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Managing nomadic knowledge: a case study of the European social forum

Published: 10 April 2010 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper we portray a specific type of knowledge which we term 'nomadic knowledge'. It is required periodically by different actors and travels along foreseeable paths between groups or communities of actors. This type of knowledge lets us question generally held assumptions about the way knowledge is enacted. We illustrate our point with an ethnographical field study analyzing the European Social Forum (ESF), a network of political activist organizations. In this network different actors organize a periodic (biannual) event in which some 13,000 activists participated in 2008. We investigate how knowledge about organizing and managing the ESF is transferred between two events respectively, the actors and communities involved. Our study highlights the specific challenges in sharing nomadic knowledge and the consequences of deficiencies on the organizing process. The paper contributes to a better understanding of knowledge sharing practices and opens new directions for technical support.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '10: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2010
2690 pages
ISBN:9781605589299
DOI:10.1145/1753326
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 10 April 2010

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Author Tags

  1. community informatics
  2. ethnographic case study
  3. knowledge management
  4. knowledge sharing
  5. nomadic knowledge

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  • (2019)Nomadic Knowledge Sharing Practices and Challenges: Findings From a Long-Term Case StudyIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2019.29169037(63564-63577)Online publication date: 2019
  • (2018)In Search for the Perfect PathwayComputer Supported Cooperative Work10.1007/s10606-018-9318-027:3-6(841-874)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2018
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