Thanks to Rob Salzman for pointing us to the David Snowden / Yasmin Merali seminar, Clustering and Swarming as self-organising techniques in virtual communities. Reading these seminar notes from 2000 today, though, it’s not Snowden’s seminal work on the importance of “story” in knowledge management, nor the title’s mention of clustering and swarming that catches the imagination — but the “tacit” search engine and approach to reputation described in the final paras.

IBM employees work in different countries and often from home using the computer. There are few rules as far as ‘virtual’ collaboration and to date there are 75,000 of these collaboration clubs and some 55 formal ones. So this ’shadow community’ is one in which people are self organising and creating vast tracts of knowledge that the company could never hope to manage formally. In fact individuals sometimes do not wish to collaborate formally for fear that their ideas will be taken by those they do not know and who will give them no credit. When forced to do so they will often resort to ‘camouflage’.

Because IBM would neither wish to nor be able to manage all the ’spaces’ and ‘boundaries’ of such groups they use a process which has been dubbed ‘just in time knowledge management’. The company has created structures which enable it to call up and move information across boundaries on a ‘just in time’ basis. This started more or less accidentally when it was ‘flagged’ that a virtual ‘teamroom’, including David Snowden in the UK were working on ’story’ - the use of narrative to pass on knowledge or expertise. Once it was put out that a report was in progress and any information would be welcome there was a number of e mails from people interested which became a flood when an article was published in the Harvard Business Review. Although David was about to write what would have been a very sizable report the questions in the discourse enabled him to focus on what was really relevant and at what level of abstraction.

IBM now have a search engine called ‘tacit’ that can trawl the ‘team rooms’ on the intranet and pick up any key words that might give a clue to information on any current problem that they have. An e-mail is then sent requesting help and a task force can be quickly assembled. But privacy is respected in that only key words and not text are picked up. Also whether a person responds is up to them. If for example you are looking for an expert on ’story’ you may not pick up David Snowden’s but he gets informed that you are looking. If he knows that you are a person that’s likely to steal his ideas he doesn’t respond. If you’re someone that he knows and trusts then he might phone. In a bureaucratic organisation the thief would prosper but in this kind of ’shadow’ system he or she gets starved of the access to knowledge on which the exploitation depends.