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The growing phenomenon of Social Software offers the chance of complementing the typical top-down approach on Knowledge Management, based on central knowledge repositories, with tools that are simpler, smarter and more flexible. Social Software is actually not new at all – these software applications (weblogs, wikis, social network services, Instant Messaging and others) have been around for quite some time – but it is only recently that they have been labelled as “Social Software” because of their common traits.
According to Stowe Boyd, the applications in this category cover one or more (not necessarily all) of the following elements: support for conversational interaction between people or groups; support for social feedback; Support for social networks. Email, forums and discussion lists are also used for social interaction and some authors tend to include them under the umbrella of Social Software. But there’s an important distinction between traditional communication software - forming people into groups with a top-down approach and assigning membership, as discussion lists and forums usually do, and social software - with its bottom-up approach, enabling people to organize themselves into a network based on their preferences.
What can Social Software actually do for knowledge management? Knowledge emerges in conversations, actionable knowledge is mainly the result of collaboration, and social capital is continuously gaining importance. Social Software provides the necessary support for conversations and collaboration, for knowledge creation, sharing and publication, for identifying experts and getting access to expert opinions worldwide.
This paper contains brief descriptions of the various types of Social Software – such as weblogs, wikis, social networking sites, social tagging, events management and geo tagging applications - seen as knowledge management tools. Probably the specific tools are not as important as the social phenomenon generated around them – through spontaneous interaction, pro-active attitudes, enhanced knowledge creation, knowledge sharing and transfer. Then, three key categories of Social Software (weblogs, wikis and social networking) are further analysed in connection with the five core KM activities included by Despres and Chauvel in their 1999 taxonomy of applied Knowledge Management: scan/map, acquire/create, package/store, apply/share/transfer, and reuse/innovate/ transform.
A number of interesting examples extracted from different sources are included in the paper in order to illustrate the various ways in which Social Software can actually support knowledge management. The examples include a reflection on weblogs usage, references to two wikis – one used as a place to collect information, the other for coordinating an event, a comment on wiki usage in a small company, and a story extracted from a weblog post on using del.icio.us for finding people potentially interested in the development of a particular software application. A final example illustrates a way of combining various Social Software tools to suit the needs of a particular community and to support its culture, referring to the system designed by Headshift for the National Institute for Mental Health in England.
The last section is dedicated to a review of some of the problems hindering the usage of social software tools (lack of standards, excessive data centralisation, users’ lack of ownership of their own data, the absence of the promised benefits from social network membership). It also includes few references to some of the latest developments and appealing trends in the field (Real Time social networking, collaborative real time editing, semantic Social Network, the Augmented Social Network).
Keywords:
Social Software, weblog, wiki, social network, knowledge acquisition, knowledge sharing
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