Paolo Avesani

The project EDAMOK (Enabling Distributed and Autonomous Management of Knowledge) aims at promoting a distributed approach to knowledge management, namely an approach based on the two following principles:

• Principle of Autonomy: each organizational unit should be allowed a large degree of autonomy in managing (creating, representing, organizing, selecting, sharing) its own knowledge (”local” knowledge);
• Principle of Coordination: knowledge sharing across organizational units should be thought of as a form of coordination between multiple autonomous perspectives rather than as a process of creating (and imposing) a supposedly shared knowledge structure.

This approach differs from most state-of-the-art information technology and software architectures for knowledge management. Indeed, despite the wide recognition that knowledge is spread across different organizational units (e.g. national branches, departments, teams, communities), current systems for knowledge management either support the management of knowledge within single units, but do not provide adequate support for exchanging knowledge across them (autonomy without coordination); or they allow knowledge sharing across organizations without providing adequate support to each unit’s semantic autonomy (coordination without autonomy).

More in http://edamok.itc.it.