Stephen Dulaney has written an interesting story on how he views knowledge management from a personal level. Here’s an extract.
I find it helpful to look locally when trying to understand and define design goals for use when creating ?everyday software?. I look at the way we handle information in our house. The information on my refrigerator door is different from the information I retrieve looking out my kitchen window and different from what kind of exchanges I get at the dinner table. In every day life we aim to weave our information seeking activities to many different single starting places. But these three places are natural aggregation information spaces. Papers of all kinds are stuck to my refrigerator door by magnets the constantly fall off dispersing the aggregated art and info to be re-layered in a new way with the stuff that flew furthest now in front. My kitchen sink aggregates dirty pots, pans, and dishes that show history of what went on in the kitchen just moments before. My dinner table is a place of aggregation for meeting and eating, exchanging ideas and perceptions.
A lot of this may be new to you, yet many of us live and derive value from this world of personal knowledge management every day. In addition to tools and techniques, knowledge management is more a particular mental model from which to work. That means, that just like Stephen, you will find yourself walking around seeing the opportunities that knowledge presents everywhere. Sometimes the opportunity is choice, sometimes learning but it is there.
