My point was strictly on the challenge of getting anyone to actually tag. They should; they could. They don’t; they wont.

“You write that “content can be tagged and have meta data applied…” but neglect to suggest who will do this, when they’ll do it, how well they’ll do it, etc”

Those who add can tag, and those who read can tag to, and that’s what we were aiming for.

You seem to suggest that this activity is pointless because content is already indexed and available through searches on the wider WWW. Sure Google is a great place to get at knowledge, but that knowledge is broad and generalised; this small scale pilot into knowledge management allowed us to capture what happens after we have filtered and then to apply meaning through our own tags to aid retrieval. This was knowledge management for a particular context, designed as such.

I think that you’re mistaking a good tool with a real solution.

We never thought that this would be the ultimate solution to knowledge management for a small group of people (although, you know, it might actually be a pretty robust way of doing things). As mentioned in the post, we are aware that there are other solutions out there we can take off the shelf, there are of course also bespoke solutions and really good, interesting experts who can be recruited to set up these systems. We were more interested in seeing if this idea of knowledge management could be useful to this group and if it could help to collect the stuff they were already engaging with. Here at BCMCR we like to find simple ways of exploring ideas before committing partners to more expensive solutions – by choosing something low cost and running a prototype solution we can test the idea, test the fit with working practices and then signpost where the partners should go next if they need something more robust.

You write that “content can be tagged and have meta data applied…” but neglect to suggest who will do this, when they’ll do it, how well they’ll do it, etc.

Without that key step you can every bit of knowledge online and searchable (Google currently offers a reasonable facsimile of this function) and still not effectively manage the knowledge within an organization.

R.I.P. David