Questioning the IKM-Emergent pointers en français : Mais de quoi parle-t-on ?

A belated post but a lot happened in the last six or sevent weeks.

At the dawn of that period was an interesting moment of organising an entire day for the Francophones, generously sponsored by IKM-Emergent as a testimony of its will to walk its talk on the multiple knowledge’s – or shall I say les connaissances multiples?

The day (5 October) was split in two discussions (*): in the morning (and halfway through the afternoon) the participants grappled with setting up a francophone community of practice for KM4DEV. In the second half of the afternoon we also engaged with the discussion topics that matter for IKM-Emergent, the more obvious topic of this post.

Anyway it was an interesting day as it engaged a different group of people on the topics of interest for IKM-Emergent. Mike gave a good verbal preamble to the discussions and we then split up in 3 world café tables to grapple with ‘les connaissances locales (et leur transmission)’, ‘les objets informationnels’ and ‘la gestion des connaissances’.

Three groups - three grapplings

Local knowledge seems to have been quite inspirational and tackled the highbrow issues of gender, equity, power relations with donors, capacity development and intergenerational dialogue. The group ended however recommending very practically to document local knowledge as much as possible.

Information artifacts initially did not go down so well, because the very term ‘objets d’information’ raised confusion and triggered a lot of questions, which were resolved by agreeing on the term ‘supports d’information’ (the types of information products e.g. books, flyers, movies, emails). From there the participants discussed the necessity of synthesising and tagging documents to allow a faster consumption, as a reflection of changing information practices.

Discussion de (world) cafe: c'est quoi un objet informationnel?

Attached to my knowledge management table I could not take part to those discussions and would encourage anyone who did to share their opinion and shed more light on what was discussed.

In the meantime, on our KM table, we discussed all kinds of issues related to the  management of knowledge and actually what this all means: what is knowledge, what is management? (ah, don’t we love to talk about concepts among francophones!). We went through some stages of the knowledge cycle (development, use, validation). The aspect of validation was quite interesting as it triggered a lot of concerned reactions: are we talking of applying an ISO seal of quality on knowledge? In fact the discussion on the validation was more about: whose knowledge / whose reality? (thank you Mike for this brilliant title) and the conditions to ensure that relevant knowledge is taken into account.

Of all stages in the knowledge cycle, sharing took a prominent place as a means to enrich knowledge, adapt it to contexts, document it and apply it. The link with the central concept of learning – and its absence from a lot of knowledge management discussions – was highlighted as crucial.

And finally the participants came up with a series of recommendations for outputs that could be useful, including a comparative study of organisations that shout around that they do KM and organisations that do it without necessarily being aware of it or showing it, as well as a study to examine priority-setting and development of development programmes by donors and large international organisations (to look critically at the inclusion of multiple knowledges – or expectedly of their exclusion).

All in all, of course it was a rather superficial run through the issues – what can you hope to achieve in two hours? – but still useful in the sense of picking people’s brains on potential questions and practical activities to work on each of the IKM strands. Furthermore, tt’s way too early to detect any pattern of discussion that may differ from any such discussion held in Anglophone circles. That said, the SA-GE francophone discussion group is now up and running and will provide an excellent platform to examine how discussions flare up and what track they are following.

The francophone creation group

So keep watching that space – or more appropriately: restez en ligne ! Les francophones débarquent.

 

(*)

The report of both discussions are available (in French) on the documentation wiki page for the event: http://wiki.km4dev.org/wiki/index.php/2009_Brussels_Gathering_Documentation#Francophone_discussions as well as in the ‘resources’ section on the francophone group page on the KM4DEV website: http://www.km4dev.org/group/km4devfrancophone.

Workshop on emerging research paradigms

How do you plan and manage a research programme if you do not know what the outcomes will be? With great difficulty is the answer, particularly in the current climate where predictability is usually expected and measured. Such expectations can impose real constraints on research processes which aim to interact with and encourage the participation of other stakeholders. They can inhibit the identification and pursuit of news ideas which emerge as the research progresses.

These issues were discussed by a group of researchers, research intermediaries and research policy makers at a workshop in Trinity Hall, Cambridge on 17-18 September 2009. The workshop was convened by IKM Emergent, the Information Systems research group of the Judge Business School and by the Bridging the Digital Divide Group, a consortium of UK funded ICT4D projects whose experiences prompted the initial reflection on these issues.

Meta-analyses of organisational strategies for KM

The first issue of the Knowledge Management for Development Journal to be published by Routledge (Volume 5, Issue 1, 2009) has now appeared, focusing on the subject of KM in organisations. Guest editors of this issue comprised Ewen Le Borgne, Catherine Vaillancourt-Laflamme and Ivan Kulis. The issue has been produced in the context of the Information and Knowledge Management Emergent Research Programme (IKM Emergent)

Connecting ivory towers

On 3 July 2009, Josine Stremmelaar, Wenny Ho and I organised a workshop at the CERES Summer School on the subject of connecting ivory towers, based on our common understanding that the domains of research, policy and practice in Dutch development cooperation are  are still acting too much from ivory towers, unable to break free from domain-related dynamics and interests. We discussed the ideas that we have been developing for some time with participants of the Summer School who are researchers.

A report of this workshop appeared in in the August 2009 issue of Vice Versa, a professional magazine for development cooperation, but it is not yet possible to link to it.  I might be able to add the link at some piont in the future…

Towards Knowledge Democracy conference (3): The Leiden Agenda

This is the third and final post from me on the Towards Knowledge Democracy conference which brought together some 500 participants from more than 26 countries, including representatives from the scientific community, politicians, the media, businesses and the general public. The participants discussed the challenges and opportunities to be found at the interface between science, politics, society and the media, and reached agreement on the Leiden Agenda which comprises the main conclusions and recommendations of the conference.

One of the recommendations was proposed by me in recognition of IKM Emergent’s perspective on multiple knowledges. Although it was edited in the process of being accepted, it appeared on the final list of recommendations as:

Recommendation 30a:

Recognise that there are many different  types of knowledge – not just scientific knowledge.  Individual and community knowledge and knowledge generated in practice are equally important to the development of knowledge democracy.

A full list of recommendations can be downloaded here.

Towards Knowledge Democracy Conference (2): Boundary work

In the session in which Iina Hellsten and I took part at the Knowledge Democracy conference last month on Boundary work: implications for the science policy interface, Robert Hoppe made an interesting presentation on Scientific advice and public policy, expert advisers and policymakers discourses on boundary work.

Robert Hoppe identified four different models of boundary work arrangements from the academic literature: an advocacy model, bureaucracy, social engineers and learning models. You can see all the different models in the figure here on axes of divergence/convergence and science/public policy.

Towards Knowledge Democracy conference (1): Bibliometrics

Last week, Iina Hellsten of the Athena Institute and I made a presentation at the Towards Knowledge Democracy conference on the subject of ‘Development cooperation: bibliometric approach to examine knowledge and communications.’

Below you should see the embedded presentation from Slideshare (and if this works it is a really nice feature!)

In this presentation, we really only presented the very first part of our collaboration to which Iina provides the knowledge of the methodologies of bibliometrics (citation analysis and semantics maps etc) and I provide some understanding of development cooperation. I’m very excited about the potential of this approach to make visible the invisible structures of knowledge and communication across the development field.

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/