Thursday, September 20, 2007

The ECKM'07 Conference in Barcelona

On September 6-7, Gabriela attended the 8th edition of the European Conference on Knowledge Management at Consorci Escola Industrial de Barcelona (CEIB), Spain.
The conference attracted a large number of participants this year, and 11 streams ran in parallel... A huge challenge - running from one room to another proved not to be the most effective strategy... Some titles were misleading, some presentations very poor, and you were always finding out during the break that you've missed an outstanding presentation that happened somewhere else...

But as always, the KM people were extremely good at networking and this made the conference pay off!

The first keynote speaker, Daan Andriessen from INHOLLAND, The Netherlands, spoke about Knowledge as Love: How Metaphors Direct our Efforts to Manage Knowledge in Organisations.
A bit shocking in the beginning, but the idea of the keynote was that the metaphor we use for referring to something as abstract as knowledge influences not only our vocabulary, but also our approach. If knowledge is treated as a resource, it can be stored, packaged, transferred. If knowledge would be treated as love, it would be all about relationship, trust, sharing and so on.

A few papers I found of interest:
- Disconnecting the Knowledge from the Knower - Jennifer Adelstein
- Knowledge Transfer Mechanisms - A Case Study From Manufacturing - Julie Boyd
- Technological Gatekeepers - Eoin Whelan

The second keynote speaker was Jan Annerstedt from Copenhagen Business School, Denmark on Intelligent Cities. The topic seemed interesting, but the presentation lacked any connection to KM.










The highlight of the conference was the Knowledge Cafe, ran by David Gurteen and dedicated to the Knowledge Metaphor. David posted Daan's slides, pictures and a few video interviews on the Gurteen Knowledge website. I set up a wiki page within the eckm wikispace to serve as placeholder for our knowledge metaphors.

My own paper - "Knowledge Work Practices in Global Software Development" was well received and initiated an interesting discussion. Why most of the virtual teams in the literature are made of software developers? Aren't there any other examples? What's the value of studying practices?

A few interesting contacts initiated at the conference:
- Andrea Fried, from Chemnitz University of Technology
- Igor Hawryszkiewycz, from The Sydney University of Technology
- Ved Prakash, from WIPRO Technologies, Bangalore
- Stella Van Rijn, from Nyenrode Business University
- Hanna Timonen, from the Helsinki University of Technology.

Hanna's research work has the same focus as ours: work practices. We explored the chances for a potential collaboration between our research groups and decided to stay in touch.

No comments: