Hi Harold - Great post! It captures (serendipitous pun) the essence of what so many have been struggling with for so long. NASA paid Rocketdyne (at the time it was a Boeing company) millions of dollars to video capture the "knowledge" of the people who designed and built the power system for the International Space Station. I believe the videos are somewhere, but I wonder if anyone remaining there is quite sure where that is.

During my time there we engaged in a major effort to characterize the over 5 million pieces of paper we had in the collections of each component team for the design, test, and operation of the Space Shuttle Main Engine. Towards the end of the program I was advocating for spending far more time, energy, and money on connecting people directly through status updates, blogs, etc. in order to facilitate a more useful transfer of information and, hopefully, knowledge and wisdom.

I'm also mindful of Frank Miller's equation, I=0, where he argues information has no intrinsic meaning and requires context in order for it to be useful as knowledge. He writes, in his abstract to the paper, ". . . [K]nowledge is the uniquely human capability of making meaning from information . . .". I believe his thoughts are in accord with Dave's, Steve's, and yours.

I'm of the opinion using a methodology that allows people to communicate - in as close an approximation of face-to-face as is possible - while capturing and indexing (or otherwise making the information findable) the products of the communication is a worthwhile goal. Anything that provides greater context while preserving content seems like an advance in the way we've been doing things since writing was invented.