For me a Knowledge (Management) System is a software or a service helping me to keep track of what I know and what I wish to know. If mean by “Know” what I keep in my head, memorize, understood and can readily apply. Concepts, words, recipes, know-how, images are part of it. What is not part of it are the feeds of news I read, tweets and tabulated data I forget asap. Things I learned long ago I can’t access at once but it will come back as soon as an initial reminder is presented to me. This could come from the system via a search with enough to allow a quick restore. Searching what I can’t name, by neighborhood is a major feature IMO. What I know is not structured as a tree, with outlines in a fixed skeleton. It is also not topic pages, nicely arranged by keyword. It evolves and changes depending on my mind-set: synthetic, analytic. The level of detail will change depending on what I do: learning or transferring to someone else. Items will be distinguished, aggregated, hidden or replaced. Since I wish to place there what I am learning we are near from an e-learning system from the perspective of the learner. Could be built-in or interfaced. If the system can help me to:

• Highlight, curate interesting incoming information
• Fight information overflow
• Trim search results

based on what I know already and what is out of scope I would call it a proactive Knowledge System. I expect it also to help me to:

• Share
• Build articulated and transferable knowledge
• Display my knowledge in various styles
• Be interfaced with my usual source of Information (twitter, rss)
• Be a help in collecting and creating knowledge.
• Stay out of my way on need
• Be trustable and obsessed with my privacy
• Slim. I don’t need to have things I don’t know stored there.
• Integrated, I don’t want to copy paste all day and do association manually.
• Versatile, accept different type of input and storage.

What I don’t need:

• To cover everything as long as proper interfaces are in place. It will not be a place to tweet.
• If the knowledge is mostly for me it can as well stay tacit. Simple reminders, links are sufficient.
• Duplicate existing contents.

If we search for “Knowledge System” we don’t find much. In Wikipedia we will find Knowledge Based System and Knowledge management. Not everyone in Knowledge Management agrees on goals and definition. So it is hard to say a Knowledge System is fulfilling a need defined by Knowledge management. At the opposite many suppliers claim that a strong Information System or CMS, EDM will do the trick. Try doing the above list with one of them. I practiced managing my Knowledge since I was a self learning student to become a researcher in Math. At that time computers were rarely personal. Then I started my career in software becoming eventually a Software Architect in 3D CAD and PLM. I learned a lot, encouraged my teams to collect, keep, enhance and share our Knowledge. This was before I heard about DIKW and KM. I always wanted to see how far a new approach of Knowledge system could succeed, neither starting from CMS or KBS. This is what I do now, Kneaver. For me a Knowledge system should enable, expand our capacity to learn, enhance and share Knowledge like phones allowed us to talk over distance, cars to reach distant places quicker, spectacles to see at distance. Motivation and resistance to change are very respectable barriers to KM. Many consultants in KM have far larger experience and competencies than me in this field and this surely important. Still once strategy, motivation and change succeeded, good software will enable and help implementation. I will take as prerequisite that motivation exists. I will concentrate on software pointing on KM blogs were applicable and take my view of Knowledge Management and make experiments as Kneaver the software makes progress. It is an ongoing process. Knowledge in itself splits into two types. Personal Knowledge residing in one’s mind in a way neurosciences still don’t capture the basic . Still we are free to continue the long history of devices found to bring information as easy to integrate as possible: Mind-maps, flashcards, videos, slides, books, sutras. New features of software could help us here as well. Organizational Knowledge is the name given to what stays in the company when all employers are at home. It has nothing in common with personal knowledge but the name. So IMHO trying to address both Personal Knowledge and Organizational Knowledge with similar tools is wrong. Typical solutions are now top-down. Let’s have a place to store knowledge in our office and employees will kindly deposit their knowledge so that we can reuse it and consider it as an asset. Strangely people resist. My view is that it is better to start by personal Knowledge and only deposit it in the common store once it is becoming aware individually. So by supporting Knowledge exchange format personal knowledge will become shared enterprise wide. This is how it worked orally before . People build expertise and share it. When sharing it a network effect make it even better. Building bottom-up is also more in phase with the emergence of ubiquitous smartphones and BYOD policies. It will be more supporting group based p2p share inside an organization. User will let know what they know and allow companions to access it possibly express it in more details on request only. My goal is to expose regularly on my blog this idea on the subject in more details, with supporting links mixed with example of knowledge build using Kneaver in various fields like Cuisine Knowledge (fun), software and PKM using Kneaver itself. Do you have any suggestion on what a Knowledge System should do or not? Let me know.