Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Starting a blog, handling knowledge management

Welcome to my blog, thanks for visiting!

I have started this blog to improve my knowledge management system! In short this blog will contain all information i feel like saving! For more details of the entire system, see later.

The need for an improvement to my knowledge mangement came up this month, when I got a new job! At my new job I can no longer commit/checkout my personal Subversion or CVS repositories. And I dont have access to Firefox, so I am also missing my bookmark sync-and-sort plugin!

Things you wont find here are real personal information or notes that are confidential, which will have to stay on my PC or in a special Subversion repository for that.

So to summarise my knowledge management system as of today, it consist of the following:
  • Ideas/readme/snip commits used to be saved in Subversion, but probably this will go into this blog from now on!
  • Personal scripts will still go into personal Subversion repositories, as it is easier to deploy to servers. Snippets from those will go to the blog when appropriate.
  • Howtos/working notes probably will stay in the appropriate CVS/Subversion repositories for a while. This is not optimal for sharing with more than a few people, so snippets will be in this blog!
  • Pictures go to appropriate flickr accounts: personal or family, available to anyone, family or friends.
  • Videos unfortunately can not be put into flickr. A place like flickr, with video power like youtube would be nice! Any ideas.
  • E-mail will probably move more and more into gmail, as that will hopefully be availble anywhere i ever need it.
  • The few websites i help o webmaster, are saved in a Subversion.
  • Instant messaging logs are not central or searchable, this would be nice to see.
  • I dont contribute to any particular Wiki anywhere, neither do I have one of my own.
  • I dont contribute to a particular forum, neither do I have one of my own.
  • I have not yet started using VoIP or mobile technology beyond low-tech personal use.
  • Daily top urls to visit (bookmark management) will stay in Sync-and-sort for now, but should not grow into a mess like recently. Instead i will post on this blog, including my thoughts of a particular url. I have a few ideas for better bookmark management so i dont have to use sync-and-sort.
  • Book reviews and notes will move from Subversion to this blog.

Search capabilities within all systems is of great importance, and if I was to share knowledge i tend to say good search possibility is the most important requirement of a knowledge system! Otherwise you will risk the system never gets used.

For my own setup above, a generic search across all systems is not available to me, I have to search each of the knowledge system parts in what ever I can. This is one of the reasons i prefer any format that is text based, because then at least i can grep for one word. I would really like to have a single point of entry search engine which can crawl any of the above! Limiting access to see and perform searches within certain data would be paramount! I am not aware of a product that can do this. For the enterprise at work we will take a look the Google search appliance, but for my personal usage i hope to find something similar that is available in some open source project?

The IBM quickr approach is appealing to me, at least from a coorperate knowledge sharing point of view. It seems perfect for Notes environments, but unfortunately i have not had a chance to try it out yet! I wish there was an open source alternative with similar functionality i could play with. A google search got me to Sun portal server but it 1) it might not be what i want and 2) has some pretty hard technical requirements for me to get started, so i will probably never know about the first issue.

I dont know how other technical people cope with the difficulties of handling job and personal knowledge management systems? Undoubtedly it must raise problems with regards to people loosing their notes if they change job or job position, and it goes without saying that you can not mirror work knowledge mangement systems off for your personal usage! As work and personal life keeps merging, this issue will keep popping up.



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