KM Made in Holland - 2nd Edition

Three weeks ago saw the second edition of KM Made in Holland. An initiatieve of professor Robert de Hoog of University of Twente and Frank Lekanne-Deprez of the Zuyd University for Applied Sciences, that aims to bring together researchers and some practicioners from knowledge management in the Netherlands. A good initiative because it sometimes feels like the KM-people in the Netherlands are each well connected to outside the Netherlands, but not so much within the Netherlands. The first edition was in 2007, and now we all returned for an update on the latest research and cases in knowledge management in the Netherlands, and to collectively reflect on it.

Some photos I took

Several talks were about the experiences made with the introduction or development of tools. How Wiki is used at Océ for instance, as presented by Samuel Driessen, and the Knowledge Café of Winkwaves (blog, Dutch) presented by René Jansen. The latter talked about how social media is used to bring 'the smell of humans' to companies and KM. I love that kind of language.

Slides:

Samuel Driessen has written along with several presentations in his own blog (I'm no good at live blogging, so I simply lazily refer to his postings from during the event):

1 The APOSDLE project (advanced process oriented self directed learning environment)
2 Winkwaves Knowledge Cafe
3 Christaan Stam on ageing workforce and KM
4 Rienke Schutte on Wikipolicy

A very interesting presentation was one of the last ones of the day (number 3 in the list above). Christiaan Stam talked about seeing the ageing population challenges organisations face through a knowledge management lens, and presented findings from his ongoing research. Certainly useful input to reflect on with one of my clients, where I support a community of practice dealing with precisely these issues. I will go into Christiaans presentation in more detail in a seperate posting (I received a copy of the slides yesterday).

I was one of the speakers the first time in 2007 (then I talked about seven years of data gathering for a knowledge management benchmark), and also gave a presentation this time.
I described how we went about setting up and doing the project at Rotterdam University for Applied Sciences where we used a self-steering learning community as an instrument for professional development. I talked about balancing issues of steering/control and freedom to explore, experiment and fail, and the way that worked during the 12-14 months the project ran.
See my posting at the start of the project and some thoughts on the results and community forming afterwards, as well as some specifics about the resulting changes in the teaching of the teachers involved.

My slides are in Dutch, but I embed them here nonetheless to give you an impression of what I talked about.

Definitely looking forward to attending the third edition of KM in Holland in 2011!

Tags: hzap08, kmnl, knowledgemanagement, research