CSHALS is a conference focused on specific applications of semantic technologies, including Semantic Web, to show where advances have been made, determine what the current needs are, and anticipate where the field is headed in order to prepare and advance with the field. The conference is organized along specific topics and moderated to stimulate interactive discussions around sets of key questions determined in advance with input from registered attendees.

Conference Details

We attract a multidisciplinary group of professionals who have either found themselves in a lead role with KM, tasked to find and implement technology solutions that support knowledge sharing, organize and manage repositories of proprietary content, improve content retrieval, or improve processes and policies for sharing knowledge assets. Degrees of our members include: information science, computer science, library science, business administration, communications, computational linguistics, operations research analysis, the behavioral sciences, law, and various engineering degrees.

All of this diversity makes for great discussions and interchanges for meetings featuring speakers, workshops, or topical discussion forums.

We benefit from hearing what our members have to report whether they are struggling to launch a new initiative, or have already established a solid basis for usable and useful knowledge transfer. Discussions of expertise  management, collaboration methods, search and navigation technologies, archival practices, content management and categorization techniques, learning system, and social tools have all been popular in recent years. Blending KM with various cultures is always interesting.

We meet on the third Thursday of every month for a speaker presentation in Waltham, Massachusetts, and would like to hear from you if you have a story to tell or just want to be on our meeting mailing list.

You can send your ideas for programs, volunteer to give one, or send contact information to info at kmforum.org or respond with a comment to this posting. We look forward to including you in our programs.

Also, check out the links on the right for postings relating to previous Thursday meetings, Friday morning breakfast topic meetings and symposia we have held at Bentley University.

TOPIC: Whether you are a KM champion, initiator, leader or have some other role in the knowledge leveraging activities of your organization, we want to hear your own story. Come and share with the breakfast group how you found yourself in the position you are in, what professional competencies and personal attributes you bring to your work and what else you would find helpful in the way of formal training for yourself or others in your peer group.

The last Thursday meeting laid out the formal training options for aspects of information and knowledge management, and a discussion ensured on how and what various professionals bring to their work in the field. You can see the brief slides from that meeting and other documents that were shared will be available to participants in this next meeting from the series.

If you are looking for validation or affirmation of your own value in the KM arena, this is a good place to get that reinforcing conversation.

Registration Form for Friday Only

Registration Details (Cost, logistics, etc.)

SPEAKER: Larry Chait, Managing Director, Chait & Associates and Lynda Moulton, Principal, LWM Technology Services

TOPIC:

This workshop will cover the key elements for making a successful KM leader and give participants a guide to finding coursework to help them fill gaps in their own education or for people they supervise.

We’ll wrap up with one of Larry’s famous thumbnail collections: highlights of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, last week.

Boston KM Forum receives a fair amount of interest from other KM communities of practice from across the U.S. and around the world. The two most frequent comments and inquiries we receive are from those seeking information about our programs or links to presentations, and questions about where there are educational programs that feature knowledge management. PRESENTATION

Our community of practice in the Boston area has attracted over a thousand attendees to one or more of our programs spanning seven years; their backgrounds reflect the myriad components that make a KM manager or KM champion. They come from disciplines as diverse as information science, computational linguistics, IT/computer science, communications, business management, operations research analysis, informatics, etc. Everyone is concerned with aspects of fostering and leveraging the purposeful exchange of knowledge in their organization or in their consulting practices. No one in our community has a degree in “knowledge management,” but that could change.

Larry Chait has lead a major KM initiative for an international professional service firm and understands the key ingredients for sharp and effective contributors and leaders in this area. Both he and Lynda Moulton have taught at the graduate level, courses related to KM and information management. Larry is an expert in process and people management, while Lynda has more experience with managing content and knowledge assets for specific user needs. While both have worked with hundreds of technology tools that support KM, they champion the human and social mechanisms that make KM work. Coursework can contribute but personal/professional attributes are also important.

BIOGRAPHIES: Prior to launching Chait & Associates, Larry Chait was a Corporate Vice President of Arthur D. Little, Inc. He built ADL’s internal, global Knowledge Management function and served as the firm’s first Chief Knowledge Officer. In that role, he oversaw the design, development, and implementation of the firm’s multi-million-dollar KM initiative. In his earlier consulting role at ADL, Larry led major engagements in change management, process improvement, and strategic IT planning for domestic and international clients ranging from start-ups to the Global 100. Larry has also authored 20 articles published in the US and abroad, lectured in MBA and post-graduate programs in five universities, and spoken at over 40 conferences on topics including knowledge management, process improvement, and the management of change. He is currently President of The Boston KM Forum, a community of practitioners that offers over 25 KM-knowledge-sharing events each year.

Lynda Moulton consults at LWM Technology Services on knowledge management strategies for enterprises with a focus on search, taxonomies, and ontologies for managing content behind the firewall. She has over 30 years of experience with search and content technologies. Lynda is also an analyst and consultant for the Gilbane Group, blogging on search. Her early career included information specialist work at Union Carbide and Arthur D. Little. In 1980 she founded Comstow Information Services a software company that developed BiblioTech®, a VAX/VMS application for enterprise content management. Lynda helps lead the Boston Knowledge Management Forum, and is a contributor to InternetEvolution’s ThinkerNet blog. She is widely published and a frequent speaker at conferences and seminars. Recent case work, typical project assignments and writings can be found at http://www.lwmtechnology.com.

PLEASE Register even if you are not certain you can attend so we have an accurate estimate of attendees for handouts.

