A Social Approach to Knowledge Management in Projects - A White Paper

I recently submitted a paper to be considered for an academic conference on the topic of IT Project Management.

The conference uses a double-blind review process to review papers and provide feedback.  In this double blind-review, reviewer’s aren’t provided with author(s) information and author’s aren’t provided information about the reviewers.

Good and fair process….and one that I’m about to completely tear apart today. 🙂

My submission, titled A Social Approach to Knowledge Management in Projects, was conditionally accepted for inclusion if I were to address a major concern on the part of the reviewer.

The main concern was a claim of plagiarism.

The reviewer believed that the author (me) had plagiarized a good part of the paper.  They pointed to a website that they claimed proved that the author had used content from and note cited.  That website was mine – https://ericbrown.com.

Plagiarism is defined as:

the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own original work.

I can see where the reviewer might have thought plagiarism existed as some of the work in the paper has been previously published here on my blog.  I’m actually quite excited that someone out there found my site interesting enough to cite as the original source of something that might have then been used in a plagiarism matter.

While this could be considered a case of self-plagiarism (if you believe in such an oxymoron), it’s not plagiarism.  The conference organizer requested that I cite my own work published on this blog within my article and also rework the article to ensure that the majority of the paper was significantly different than any other paper / article I’ve written.

Because I don’t believe in ‘self-plagiarism’, and because I’m feeling a bit rebellious this morning, I’ve decided to withdraw the paper from the conference and publish it, in its entirety, as a PDF here.  You can download the full paper using the link at the bottom of this post.

In the paper, I try to look at ways to answer this question:

Can a project team use Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 platforms to communicate and share knowledge during a project? Can this communication be indexed and mined to capture relevant knowledge about the project, project team members and project technologies without adding additional burden to the project team members?

Download a PDF copy of A Social Approach to Knowledge Management in Projects today

Enjoy.