I am currently involved with a Knowledge Management Honneurs group of students as a guest lecturer. One of their assigments is to contribute a Wiki page that demonstrates the role of an information curator. An information curator is described as someone who continually finds, groups, organises and shares the best and most relevant publications on a specific issue online.
Nancy White sets a good example as a curator, also with regards to curating the record and summaries of events. In this way the information is not lost in cyberspace. Two interesting recent examples are -
There are also various interesting curation tools that is showing up out there, such as Storify (see Uprising in Egypt: Feb. 05, 2010) and Summify. These integrates various modalities such as Twitter feeds, videos, blogs etc. paper.li is an aggregator that ‘ organizes links shared on Twitter and Facebook into an easy to read newspaper-style format’, e.g. The WWF_Climate Daily. It updates on a regular basis and hence it is not a curation tool in the true sense.
The KM4Dev community is an exemplar of vibrant sharing. There main mechanism is a mailing list since many of the members are located in low-bandwith areas. The agreement in this community is to summarise relevant discussion on the KM4Dev wiki – also a form of curation. The following extract from the KM4Dev Wiki front page describes this practice -
“Our first project on the KM4Dev wiki was the [Community Knowledge] area, (formerly called the FAQTory ( FAQ Index)- a place to make and use FAQs and information pages out of our knowledge surfaced in our online conversations and from member experiences. This project gives us a chance to co-edit, created linked pages as background resources and play with a new tool. We encourage you to look around and play with us.”
A good example of such curation is the wiki page on Brown bag lunches -
“This discussion was sparked by a question: “ideas for a short (e.g. 45min) brown bag lunch type session, aiming to share information about a particular piece of work ongoing within a large (newly formed) team,in a way that encourages discussion and thought about potential internal synergies, during the lunch break.”"
It is interesting to see how curation manifest as a blog post, a wiki page or a storify page. Each of these afford different dynamics and value.
More links about information curation available in my shared bookmarks in Diigo.
**** Addition on 17 May 2011 ****
