journal here.

Selection of articles

Knowledge Management and Higher Education: A UK Case Study

Authors: Desire Joy Cranfield, John Taylor

Abstract

Higher Education Institutions within the United Kingdom are very complex institutions, with diverse backgrounds, history, culture, resources and missions. The University presents itself in today’s knowledge economy with a dichotomy of priorities, one which aims to provide quality teaching and research activity, and the other, to ensure effective and efficient management and administration within an increasingly competitive market. Being a service, non‑profit organization ensures that the values of scholarship remain a very important aspect of its mission; yet, the external environment within which HEIs conduct their business today is rapidly changing, forcing HEIs to reflect on how they do ‘business’ given the external pressures they face.

This case study uses the Grounded Theory methodology to begin to unpack the issues related to the implementation of Knowledge Management within this context. It focuses on two aspects of the case study — the characteristics of universities and academics that hinder or promote the implementation of KM, and the perceptions of Knowledge Management and its challenges for implementation within the HEI sector. Initial findings are presented.

The Concept of Knowledge in KM: a Relational Model

Author: Colin Reilly

Abstract

A relational knowledge domain model is proposed that shows how knowledge is derived from observing real or imagined universes, is stored in knowledge artifacts, and is operated on by natural and designed processes to realise future states of the universe being observed. This model is intended to promote a more holistic approach to knowledge and its management in values driven organizations but can be applied in any organization or community of practice.

In Search of Alternative Metaphors for Knowledge; Inspiration from Symbolism

Authors: Daniel Andriessen, Marien Van Den Boom

Abstract

Distributed Knowledge Management in Virtual Organizations: the ‘Social’ Experience Factory

Author: Demosthenes Akoumianakis

Abstract

The SEF incorporates domain‑specific workflows and several model‑based tools to facilitate systematic accumulation and reuse of collaborative artefacts. An account of these is provided by discussing current implementation in the context of a pilot application.

Value Creation Role of Knowledge Management: a Developing Country Perspective

Authors: Khusro P. Malik, Sobiah Malik

Abstract

This paper highlights the importance of developing and managing the intangible assets and intellectual capital of organizations to create distinctive and sustainable value. It sets forth the concept of Knowledge Circles to enhance activities along the Knowledge Value Chain. Some of the factors that will impact knowledge management initiatives in Pakistani organizations have also been identified.