Saturday 20 March 2010


Lower the barriers to knowledge acquistion.






no climbing over the fence
Originally uploaded by lynnsta

I found this quote today, which makes a key point.

Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.
Samuel Johnson


This is an absolutely crucial point, by the way. Johnson was really onto something, not just being his usual cynical curmudgeonly old self.

People will not seek knowledge if it requires very much effort at all.

And if people don't seek for, or acquire, knowledge, then there is no point in capturing it, or offering to share it, or blogging it, or talking about it. It's that thing again about Push and Pull.

Therefore when we design Knowledge Management approaches we much remove all the barriers was can for finding and reusing knowledge, even if this means leaving some barriers to knowledge capture and sharing, such as requiring the knowledge sharer to add some extra tags or metadata, or to give some more context to their knowledge or their story. Barriers to sharing are less critical than barriers to finding and reusing.

No comments:

Blog Archive