KM@KSU Webinars Kickoff Event

1. KM@KSU Webinars Kickoff Event Dr. Denise Bedford Goodyear Professor of Knowledge Management Kent State University Kent Ohio

2. 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

3. Goals for the Webinars

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. Linking Across the Globe • Asia, 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

11. Kinds of Events

12. 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?

13. 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?

14. Or, what is an appropriate topic? The Context: Knowledge Sciences Discipline

15. 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

16. What do each of these facets include?

17. 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

18. Nourishing the Knowledge Sciences Community

19. 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

20. How to Propose an Event

21. 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

23. Governance Questions

24. 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

25. 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

26. 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

27. What’s On The Calendar Now?

28. 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

30. 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.

31. Events in the Pipeline • We’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. IouriBairatchnyi 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

32. Logistics

33. 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

34. 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.

35. 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!

36. Questions, Comments, Open Discussion Thank you! dbedfor3@kent.edu