Compendium: Making Meetings into Knowledge Events. Knowledge Technologies 2001

In this paper, we describe the Compendium methodology and suite of tools. Compendium is the result of over a decade’s research and development at the intersection of collaborative modeling, organizational memory, computer-supported argumentation and meeting facilitation. We claim that Compendium offers innovative strategies for tackling several of the key challenges in managing knowledge: • improving communication between disparate communities tackling ill-structured problems • real time capture and integration of hybrid material (both predictable/formal, and unexpected/informal) into a reusable group memory • transforming the resulting resource into the right representational formats for different stakeholders. Our starting point is the face-to-face meeting, potentially the most pervasive knowledgebased activity in working life, but also one of the hardest to do well. Meetings in Compendium’s perspective: 1. are untapped knowledge-intensive events: often they are unfocused, but they can be improved with facilitated tools that help participants express and visualize views in a shared, common display; 2. can be more tightly woven into the fabric of work: they are preceded and followed by much other communication and the generation of associated artifacts

Contrary prescriptions: Recognizing good practice tensions in management

This paper is concerned with rethinking the notion of 'good management practice'. It explicates a way of framing management theory in terms of tensions between apparently contradictory pieces of good practice advice. The relevance of this, as a practical conceptualization that could usefully inform managers about the kinds of considerations they might take account of in both their day to day and longer term management thinking, is explored. The emerging theoretical framework is elaborated in terms of some characteristics of, and language about, tensions together with possible levels of use of the concept to inform practice. It is suggested that the use of the approach necessarily implies a view of the user as a reflective practitioner