Peer-to-Peer Knowledge Management: Overcoming Bottlenecks and Improving Information Quality

Access to current, complete and relevant knowledge is a key competitive differentiator in the present economic market space. But most knowledge management today only shifts the traditional, expert-based KM processes onto electronic media. This paper discusses a paradigm shift from an expert-centric to a peer-to-peer approach to knowledge creation and management. Leveraging the lowered transaction costs provided by Internet technology, methods and tools of collaboration that have been invented and refined by the Open Source and Free Software community over the last two decades are now being adopted by early movers in the Knowledge Management space. This new approach, based on a peer-to-peer approach and open collaboration, has shown the potential to revolutionize the way knowledge is created, developed and managed. We outline the characteristics of the two opposing paradigms and present ways in which the peer-to-peer knowledge management approach is already being successfully used in practice today. We address how the quality of information is kept high without a traditional review/quality-check role by using a revision control system and distributing the task to all interested practitioners. Finally, we discuss four key challenges for introducing the new paradigm within companies.