Registration Form for Thursday

Registration Comments (Cost, time, meeting format)

TOPIC:  No surprise here, but this is to confirm that there will be no meeting the first Friday of January, 2010 due to the launch of the decade. HAPPY NEW YEAR to all!

Our next regular meeting will be January 21st. Speaker and topic to be announced.

Registration Form for Friday Only

Registration Details (Cost, logistics, etc.)

SPEAKER: Thierry Hubert and Bill Ives, Darwin Ecosystem LLC

TOPIC:  The presentation will share with the audience a practical application of chaos theory for creating knowledge focal points from the chaotic mess of content resources distributed across the Web. Using a couple of examples, one from the Internet where socially generated content is exploding, and one from the enterprise where social tools are also contributing their own content bloat, Thierry will discuss the ideas that are driving a new product idea. The examples will illustrate how activity can make information more discoverable, and easier to explore through various visualization techniques. These techniques open the door for more self-discovery through intuitive recognition of patterns. They will help the explorer to find relationships among content objects and people that would not have been found using traditional search methods. PRESENTATION

BIOGRAPHY: Thierry Hubert has over 20 years experience in Knowledge Management, Collaboration Technologies and online Social Networks.  He is the co-founder of Darwin Ecosystem, a company currently building a next generation awareness engine based on emergence ranking from chaos theory principles.  While working for Price Waterhouse, Lotus Development Corporation and IBM, he helped create and pioneer some of the first recognized collaborative, knowledge management and enterprise 2.0 solutions for Fortune 500 companies.  His experience and passion for solving information consumption overload, in the increasingly chaotic and unstructured Web 2.0 communication flow, has lead him to embrace the chaos theory as a foundation for awareness, discovery and serendipity.

Bill Ives leads the social media efforts at Darwin Ecosystem. He has served for over 25 years in leadership positions as a consultant in learning, knowledge management, other business applications of emerging technologies, and most recently with social media such as blogs and Twitter. He has worked with US Fortune 500 companies in a range of industries, along with a number of leading European firms. He is also currently working with a variety of firms and individuals helping them with their blogging and Twitter strategies. Bill contributes to two blogs on enterprise 2.0: FastForward and the Appgap, as well as his own Portals and KM blog and the new Darwin Discovery Engine Blog.

PLEASE Register even if you are not certain you can attend so we have an accurate estimate of attendees for handouts.

Registration Form for Thursday

Registration Comments (Cost, time, meeting format)

TOPIC: We have set up an account for Boston KM Forum on NING.COM, a social networking and collaboration space. This blog will continue to be administered and managed for Boston KM Forum meeting information. However, we’d like to explore and learn about other tools that can be deployed at little or no cost by our members.

This meeting will be a learning and sharing experience and we expect everyone to come prepared to contribute and share their ideas. You can check out the initial page (with nothing yet implemented) at http://bostonkmforum.ning.com/ . When you sign up for the meeting, you will be sent an invitation to join so you can begin exploring. At the meeting, we’ll talk about how it can be used by the Boston KM Forum or for other enterprise use by our members.

Registration Form for Friday Only

Registration Details (Cost, logistics, etc.)

When: Tuesday, November 17, 5:30pm to 7:30pm
Where: Social Law Library — John Adams Courthouse, One Pemberton Square, Suite 4100, Boston

Details: http://sla-divisions.typepad.com/slaboston/2009/10/sla-boston-program—november-17.html

Costs: SLA/SCIP/ASIST Members - $20; Non-Member - $25

Register here:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=LDLvOKtuYbnzlYBgt4EDlw_3d_3d

Questions: Please send any questions about the program to Kris Liberman at k.liberman@verizon.net  — thanks!

SPEAKER: Chris Poulin, Managing Partner, Patterns and Predictions

TOPIC: The deep integration of social networking tools is deceptively complex to execute well. Effective incorporation into products requires a clear integration strategy. At the same time, incorporating social networking into enterprise IT operations has its own internal challenges.

A recent case study of  a Fortune 500 client’s needs will describe our proposed solution set,  the integration challenges, and lessons learned. The knowledge gained will be carried over to a discussion of a new cutting-edge analytics project (under development), that illustrates the unique challenges of designing high performance social networks. Finally, the discussion will conclude with specific recommendations for those planning or implementing social networking integration projects of any size or depth.

BIOGRAPHY: Chris Poulin is Managing Partner of Patterns and Predictions (predictive analytics) & Poulin Holdings (web/network services.)  His most recent projects have been in integration of analytics and social networking. Research affiliations include Dartmouth College in machine learning and Umass in high performance computing (HPC). He was previously the Chief Architect and VP of Advanced Technology for a commercial entity (Viziant) a provider of  Search/KM. He is a patent holding inventor in Federated Web and Information Retrieval systems.

Readings

Clark, Robert. Culture, Not Tech, Slows Social Nets at Work. Computerworld/PCWorld, 04/05/2009, 1p. “The takeout? If you’re planning a social networking project at your organization, make haste slowly — you’re way ahead of your colleagues.”

Conry-Murray, Andrew. Enterprise Social Networking Pay Off? Information Week, 03/23/2009, pp. 23- 29. “Five best practices for social networking in business: 1. Test the waters 2. Set modest expectations 3. Don’t let fear strangle growth 4. Resist exclusivity 5. Don’t forget about search”

Reid, Carolina. Should Business Embrace Social Networking? EContent Magazine, 06/15/2009, 3p.

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PLEASE Register even if you are not certain you can attend so we have an accurate estimate of attendees for handouts.

Registration Form for Thursday

Registration Comments (Cost, time, meeting format)