Patrick’s taxonomy development infographic has sparked off a little friendly competition in the office. The infographic you see above is my attempt at explaining the different pieces of an intranet puzzle that KM practitioners may have to deal with, and how they all fit together.

This is the link to the pdf version – Intranet_Poster.pdf. Note that it is formatted for A2 size and you will need to set your printer to print within paper size for smaller sizes.

I would like to commend Patrick for his sportsmanship, for even though my poster is evidently better than his, it did not hold him back from providing some of the explanations that you see on the poster.

Nancy Dixon has a terrific post on how NASA went about creating a knowledge continuity strategy to ensure that all the knowledge created in the cancelled Constellation Program can be sustained within the organisation. I’d love to learn more about the knowledge mapping techniques they used, but the centrepiece was a knowledge cafe, used to develop the key focus areas for the strategy moving forward (They have only a year to complete this).

As Nancy points out “Dave Lengyel [head of NASA’s Risk and Knowledge Management Program] could certainly have sat at his desk at NASA headquarters and drawn up a knowledge capture strategy, but that plan would not have been able to take into account the unique aspects of each of the Center’s needs. It would not have been as rich nor as comprehensive as the plan the group was able to develop together. Moreover, had Lengyel constructed it on his own, he would then have had the job of selling the plan to those who would implement it – never an easy task with a plan conceived at headquarters! The Knowledge Café gave everyone the opportunity to fully express their thinking and needs and to understand the needs and thinking of their colleagues.”

I can’t remember how I happened across this post by Robert Kosara on “The State of Information Visualization” but it’s a good one – and here’s an interesting prediction:

“2010 might be the year of visualization theory. While our field is certainly an applied one, we still need a much deeper understanding of how it works and how to build better tools. There is some existing work, but much of that is old (Bertin’s work was published in the 1960s, Mackinlay’s almost 25 years ago, Shneiderman’s 13 years ago, Chi’s taxonomy almost ten years ago). The field is progressing and we are developing new tools that do not always fit the old molds. We are also gaining a better understanding of how things work, and we are seeing interesting new concepts from other fields. So an update of our theoretical foundations is really overdue now, and this year will hopefully be when it happens.”