One of the immediate goals of a community Knowledge Sharing (KS) project I am currently working on is to activate the structure of Knowledge Contacts.  

These are ‘scouts’ within the community who can provide valuable intelligence to/from the community groups to the Knowledge Manager. A current group exists however, the expectations of the role has not been clearly defined or promoted to their Managers/Partners. 

For me, setting up this simple, basic structure is more exciting than any thoughts of building a repository or database. Walking and engaging with people in your community, shows one way in which commercial insight into issues can come from simple interactions rather than formal organised learning and repositories. There is sometimes an obsessive fascination with the idea of knowledge as content, a object or a document. Itignores the human experiences – again moving systems towards people rather than content based. 

If we are given a message it is assumed the delivery is known and complete. This doesn’t happen in a working environment. We don’t follow up how this knowledgeis translated into actions and behaviour.

The role of the Knolwedge ‘scouts’ will be to pick up information scents and use these to network and engage. These engagements may then turn into conversations of commercial value to the community.