The frustration I have with conferences (which is really about knowledge capture and use)

The big consulting firms are all about knowledge capture and management. Wikipedia says that knowledge management:

comprises a range of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences. Such insights and experiences comprise knowledge, either embodied in individuals or embedded in organizational processes or practice.

The thing I like about conferences is that the presenters tend to be leading experts and practitioners, and the people who attend conferences are amongst the most motivated within their professions, so you can learn a lot, very quickly, on a subject.

(Although if you go to the same conferences every year after awhile it can get stale and you need a break. I understand now why David Canada, the city manager of Petersburg, Virginia, told me that each year he goes to one conference not in his primary area of expertise, in order to be exposed to new ideas and experiences--we happened to be seatmates on a tour in Pittsburgh at the National Trust for Historic Preservation conference in 2007.)

But in terms of knowledge capture and development of what I call "meta-learning" and "meta-theory" (and I am referring to topics within the field of urban revitalization for the most part), conference sessions are still at the level of case studies, and that we aren't utilizing conferences to adequately capture and use learning in practical, focused ways that can accelerate change and improvement on a wider scale.

For the most part, even the best practitioners aren't linking theory to practice and trying to build the overall knowledge frameworks and typologies for best practice that not only explain what they did and how, but that can be used to guide change in places beyond their own experiences, places where there may be differences in material conditions, but where the knowledge can still be applied, given the proper frameworks.

And this is true even of a couple amazing presentations I took in at the ASLA conference on Friday and Saturday (one on Main Street revitalization in Louisville, Kentucky, the other seemingly on "site furniture" but just as much on best practices in urban parks management).

It comes out in the questions, when people in the audience ask questions related to their own concerns and experiences -- such as how store owners in local commercial districts don't want trees because they say that the tree branches block the signs; or how to bring about better management and experiences to local parks when you don't have access to the resources that public-private partnerships bring to the table in New York City, etc.

What I've thought for awhile is that you need a subject specialist to sit on these panels also, to provide the kinds of connections and linkages and typology generation.

And Friday I came up with another idea, that the major publications in the field, specifically Planning Magazine and Landscape Architecture probably as well, should publish best practice overview articles on a recurring basis, and that the continuing education system requirements process for the planning and architecture (and public administration) professionals also should test people on these best practice articles, to ensure that the material is covered (and hopefully assimilated) by practitioners.

For example, any planner (or landscape architect) dealing with commercial district revitalization ought not to be able to practice if they aren't familiar with the research on the positive connection between quality of environment, including tree cover, on the economic success of local commercial districts, as well as the knowledge of the right species to plant so that store windows aren't over obscured, and the right management and maintenance practices so that trees are maintained properly. But merchants need to know too, that not every customer drives by and looks at their signs and stops to shop, that people on foot and bike and transit spend just as much if not more money shopping as do the people in cars.

Instead these issues come up over and over and over and over and over and over again with every commercial district revitalization project.

I have thought about the knowledge capture process quite a bit in terms of urban revitalization. In fact I applied for a job with the National Main Street Center a couple years ago--not even getting the courtesy of an interview--for a research and training job no less, and in the cover letter I identified the problem of knowledge capture and transfer as a key problem within the Main Street network.

I wrote that even though there is a Main Street network with over 1,200 commercial districts as members, and a few thousand practitioners, that we aren't leveraging the value of the network as a platform for knowledge generation and practice in a concerted way.

I outlined this proposed four point process as a way to improve the success of commercial district revitalization projects nationwide:

1. Indicate -- figure out what we are doing/what we did, what works, what doesn't and why, and build the frameworks and typologies so we can do something with the information;

2. Duplicate -- after we figured it out, and have the right frameworks, structures, processes, plans, apply the knowledge somewhere else, successfully, and ideally more quickly based on the previous learning, to prove that what we figured out is in fact correct, and applicable beyond the particular circumstances of the original case;

3. Communicate -- after you've figured it out and "proven" that it works by duplicating it in places other than the first, communicate the results across through professional networks (reports, papers, conferences, workshops) at local, regional, state, and national levels;

4. Replicate -- scale up the change, continue to communicate out the info and process, through workshops, etc., across knowledge networks and communities of practice, and move change forward in more places, more quickly, and more successfully.

Now we can't totally criticize the National Main Street Center for failing to get this. We don't even do this at the level of a single locality, such as DC.

Which is why I find the various flailings about in the commercial districts and neighborhoods of the city to be so @#$%^&*()_+ frustrating.

What needs to be done is pretty clear.

Why we aren't doing it is another question entirely.