First IKM Interactive workshop

On June the 2nd and 3rd the first of a series of IKM interactive sessions was held with the information managers  of 11 Organisations working in Francophone Africa. The workshop in Dakar, Senegal, was hosted by CODESRIA at the AUF Campus Numérique.

The meeting focused on the use of new opportunities provided by the Internet and Web2.0 as well as on  the obstacles to publishing, promoting, aggregating and finding  African research outputs. The participants worked together on a wiki platform where they could get access to a series  of modules and provide feedback. The modules examined which new approaches showed promise both for searching , dissemination and promotion.
In the video below Benoît Diouf, a University librarian in Saint-Louis de Senegal, talks about his expectations of the workshop:

After the workshop  Benoît reports in this blogpost about the  outcomes.

Although the workshop was practical with an emphasis on hands-on work very lively discusses emerged, both spontaneously and because they were planned in the program.

Some of the key findings included:

1. The bias produced by Google’s PageRank does not favour many of the research institutes represented at the meeting. Instead it puts emphasis on publications by  larger international bodies.

2.  Other scientific  search engines (Scirus, Pubmed, Scholar) do not index much of the research material published on the web. More active steps can and should  be taken to ensure these indexes and sources like Google books include African research. One of those steps is digitization of existing resources.

3. For delivery and creation of information one needs to take into account the realities of developing countries such as limited access to computers and the net. Paper and offline version of products are necessary to avoid excluding people.

4. There was much concern about the quality of information. It is necessary to develop new measures for this quality in an electronic environment.

5. African scientists have long been deprived of access to relevant resources. Access has been improved recently but these opportunities will not be used to their full potential unless they become part of the daily way of working. There is an urgent need for capacity building, both for information professionals and scientists. Information literacy should be part of curricula.

6. Intellectual property rights are an important issue in this context. There are doubts what one can do with the information provided by others (and for that reason it is sometimes decided not to use it). Likewise it is unclear what others can do with the information that one provides.

7.  Folksonomies and traditional controlled vocabularies were discussed extensively as approaches to make information easier to be found.

[We will extend this post when more materials and videos become available]

Measurement of knowledge management

Yesterday afternoon, together with a Context colleague Peter Das, I went to a knowledge cafe (kennis cafe) on the measurement of knowledge management. It was organised by the Centre for Research in Intellectual Capital (Kenniskring) of InHolland University for Applied Sciences. There were two presentations: one of a research project by Guy Mestrini to measure the value creation  in Fokker Stork; and another by Christiaan Stam on different approaches to measuring knowledge processes.  Both of these were very interesting and were followed by a world cafe to discuss the main issue: how to measure knowledge management initiatives.

Managing “le savoir”

The date is set: 5 October 2009, in back to back with the annual KM4DEV event, the first cobbles on the road to a francophone community of practice on learning for development will be paved, in Brussels the modern Babel tower!

The objectives are two-fold:
- to introduce the IKM Emergent discourse in the francophone arena;
- to explore the possibilities of developing a community of practice on learning for development.

There are a couple of very interesting aspects around this double bill: a francophone community of practice could potentially emerge out of the discussion, even though the ever shardy question of funding remains unclear so far; it will be an excellent opportunity to explore the discourse around learning and KM among francophones and find out how the francophone and anglophone communities could complement each other – discussing different topics in different ways – and establish bridges between them;

The question for me a) what is really driving the francophone learning agenda (if there is such a thing in the first place) and b) whether francophones and anglophones can indeed have meaningful joint group discussions.

I obviously think it’s important and necessary but our work in West Africa shows that it is a real challenge to stimulate learning and sharing across languages – though perhaps for other reasons in that region such as administrative differences making experiences very difficult to compare. As for the first question, it comes from a lot of doubts I have had regarding the way quite a few francophones seem to frame the concepts of learning and knowledge management. A discussion that took place in 2007 about this on the KM4DEV mailing list is briefly referred to in Julie Ferguson et. al.’s meta review and scoping study of knowledge management for development (See pp. 28 and beyond).

Multiple knowledges, multiple languages: cacophony or symphony?

At any rate, I cannot wait to start this and hope that the results will exceed my expectations. With a Spanish-speaking community of practice in shaping in the KM4DEV community too, the ‘multiple knowledges’ that form the red thread of the IKM emergent programme are all coming to the fore. Will it be a symphony or a cacophony?

If you want to join the reflection about setting up a francophone community of practice or wish to join the discussions in October, simply let Ewen know or register and leave your details on: http://www.km4dev.org/wiki/index.php/Francophone_KM4DEV

This post was originally published on: http://km4meu.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/managing-le-savoir/

Welcome, Bernike

This post is to give a warm welcome to Bernike Pasveer of the European Centre for Development Policy Management who is going to be blogging with us here on The Giraffe.

