Snejina Michailova and Kenneth Husted, professors at the Copenhagen Business School, identify knowledge sharing hostility in six post-Communist Russian companies (no law firms, unfortunately) where there is a "high respect for hierarchy and formal power":

Inequality in status among organizational participants can be a strong inhibitor for sharing knowledge, especially from lower levels to higher levels. Russian managers have difficulties accepting that they can learn from employees from lower levels. This is well expressed in their resistance and dissatisfaction when they have to work in a group with people from hierarchically lower levels, for example, in the context of management education and training programs. (From Dealing With Knowledge Sharing Hostility: Insights from Six Case Studies)

Husted and Michailova offer hope, though, in Diagnosing and Fighting Knowledge-Sharing Hostility. [excited utterances]

What's Your Definition of KM?. Here are some definitions of KM from leading KM theorists and practitioners. [excited utterances]

Thinking through these distinctions is essential for organizations that want to get internal knowledge management working effectively.

Understanding the difference between "audience" and "community".

Shirky on Community. Clay Shirky's written another sterling essay, this time on the nature of communities vs/ broadcasting and why only fools think they're going to build a really cool community and everyone will come and like hang out and then they'll be like all popular and everything.  [JOHO the Blog]

Clay's got it right. A few quotes (emphasis mine):

The order of things in broadcast is "filter, then publish." The order in communities is "publish, then filter." [...]

Media people often criticize the content on the internet for being unedited, because everywhere one looks, there is low quality -- bad writing, ugly images, poor design. What they fail to understand is that the internet is strongly edited, but the editorial judgment is applied at the edges, not the center, and it is applied after the fact, not in advance. Google edits web pages by aggregating user judgment about them, Slashdot edits posts by letting readers rate them, and of course users edit all the time, by choosing what (and who) to read.

Note that this new kind of post-publication filtering wasn't at all possible back when broadcasting was expensive. It's a very significant change that we've only begun assimilating.

[...] To create an environment conducive to real community, you will have to operate more like a gardener than an architect.

But, truth be told, architects need to operate more like gardeners, too, as Christopher Alexander so eloquently argues in his books.

[Seb's Open Research]

Excellent insights in response to the recent Inforworld article about blogging from an anonymous CIO. A good article, if your objective is to spark controversy. Not so good if you're looking for sensible advice.

Gayle nicely summarizes why weblogs will be critical to successful knowledge sharing in organizations. There are probably many CIOs who share the sentiments of our anonymous friend here. But they weren't happy when PCs started finding their way into organizations either.

CIO article on Blogging. Got the link from The FuzzyBlog!]. What a crock.

One of the big ideas about the combination of weblogs with aggregators is that you only get information about blogs that YOU decide are interesting, not the writer. I check out new blogs all the time, and I easily delete those that hold no interest.

Now, in a corporate environment, say you run a weblog about a particular project. Everyone on the project can subscribe and post their info on their own logs. It allows everyone to stay current when THEY have the time to read it.

Another example is from research, which is where most KM technology is needed. The company is not concerned about what the admins know (although perhaps they should) or if the janitor has a weblog. It is what this technology can do for the creation of new products. One of the big problems many people have is staying current with the literature. Everyone needs to find hours per week to stay current. But, if people subscribe to newsfeeds for the journals, a single reader can filter out the relevant articles and post them to their weblog. I subscribed to over 50 newsfeeds for biology journals. I could browse over 300 articles in less than 1 hour, posting the important ones to my blog to be read later. That is right. Browse and make posts. I could then link to the article when I had the time. It was incredibly efficient, especially compared to reading each journal TOC individually. Others could then get to the important new literature quickly. People with particular expertise would be the first to find useful articles.

This moves information around much faster than any other approach. Because, simply finding an important article is not enough. You need to get it into the hands of others to whom it might also be important. Hard to do in a company of 10,000 without using weblogs and news aggregators. You can capture the tacit knowledge in the heads of people.

People are not going to put completely inappropriate info up BECAUSE of the transparency. They know others can easily read it. If someone posts something that may be misleading, others can quickly reply and provide context. This is where e-mails caused legal problems. There was no context so innocently saying 'We will cut off their air supply' could be misconstrued (some satire). Many corporate lawyers hate transparency and that causes most of their problems. It is a lot easier to lie and mislead if no one knows anything. But then it is very hard to move forward. I firmly believe that there would be no Internet if the lawyers had been involved. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog][emphasis added]