Saturday, October 18, 2008

What Communication Takes

Blogging has many of the same characteristics of relationship building. You make contact, check out each other's ideas and values.... if there is interest in the ideas and commonality in the values, you may continue the communication and learn more about each other.

Good blogging also requires feedback and give and take from both the audience and the blogger. Additionally blogging requires nurturing and time. These characteristics are true with all knowledge management just as they are with relationships in general.

After a hiatus, I'm about to announce a new blog and a new website (same location, but a few updates) which will both get the nurturing and time they need. There is more call now than ever for assistance in managing knowledge and we need good forums to dialogue with each other on how to ensure we all continually learn and grow, individually and in our organizations. We must. The alternatives are evident and staring us directly in the face. I look forward to building this with you, to learning from you and to sharing my learnings with you once again.

In the meantime, if you want to see knowledge painstakingly shared from well before the year 1000, check out the website now housing the ongoing work to share the library from St Gallen, a collection of the oldest medieval books in the world: www.cesg.unifr.ch

144 manuscripts from this Swiss Abbey library are already available online. This is NOT part of the work being done by Google, but rather by separate grants and donations. And we complain about sharing 50 years of knowledge in organizations?