If you've looked at our wiki recently you may have spotted a new public space. It's part of the lead up to Contactivity '06 an event that we're helping out with and are very excited about. It's a knowledge management workshop organised primarily by KnowledgeBoard with help from us and the London Knowledge Network.

There are many conferences around this subject but the reason we're partnering with this one is that this is not your normal sit back conference of talking heads. We're taking part because it's a fully participatory gathering over two days, exploring and sharing experiences of KM practitioners. As part of the process attendees are expected to engage upfront in an open space like debate, preparation and agenda setting on the Contactivity wiki. So that when everyone arrives on the first day they all know what to do and hits the ground running; making full use of the whole time. We're trying to disrupt the traditional conference model of the organisers deciding the direction and ask the attendees to define what they want to discuss.

In the words of the KnowledgeBoard:

A serious highly interactive, learning goals-oriented meeting of minds from all networks and professional paths which is also the experiential material for an academically-supported research project. It's a CoP because we will work together across a pre-defined lifecycle (in both the virtual and physical environments), and we use co-creation to surface the issues (from the 'Define Domain' phase onwards).

Although we do not identify Contactivity as a 'conference', we equally do not identify it as an 'un-conference'. We see it more as a 'constructivist conference'. We are here to do Knowledge Management together on the issues we need to do it on.

So we focus on real world problems defined by ourselves with experienced practitioners, seasoned researchers, (also some 'clients' of KM from organisations we hope) and a range of workshop techniques through which we will go together. Naturally the networking stuff will be proceeding at full speed all the way through the event.

The event (and the lead up) is facilitated by Ed Mitchell from KnowledgeBoard, David Gurteen, Martin Leith and Martin Laycock.