Identify community managers and curators
Your knowledge management and community platform should allow everyone to contribute without friction. However, you need two levels of “sense making”:
Community managers: This group should exist at every community, practice, centre of excellence or department level in your organisation. While the best content will bubble up, these people help add metadata and organisation - so it’s easy to access the “state-of-the-art” at a later point in time.
Curators/ Knowledge managers: These individuals help create an information architecture that mirrors the structure of your organisation. Their responsibility is to ensure that your knowledge ecosystem is “browsable and navigable”.
To make sense of your knowledge ecosystem, you need the right people
Think of this sense making structure as similar to that on Wikipedia. While each one of us can enrich the system with our contributions, dedicated editors help interlink pages, and to organise them in the right hierarchy. Editors also watch pages, so they can review changes when necessary.
Today, AI can handle many of the mundane tasks that a community manager or a curator would do - adding tags, updating metadata, creating newsletters and digests. In case you’re able to get to this level of sophistication, your community managers and curators can take charge of more human activities. Here are some indicative activities that your community managers and curators can take part in.
Being cheerleaders and creating opportunities for people to connect outside the system.
Building personal connections with and between valuable contributors across organisational boundaries.
Breaking silos where they may exist.
Fine tuning recommendations and search results.
Blurring the boundaries between work, knowledge sharing and learning by embedding the content creation process into work itself.
Enabling peer review and feedback mechanisms for content.
Helping people get answers to unanswered questions.