Knowledge Ecology Fair 98 is in its second half. We'll continue to the end of the month and registrations still are coming in daily. Over 400 people have gathered for the first online conference devoted to Knowledge Ecology. It's not to late to join!

For a sneak peak at some of the things you'll find at the Fair:

According to Karl Erik Sveiby, "A lot is currently said about the virtues of managing intellectual capital and knowledge by notable visionaries, many of whom are presenting on the KE Fair, but how do we go from words to action? The truth is that the majority of all companies are still managed as closed fiefdoms by autocratic rule, with no systems in place for the rulers to perceive that the world is changing dramatically and that their own ruling behavior has to be changed. Much of the problem lies in the language business is using. Unless we change the language, managers have no means of "seeing" the new and no means of a meaningful dialogue. The most powerful "language" in corporations is the Management Information System, and it is still using the accounting language invented during the 1400s in Italy. Businesses are making decisions affecting the future for all of us using Latin."

Take up Karl Erik's challenge and find out about some of the alternatives by joining him in the Keynote conference which this week also features synergistic sessions with Bipin Junnarkar, Senior Director, Knowledge Management at Monsanto, and Leif Edvinsson, VP of Skandia AFS of Stockholm.

If you'd like an opportunity to interact with fellow participants and presenters in a more intimate setting, join one of the KEFair workshops for focused and manageable discussion. Remember that a complete CALENDAR of KEFair events is always available to click on when you first enter the KEFairgrounds to find out all the events happening this week including who will be available to answer your questions in Meet the Exhibitor. This is a great chance for dialogue in a small group with people from some of the leading companies in the knowledge ecology industry.

One of the biggest challenges of the Fair is coping with the large volume of interesting and valuable contributions being generated in all the sessions. How to interact with all this material effectively is, of course, a major theme of the topic of knowledge ecology itself. Our own experience is becoming a case example we can use to explore. A group of "bootstrappers" has emerged at the Fair and designed a set of tools developed explicitly to help with some of the key roles and tasks related to sensemaking in a rich knowledge environment like ours. You can test drive these tools yourself by clicking on the Knowledge Tools icon.

A team is developing in the OPEN SPACE CIRCLE (Item #32) to create a KEFair Newsletter. They are working on it over the weekend for an early week release and if you would like to contribute join in! We're looking for anyone interested in writing or being interviewed for personal profiles, author interviews & book reviews, your favorite stories from the Fair and knowledge ecology solutions.

Interested in more interaction with fellow participants? KEFair's "Chat" facility is open now. Find out more about how you can spend some "real" time with your colleagues in Item 17 of the Community Cafe'.

The participant list for KEFAIR is now available in the CYBRARY which also contains the KEFair Bookstore and Knowledge Garden of materials. You can go to the CYBRARY to read summaries of some of the sessions you may have missed so you can get a feel for what's being discussed.

Now that we're in the second half of our conference, many discussions in keynotes, workshops, and the participant-generated sessions in the Open Space circle are moving from theory to applications to next steps for action. Even if you haven't had as much time as you wanted to invest in participating in KEFAIR so far, there is still time to pick up many actionable ideas and make connections with colleagues which will support your current and future work. Use the Table of Contents on the KE Fairgrounds to get an overview so you can choose where to go to get what is most interesting and useful for you.

And, as always, if there's anything we can do to help you get what you want and need from KEFair, please contact us at 703-243-6622 or 800-277-0414.

Lisa Kimball, Metasystems Design Group

p.s.: BREAKING NEWS

ENGELBART'S BOOTSTRAP INSTITUTE JOINS THE SPONSORS OF KNOWLEDGE ECOLOGY FAIR 98

"The hypertext links we see on the Web barely scratch the surface of what Engelbart foresaw decades ago. He wants to create links between vast libraries of thoughts and experiences. Today, only snippets of any one person's insights and intellect are preserved, and apart from the rich and famous, few people leave any lasting trace of the wisdom they attained." Business Week, February 23, 1998.

The R&D think tank of computer visionary Douglas Engelbart, Bootstrap Insitute has just announced to become an official sponsor of KEFair. To find out more about Engelbart and the Bootstrap Institute, visit http://www.bootstrap.org .

© Copyright, 1999, Community Intelligence Labs, Ben Lomond, CA