Many years ago now I formulated three rules or heuristics of Knowledge Management. The first of these reference the fact that you cannot make someone surrender their knowledge in the way that you can make them conform with a process. It was originally coined in reference to individuals but I have come to realise that it also applies to organisations. We are currently working on a major software development which requires sharing data across agencies. The goal is noble but there is no way that one agency is going to make all of its data visible to the others on the basis that they might need it. It would break ethical principles and some cases the law for them to do so. It is one of the reasons why I don't panic too much about Government agencies gathering data, the likelihood that they will put it together or share it is not high.
All of this brought me to an extension of my first rule, which also encompasses the whole notion of gifting which has been so much a part of human evolution. So a new formulation, or possibly extension of the first rule would be: if you ask someone, or a body for specific knowledge in the context of a real need it will never be refused. If you ask them to give you your knowledge on the basis that you may need it in the future, then you will never receive it.

Having seen this extension, I briefly revisited the original three rules. These are more fully explained in a paper Complex Acts of Knowing but I repeat them here.

1. Knowledge will only ever be volunteered it can not be conscripted

2. We only know what we know when we need to know it

3. We always know more than we can tell and we will always tell more than we can write down