We are proud to announce our second 'Contactivity' KB gathering. The event will run over Monday 10th and Tuesday 11th April, 2006. It will be in the Council Rooms, Greenwich Business School, London, UK.

(The actual venue: not a stuffy conference centre)

NOTE: all registration and advance co-creation work will take place on the Contactivity wiki from February onwards. In order for the event to reach its full potential we need you to decide to come and register on the wiki as soon as possible. This is not a traditional conference; we will work together to design it in advance (although there won't be much work we promise). For more information on how to register, read the How to register onto the Contactivity wiki page.

If you are having problems with registration, please do not hesitate to email us and we will set you up ourselves.

Event background:

Following on from our long history of KB research most recently presented at the eChallenges conference in 2005 (virtual and physical CoPs comparisons), we think that the Communities of Practice (CoPs) framework, combined with excellent co-creation design and collaborative technology is the best way to think about any gathering of people around a topic.

We think that this idea is a good foundation for thinking about knowledge exchange practices in all organisations, not just our own virtual community, and we want to share this with everyone. So we need a research base to study and a theoretical analysis from which to study it from.

Hence Contactivity is:

A serious highly interactive, learning goals-oriented meeting of minds from all networks and professional paths which is also the experiential material for an academically-supported research project. It's a CoP because we will work together across a pre-defined lifecycle (in both the virtual and physical environments), and we use co-creation to surface the issues (from the 'Define Domain' phase onwards).

Although we do not identify Contactivity as a 'conference', we equally do not identify it as an 'un-conference'. We see it more as a 'constructivist conference'. We are here to do Knowledge Management together on the issues we need to do it on.

So we focus on real world problems defined by ourselves with experienced practitioners, seasoned researchers, (also some 'clients' of KM from organisations we hope) and a range of workshop techniques through which we will go together. Naturally the networking stuff will be proceeding at full speed all the way through the event.

Outcomes are defined by us all in the early phases:

We are very keen for some outcomes beyond a CD with the presentations and a lot of business cards in our pockets; but that is the nature of co-creation: KB itself cannot tell the attendees what to do or what to get out of it - that is up to the attendees to work that out together.

There will be a free book, and a flickr group with pictures on it, maybe you will win a competition and see your paper idea come to fruition and publication. There will be a full set of journalist-written event reports, miles of flipchart paper everywhere, and your own printout of your Contactivity network. But we think everyone should go away with more.

This is up to you; we can only empower you to feel confident enough to tell eachother what that is.

Programme (emergent: to be defined by the attendees):

Monday 10 April: connect, define context, stretch the little grey cells

We will be workshopping real world case studies together from our new KB members' KM case studies book. We will be doing some facilitated networing based on our proven networking tactics and awesome visual networking technology. We hope to see the launch of Europe's freshest new KM journal, with a challenging editorial hothouse session, and take a guided tour of Greenwich's famous observatory before a slap up dinner in a local pub.

We will be making new friends, meeting old friends, and preparing ourselves for the un-chart-able voyage on day two.

9:30 Welcome and introduction

10:00: Power visual networking with Dr Wolf, Dr. Troxler, Simon Lague

1:30: Case studies workshop

3:30: You the editor

5:30: Walk around Greenwich

7:30: Pub dinner

Tuesday 11 April: To be defined by attendees. Subject and learning goals to emerge from wiki

We do not know what will happen on the second day yet; we have three great facilitators keen to help at workshop sessions, followed by an analytics session dedicated to extracting the learning points and comparing the facilitation techniques. That is all.

What they are about depends on who comes and how they want to use their valuable time: this will emerge from this wiki, in the 'define domains' CoP phase that begins the moment we put our names down here.

We're serious - we believe in our networks and expect you to tell us what to work on. Indeed, if this format is unsuitable we can always break out into three all day sessions in parallel.

9:30 - 4:00 co-created workshops with Martin Leith (Leith), Martyn Laycock (London Knowledge Network), David Gurteen (Gurteen Knowledge Network)

4:00: Day review: Compare and Contrast 3 different workshop techniques: strengths and weaknesses, contextual suitability, learning efficacy

5:00: End of Contactivity

7:30: Big slap up dinner in University of Greenwich 

For more pictures of Greenwich Business School (and our gathering at KCC Europe in November 2005), please look at the KB flickr group.

Directions to University of Greenwich:

The event will be held in the Council Room in Queen Anne's Court - room no: QA063

Enter the college campus through the West Entrance. On the large map the road marked as "COLL" is actually College Row and leads directly from the Cutty Sark DLR station (close to Ottakars Book Shop). If you look eastwards from there you can see the large Wrought Iron Gates that are the West Entrance to the campus. If you walk the whole length of the central campus walkway, Queen Anne's Court is the last building on the left hand side.  Note you cannot enter the campus from Park Row.

Tip: If you are travelling from central London - take the Jubilee line to Canary Wharf and then change to the Docklands Light Railway at "Heron Quay Station" - just a few minutes walk - from here proceed to "Cutty Sark at Greenwich" (yes that's the name of the station). The West Gate is just a few minutes walk along College Row - see directions above.

Other links

• Greenwich Business School website
• Large map
• Campus map