The Power of Community Knowledge Management
Celebrating Open Education Week 2024
A couple of days ago we ran our fourth Community Conversations session. This one was timed to coincide with Open Education Week, an initiative of OE Global created as “an annual celebration [and] opportunity for actively sharing and learning about the latest achievements in Open Education worldwide”.
Our focus was on managing knowledge in communities. The version in the video above is a shortened version of the session, which we recorded without the activities. This blog post contains most of the information in the recording.
What is Knowledge?
Community is key to open education, with an often-overlooked aspect of community management and evolution being how knowledge is stewarded within such networks.
Let’s start with the above image, showing the difference between terms and concepts that are sometimes used interchangeably, but actually mean different things.
When we talk about community knowledge we’re talking about connecting the dots between information being shared between members. This can turn into insight through a process of reflection, and wisdom by connecting together different insights.
In practice, nothing is ever as simple as the process shown in the above diagram. However, it’s a convenient way to tease apart some of the subtleties.
A Simple, Homely Example
I went on holiday with my family recently. We ‘favourited’ some places on Google Maps as part of our planning, to help us navigate while we were there, and to be able to share what we enjoyed with others afterwards.
What’s represented on the above screenshot is a bunch of data arranged on a map. When you click on each point, there is further information about each place. If I put these together into an itinerary, this could be considered a form of knowledge.
This is a form of community knowledge management on a very small scale: the community represented by my nuclear family, my extended family and friends, and potentially those people who might in future ask for recommendations on what to do in Faro, Portugal.
Other proprietary tools that might be used to store data and information with others include Trello and Pinterest. You are curating these things as individuals for a particular purpose, but there is not necessarily an effort to connect together the dots in any meaningful way.
Community Knowledge Management
So, what’s the difference between what we’ve discussed so far and managing knowledge within communities?
In this case, we’re specifically talking about Communities of Practice, which we discuss in the first three Community Conversations workshops. Briefly put, they can be defined in the following way:
“Communities of Practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.” (Etienne Wenger)
Harold Jarche has a very clear diagram that he uses regularly in his work around Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) to explore the differences between the spaces in which we interact:
We’re interested in the middle oval in this diagram, with Communities of Practice (CoPs )overlapping with ‘Work Teams’ and ‘Social Networks’. While we might build knowledge within the walls of our organisations, and share things online with strangers, CoPs are intentional spaces for us to build knowledge between organisations with people we get to know better over time.
Rosie Sherry defines Community Knowledge Management in the following way:
Community Knowledge Management is a process for collaboratively collecting information, insights, stories and perspectives with the goal of supporting a community and the ecosystem with their own learning and growth. (Rosie Sherry)
Although she doesn’t mention it explicitly, the inference is that by “collecting information, insights, stories, and perspectives” the idea is that we not only share knowledge, but we also co-create it.
Tools for Community Knowledge Management
The new version of the Participate platform, to which we are migrating the ORE community, is organised around three types of ‘thing’: Badges, Events, and Docs.
This is useful for keeping communities organised. But what if you’ve got a lot of information — books worth, almost, and you need to organise that? In this case, it’s worth looking at another tool to augment your community’s ‘home’ and which provides some more specialised features.
As you would expect from an organisation entitled We Are Open Co-op, we’re interested in working openly, using openly-licensed resources, open source tools, and cooperating with others. That means we’re going to point towards Open Source software in this section that we know, have used, and trust.
Here are three examples of the types of platforms which can host knowledge created in CoPs:
- Wikis — everyone knows Wikipedia, but any organisation or community can have a wiki! You can use the same software, called MediaWiki, or use many other alternatives (we use wiki.js)
- Forums — these are easily searchable so can be used to capture useful information as part of conversations. We’re big fans of Discourse and have used it for several clients projects.
- Learning Management Systems (LMS) — can be used to capture information, especially if your community is based around educational resources. Our go-to for this is Moodle.
For the sake of brevity, and to point to our own example, we’re going to show our use of MediaWiki to form Badge Wiki. This has been around for over six years at this point, and serves as a knowledge base for the Open Badges and wider digital credentials community.
Community Knowledge Contribution
There are behaviours around this knowledge repository that overlap with those inside the main community platform. But there are also others, specific to it. For example:
- Community Calls specifically focused on discussing and planning elements of Badge Wiki.
- Barn raisings which focus on co-creation of pages to help establish the knowledge base.
- Asynchronous discussions to talk about strategy, and catch up between synchronous events such as the previous two.
- Pro-social behaviours are encouraged and recognised through the use of badges.
To dig into the last of these, we know that there are all kinds of reasons why people contribute to Open Source and community projects. We just want to give them a reason to keep doing so.
We created a range of badges specifically focused on the community knowledge base. There are attendance badges, for example with the barn raising (and attending multiple times) but also for particular actions such as authoring pages, tidying up existing content, and making it look better!
Once you’ve got a knowledge base, you can run projects on top of it. So when an ORE community member mentioned that it would be useful to have a ‘toolkit’ for helping people understand Open Recognition… Badge Wiki was the obvious place for it to live!
We launched v0.1 of the Open Recognition Toolkit at the ePIC 2023 in Vienna. As it’s a wiki, this can be easily iterated over time with multiple authors — who can contribute as little or as much as they want.
There’s so much more we could say, but there’s no substitute for practice! Whether you’re planning to start a new community, in the midst of setting one up, or stewarding an existing one, it’s important to think about good practices around Community Knowledge Management.
Being intentional and inclusive about what kind of knowledge is captured and shared within communities is crucial. It’s powerful to pool resources and to help generate insights; it helps to provide impact. It also helps fulfil the needs of different members of the community and helps increase the diversity and richness of who gets involved — and how.
If you would like a thought partner for this kind of work, why not get in touch and have a chat with the friendly people at WAO? The first 30 min call is free of charge, and we’ll do our best to help, or point you towards someone who can!
