ActKM conference - part 2

Again (see part 1) - these are some of the points I jotted down or tweeted from the ActKM conference I attended recently. They are largely comments I agree or disagree with and/or learning that is relevant to my current workplace or role. Quotes and notes from each speaker in bullet points and my personal notes and comments in italics!

I found the interactive sessions at the conference to be great for learning new techniques, meeting new people and also just to change the pace from the usual presentation style. Arthur Shelley got us to do some thinking about what keeps CEO's up at night and to brainstorm around specific themes or terms. The resulting mind map was quite a mess and in a way sums up why the KM role can be so hard to describe or summarise. We cover so many areas with an organisation.

I have been to many seminars and read so many government website that advise me to write a policy, strategy, framework, guidelines or some other sort of document. Disability Action Plan, Information Publication Plan, Information and Records Managment Framework, Information Architecture, Knowledge Management Strategy, Social Media Policy, Digital Transition Plan and it goes on ..........

Michelle Lambert - Planning your social media strategy.

• Social media is about relationships and engaging with stakeholders and the public, not just here's more 'about us'. It can so easily be added on to a Corporate Communications Strategy to drive visitors to the organisations website or as another media release feed.  These are good uses of some social media tools and a good way to start. But there is so much more value to be made here. 
• The communication should be two-way and interactive.
• Resourcing is fundamental to a successful social media campaign. 

Ian Fry - Is "good enough" KM OK?

KMers need to toughen up!! KM doesn't keep CEO's awake at night..... How do measure our contribution or ROI?

• There is safe and unsafe re-use. When promoting collaborative workspaces and technologies it is important to establish that they are editable and should be understood in context. An example of 'unsafe reuse' that Ian gave me was of a wiki where someone cuts and pastes a section of content for use in another tool or page. The content may have been correct in it's original location (jurisdiction, part of a process, different industry etc) but is wrong or misleading in it's new context or location.
• Metadata is important - when was the content validated or updated? Whjen is it due for it's next revision? Other contexts at time of creation/background information? This is an important consideration with wiki content, in my last workplace we had an internal research wiki and came across these issues, how do we revise content, do we remove old content, how do we know if it is still correct? In an unstructured collaborative space like a wiki these questions are difficult to answer. We had to retrospectively go back through images and apply a template to capture source, authorisation for use and other metadata across several years of content when we discovered that we were at risk of breaching copyright law.

Probably enough for this post .......