Why Should I Share?

I've been following some of the goings on at one of our more eventful annual conferences the last couple of days, and this headline caught my eye: "Harnessing Your Experts' Knowledge for Sustainable Competitive Advantage". Ooh, that sounds like "knowledge management", which is something that's right up my alley. So I clicked the link and watched the Slideshare presentation.

About 10 minutes into it, a Cheshire cat smile appeared on my face.  

As I'd expected, it was about knowledge management, but what surprised me was the freshness of that idea in that company's setting. Knowledge sharing was part of what made the web evolve into what it is now. But that revolution began more than 5 years ago, and yet here was a company that has just adopted it for the very first time. The best part is, they're very excited about it, especially because they're beginning to see how it is changing the way they work.

I find their story so refreshing because my idea of knowledge sharing has matured and grown tremendously since I first jumped into this game 5 years ago. Hearing about knowledge sharing in its most basic form reminded me again why I'm drawn to it. And getting inspiration like that is really helpful, because being a knowledge/social media worker is frustrating most of the time.

The first hurdle really is this question: "Why should I share?" In the olden days, people held on to their knowledge because, supposedly, it's the only thing no one can ever take away from you. You are being rewarded for what you know. Before knowledge sharing took off, people had to ask questions so they could get answers (think Yahoo! Answers and the now-defunct Google Answers). But when the tools that enabled free-flowing knowledge sharing were invented, and people gradually began to dump their collection of "stuff I know" into these repositories, the trend changed from asking to searching. "Google" became a verb. More importantly, people began to interact around these pieces of knowledge. What was a knowledge base before has turned into a social network.

So now the question isn't anymore "Why should I share?" but rather "What can I share?"