For Complex Development Problems: We Need Bridging Leaders

This afternoon I saw in CNN how residents in Fargo, North Dakota pulled themselves together to protect their town against rising floodwaters by piling sandbags over threatened dikes.

Knowledge management (KM) is about achieving effective group action. During crisis situations — when a common threat is publicly visible and cause-and-effect relationships are known to everyone — effective group action follows easily. In complex development contexts, effective group action can happen if there is a leader who can see (better than most people can) and lead through three kinds of complexity:

• Dynamic complexity: when causes and effects are far apart in space and time, and therefore less publicly visible;

Generative complexity: when the future is difficult for most to predict, or is likely to be unfamiliar or different; and

Social complexity: when people who are affected or who should take action do not share similar assumptions, beliefs and interests.
(Source: Adam Kahane’s book “Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening and Creating New Realities,” Berrett-Koehler, 2004)This type of leader is called a bridging leader.

Linking research with action

Thanks to the recommendation by a colleague, I have just been reading a paper on Linking agricultural research knowledge with action for sustainable proverty alleviation: what works? written by a group of 19 people from Harvard University and the International Livestock Research Institute. The size of the group of authors in itself seems to indicate an alternative and inclusive perspective…

The paper asks ‘What kinds of approaches and institutions, under what sorts of conditions, are most effective for harnessing scientific knowledge in support of strategies for environmentally sustainable development and poverty alleviation?’ It applies an innovative conceptual framework to a diverse set of sustainable poverty-focused projects undertaken in a variety of African and Asian countries, identifying the following strategies as key to closing gaps between knowledge and action: the importance of combining different kinds of knowledge, learning and bridging approaches; the need for strong and diverse partnerships which level the playing field; and the need to building capacity to innovate and communicate.

The Triple helix

From Iina Hellsten of the Athene Institute at the VU University, I heard about work by Loet Leydesdorf (the image on the left is ‘borrowed’ from his website and you can click on it to get to the website too) and others on the model of the Triple helix. What is the Triple helix, and why is it so interesting?

The importance of being… repositories

Just lately I have been hunting down quite a lot of publications, both official and grey or informal ones, and this has brought home to me, more than ever, the pressing need to preserve the documentary record of development practice. As Ewen Leborgne and I commented in a very recent paper on knowledge management strategies of organisations, many approaches to knowledge management are not fully documented:

The paper is only able to offer a glimpse of the current reality or the tip of the iceberg. This is because what is happening in organisations is not fully documented. Not only are experiences with knowledge management often not published – they remain for internal use only – where they are published, this is often in the form of grey literature which is by its nature less easily accessible and less permanent. Two initiatives which have made efforts to document what is happening in organisations: the organisational case studies collected by the Knowledge Management for Development (KM4Dev) community of practice and which are available on its website and the related Knowledge Management for Development Management Journal…The importance of these two sources is reflected in the references.

As background to the paper, Ewen Leborgne and I have made an inventory of organisational case studies which we will continue to add to and which is fully accessible to all.

But this does not preclude the need for document repositories because documents on the web – particularly grey literature – is not going to remain there for ever. And without this record we can’t get better and learn from what happened before.

Hivos Knowledge Programme

The Hivos Knowledge Programme now has a website. The programme was started in 2007 to address some of the complex challenges facing development: how to understand and innovate support for civil society building, how to promote pluralism in times of growing intolerance? Created on the understanding that the development sector needs new knowledge and, more specifically, appropriate knowledge to tackle specific knowledge gaps, it is based on the process of knowledge integration. Hivos, working with academic partners, is integrating knowledge on issues imperative to the work of civil society and the development sector at large.  It builds, among other things, on Hivos’ extensive work on freedom of expression and ICTs.

Many organisations have been criticised for their internal, inward looking knowledge strategies. Such criticism has come from a wide number of commentators: Kenneth King and Ben Ramalingam to name just two. The Hivos Knowledge Programme is seen by many as an example of good and innovative practice with its external orientation and attention to system-wide issues, not only Hivos’ own knowledge needs.

New KM e-Book

The Asian Productivity Organization today released a new KM e-book entitled “From Productivity to Innovation: Proceedings from the Second International Conference on Technology and Innovation for Knowledge Management.” The conference was held in New Delhi, India last 12–14 February 2008. Dr. Serafin D. Talisayon of the Philippines served as the conference rapporteur and volume editor.

You can download the e-book for free by clicking HERE.