In writing about knowledge management in Business @ the Speed of Thought, Bill Gates states, “The old saying, ‘Knowledge is power’ sometimes makes people hoard knowledge.  They believe that knowledge hoarding makes them indispensable.  Power comes not from knowledge kept, but from knowledge shared.” 

The concept of empowering people, organizations and communities with shared knowledge is what we call knowledge networking.  Knowledge networking is the combination of knowledge management, or the electronic capture of the knowledge assets of the organization—that is; digitizing information in order to make it broadly accessible to anyone who may need it—and social networking, or as defined by Wikipedia, “a category of Internet applications to help connect friends, business partners, or other individuals together using a variety of tools.”

Many philanthropic organizations have started to wrestle with the concept of knowledge management, particularly with regard to the knowledge assets related to their program activities.  Software systems such as DonorEdge, dot.che and the former ImpactMgr allow foundations to capture, in data format, information on their grants and grantees.  This data can then be analyzed and synthesized and “packaged” in ways that can be presented to donors as either ROG (return on gift—a report on the impact of a donor’s generosity), or as a strategic, knowledge-based giving opportunity.  But this is only half the story of knowledge networking.

To get all the way to knowledge networking, those same donors would need to be enabled with tools that allow them to invite others to share in the giving experience with them.  These tools have been successfully applied to Internet social networking sites since classmates.com in 1995, and include such examples as MySpace, Friendster, and Facebook.  However, the requirements of social networking in the philanthropic space may demand a higher level of social networking, or what is called, augmented social networking (ASN).  Again from Wikipedia, ASN is described as “an Internet-wide system that enables users to find others who have relevant interests or expertise, in a context that engenders trust, so that they can form a social network more effectively. At its core is a form of digital identity that supports appropriate introductions between people who share affinities through the recommendations of trusted third parties. It also supports the distribution of media using the same Internet-wide recommendation system.”

In the philanthropic space, an early example of knowledge networking is the Website www.xigi.net. Created with a focus on the social capital market, xigi.net “provides a space for conversation by offering a blogged dialogue among industry players and third parties. It also provides users with something to talk about -- a deal database of entities and offerings that show deal sizing, terms and other critical data such as relationships. These two core components will drive a collaborative discovery process and lead to market formation for the social capital market as a community gathers to add intelligence and analysis to the primary information of who is doing what, who is involved with whom and which institutions are partnering.”

Knowledge is power.  Shared knowledge leverages that power by taking it to scale.  Applying knowledge networking to philanthropy creates a dynamic that empowers donors with the information they need to connect their resources (dollars, time and relationships) to organizations working to solve the most pressing social problems of our day.