Collaboration, Collaboration, Collaboration

As a jumping-off point for this round of investigation, I went in search my blogs by my classmates. In keeping with my fledgling investigations into knowledge flow through communities, I decided to use their idea to help inspire me in reading selection and topics of discussion for this post.

I began with this post by my classmate Whitney, which tackles a truly titanic amount of reading for one post. Her endorsement of the Hara book "Communities of Practice" told me that now was as good a time as ever for reading it, so before I discuss anything Whitney went into detail on, I'm going to stop and do Hara for a minute.

As Hara defines it, a "community of practice" is a collaborative but informal network that supports professional practitioners in their efforts to develop shared understandings and engage in work-relevant knowledge building. The idea of a shared understasnding is at the core of all the readings I've done on knowledge management thus far, as well as in several other courses I've taken in my LIS program. It is important in a particularly concrete way in terms of professionals in a shared field, because they must deal with knowledge in ways that are specific to their profession, which must make sense in their contexts to be usable, but may not apply outside their field. (This has come up in my catagloging class with the concept of the "shared vocabulary.")

Some of this shared understanding is serendipitous or inherent; these are people who already share a lot of thought processes and knowledge in common in order to work in their shared profession of choice. However, as no two brains work precisely the same, this still requires careful coordination to eliminate ambiguity and make communication as smooth as possible. This can even help with the transfer of invisible or tacit knowledge, as described by the lawyers who simply "know" what a judge's facial expressions mean for their clients and which jurors will be good choices for a jury.

This gave me an extra framework when discussing another of the pieces referred to by Whitney, the Grace article "Wikis as a knowledge management tool." While wikis are often thought of as decidedly unprofessional because they are tended to by the public rather than information professionals, they may very well be curated by the people who know most about the material. Wikis, collaboration, and the democracy and utility of public sharing have always been topics that are very interesting to me, and I was excited to read Grace's piece.

As Whitney said, Grace's piece is relatively straightforward and practical (although perhaps a bit technical for me close to the beginning). It discusses bringing wiki techology to professional systems to help organize knowledge efficiently between individuals and within systems, independent of formal training. This seems a natural extension of the community of practice into the digital sphere, and I am glad of it. While wikis present challenges-- without the authority of a formal trainer, control of the shared understanding becomes a bit shadier and more reliant on group policing-- I think it speaks to a concept brought up in one of the articles I discussed in my last post: that a decentralization of power is somewhat necessary for efficient information-sharing.

Now I get to feature another of my classmates, because I'll be referring to this post by Darra. (Is it recursive to refer to a post that refers back to my blog? Yes. Am I doing it anyway? Yes.) Darra also touches on Hara and group knowledge, and you should definitely go check it out. Particularly inspirational to me was the bit about a law degree being insufficient to practice law, and needing a community to be able to apply even the formal schooling, which really helped me contextualize Hara's points.

Darra's points on the Cook and Brown article "Bridging epistemologies: The generative dance between oganizational knowledge and organizational knowing" are what I really want to get to. Darra reports having struggled with this reading (which is kind of a natural reaction to it), but she unpacks one of its ideas really beautifully and inspired me to pursue the thread myself.

Cook and Brown touch on an idea I've seen outlined as the difference between knowledge as data versus knowledge as process. They use different terms, referring instead to knowledge possessed by individuals and knowledge practiced by groups, but I think the concepts are related. Cook and Brown argue that what the typically think of as "knowledge" is the provision of the individual rather than groups, but that this is a limiting way of thinking. Knowledge as a possession of individuals isn't very useful in the context of this class, unless that individual chooses to share that information (say, on a wiki as discussed by Grace) and allow it to transmute itself into group practice. This would make it utile to a community of practitioners and subject to the kinds of forces described in Hara's book, which brings this blog post full circle and ties these concepts together far better than I would have hoped.

Onward and upwards!

~*~
Readings discussed:

Hara, N. (2009). Communities of practice: Fostering peer-to-peer learning and informal knowledge sharing in the work place. Information Science and Knowledge Management (Vol. 13). Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Cook, S. D. N., & Brown, J. S. (1999). Bridging epistemologies: The generative dance between organizational knowledge and organizational knowing. Organization science, 10(4), 381-400. doi:10.1287/orsc.10.4.381

Grace, T. P. L. (2009). Wikis as a knowledge management tool. Journal of Knowledge Management, 13(4), 64-74. doi:10.1108/13673270910971833