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Our Blog

In the blog of Theandb (definition of blog), we share with our readers the personal view and insights we have on developments in the technology sector. And as that is nowadays quite a broad sector, we set our eyes on many diferent topics and questions facing society. We also post entries on recent developments of Theandb as a company. For us, it is a part of an ongoing collaboration and communication with colleagues, clients and friends.

A review of knowledge management tools & techniques

Below, I would like to share some of the knowledge-management tools we use to organize, share and collaborate with others in our business and private life. The idea for this entry matured at the Net Generation event (organised by SlatteryIT).

Knowledge Management (KM), desktop tools and applications:
Some techniques and associated tools that we are using both in business and for private projects:

  • Mind mapping . We have been mind-mapping for years now, for both business and private projects. A powerful technique that you can practice digitally thanks to a couple of handful applications. We adopted MindManager and NovaMind (both commercial). There are open source applications as well such as Freemind. Within a certain extent, PersonalBrain (see below) can also be used to create and use your mind maps on your desktop. Example of business usage: interviews, note-taking, auditing, brainstorming, business requirement gathering, etc.
  • Concept mapping . A more sophisticated technique to articulate "concepts": conceptualize a process, storyboarding, etc. In software development you can use a concept map to make a flow chart. CMaps is an excellent and powerful free-ware application dedicated to concept mapping.
  • PersonalBrain . A personal organizer tool with a great GUI sitting on your desktop . There is literally a "fan club" of Personal Brain users that have been sharing ideas and experiences for years now on a Yahoo Group. Actually, the story of Translucid (see below) began with this wonderful program. PersonalBrain™ features a dynamic visual interface of thoughts that contains it all—your files, Web pages and applications—all linked the way you think.
All the softwares listed above, are desktop applications; some include export function that allow you to share the resulting maps & content with others. However, the exporting solutions can be quite cumbersome. Not optimal for sustainable team collaboration.

KM collaboration & sharing tools:
Without going into the details, let's focus here on the collaboration tools that we have found the most helpful, used in corporate environment and at Theandb to work with remote teams. I will present as well translucid, the one that we develop through our open source venture Pantha software ltd.
Note that there are also enterprise & commercial suites that can be purchased to complement the softwares quoted previously, published by MindJet (for MindManager) and by TheBrain Corporation (for Personal Brain). But I won't discuss them here.
  • Wiki: easy to use online publishing systems, to share knowledge within a team, a company or publicly (most popular example: wikipedia). We have used wikis since our time at Amazon.com where wikis were the natural way for anyone inside Amazon to produce documentation, how-tos, personal tips and so on (works well in a geeky culture). Your primary source of information to understand the companies jargon and know how to do "anything" with the Amazon systems. We introduced the usage of wikis to build the knowledge-base for projects & teams in several other companies. A problem with wikis can be that they grow organically and result in unstructured content that you can only really explore and retrieve through adequate search features. There are plenty of wiki softwares, open-source or not.  An open-source wiki that we recommend  is Twiki : very solid, lots of features, project-orientated, integrated work flows, etc. Amongst the commercial version of wikis one of the best actually is published by an Australian company (Atlassian): Confluence. Another popular one (in the US) is SocialText.
  • Blog: well you are reading one right now! Most popular blog softwares: Movable Type, Wordpress. A success story with blogs we would like to share started 2 years ago. We introduced the concept of "project blogs". For each project, we initiated at our clients' company, we opened a blog where all the project communication was published. It happened to become a very popular and very helpful mean of communication. Useful in many different ways such as to enable stakeholders to comment on specifications, design (UI) choices, and other documentation.
  • Translucid: "a light-weight publishing system geared in particular for users of knowledge-management desktop applications such as PersonalBrain, FreeMind and MindManager. It will free these users from their desktop environment and allow for a presentation of and collaboration on their content online, based on transLucid's powerful importing & exporting capabilities. With its easy to learn & use editing interface, it can power anything from knowledge-spaces to whole websites."  Translucid is an open source initiative from Pantha Software Ltd, which we founded. We are currently setting up a hosting solution for translucid: Translucidonline . Translucid can also be used as a light CMS to publish small-scale website easily (local Australian example: DPPP )
Sharing further resources and links:
When I started to focus on Knowledge Management , Social Network Analysis, and a couple of other areas related to my research at the time (2004) ; I created a dedicate knowledge base with PersonalBrain. Then decided to publish it using the ancestor of translucid (flashbrain) combined with a wiki system. The resources published in this so called "wikibrain" have not been refreshed for a while, but i believe most is still relevant today.
Among the many blogs and RSS feeds I am reading on a continuous basis, the one that consistently features outstanding content (on KM especially) is called "how to save the world" by David Pollard. I would like to highlight in particular one entry that I found very useful  in regards to the topic of this entry: Adding Meaning & Value to Information