KM, E2.0 and The Law
In my last post I shared a recent conversation I had, regarding KM, with a group of graduate students. I concluded, "Life is Good", commenting on how enjoyable the experience was. I also indicated that today, Dan Keldsen and I would be discussing KM with a group of attorneys involved in KM practices. Oh Life is Good. Yes, it was a most enjoyable experience.
Specifically we spoke on the relationship of KM to Enterprise 2.0 (E.20). The slides we used are posted here.
Additionally, for those who wish to review a synopsis of the entire presentation, including an exercise we conducted, see Ron Friedman's blog. Ron is an attorney and fellow blogger, avid blogger, who had the event posted to his site before I returned to the office, just blocks away.
What made today's discussion so enjoyable were two things. First, the group was KM aware. There was a higher level of appreciation and understanding of basic KM tenets overall. (There was a mixed level of awareness regarding E2.0 - from well seasoned to no experience, which accounted for much of the learning and discussion.) Second, there was a high level of appreciation for the issues of risk, privacy, liability etc., associated with content. This was a room full of attorneys after all. So maybe it was a bit of preaching to the choir, but I found it invigorating and self-assuring to be discussing this "dark side" of enterprise 2.0 with like-minded "experts".
To top it off, as the perfect footnote to today's activities, there appeared an article in The Economist about e-Discovery and web 2.0. Its a great article - worth a read. But its bottom line is that for anyone who thinks that Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 content is "personal", or in any way above the law - think again. In a class action suite between a group of families with daughters suffering from anorexia nervosa, and their medical insurance company, the courts ruled in favor of the insurance company, that any and all content posted by the daughters ("Facebook and MySpace profiles, instant-messaging threads, text messages, e-mails, blog posts and whatever else the girls might have done online") was discoverable. The plaintiff's objection that this violated the girls’ privacy was shot down.
So while I have warned about this before, and had confirmation from a roomful of KM colleagues/attorneys today, - don't just take our word for it. Read the article, it really is a good read.
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