Decentralizing knowledge management: Affordances and impacts

Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is envisaged as a decentralizing Knowledge Management (KM) revolution and as a vital educational concern. The objective of a current design science research (DSR) undertaking is, thus, the conceptualizing and prototyping of a PKM System (PKMS) aiming at departing from today’s centralized institutional solutions and at strengthening individuals’ sovereignty and collaborations, not at the expense of Organizational KM Systems, but rather as the means to foster a fruitful co-evolution. This article expands on a recent paper focussing on the PKMS’s affordances in the context of the individual and collective, explicit and tacit knowledge of knowledge workers by integrating twelve renowned models of knowledge creation in a three-dimensional dynamic ‘public-transport-like’ map of holistically portrayed complementing work flows. In further detailing the impacts and benefits for a prospective PKMS user community, the article highlights the major radical changes of the PKM approach according to the decentralization, mobilization, accessibility, granularity, traceability, transdisciplinarity, transparency, diffusibility, negentropy, and synergies of knowledge.