Engagement in KM initiatives

leonardkish

Please join us for the #kmers chat on Twitter Tuesday at noon EST where I'll be hosting a discussion of engagement and KM, here's some of the background and some questions to consider (I won't ask them all, but they'll be fun to think about):

There's been a lot of hype about a couple of related words in the tech lexicon over the last year: "gamification" and "engagement".

It's no accident that some of the most successful communities today are gaming communities. Their members are passionate and purposeful, in other words, deeply engaged, both with their games and with their communities. In fact, and some times their games are there communities. They treat the games like a second job.

Gamification is also becoming a real force in the enterprise in hopes of engaging customers and employees. SAP had a big event last week that heralded the beginning of enterprise gamification: j.mp/hE17d0http://www.enterpriseirregulars.com/32689/sap-plays-games-with-the-analysts-and-the-gamification-of-the-enterprise-begins/

How can KM leverage these powerful new forces that are being enabled by social media and enterprise 2.0, when communities are everywhere on the Web especially within games? World of Warcraft has a Wiki that is second only to Wikipedia: http://www.wowwiki.com/

The somewhat surprising elements of successful engagement highlighted in Reality is Broken by game designer Jane McGonigal (@avantgame):

• People crave satisfying work.
• The experience, or hope, of being successful.
• People crave social connection
• People crave meaning

Have people used these in a KM context? How successful?

The five motivating factors that I learned in Management class:

1. Sense of Achievement
2. Responsibility
3. Recognition
4. Personal Growth
5. Challenge

How well are these worked into current community dynamics. What have you seen that has worked?

How are motivation and engagement different? Which of these can be used to drive engagement?

Here's a great resource for motivation tied to gaming:

Motivation for Gamificators: http://lithosphere.lithium.com/t5/Building-Community-the-Platform/bg-p/M...

How about these methods?

http://enterprisestrategies.com/2011/02/22/4-guidelines-for-encouraging-...

What gets people engaged?

There's a multitude of successful communities out there, including this one, that gets people to give of their time and resources.

What's are the top drivers of that involvement?

Can KM get past the 1-9-90 rule with engagement? (Even WoWWiki has a relatively low amount of editors, they say)

What should they be getting from their involvement. Is it just the ability to connect with people with similar passions?

How do real-world leaders compare to network leaders?Are they the same skills or different?

Do networks need leaders to drive passion and purpose, or can it emerge spontaneously?

Can KM get by with collecting artifacts of knowledge?

How can KM get more involved in the flows of knowledge? 

Where do the analytics of these artifacts and/or flows come in?

What does KM as a discipline need to do to move toward flows vs. stocks of knowledge? Original issues with KM were valid because knowledge has to flow. It can't be stored.

What's the half-life of relevancy to a tweet or of most enterprise information? Is there a way to measure or predict it? Is part of the problem with KM that business is not like engineering? It has to form on the fly?

Can communities help with getting the required knowledge in near real time (pair programming is one example)?

We tend to think of KM activities as happening within the enterprise, but how can cross-institutional communities be leveraged for the organization?

About the host: Leonard Kish is a knowledge-focused product manger and sometimes consultant and adjunct faculty on KM. He is the former VP of Operations for Capitis Healthcare, as well as the founder and host of the Rocky Mountain KM Cluster from 2004 to 2005. Lives in Colorado with wife and 2 boys and likes to see how complexity theory relates to organizational design. He's currently exploring gravitational shifts in communities.

Some powerful new forces are at work and he'll be highlighting them on his blog: http://ideasarecheap.posterous.com/todays-explorers-are-innovators . These forces are ultimately related to what drives people and their behavior, so he hopes to learn from KMer community to include in upcoming posts.