Knowledge Management in National Parks

I'm a Partner Investigator on a Linkage Project with RMIT and Parks Victoria. Based in Wilson's Prom, the project is investigating whether Social Media can be useful in the acquiring, storing and communicating the tacit knowledge that Park Rangers and regular visitors all hold in their quiet devotion to the place. On the last visit to the Prom, talking with the prodigiously knowledgeable Parks folks, I was struck by how there's the possibility of a loosely organised, ritualised body of COMMUNAL knowledge. No one person knows everything. But somehow, the place and all its inhabitants and devoted visitors all constitute the full consciousness of the Park. What's needed are narrative and performative moments, guaranteed by recurrent ritual, 'pilgrimage' and place-visitation, moments that knit together in response to space and time, moments that accrue into a constantly growing and adapting tract of knowledge bout the loose and open system that is the Park. Loose, open, but tendency-governed. Ecological but also sociological, natural and cultural.

I kept thinking of Eric Michaels' great work on knowledge-management and narrative in FOR A CULTURAL FUTURE.