Content area
Full text
Eurocontrol, an intergovernmental aviation industry body, is committed to making European aviation safer, more secure and more environmentally friendly. That means providing a forum where civil and military aviation specialists can learn from safety lesson promotion and best-practice dissemination. With that in mind, Eurocontrol is now in the final stages of creating "Skybrary", a wild for aviation safety knowledge. Here, Eelco Kruizinga and Tzvetomir Blajev tell KM Review readers about this ambitious and forward-thinking KM project.
Intergovermental agency adopts Web 2.0 approach for KM project
Europe's aviation and air traffic control industry has always had the highest focus on safety-critical processes and best practice across operations.
But how does an industry move to continually promote best practice and capture its knowledge among different stakeholders across nearly 40 countries, from air traffic controllers to Government ministers?
Eurocontrol, the "umbrella" organization for safety of air navigation, is currently addressing this complex goal with a unique aviation industry KM platform called "Skybrary". The platform's goal, by 2010, is to "organize the world's aviation safety knowledge and make it universally accessible and used."
Wikis and beyond
While one of the eye-catching aspects of Skybrary is the use of corporate -style wikis to disseminate expert knowledge, the project is already providing insight into the way that complex organizations (and their wider professional networks) ascertain, model and manage their information needs to harness the potential for user- driven information sharing and collaborative content management.
While Skybrary (www.skybrary.aero) is still in development at the time of writing - official project launch is scheduled for May 2008 - the project team envisages the development of an industrywide, even global, community and expects increasing user input and editorial collaboration over the next couple of years.
But this vision depends on a series of vital "building blocks" being in place: knowledge sharing architectures, strategies for content management and ways to manage ever-increasing information sources for professionals at the desktop.
Skybrary project background
Created in 1963 by six founding members, and now representing 38 member states, Eurocontrol is a hybrid civil and military intergovernmental organization whose objective is a uniform panEuropean Air Traffic Management (ATM) system. This approach is contributing to making European aviation safer, more secure and more environmentally friendly
Eurocontrol is governed...