Abstract
Proposing a major (though envisaged synergetic) shift in the knowledge management (KM) paradigm needs to convince a skeptical audience. This article attempts such a feat and motivates its conceptual considerations by fusing a wide scope of theoretical KM-related foundations in response to current KM unsustainabilities and emerging enabling technologies. The envisioned workflows, infrastructure, affordances, and impact resulting from the progressing design science research and prototyping efforts are consolidated and reframed, guided by a five-step visioneering process and twelve triple-criteria-clusters combining innovative, technological, and vision-related qualities. Inspired by Bush’s “Memex”, a desirable vision never realized since its suggestion three quarters of a century ago, the novel KM system (KMS) pursues the scenario of a mutually beneficial co-evolution between individual and institutional KM activities. This article follows up on the unsatisfactory and unsustainable state of current KM affairs suffering from accelerating information abundance, invisible work, structural interdisciplinary holes, lacking personal tools, and widening opportunity divides. By portraying a potentially transformative and game-changing technology, the crafting and drafting of a desirable, sustainable, and viable KMS vision assures transparency and can be more easily shared with a critical mass of stakeholders as a prerequisite for creating the respective future KM reality. The drafting of the “Desirable Sustainability Vision” is envisaged to assist a currently accepted KMS start-up project and investment.
Highlights
Kolb defines “Learning” as the process of transforming experience into knowledge embracing creative tensions among subjective personal and objective environmental concerns and among four dynamic recursive learning cycle modes: (1) immediate or concrete experiences (CE) are the basis (2) for reflective observations (RO). The latter are assimilated via thinking and (3) distilled into abstract conceptualizations (AC) (4) from which new implications for action can be drawn and which can be tested via active experimentation (AE) resulting in informing guides for creating (back to (1)) novel experiences [48]
A “PKM for Development” framework (PKM4D), expanded the four criteria above to twelve progressing sub-needs which correlate closely to Maslow’s extended “Hierarchy of Needs” [52]. The satisfaction of these sub-needs impacts on individuals as “exciters & delighters” whereas their neglect causes detrimental effects in form of “inhibitors & demotivators”. As these sub-needs correspond to the PKM concept and system (PKMS) digital ecosystems alluded to and their distinctive characteristics and affordances, growing PKMS communities may successfully narrow opportunity divides at societal level which can be targeted by six intervention clusters [53]
In the PKMS context, Memes introduce the suitable metaphors of knowledge as living organisms where authoring increases the potential of memes to mutate into new variants or form symbiotic relationships with other memes to mutually support each other’s fitness and to replicate together in an “Ideosphere” [82], an “invisible but intelligible, metaphysical sphere of ideas and ideation” where we engage in the creation of our world [83]
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. In using the Memex as the point of departure (past), this article portrays the unsatisfactory and unsustainable current KM state (present) to depict an innovative KMS technology (future) as a potentially transformative and game-changing solution (impact) It repurposes prior research and findings as evidence to meet established visioneering and vision quality criteria and compares the ensuing qualities of the envisaged Memex with the novel personal KM system approach. The emphasis on a sustainability vision is envisaged to assist in paving the way for a successful launch
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