The MATURE consortium was pleased to welcome almost 20 representatives of partners from different countries like Germany, Switzerland, Spain, United Kingdom, or Israel, both from industry and research (about two thirds from industry). Their background was very different, but all of them had a shared interest in the topic of knowledge maturing support in organizations. The event took place at FZI in Karlsruhe, and consortium representatives gave a brief overview of the activities of the first year of MATURE.

Participants were very actively engaged in interesting discussions and have brought in their opinions, experiences, and expectations - and their willingness to join forces on subjects related to MATURE. The event also helped the participants to make new contacts.

Project Overview

As Scientific Coordinator of the project, Andreas Schmidt from FZI provided an overview of the project and the conceptual model behind it with a particular focus on the participatory design approach with a high degree of user involvement and the bottom-up research activities that have yielded innovative solutions at a very early stage. Within the discussion, the relationship of knowledge maturing to guidance was particularly in the focus.

Content Maturing for Career Guidance

Jenny Bimrose from the Institute for Employment Research at University of Warwick and Nicolas Weber from TU Graz presented the user-centered design process and the prototype for supporting content maturing based on Semantic MediaWiki and widgets that provide knowledge maturing support.

Maturing Business Processes

Hans-Friedrich Witschel from SAP illustrated the ideas for supporting process maturing by presenting the design study and the demonstrator planning, combining business process support with personal task management, which enables knowledge workers to evolve business processes within their daily work practice

People Tagging and Knowledge Maturing Dialogues

Simone Braun from FZI presented the novel approach of MATURE to competence management and expert finding, bridging the world of tagging and the more formal world of ontologies. This idea triggered a lot of interest in the audience, and the resulting discussion brought forward many very good ideas, but equally important also challenges that have to be tackled to embed these solutions into the corporate reality.

In the second part of the talk, joint work with Andrew Ravenscroft from LTRI was presented that tackled the problem of collaborative evolution of a shared understanding through dialogue games.

Visions of PLME & OLME

• Tobias Nelkner from University of Paderborn opened the afternoon session with a vision on the Personal Learning & Maturing Environment that will be one of the major outcomes of MATURE.
• Barbara Thönssen from University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland presented the organizational perspective and showed a decomposition of maturing support into five different types of services that form the Organizational Learning & Maturing Environment

The event concluded with an open discussion space where many ideas and experiences could be exchanged and concrete steps were discussed how to collaborate with MATURE. We are looking forward to the further steps!

The slides from the event are available from here.