I have recently teamed up with Martin Cleaver and Stephanie Barnes to create a Toronto interest group for Knowledge Management professionals. This will be a speaker series across industries, meant to foster discussion and cross-pollination of ideas.

We have taken the name Toronto Knowledge Workers, and have our first meeting lined up for  Wednesday, January 28, 2009, 6:30 p.m. featuring management consultant Joel Alleyne.  Joel will be talking to us about the notion of “Expertise Networking,” which embraces emerging concepts such as expertise management, expertise location, and expertise sharing. Expertise networking also embraces the social, cultural, organizational, and technical dimensions associated with managing, locating, and connecting expertise in organizations. Expertise networking is a framework that provides technical scaffolding to support experts and expertise in organizations.

You can find additional information about the group at http://knowledgeworkers.org/. If you would like to attend the meeting next week, please sign up for the group and RSVP so we have a correct tally of numbers (and hopefully enough room!). The atmosphere will be informal (it’s in a pub, after all), and the cost is free except for whatever food and drink you order.

If you are a knowledge management professional, I hope you will join us. If you are a speaker/presenter in the area of knowledge management, feel free to contact me, Martin or Stephanie to propose a talk for a future meeting. Already we have a good crowd signed up before we even have one meeting–I credit Joel’s high profile for that–but we hope to keep the ball rolling with equally interesting talks in the future.

- Connie Crosby