PKM
PKM is the act of collecting and organising a person's knowledge.
Why?
The ever-increasing volume of information humans generate and transmit
Martin Hilbert and Priscila López, The World's Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information:
In 1986, the world’s technological receivers picked up around 432 exabytes of optimally compressed information, 715 in 1993, 1.2 optimally compressed zettabytes in 2000 and 1.9 in 2007.
McKinsey & Company, The Social Economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies:
Americans spend approximately 11 hours a day communicating or consuming messages in various ways, including in-person, watching TV, reading, and using e-mail.
The challenge of retrieving what we need
IDC, Intelligent Knowledge Discovery: Moving Beyond Search:
Nearly 70% of respondents (knowledge workers) to IDC’s KMWorld Conference search survey indicated that they spend five or more hours per week doing online information searches, with 16% indicating that they spend 12 hours a week or more doing searches.
An average UK employee wastes one and a half hours a week looking for lost documents/information at work.
Top-down knowledge management doesn't work
Moving knowedge from individuals' minds to shared knowledge bases risks losing valuable context.
How?
Extracting what's valuable
Seneca:
What is the point of having countless books and libraries whose titles the owner could scarcely read through in a whole lifetime?
Marshal McLuhan:
One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There’s always more than you can cope with.
Structuring for retrieval
- Tree-like structures provide a means of more quickly retrieving information from a cache.
- Drill-down from a specific note.
- Browse siblings.
- Linking related contents, preferably with some form of expression of the relationship.
Children
Backlinks