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Future Challenges for KM 435

.creativecommons.org/) and refers to a more customized approach to author rights
than the one size fi ts all approach of more traditional copyright rules. The polar
opposite of copyright would be the removal of all restrictions, for example, open
source software or any publicly available content. Copyleft does not venture this far
but does remove some of the copyright restrictions, making it easier for others to use,
modify. and otherwise adapt their original works. A typical creative commons license
would read as follows (excerpt from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons):
There are four major permissions that are contained in creative commons licenses:

• Attribution (by) requires users to attribute a work ’ s original author. All Creative
Commons licenses contain this option, but some now-deprecated licenses did not
contain this component.
• Authors can either not restrict modifi cation or use Share-alike (sa), which is a
copyleft requirement that requires that any derived works be licensed under the same
license; or
• No derivatives (nd), which requires that the work not be modifi ed.
• Noncommercial (nc) requires that the work not be used for commercial purposes.

As of the current versions, all Creative Commons licenses allow the core right to
redistribute a work for noncommercial purposes without modifi cation. The creative
commons license has become quite popular in the academic world and has a good
potential to be applied to knowledge content in organizational KM systems.

How to Provide Incentives for Knowledge Sharing
KM practitioners often neglect the crucial management issues of organizational learn-
ing, motivation, and culture when formulating a knowledge management strategy.
Knowledge workers need to have a climate in which knowledge sharing is encouraged
and they need a reason for sharing the knowledge. Incentives remain one of the more
important challenges facing KM today. An incentive is a reward or some form of posi-
tive feedback given when a desired behavior is exhibited. Since human beings are
purposeful creatures who would tend to continue behaviors associated with positive
rewards and avoid those behaviors that lead to negative consequences, it seems rea-
sonable to expect that incentives for knowledge sharing should lead to more sharing
of knowledge. This being said, the situation is, as always, not so clear-cut.
Incentives can be quite tricky to get right because others may see as an insult what
some perceive as a reward. An example is the system of recognition. In one company,
the public posting of a “ knowledge-sharer of the month ” serves to motivate employees
to share more knowledge. In another context, employees feel that as highly educated