Using Obsidian for teams and group KM
Obsidian is normally seen as a way to manage your personal life — ie a personal knowledge management (PKM) tool. But what happens when you want to share your thoughts or vault with co-workers? How can we use Obsidian for overall knowledge management while overcoming its focus on PKM?
Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) to Organisational Knowledge Management (OKM)
This isn’t a new problem. All of us probably have a special way we manage knowledge, be it in emails, Confluence, Sharepoint or just notepad, that we then have to transfer to some company system just to accomplish our work. For example, recording your to-do list on a paper calendar then manually entering that info into your team’s Jira.
This paper — Personal Intelligence in Collective Goals (A Bottom-up approach from PKM to OKM) — notes that many different PKMs exist as people create their own processes to get their jobs done, and the OKM can add friction to the process by insisting on a top-down structure that doesn’t reflect how people do their work. The paper ultimately argues that
“If end users have their own means of getting the jobs done to achieve organisational collective goals, then there is a possibility of looking at an organisational knowledge management (OKM) from the bottom-up approach.”
