YouTube as a KM Platform

Arjun Thomas of It’s All about KM posted: YouTube a KM Platform?

He listed these five points as what makes a good KM Platform:

1. Communities of Practice
2. Expertise Map
3. Great Search feature
4. Collaboration
5. Information Repositories

The problem with YouTube as a KM Platform is how much content is in video. Working at a law firm, most of the content ends up in word documents or .pdf files. There is not much video.

However, we do videotape training sessions and some group meetings for later use. However those videotapes sit on shelves and are not available through our intranet. Video caused a lot of problems with our infrastructure.

My solution was to offload the infrastructure to YouTube instead of trying to develop our own internal infrastructure. YouTube could be the plumbing. We could have a firm channel to organize and label the content. The content could be available internally and externally. Best of all, it is cheap and easy.

Of course, we would have to sanitize or exclude anything that addressed specific clients or trade secrets. But it would allow us to share training opportunities with clients.

The Cardozo Law School set up a channel with several short presentations. I think this would look great for a lawfirm. But nobody in my proposal meeting agreed with me.