KM Europe 2003 took place last week in the beautiful city of Amsterdam, and saw a gathering of software vendors, consultants and thinkers concerned with knowledge sharing and the role of knowledge and intangible assets generally on current management and organisational thinking.

As an entirely commercial conference underwritten by the contributions of vendors who pay to exhibit, KM Europe provides little more than a venue for interested parties to get together and hear some interesting speakers. The lack of any wireless connectivity came as a great shock, which shows how we are stating to take it for granted, and would significantly improve the conference in future. Martin Roell received a tip-off that certain parts of the building could piggy back on the WLAN of a Borland developers’ conference nearby, but by that time I had retreated to the city in search of access.

It was good to see some friendly faces such as Ton Zijlstra, Lilia Efimova, Ana Neves, Martin Roell and David Gurteen, and we had some good discussions on the role of Weblogs and social software in stimulating informal knowledge sharing more effectively than the bog-standard database, DMS, CMS and search systems that were being exhibited by vendors.

The main conference presentations are now available online.

See below for my notes of the main keynote presentations:

• Dave Snowden on influencing complex systems using boundaries and attractors
• Verna Allee on Knowledge, Networks and Value Creation

See below for my notes of two practitioner case studies:

• Sam Marshall – Unilever Research & Development Case Study
• Jean-Marc David – KM at Renault: a contribution to the e-transformation of the enterprise

See also:

• Lilia Efemova on Dorothy Leonard’s keynote about “Deep Smarts”
• Ton Zijlstra on underwhelming vendors
• Details of Dave Gurteen’s excellent Knowledge cafe

Finally, there was also a masterclass by Mark McElroy, which I did not attend but came so highly recommended by Ana Neves that I must provide some background links about Mark’s approach:

• Interview
• book review
• company site
• The New Knowledge Management paper

Knowledge in Amsterdam: KM Europe reports and analysis