I was honoured and privileged this week to learn that Stan Garfield (@stangarfield), a prolific writer and expert on the topic of Knowledge Management for many years, did a post on my work for his Profiles in Knowledge series on LinkedIn.

You can read the article here.

I am a great admirer of Stan because he has been an active sharer of wonderful and thought-provoking content on topics that are of interest to me in knowledge management, learning, personal knowledge mastery and so much more.  His curation skills are amazing and it’s often that I have used his LinkedIn posts as reference guides because they are filled with great information that you can directly apply.

I’m someone who doesn’t mind paper – I’d happily print out something that I find valuable so that I can often refer to it by my side at the desk or bookshelf and I have to admit that I have printed out some of Stan’s posts over the year and bound them into a book.  If he was to collate his work over the years, I’m sure he would have volumes!  (and he’d have a customer who would buy them all – AND also refer others to them).

What struck me most with Stan’s post, was that he took the TIME to go through my profile and work online and to curate my work in some kind of order to him.

This is what kills me.  (If I can use the words of Holden Caulfield from The Catcher In the Rye which I read over this weekend).  

In this day and age, someone has taken TIME to go through the work of someone else and to curate some of it into an article and then to SHARE it to the WORLD.

This is such a generous, kind and open-hearted gesture that really took me by surprise and admittedly, a lump in my throat started to form.

I was sitting on the lounge, scrolling through my LinkedIn feed and saw a notification from someone which was a reply to Stan’s post.

Stan DIDN’T EVEN @ ME to notify me – it was a SURPRISE.

Even THIS gesture tells a lot about someone when they do this.

It’s unassuming and it’s supportive – it doesn’t present itself as “look at what I have done for you” but instead, your own network shares the posts and replies which comes back to you. 

It’s the modern day version of walking into your own surprise party – and it feels WONDERFUL.

Most of all, it made me think of who I can help to curate and share THEIR work too because we don’t see this enough on social networks as everyone scrambles to promote themselves or their own products and services thinking that if they promote others, somehow it may affect their own potential business or reputation?

I scrolled through Stan’s post and there was SO MUCH THERE I HAD FORGOTTEN ABOUT. My work over the years was curated there for me to see, recall and remember.  As someone who always worries about how I can curate my own “bits of myself” all over the internet, seeing this article just….humbled me.

So I sent Stan a voice mail of thanks on Facebook Messenger.  It was the first time I had spoken to him in this way but I needed to express my gratitude.

Please follow, refer and share Stan’s posts and support his work. He has been a stalwart in the field of Knowledge Management for many years and done so in an unassuming manner. He is one of the best curators of his own work (and of others) with an immense amount of knowledge, skills and experience all captured across multiple social networks.

Here are his details:

• LinkedIn articles 
• Mind boggling curation of his entire work  (use this as the reference point)
• His curated list of blog posts 

This blog post by Helen Blunden was written in Melbourne, Australia and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.