By drofnar on

"Community Plumbing"... Thats the tagline for Drupal. Personally I think its appropriate and good

I'd Like to suggest that anoher term that may also accurately describe the same thing and Drupal is "Community Knowledge Management".

Using this term may turn the light on for a lot of people. Vendors are pushing all sorts of Knowledge Management (KM) solutions, most of which are way inferior to Drupal, other than for the superficial polish of their interfaces. Of course the base platform doesnt give anyone a KM solution. KM solutions need to be built out of Drupal. But all the potential for great KM solutions are there in the base Drupal platform, just waiting to be formed, moulded and nurtured.

Why is Drupal such a good KM platform? Because real KM is all about people, and about the flow of knowledge between people - community. And Drupal as per its tagline is great at community plumbing.

One more thing that I wish to stress is that communty is formed by people. And any community that wants to succeed needs to put the needs of the individual members as it priority. So in a sense a good community platform, must in fact be an excellent individual platform. Community Knowledge Management at is core is really all about Personal Knowledge Management. but personal knowledge management that is intimately bound to communities. the two are like two ends of a string. You need both of them otherwise you cant even talk about a string.

Drupal does do better community plumbing than other CMS's precisely because it expands the capabilities of individuals who form part of any drupal community. 2 features that strongly manifest this are the Blog and Orgnic Groups. For all their flaws, these are key elements of Drupal and a good Personal & Community Knowledge management system.

I said flaws, but I dont mean that negatively, I just mean that there are a lot of ways that these elements can be improved upon in their current state. Blogs for example must endeavour to provide individual members with all the capabilities and independence that specialised blog applications provide. A good example being Wordpress. And the way drupals community interplays with individual blogs is also critical to the outcome. Organic groups are a start but they really dont yet give a strong sense of individual group identity. And thats probably the key word - identity - for both blog and group functionality that I believe needs upgrading. The other key element to address is control, but of course control is a corollary to identity. If one has the control to change the look and feel as one needs, the control to expose certain content to various levels of access and other content to different accessibilty, themn that control effects the identity one can build and form with a tool.

I'd like to begin more discussion with others focussed specifically on these aspects. With the aim of advancing the value of Drupal as a "Personal & Community Knowledge Management" platform.

my own feeble efforts to put into practice the drupal platform towards such a thing can be seen there. One side of the site describes the business - dont bother going there, the other half aims to be a living evolving prototype that embodies the concept of drupal as a "personal and community Knowledge management platform" www.stratagility.com/connect. Please feel free to join me there and critique / suggest / learn & add to the ideas there.

Of course that is just one way of implementing a drupal sight towards such a vision. Maybe one of the things that a forum here can do is to provide a central space to link such "experiments" in implementing community KM through Drupal. So anyone else who can point us to their site & efforts would be greatly appreciated. Id like to add that applying the ideas of Drupal as a Community KM tool are applicable across the board, in education, ngo, business etc, all can benefit from seeing knowledge flow as something that can benefit from careful nurturing & management.

All the best, mark