Knowledge management for small groups
Doug Cornelius tells us about his experiments with Wikis and Household Knowledge Management.
I have often proclaimed the virtues of using a wiki for knowledge management. But does it have place in household knowledge management? Today I have two stories. One is a great success and the other a failure in using a wiki for household knowledge management.
I generally categorize this in the bucket of "personal knowledge management," but there is an important element of interaction around the household information. Maybe this is "KM for small groups."
His link above gives you a series of articles on household KM, as he's been contemplating different aspects of what he would like to see the deal with the stuff that could be made more available: books, calendars, contacts, baby's sleep schedule... I appreciate hearing about his experiments with various ways of dealing with the problem (from paper to fancy web2.0 tools). And I like seeing examples of what works and what doesn't, particularly as lessons learned in more formal settings get reflected back into the informal business settings too.
One area that I've found troubling is the issue of calendars. We've setup a Google Calendar with a couple different views (mine, hers, and the boys), and this works to an extent. But this does not synchronize well with my professional calendar (Outlook 2003), so it feels like things still fall through the cracks.
4 Comment(s)
I'm looking into a service called Timebridge (http://timebridge.com/home.php) that purportedly syncs various calendars for the purpose of finding mutual free time. Might be worth checking out.
All attempts to bring our household calendars online have failed. My wife and I live on our computers, but the hang-on-the-wall kitchen calendar wins out to this day.
She's staring at it right now, in fact, asking me questions, talking about things that are happening this week.
I think that's the thing with household knowledge is that it involves interaction. So standing around a paper calendar or list in the kitchen is what works best.
said:
Scott - This is an interesting observation, and I have heard variants on it before. I like the way you make it blindingly clear why the dry-erase calendar is so helpful. If it's all online, it's hard to stand around and ask questions. At least in the way most of us have things online.
We had a great experience of using a wiki for our wedding - planning, budgeting and so on. I actually had printouts of some pages on the day itself - to make sure people involved had schedules and information.
It has not been used that much afterwards - mainly for collecting info about slow longer term or not frequently repeating projects (e.g. arranging visas and other international paperwork).