How do you define knowledge ecology?

The simplest idea about knowledge ecology is to step back and honor the power of diversity underlying knowledge creation. And how we are coming out of a world of specialists to where now we need to explore the white space between disciplines ...We then develop the whole notion of a community of practice and how new knowledge has a major tacit component to it. You can look at every piece of new knowledge as having a tacit and an explicit component. The explicit component goes quickly over the Net. The tacit component lies more in the shared practices. That's where the trust in the knowledge really comes from...So now we're looking at an ecology of communities of practice and how knowledge moves within the community first and then starts to jump across related communities and then finally can break out completely to brand new communities where the warrants for that knowledge are more explicit and less in the intangibles that led to the creation of the knowledge in the first place."

What role do brokers play in moving new knowledge across boundaries?

What role does the relationship between the physical and the virtual environment play in a successful community?

"What we're really looking at is some of the dialectical interaction between the physical and the virtual. Claiming that the virtual doesn't do as much work as you might think unless it emerges out of the shared physical social communities, like the Well. Or if it started purely virtually, at points it has to be reinforced by coming back together again in physical social space. So we're looking at more of a balance between the physical and the virtual..."

How can these understandings be used to facilitate the transfer of knowledge?

How can the Internet open up new niches?

"...The flip side of this is how do you use the Web to leverage the small efforts of the many as opposed to the large efforts of the few...The fact that for example, senior citizens today could become incredibly powerful mentors to kids in school because they talk about being resource limited in the school system...What would it mean to be able to wire all the senior citizens of Michigan together creating more meaning in their lives. But then to use that network community to be able to be a resource to kids in the school system. So you now have a double win. You have the fact that the senior citizens are engaging in networking themselves...and the kids are getting so very interesting wisdom about how to step back and be prepared for a lot of changes in life. And so here is a simple way that the Web transforms the resource model for education...It's a beautiful example of going beyond the reach model of the Internet to a reach and reciprocity model."

How do you go about designing a good system?

How have your attempts at Xerox to bring market development specialists and researchers closer together worked?

In an attempt to distill knowledge from the tech rep community, Xerox has set up a process similar to academic peer review. How has that worked?

What role does reciprocity and social capital play in the exchange of knowledge?

Who influenced your thinking in your knowledge ecologies paper (Annalee Saxenian)?

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