Can ownership and control help information sharing in complex organizations? This is sort of hazy and poorly formed, but I read Landbeck's article [1] and sort of started to think about the community in Flickr vs. the community in Wikipedia and about conflict resolution. Ownership is important in Flickr while the whole point in Wikipedia is to anonymously contribute to the whole (see also my discussions of the nature of communication in blogs vs. wikis, most recently at tech day). Then, just this morning, I was catching up on the JASIST RSS feed and ran across another article on online communities [2] and started chasing those citations based on a comment there, and it gets more complicated, ended up on an interesting article and then looked to see that it was cited 64 times in Scopus, and then went to Scopus and found this interesting article on ownership [3] (whew! yes, we are very rich in information resources here, full text and interlinked databases everywhere, I love MPOW).

Ah-ha. One of my (maybe less well-justified) feelings about KM is that researchers do not like to give up control of their knowledge (or information or data) to be put in some central KM system for various reasons. Nowadays, why can't we federate and exchanged instead of take, copy, lock up, etc.? Things like Ziki do pretty well at gathering online community contributions across various sites -- can't we mark calendar, e-mail, blog, wiki, lab notebook, technical report, memos, whatever, for sharing (internally in the organization), and have these feeds aggregated into a KM system, perhaps preserved, perhaps tagged with some automatic metadata (author is in x department, working on y project, etc.), some semantic information included...

There are massive amounts of research on this so perhaps this has been tried and failed? I just wanted to get this thought out there.

[1] Landbeck, C. (2007). Trouble in paradise: Conflict management and resolution in social classification environments. Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 34(1), 16-20. http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Oct-07/Landbeck_OctNov07.pdf
[2] Hew, K. F., & Hara, N. (in press). Knowledge sharing in online environments: A qualitative case study. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. DOI:10.1002/asi.20698
[3] Raban, D. R., & Rafaeli, S. (2007). Investigating ownership and the willingness to share information online. Computers in Human Behavior, 23(5), 2367-2382. DOI:10.1016/j.chb.2006.03.013  ¶ 10:17 AM| |cites (technorati) |