Next week is the sec­ond iter­a­tion of BarCamp NewsInnovation Philadelphia. One of the ideas for a ses­sion is dis­cussing the cur­rent state of knowl­edge man­age­ment sys­tems. Daniel Bachhuber describes this as:

how news orga­ni­za­tions man­age all of the data they’re privy to that is either stored in struc­tured for­mat or could be stored in a struc­tured for­mat if they had the tools to do so.

In prepa­ra­tion for the ses­sion there’s a thread going on Hacks/Hackers about what could be cov­ered in such a ses­sion. Since I can’t make it out to Philly I wanted to out­line my thoughts here.

I’m inter­ested in three broad ideas about the way a knowl­edge man­age­ment sys­tem could be effec­tively deployed in a news organization.

Cross-platform track­ing of information

• Can knowl­edge be tracked in stan­dard for­mats so that a news organization’s KMS is valu­able to non-news orga­ni­za­tions as well?
• What would it look like for var­i­ous news­rooms to aggre­gate and inte­grate what is con­tained in their KMS? More impor­tantly what would it look like if we had a sys­tem of standards-based KMSes from var­i­ous fields that could be plugged into each other? What would the role of a news orga­ni­za­tion be here?

Role of a KMS in mobile

• How can we present all of this data in a way that not only works for the desk­top envi­ron­ment but is also dis­cov­er­able enough for mobile users?
• What forms could a KMS take that makes infor­ma­tion even more rel­e­vant to mobile users?

Role of a KMS in ongo­ing coverage

• What are the ways that this struc­tured knowl­edge repos­i­tory can be used to ana­lyze and make adjust­ments to a news organization’s coverage?
• Can track­ing user inter­ac­tion with the prod­ucts of a KMS help us to cre­ate more (in both a quan­ti­ta­tive and qual­i­ta­tive sense) journalism?
• Do the views of a news organization’s top­ics of impor­tance mesh with a community’s?

For those inter­ested in this ses­sion I would also rec­om­mend this dis­cus­sion with David Siegel about the seman­tic web and the notion of a pull econ­omy of infor­ma­tion. This post from “the human net­work” is also worth read­ing as a back­ground for the discussion.

Those are just some brief thoughts for now. Wish I could be there in Philly but I look for­ward to track­ing the con­ver­sa­tions on Twitter.