KM FAQ - What is Personal Knowledge Management ?

English: The Logo of the Dokuwiki software. Deutsch: Das Logo der Software Dokuwiki. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Personal Knowledge Management – the capturing and re-use of personal experience in a structured way. So how does one manage personal experience. While I think there is no best answer that fits all lifestyles and ways of making experiences, I do think that there are some basic rules that allow everyone to improve their own means of PKM:

• have a way of making notes anywhere and anytime (computer, phone, cloud)


• make sure the notes are searchable (full-text)


• notes need to allow to capture text, graphics, URLs – the more the better


• notes that are interlinkable (like wikilinks) are best to link relevant information to each other in a semi-automated way


• a tool like dokuwiki also allows for sharing individual notes with others. Dokuwiki is also great to run locally (as part of a WAMP implementation; Windows/Apache/MySQL/PHP) or in the cloud (hosted/self-hosted)


• a blog (like wordpress; like this one) or a dokuwiki (with add-ons) also allows for other to interact and discuss one experience. 


• combining a wysiwyg wiki with a social network allows for the creation of a knowledge network


• another great way of capturing personal knowledge are tiddlywiki pages, editable, local html pages that behalf like wiki pages


• My personal experience with personal experience (pun intended lol) – I have been capturing information for reference, thoughts on experiences I made ideas that flew through my mind – with different wiki solutions that interact. I am using zim desktop for linux and windows, dropbox for replicating notes securely across computers, touch wiki for IOS and another one for Android – wikimind – all of them supporting mark-down syntax.


• A lot of people also use solutions like Microsoft OneNote, Evernote or Springpad (besides others), where-as I am going for the lowest common denominator (text and file based) as previously mentioned solutions (and their storage format) may come and go over time

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KM FAQ - What is Personal Knowledge Management ?