Week 1 and thoughts from KS participants on Why share knowledge...

This week, the participants have been sharing their thoughts on what is knowledge sharing and why should we care? To summarize the replies, I used the online mind mapping tool called "mindmeister".

I did this as an iterative process. I started by reading few posts on why share knowledge and adding key points from each post to the map. After doing this for few posts, I looked only at the map and reorganised the points and grouped them into different areas of similar scope. This was followed by reading more posts, more edits on the map and then further reorganization.. so on and so forth. Right at the end, I also tried to prioritise a little bit the issues/ideas under each area.

I really enjoyed this exercise because it made me:

1. understand the dynamics for sharing knowledge (who, how, what are the challenges).
2. that mindmaps can be developed in an interactive manner, instead of sequential. For example, I could start with okay, what are the "barriers to KS" or "What are the incentive". But instead, I just read through each post and put all the key ideas that were there on to the map (without thinking about how to group them or merge them into others). Once I had a good number of ideas up, I started focus a bit more. This way, I did not judge any one area or any one idea important but let it all "flow".
3. understand how useful this tool is. I can imagine using this in brainstorming ideas for papers and issues, working in groups, etc.