Today saw the launch of the Compendium Institute, a website to link the growing practitioner/researcher community using the Compendium technique for knowledge management.

“Compendium provides a methodological framework, plus an evolving suite of tools, for collective sense-making and group memory. Validated in both small and large scale business projects, it is the result of over a decade’s research and development at the intersection of collaborative modeling, organizational memory, computer-supported argumentation and meeting facilitation.”

The Compendium approach, co-developed by Al Selvin (Verizon eBusiness), Maarten Sierhuis (NASA), and Jeff Conklin (CogNexus Institute), has been further developed and contextualised by an international, multidisciplinary group of researchers. The Java concept mapping tool that lies at the heart of the Compendium approach has already been integrated with KMi’s D3E technology to generate web discussion sites from visual maps tracking a meeting’s discussions and decisions.

The Compendium Institute website will provide the portal for the growing documents, software and people who form this community. It makes use of D3E to provide document discussion forums, developed by KMi’s Gary Li, with content edited by Simon Buckingham Shum, and graphic design by Harriet Ansell.

• www.CompendiumInstitute.org
• Technical Report: Compendium: Making Meetings into Knowledge Events