KS-F01: Foundations of Knowledge Systems

What this course is about

Organisations rarely fail for lack of knowledge. They fail because the knowledge they hold is inaccessible to the people who need it, at the moment they need it. This foundation course is about the systems, technical, social and procedural, through which knowledge is captured, stored, found, trusted and reused, and about why most attempts to build them disappoint.

How the course is structured

The opening sessions establish distinctions that sound academic and turn out to be decisive in practice. Data, information and knowledge are not synonyms. Explicit knowledge can be written down; tacit knowledge resides in practice and resists documentation, which is why so much “knowledge capture” produces documents nobody consults.

The middle sessions cover the components of a working system: classification and metadata, search and retrieval, provenance and version control, and the human arrangements, communities of practice, mentoring, deliberate handover, through which tacit knowledge actually moves. Students audit an information environment they know and identify where knowledge is lost.

Later sessions deal with the organisational politics of knowledge. Hoarding is often rational when expertise is a source of security. Systems that ignore this fail regardless of their technical quality. Students design an intervention that accounts for incentives rather than assuming goodwill.

What you will be able to do

You should be able to diagnose where knowledge is being lost in an organisation, distinguish problems that a tool can solve from problems that a tool will make worse, design a classification scheme that people will actually use, and make a realistic case for investment in knowledge infrastructure.

Who it suits

Librarians and information professionals, records and archives staff, organisational development practitioners, IT and systems staff who have been asked to build a knowledge platform, and managers facing the retirement of experienced personnel.

The course opens the sequence in the School of Knowledge Systems and connects to conceptual work in the School of Philosophy, Knowledge & Civilization. Applied production work is described under Knowledge Factory, and reference collections sit in the Library. Other pathways are listed in the Academy.