Another day, another town, another buffet. I spent the middle part of my day trying to explain the benefits of weblogs, wikis (*why* do we have to use such silly names!), total RSSification and freestyle, bottom-up aggregation as tools for informal, joined up knowledge sharing among dispersed health professionals. I do this a lot. I am frankly amazed by the patience and interest today's group showed as I waved my arms in front of a hastily cobbled-together bunch of machines and wires (aren't British hotels so quaint...not) sounding like C3PO.

Informal collaboration and publishing tools combined with simple, standards-based information sharing can do so much more than ossified KM software to promote knowledge sharing - and it can begin to do this for people who have hitherto not had the opportunity or the inclination to engage with IT in this way. Therein lies the challenge: how to convey these ideas to groups of people who in some cases use little more than email. We are not all like Bob or Danny. When this succeeds, as I hope it did today in some way, it is a very rewarding experience. The relative value of bringing new voices from first base to third base (as Round would say) is so much greater than helping an already proficient batter at fourth base polish their swing. Slowly and surely, working with real practitioners one by one, I hope we can create a meaningful knowledge sharing network by joining up existing networks rather than just by creating new content for a generic audience.

There is so much going on right now in the area of informal knowledge sharing and collaboration tools that supporting evidence is not hard to find, but a few ideas have caught my aggregator's eye recently:

Ray Ozzie, who knows a thing or two about collaboration software, recently became quite animated over the issue of email and its unmanageable nature, and urged people trying to work together to use workspaces as an alternative to long, pointless email missives.

Ross Mayfield, whose company Socialtext is operating in this space, notes that Business 2.0 think blogs will become a staple of business software, and points to an intro to using wikis as collaboration tools by Stowe Boyd.

Anyone who spends more time on inbox triage at work than task planning needs to take this seriously. Blogs and wikis are a great way of using this time more effectively, whilst building something with greater long-term value than a bulging flat file inbox. If you have never tried a wiki, start here. How can you build quality content from open collaboration? Ask Wikipedia, which has just passed the half million entries mark and ranks as a seriously useful open source encyclopedia.

Too many meetings? Virtual conferencing is one answer, and Skype voice conferencing looks worth a try, but wikis and collaborative workspaces are also another. Face to face presence cannot be replaced by virtual tools, but social software can be used to extend the experience of meetings and conferences (within limits) in a way that increases the chance of people staying in touch afterwards. David Wilcox, who has excellent experience in this area, writes that .

Some of these ideas will work brilliantly, some may be useless, but the exciting thing is that they are all relatively cheap and relatively easily to integrate. The challenge for us is to find creative combinations of tools and techniques that can achieve real benefits without getting in the way of the real business of collaboration and social interaction.