Home > News & Events > MITRE Publications > The Edge >

Four MITRE divisions collaborated to implement the simplest knowledge management (KM) activity -- a knowledge fair. Knowledge fairs complement formal technical exchange meetings and provide a venue for knowledge producers and consumers to share and trade. All it takes is a real or virtual place, a guest list, an incentive, and a little publicity. For our knowledge fair, we had a conference room at lunch hour, departments with shared interests in information management technologies, a dozen pizzas, and e-mail invitations. We discouraged presentations and preparation. We limited data collection to comments on 3x5 cards. We kept it simple and tried not to interfere with the process. We formulated approximate cost-benefit (C/B) goals and feel that we met them. Comments collected from the over 50 participants included:

• "This was a good chance for me to find out what the people I don't see very often are doing. A good way to find out about new projects and programs."

Two specific comments that indicated we had met our C/B goal were:

• "I made an excellent contact in [another division] for my [sponsor] project."
• "The person I was talking to pointed me to books and tools [that could help me] organize our design process."

Two response cards indicated reciprocity in knowledge exchange:

• "Linked up with someone who used one of the tools [needed for our research], and I answered some of his questions about logic programming."
• "Met someone who knows about logic programming (which I need)."

Overall, it seems that our knowledge fair succeeded as a low-cost approach that improved knowledge exchange. In the future, we hope to expand the scope of our KM activities to gain experiences that will prove valuable to MITRE and our sponsors.

---

For more information, please contact Tony Zawilski using the employee directory.

---