A PKM practitioner in KM-land: Discovery journey to a related world

Just like Uncle Matt from The Fraggles who leaves the fraggle cave to explore the wide world, I traveled to Dublin to discover another knowledge world - a world that looks like what I know, but is just a bit different.

It all started with Bart Verheijen, manager of one of the largest knowledge management groups in the Netherlands and owner of GuruScan. Bart, who is also part of the curation team of the PKM Summit, made the connection between our Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) world and the Knowledge Management (KM) world of Barry Byrne's Knowledge Summit Dublin.

Bart's observation was simple but powerful: the worlds of knowledge management and personal knowledge management are relatively close to each other. It would be good to exchange more. So we decided as organizations to exchange tickets, and last Sunday I departed with my love to Dublin for a nice getaway - including a two-day conference on knowledge management.

The Setting: Trinity College Dublin
It was fantastic to attend a two-day event at such a special place - Trinity College in Dublin. The conference brought together people from all over the world: from the World Trade Organization and NATO to pharmaceuticals, bankers, the UN Food Programme, major accounting firms, and of course many independent enthusiasts, scientists and IT people.

I like to be helpful and discovered long ago at the Quantified Self Summit, that if you show up first and immediately start helping, it's the best icebreaker for new contacts in a world where you haven't been before. So I arrived as one of the first and immediately started helping - organizing badges, doing volunteer tasks. I found a strategic spot at the front of the hall to see everything well and be able to approach speakers afterwards. My 100 flyers of the PKM Summit in March (with handy QR code and part of the program still being built) were ready for distribution.

The Big Difference: Abstract versus Super Practical
What immediately struck me: the PKM world is really a completely different world than the KM world.

So I attended a session by one of the Big Five accounting firms. The speaker talked passionately about the phenomenon of 'knowledge graph' and what you could do with AI. I didn't understand why everyone was so enthusiastic - all Obsidian users (and there are millions of them!) use this daily. Free, privacy-friendly and just locally on their own computer.

When I showed my own knowledge graph - thirty years of personal knowledge, experience and structure - the man had never heard of Obsidian and didn't know how I had done it. I showed people how I catch, record and especially quickly retrieve information and knowledge, while they seemed more concerned with structuring large IT systems than with the practical side of the average employee.

This also turned out to be a concern among many of the summit participants in the various discussions. Will companies outsource the recording and finding of knowledge and information to AI? Will they therefore lay off a lot of people? This was quite significant, I noticed. For many people it would be a reason not to share knowledge. Because it gets captured and absorbed by AI and might make their work redundant. That fear seems justified to me.

Ultimately it's fortunately still about people
What I found really great to notice is that most people who understand this have been hammering on the human side of knowledge for years. Knowledge sits in people's heads and they will only share it if there is psychological safety and opportunity. Something that most organizations forget and try to automate - which of course doesn't work.

There was therefore a lot of attention for communities of practice and for exchanging ideas, insights and experiences with each other. People will only share knowledge if you make it easy. That's why knowledge management cannot be solved with technology, but with attention for each other and with a psychologically safe environment. And with meetups!

This is something we at the Digital Fitness Community and the Digital Fitness Meetups have known for years, and why the DNA of the PKM Summit is built on that mechanism - warm and communal, so everyone can exchange enthusiastically and nothing is too crazy.

You have to do something when you don't get a stage?
I had signed up for a potentially available speaker slot should a speaker unexpectedly drop out, but fortunately for them that didn't happen. Unfortunately, I therefore had no stage to share my insight and knowledge, so I decided to use the question rounds after each keynote for some in-depth questions from my world and spectrum.

The nice thing about this was that every time I said something for a few minutes, people immediately stormed up to me asking if I could explain and clarify that in their country - all the way to Australia. It led to many short, nice conversations about how I look at my information capital, information liquidity and social capital and utilize that.

My old adage that the issue has fallen into the Bermuda triangle HR-IT-IV (Information Services) - that decision makers and executives don't feel the pain themselves and therefore don't have it on their radar - also found eager uptake here.

The Evenings: Connection and Reflection
On the first evening we had a fantastic dinner with all participants in a beautiful, old, classical hall that reminded me of the Harry Potter films. Due to my stroke last January I unfortunately couldn't make it to dessert - the amount of echo and sound was too intense after a day full of stimuli. While I was finishing my book between activities, at nine o'clock my lights went out and I had to quickly go to the hotel with my love. Fortunately that was around the corner.

On the second evening we closed with a great drinks session with live music in a fantastic Irish pub, also around the corner from our hotel. I don't drink much alcohol since my stroke last January, but I still enjoyed a Jameson and a Guinness for a moment. Mission accomplished!

The Big Discovery: Tacit Knowledge = PKM
My biggest insight was a language bridge between the world of knowledge management and personal knowledge management. One of the holy grails of knowledge management is something they call 'tacit knowledge' - the knowledge in all those people's heads, the unwritten knowledge.

This touches on almost every conceivable way what we are working on with PKM: catching, filtering, structuring and lightning-fast retrieval of information. Ah! So that's just called something different by them. They call it tacit knowledge, but they all don't know how to tackle it. Well, we do! Because that's exactly what we focus on in the Digital Fitness course in the PKM section. You only need a few digital skills and a form of digital hygiene for that.

Bart's assumption was correct. These worlds should start touching each other soon.

The Harvest: International Connections
Many nice contacts added, a lance broken for PKM, and I'm sure that quite a few people from this summit will come to the PKM Summit next year. I have at least eight people who asked if I could visit them abroad. You always have to wait and see what comes of it, but this could very well succeed.

Fortunately, my soon-to-be released book on personal knowledge management with Obsidian is also coming out in English and Spanish soon - a perfect timing for these international connections.

About my own journey in the world of knowledge
This intersection of KM and PKM isn't new territory for me. I've been practicing what they call "tacit knowledge management" since I was 12, evolving through tools from Commodore 64 to Obsidian. My approach to information capital, social capital, and what I call "information liquidity" has been documented in recent in-depth conversations and podcast features within the PKM community.

 Two Worlds, One Mission
Just like Uncle Matt who returned to the fraggle cave with stories about the 'Silly Creatures' he had met, I return with the realization that the KM world and PKM world are indeed related, but speak different languages and have different perspectives.

Where they say tacit knowledge, we say personal knowledge management. Where they search for large systems and structures, we build individual skills and digital hygiene. But the mission is the same: making knowledge findable, shareable and usable for people who benefit from it.

And I'm glad we laid the first connections here. I hope this is the beginning of more cross-pollination between our communities. That could become quite a thing in a few years, this collaboration.