There are three prerequisites for enabling knowledge sharing among a group of people:
- Clearly understood goals for sharing knowledge that provide value to everyone;
- A trusting and safe environment for sharing;
- Effective processes and systems for sharing knowledge.
Without inherent value for the participants, you will not achieve significant or enduring adoption.
Without trust, you will not achieve significant or enduring adoption.
Without effective systems and tools, not much will be shared.
C. David Gammel, CAE 
Good points, all true. Seems to me the harder question is — how do we leverage all the options at hand (particularly with the wider availability of free online sites and tools) for capturing, sorting, and making that shared knowledge available, so the original sharing can be accessed by a wider group, searched by others in the future, more knowledge added, etc.?
Has anyone identified a way to leverage wikis, blogs, forums and social networking sites to accomplish this?
Otherwise different members are having the same conversation at different programs, via different channels, at differnt times. Without capture and/or linkages, those conversations have to take place over and over again….
Thanks for the comments Ellen.
A couple thoughts:
Having effective systems and tools will address this to a certain extent. What is effective is going to vary from group to group depending upon how they best interact and learn.
Repeating the conversation isn’t a problem, I think. That’s how we learn and as people new to a topic come along they will bring it back up. The key is to have people and processes in place to connect them with the past iterations so they can build upon it, challenge it, or ignore it as they choose. I’ll write a post this week that addresses some ideas on to do this.
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