A big part of the web’s future impact on business will be through its ability to share knowledge almost effortlessly over large social networks. I call this ‘lightweight knowledge sharing’ (LKS – licks? lucks?), and in an upcoming presentation I’ll be contrasting LKS with what I call ‘traditional Knowledge Management’ (KM).

Traditional KM assumes that people need to be bribed or coerced into sharing knowledge. KM also requires a large up-front investment on pre-defined categorization schemes, and large knowledge bases. Lightweight knowledge sharing, in contrast, assumes that people want to share. Simple tools such as blogs and wikis can become a means for large-scale knowledge sharing through the combination of: 1) simple syndication (subscription), and 2) simple ‘social graphs’ that naturally define which subscriptions are of interest. LinkedIn and Facebook are two interesting examples of this trend.

Both the slides and the abstract are available online. These slides will be presented at IFIP 9.1 Computers & Work workshop in St. Gallen, Switzerland.