Matthew Hodgson — Social computing for knowledge management

A pre­sen­ta­tion given at Web Directions User Experience, Old Parliament House, Canberra, May 19 2008.

Presentation slides

Session descrip­tion

The world is abuzz with social com­put­ing: Facebook, My Space, YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, blogs, wikis and other spaces pow­ered by Web 2.0 tech­nol­ogy. It’s a social rev­o­lu­tion, empow­er­ing indi­vid­u­als to com­mu­ni­cate, share what they know online, and help oth­ers locate infor­ma­tion that is impor­tant to them in both their pri­vate and work­ing lives.

Some see all this as a big waste of cor­po­rate time, but is it? Is there value in hand­ing over con­trol of col­lab­o­ra­tion and shar­ing knowl­edge to indi­vid­u­als, rather than hoard­ing it in records sys­tems, knowl­edge sys­tems, and thou­sands of net­work dive fold­ers? Is there a way you can har­ness this social rev­o­lu­tion to help improve our organisation’s knowl­edge man­age­ment prac­tices? Is there actu­ally a solid busi­ness value propo­si­tion for social computing?

Matthew will look at knowl­edge man­age­ment in mod­ern organ­i­sa­tions, and how you can ben­e­fit by learn­ing from the prin­ci­ples of social com­put­ing and Web 2.0 tech­nolo­gies. Matthew will intro­duce two case stud­ies in gov­ern­ment that demon­strate suc­cess­ful and not-​​so-​​successful ways of employ­ing social com­put­ing tools, the fac­tors that con­tributed to their suc­cess, and the pit­falls to watch out for. In par­tic­u­lar, he will look at the issues in rela­tion to cor­po­rate cul­ture by draw­ing on recent research in blogs and wikis based on work in organ­i­sa­tional psy­chol­ogy by Hofstede.

About Matthew Hodgson

Matthew Hodgson PortraitMatthew Hodgson is regional lead for Web and Information Management at SMS Management & Technology in Canberra. He has over 10 years expe­ri­ence in e-​​business strat­egy, infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture, infor­ma­tion man­age­ment and knowl­edge man­age­ment, work­ing with the gov­ern­ment and com­mer­cial sec­tor to deliver inno­v­a­tive solu­tions to dif­fi­cult web prob­lems. Matthew has pub­lished papers in the areas of social psy­chol­ogy, has lec­tured at the University of Canberra on social com­put­ing, and is pas­sion­ate about the way in which tech­nol­ogy can pos­i­tively impact on social change through facil­i­tat­ing inter­per­sonal com­mu­ni­ca­tion and knowl­edge sharing.

Matthew’s expe­ri­ence is under­pinned by a com­pre­hen­sive applied knowl­edge of gov­ern­ment and inter­na­tional web and infor­ma­tion stan­dards, degrees in organ­i­sa­tional psy­chol­ogy and knowl­edge man­age­ment, and an inti­mate under­stand­ing of Web 2.0, from folk­sonomies to wikis and blogs.

Matthew blogs at Matt’s Musings and is a con­tribut­ing author at The AppGap.

Related presentations

Your opinion:

XHTML: You're allowed to use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>