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.

EDM Group:

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
  1. PARA

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