Nearly the end of the working year so doing some musing over the last decade in the world of knowledge and intranets. We’ve seen:

• the rise of crowd power – crowdsourcing
• people’s ability to use online for their own ends
• the growth of Google
• broadband
• explosion of content generation
• social networks
• anytime, anywhere intranets
• rss feeds
• blogs – then bite-sized remarks through Twitter
• cloud computing 

What will be the trends for the next decade? For me its lies somewhere around mobile and location-based services. Local may regain its popularity, rather than global (I think we already start to see this in terms of knowledge); intranets will become the workplace of tomorrow – energy efficient practices will keep more people away from the physical workplace; we will also see the demise of traditional websites and intranets as content looks for channels and audience rather than defined databases.

The two trends for me will be governance and community.

Governance – how well do we want the space governed – in terms of trust, authentication and validation?

Community – we must excel in finding, developing and enhancing communities and learn how to gain mutual value from them. This will focus more around people than technology. We should see the digital channels as not another way to distribute content. Our online experiences should revolve around building community and collaboration, rather than the production and consumption of content.