Intranets and Knowledge Sharing

James Robertson’s paper "Intranets and Knowledge Sharing" deals with the concept of "community practice". In the context of Robertson’s paper, community practice refers to the practice of information sharing within a small group, or "community". The community decides among themselves, consciously or unconsciously the best method to share this knowledge. In Anne Lloyd’s article "No Man (or Woman) is an Island" she describes it as a "collective view of practice and profession". The two components of community practice are firstly, and more importantly, the community interaction that gives a need for information sharing, and secondly, the media used to provide this information and distribute it. It is in the second component that Intranets are involved.

Robertson lists many applications of an Intranet, provision of staff directories, enabling an easier and quicker evaluation of who is involved in which project, and using the Intranet to maintain or increase staff morale. Of course, the structure of such a collaborative space is immensely important. It is not enough to be able to store information, but in accordance with the concept of community practice, the information must be easily shared. A system that falls down on this point is not worth the expense of having implemented. Therefore, the more successful systems will be easy to use, and able to be used quickly.

Intranets can also house a weblog that can be used to publish information to a group. An example of a weblog, to a limited degree, is what you are reading now. Usually written in a more informal style, and easy to update through online forms, a weblog is able to contain easily accessible information for a group. Many organisations have moved into a related item, the "knowledge log" or K-log. These are more formal blogs used solely for archiving and publishing knowledge on a specific project or for a specific group. These vary from many weblogs, which are more personal, (an example is my Livejournal at http:jerichospin.livejournal.com)

Recent years have seen the emergence of the wiki. A major example of the power a wiki can present is the online encyclopedia, wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/ ) Wikis are able to be edited, (information added, removed or edited) by anyone, and thus can make the informations store fairer to those involved by not being able to promote certain information at the expense of other information from another source.

All of these techniques and tools are used through an Intranet setup to enable more effective and fairer sharing of knowledge through the principles of community practice.