Collaboration vs sharing

James Robertson talks about collaboration tools as anti-knowledge sharing. If I understand JR correctly, his point is that collaboration tools are great for specific teams. However each team works in its own context and this leads to the creation of silos which prevents cross-organisational leveraging of this material. He also notes that this cannot be solved simply by the implementation of a search tool.

I agree with him. A big part of the role of KM (or whatever you want to call it) is the development of shared contexts between groups within an organisation because without that shared context you can't transfer anything. One approach is to develop common methods, taxonomies & languages for teams. N.B. This is a non-trivial task and many groups won't follow something imposed on them from outside. Nevertheless, allowing groups to identify commonalities in their work is an important part of that. Another aspect are human connections between teams - are people moved between groups or are those silo walls impenetrable?

Michael Sampson says that this is a governance issue - which I think James agrees with.

As both Michael & James note, most of the material in these collaboration spaces is not actually relevant to other groups - i.e. the fact that it is not shared is not an issue. The issues are:
1. Predicting what does need to shared (tricky).
2. Encouraging people to put in that extra bit of time to make it available (trickier).