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What is shareability?

Jennifer J. Freyd provides a definition of shareability, and points to further resources. To quote:

Shareability refers to the extent to which information is shareable. Information has high shareability if it is easy to share between different individuals without loss of fidelity. Shareability theory (Freyd 1983, 1990, 1993) proposes that internal (e.g. perceptual, emotional, imagistic) information often is qualitatively different from external (e.g. spoken, written) information, and that such internal information is often not particularly shareable. The theory further proposes that the communication process has predictable and systematic effects on the nature of the information representation such that sharing information over time causes knowledge to be re-organized into more consciously available, categorical, and discrete forms of representation, which are more shareable.

[Thanks to Peter Bond.]

Posted by jamesr on May 08, 2004 04:40 PM
Categories: Knowledge management

Comments

The distinction made above between internal and external information sounds almost exactly like the distinction made in the Knowledge Management (KM) discourse between tacit and explicit knowledge. Furthermore, the definition does not seem to make distinction between information and knowledge, even though such distinction appears to be very relevant in the context of the definition.

Another concern that might further help the above definition or the theory of shareability is to note that it is not the knowledge that is organizable, rather, it is mostly the representations of the explicit knowledge, and to a much lesser degree the representations of the tacit knowledge (if at all).

And one more thing, in the spirit of the concept of openness, for something to be shared it first must be open to change (open content) and the access to it must be also open.

Posted by: Mentor Cana on June 30, 2004 03:01 PM