Home   »   News
05.07.2015 | SSP News & Releases

Inaugural Regional Programming Lecture a Success in Boston

American Meteorology Society headquarters in Boston

American Meteorology Society headquarters in Boston

The Society for Scholarly Publishing closed out April at the American Meteorology Society (AMS) headquarters in Boston, where the first in a new series of regional programming events was held. The inaugural event was a lecture by Katrina Pugh entitled “Building Collaborations: Eight Tips for Effective Knowledge Networks.” The event sold out several days before the lecture and was attended by scholarly publishing professionals from the Greater Boston and New England area.

“This first New England programming event was a year-long process,” said Mike Mozina, who chaired the New England Regional Programming Committee. “We couldn’t be happier with the speaker and how the night turned out.”

Pugh, Academic Director of the Columbia University Information and Knowledge Strategy Program and president of AlignConsulting, spoke for an hour before taking questions from an enthusiastic crowd. The presentation offered strategies for creating and maintaining knowledge networks.

Knowledge networks are a collection of individuals who come together across organizational, spatial, and disciplinary boundaries to collaboratively create a shared body of knowledge. Networks learn faster than hierarchies, according to Pugh, and the decentralized nature of these communities allow them to take extensive use of the resources, reach and scale of the community as a whole.

Katrina Pugh

Katrina Pugh delivering SSP’s Inaugural Regional Programming Lecture

The lecture was pulled from Pugh’s extensive work and experience and offered strategies to organize and manage knowledge networks in the most effective ways. Pugh began her presentation by debunking the idea that the motive for individual’s participation in a community has typically been the pursuit of individual gratification. Instead, she offered that people approach groups and networks with a strong desire to be part of something bigger than themselves.

Citing a recent Gallup Poll, Pugh explained that the key reasons people were interested in participating in knowledge networks were to develop abilities and put them to productive use, have a palpable sense of community, and finding satisfying collective work. According to Pugh, collaboration is a sense of self and it’s that sense of self that is activated when knowledge networks are put in place. The advantage to the knowledge network approach as outlined during the discussion is that the community is galvanized by purpose, can be flexible enough to cross organizational boundaries, is inspired to build out a shared body of knowledge, and innately desires to be connected.

Before and after the event SSP members and non-member were able to mingle over appetizers and beverages. Pugh continued to be available to attendees to further discuss her presentation. The evening was fully sponsored by the AMS.

The committee is now planning the next event, tentatively scheduled for the fall. Stay connected to SSP and SSPnet.org for more information.

View Comments

Be the first to write a comment!

Join the Conversation