Idea in Knowledge Management: IssueLab
I'm kind of a dork when it comes to knowledge management. Something about it just gets me excited. It's a very important topic, after all. When you think about it, knowledge is a sustainable, non-polluting resource—and it happens to power everything we do.
The beauty of it is that knowledge is also one resource that, when managed properly, grows strong and full and bears fruit while cross-fertilized seedlings germinate and sprout under its canopy and grow to become tall and strong in their own right. The forest of knowledge that results is an ever-growing and -evolving, rich, and productive resource. In that sense, it presents the world with a singular opportunity in its cultivation that probably deserves more attention. Just imagine if other resources were similar and fields of solar panels or wind turbines grew in the same way.
Image by Jon Wiley.
When I get excited by the idea of knowledge management, then, it's because of the vast potential I see in the cultivation of knowledge.
So, when I came across IssueLab, I was immediately intrigued. Co-founders Gabriela Fitz and Lisa Brooks saw a great, unfulfilled potential in the thousands of research publications created, but hidden, across the nonprofit landscape. "Despite the widespread interest in this work and the billions of dollars spent each year to produce it," the IssueLab site reads, "most nonprofit research remains unpublished, hard to find, underexposed, or archived in issue-specific information silos." So they created IssueLab to seek out, organize, archive, and share the work being produced by the third sector.
The basic concept is at the same time elegant and striking. By creating a portal through which this research content, otherwise generally tucked out of sight, is brought to light instantly increases the richness of the world's knowledge resources. The research is then available for anything from academic literature reviews and public policy discussions to high school papers and hungry minds.
As investment bankers we called the process of an initial public offering (IPO) a way to "unlock the value" of a privately held, illiquid asset. IssueLab is doing much the same thing with this research.
Of course, that value isn't realized until that knowledge informs people's actions, so visit the site to see what's available. The 2,870 research pieces currently available range in topic from economic development to disability to substance abuse and more.
Visit also because an important element of the IssueLab model needs your participation. While the archive has criteria that submissions be data driven and contain citations, IssueLab itself can't judge the quality and relevancy of all the work it shares. It has "handed the quality judgment back to the community" by allowing users to rate and comment on publications, according to a podcast interview with Ms. Fitz1.
Ensuring a healthy discourse surrounding the research, which does not benefit from a structural peer review system as does academic work, is perhaps where IssueLab has the most work to do going forward. The more earnest ratings and insightful comments that are given, the more powerful this tool becomes for fertilizing the world's body of knowledge and for helping that resource to grow.
1 The interview begins roughly 6m 45s in.
0 Comments
Post a Comment