Guest editorial
Article Type: Guest editorial From: VINE: The journal of information and knowledge management systems, Volume 41, Issue 1
The International Conference on Knowledge Management (ICKM) was held on the 3 and 4 December 2009 in Hong Kong. It was jointly organized by three local universities – University of Hong Kong, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the City University of Hong Kong. The theme of the conference was“Managing Knowledge for Global and Collaborative Innovations”. With four international keynote speakers, 115 presented papers, 354 attendees from 26 countries spanning all the five continents, the event was very well received and clearly Knowledge Management, as a relatively new discipline, continues to garner support from academia and industry on a worldwide scale.
The conference offered many presentations spanning various streams in KM. For example, there were Tools and techniques, Web 2.0, Intellectual Capital, KM applications, Knowledge Sharing, Innovation etc. From the inspiring and cutting edge work presented in each of these streams we have focused on the topic of Knowledge Sharing for this edition of VINE, given the growing importance and the wide applicability of this topic, and the growing recognition that knowledge is socially-constructed. We believe these five papers would suit the readership of VINE.
Usoro and Majewski provide a case study on the identification of critical success factors for designing a conceptual model for a virtual community of practice for intensive knowledge sharing and transfer. They have validated their model with participants from a Finnish laboratory. A second contribution from these two authors is on knowledge sharing in immersive virtual worlds. Virtual Worlds are increasingly gaining attention especially in the learning and marketing fields due to their high degree of realism and ability to model real world objects and activities in an interactive fashion. This second paper by Majewski and Usoro focuses on a model for supporting knowledge sharing in immersive virtual worlds. They conclude that paying attention to a sense of community and offering motivations, yield a higher level of knowledge sharing than other virtual sharing environments.
Huck, Al and Rathi provide another case study on the creation of a knowledge strategy for a non-profit small to medium size organization via a knowledge audit. Much of the KM literature up to now is still very much biased towards large organizations and this paper is especially valuable as it investigated the knowledge requirements and technologies for, firstly, non-profit (which has different values and goals from commercial organizations) and, second, a small to medium size organization (which obviously has resource and operational constraints that are different from large organizations).
Through studying the production, implementation and improvement processes as part of the clinical-pathways activities in two Japanese hospitals, Yamasaki,Ikeda and Umemoto’s paper reveals important knowledge management elements,processes and implications, as well as maps these to established models of knowledge creation and transfer.
Also on knowledge sharing, Sabetzadeh and Tsui provide a paper on studying factors that influence participants to share in social groups. They have validated their model via a quantitative approach in a web-based public domain portal.
Finally, we would like to thank the reviewers for offering constructive comments to improve the early versions of each paper:
We hope you enjoy this special issue of VINE from ICKM2009.
Eric Tsui, Johann KinghornGuest Editors
