Applying Social Software for Knowledge Management

On the next days I´ll be on the 2nd International Symposium in Media Informatics - "Cow Paths: Agency in Social Software". More informations are avaiIable at the Symposium homepage. I´m organizing a workshop there together with Claudia Müller from University of Potsdam, Germany. The topic of this workshop will be "Applying Social Software for Knowledge Management".

Workshop Backgound:

An increasingly important resource for companies especially in an economic sense is knowledge. Knowledge is bounded to a person therefore a person as knowledge worker plays a key role for a company. From this is follows that the greater the importance of people for a company’s success, the greater the importance of interaction based on social relations within a company. Social networks describe these social relations of individuals. Due to the application of social software in companies existing social networks of persons become a technical equivalent. At the moment social software account for describing these human social networks. In current research the question of how social software can be applied to support existing social networks is still insufficient answered. The workshop aims to discuss social software applications in companies, and how they can capture the real social networks. Applications of social software include social sharing, e.g. Flickr, social collaboration, e.g. Wikipedia, social bookmarking, e.g. del.icio.us, social communication, e.g. Skype, and social networking, e.g. OpenBC. All these examples are positioned in the Internet. Companies like socialtext use the idea of social software to carry on a business. But to prolong the success of social software a affordable and effective application in companies must be visible.
Following questions are discussed in the first part of the workshop:
*Are existing Social Software applications transferable to business applications? If yes, how? *What are requirements, e.g. for the company’s structure, the people, the culture for applying social software in a company?

The second part of the workshop deals with relationships between Knowledge Management (KM) and Learning Management (LM). This topic have been widely discussed by many researchers. Some of them go a step further and argue that KM and LM can be viewed as two sides of the same coin, since the two fields have as primary goals how to connect people to quality knowledge as well as people to people. In the past few years, there has been an increasing focus on social software applications in learning environments as a result of the rapid development of Web 2.0 technologies. In this workshop, we discuss how LM and KM solutions can merge and explore the potential use of Web 2.0 technologies and social software in workplace environments to leverage professional learning and enhance work performance.

Online poster
Online flyer