Finding People

So, not wanting to be the last to notice this but, it seems more and more that KM 101 is now being applied to people, not just to people in the enterprise (that was KM 102) but to everyday users of the Internet, to you and me..?

This started a while back with online dating sites that matched seekers by basic attributes in the context of finding companionship. More recently finding people through the things they share with you has become the norm on Amazon etc where you can see people who bought what you bought and then see what else they like. Pandora.com, the music site makes use of this along with the very inventive (and uncannily accurate) music genome algorithm that finds music similar to the music you like.

Facebook and LinkedIn, Spock and Ecadamy followed and these are very much more wide ranging (at least Facebook is) in the context in which they operate and while the last three purport to be focused on managing your professional network, for most of us there is a good deal of overlap between professional networks and personal.

Getting a little more specialized here, I recently had some fascinating discussions with a few of the managers at Gerson_Lehrman Group  whose flourishing business is built around matching your expertise needs to experts with those skills in thousands of different professions. To do this they use a very complex and wide ranging Taxonomy to describe people. 

This struck me as a very interesting development as it opens the door to building virtual teams of people for one-off projects. This is something any small consultancy or indeed, more recently, larger business, without the desire to keep experts on staff full time, needs constantly and can make good use of.

The most recent development is a service like Peoplejar which is simply about helping you find people. No predefined context at all but all sorts of ways for you to create custom context as you go. Sort of like a phone book with lots of other attributes about the people listed.

This looks like a very novel and interesting way to push the envelope a little further and I will be spending a little time learning how it works and what lessons we can learn from it. 

It almost seems like KM 101 is spilling out of the office and onto the street and who knows where it will lead us.