KMIC 1: Webinar on monitoring and evaluation of KM

Last week, I attended my first webinar – a seminar on the web – which was organised by the Knowledge Management Impact Challenge (KMIC) and the Society for International Development (SID) in Washington DC. Louise Daniels, working for the Challenge, posted some information here about the KMIC a few weeks ago.

I’ve never been to a webinar before – or any virtual conference which may seem a bit surprising – so it was a new experience for me. Actually, I was rather sceptical about the form although I had high hopes of the content. But, in reality and for lots of reasons, it was a wonderful experience.

Not the Semantic Web, part two

This is a second post reporting on the Semantic Web stream at the 09 Online Information Conference, with the next four points that struck me as important. In this post we look more at the processes involved in engaging with the Linked Data web. A useful UK resource for following developments is the Nodalities blog run by Talis Ltd, quoted in the earlier post. The blog and Talis are worth following: they are embedded into  the developing Linked Data scene and they themselves have both thought about and experimented with these ideas and technologies, building from their previous experience in building and managing IKM applications. They also follow good web 2.0 practice in that they Slideshare their presentations. Several of the ideas in these posts come from the presentation by Ian Davies , their CTO and the one by Richard Wallis previously cited.

8. “The coolest thing that will be done with your data, will be thought of by someone else”

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)

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.