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.

The workshop was not based on any critique of existing research methodologies, the continuing validity of which was taken for granted. It rather sought ideas on what new paradigms are emerging to support exploratory research which cross the boundaries of disciplines, cultural realities and traditional researcher/subject roles. Such paradigms are potentially of relevance to many areas of research, but it was felt that they were of particular importance to development research and, also, that development realities posed many challenges which help identify the issues any new paradigms need to address.

The workshop concluded with a declared interest in a continuing an open discussion of these issues, in particular the theory on which new paradigms should be based; the evidence base for why they are needed and what form they may take; and the communication required if research policy makers and funders are to be persuaded to alter their thinking to encourage rather than inhibit emerging forms of intellectual endeavour.

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)

This special issue focuses on organisational knowledge management strategies and their role in facilitating learning among and between Northern and Southern development organisations. Many development organisations have knowledge management and/or learning strategies, but these are often not known outside the organisation itself. Where these strategies have been shared outside the organisation, they have often been publicised informally but not widely distributed to a broader public. Learning about how other organisations are undertaking knowledge management is a way to hold up a mirror to our own practice and understanding.

The papers
Three papers in this issue attempt meta-analyses of development organisations’ approaches to knowledge and learning. The first paper in this issue ‘Head Office attitudes toward inter-organisational learning in Irish non-governmental organisations’. In this paper, Caroline Forsyth and Malcolm MacLachlan examine the dynamics of organisational learning between non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working with health-related projects in Africa. The strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats associated with organisational learning were explored through key informant interviews with representatives from 10 NGOs, undertaken in 2006.

The second paper ‘Organisational energy and other meta-learning: case studies of knowledge management implementation in nine Asian countries’ by Serafin D. Talisayon provides comparisons of two sets of cases. The first set comprises learning and knowledge sharing processes across 22 case studies of knowledge management practice from the corporate and public sectors in 9 Asian countries. The second set is based on the initiation, implementation and initial outcomes of 21 case studies of knowledge management in the development sector in the Philippines. A salient observation that emerges across all cases is the importance of managing motivational factors for such initiatives to succeed.

In the third paper ‘The tip of the iceberg: tentative first steps in cross-organisational comparison of knowledge management in development organisations’, Ewen Le Borgne and I investigate the variety of knowledge management and learning policies and strategies that have been developed by various development organisations in the past decade. It draws upon over 30 case studies yet offers but a glimpse of the current reality because organisations are always documenting or publicising their learning-focused activities. This article is based on an ongoing inventory of organisational KM strategies, available as a Google document.

Case studies
The first case study ‘Swiss roots with multi-cultural and multi-linguistic branches: the challenges of sharing and building on knowledge at Intercooperation (Jane Carter, Pascale Aubert, Arjumand Nizami, Alain Cuvelier, Julia Randimbisoa and Lorena Mancero) focuses on the experiences of a Swiss international development organisation in promoting knowledge management. It notes that participatory learning is strongly embedded in organisational practice, and has led in the past decade to more pro-active knowledge management. This is examined through the lens of the ‘multiple knowledge variables’ of gender, seniority, specific belief systems, field-head office interactions, working function, language and organisational culture. A variety of impacts of knowledge management are discussed, taking specific examples from Latin America, Madagascar, Pakistan and India.

In the second case study ‘Knowledge integration for development: the Hivos approach’ (Josine Stremmelaar) describes the development of the Knowledge Programme of the Humanist Institute for Development Cooperation (Hivos), based in the Netherlands. In 2007, Hivos developed a ‘knowledge integration’ programme on issues imperative to the work of civil society organisations and the development sector at large. By integrating various forms of (new) knowledge, such as academic knowledge, practitioner knowledge, educational and cultural expressions of knowledge, new insights can be created and strategies formulated.

The third case study ‘Revisiting the Eastern Indonesia Knowledge Exchange (BaKTI)’ by Petrarca Karetji describes the current functions of BaKTI, an organization which aims to facilitate discourse, interaction, knowledge sharing and collaboration . This case study provides an update on BaKTI’s current journey, and reflects on the process BaKTI has undergone since 2005.

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…

Development is taking place in a turbulent, rapidly changing environment. Over the years, the development sector has increasingly become aware that, in order to tackle the tremendous complexities of the problems and opportunities, appropriate and timely knowledge is needed.  There is also recognition that the knowledge domains of policy, practice and academia need to be better integrated and combined if development is to be more effective and efficient, is to avoid duplication, is to facilitate innovation and is to tackle development as a wicked problem or series of interlinked wicked problems. Despite the fact that there are a number of individuals (including many of the participants at this workshop) and initiatives which are trying to bridge the gap, such integration and combination has not yet moved beyond ad hoc successes.

Cross-fertilization between the three domains is hampered by differences in incentive systems, ways and dynamics of working, timelines and priorities, knowledge creation systems, organizational cultures, and difficulties to strengthen mutual understanding. So, the main question at the workshop was:

How can we foster more structural relations between the domains of policy, research and practice?

The workshop report is available here.

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.

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.

Although Hoppe identifies idealised types in the situation of interactions between science and policy in the Netherlands, it did make me think about how we see ourselves as IKM Emergent because we definitely see ourselves as boundaries workers although not narrowly between science and policy in the sense that it is explored in this paper. According to Hoppe,   so-called divergers experience a gap between science and politics/policymaking and that it is their self-evident task to act as a bridge. In the Dutch situation, Hoppe argues that they spread over four discourses: ‘rational facilitators’, ‘knowledge brokers’, ‘megapolicy strategists’, and ‘policy analysts’. Other boundary workers aspire to convergence: they believe that science and politics ought to be natural allies in preparing collective decisions. But ‘policy advisors’ excepted, ‘postnormalists’ and ‘deliberative proceduralists’ find this very hard to achieve.

Well, some of this went over my head. For example, what are post-normalist and deliberative proceduralists in the context of boundary work? The text says:

Postnormalists wish to create and institutionalize stable role and interaction patterns, so that scientists and policymakers may engage in productive, open dialogue, and integrated assessment of all pro’s and con’s and uncertainties surrounding sustainability issues.

Deliberative proceduralists may be characterized as saying:v good boundary work requires a procedure and process-criteria that allow robust, but trusting parties, dissidents included, to fully and openly debate, each from their own perspective on the common good, policy proposals and their concomitant uncertainties as well as normative issues.

Looking at these different roles of knowledge brokers, IKM seems to be on the one hand a knowledge broker:

knowledge brokers believe that, in spite of (well-known) cognitive impairments of politics and bureaucracy, and in spite of the inevitable gap between politics and science, under favourable conditions, knowledge brokers in government may exploit opportunities for instrumental learning.

and trying to fill the role of a megapolicy strategist:

boundary workers engaging in strategic megapolicy-type boundary discourse claim a government-oriented think-tank function, by verification and critical examination of strategic policy guidelines and assumptions.

However, there are mixes in different types of approach to boundary work and I’m wondering if a network, like IKM, doesn’t use different approaches at different times in different contexts. For example, an issue of the Knowledge Management for Development Journal is the work of a knowledge broker while organising the display at the EADI conference is the work of a megapolicy strategists, and in some workshops, IKM is the rational facilitator of accommodation, another idealised role.

Well, I don’t know if these musings really get me anywhere (or if I have explained it all well enough to follow) but at least, next time, when I feel inadequate at some social gathering and someone asks me what I do for a living, I can say with insouciance  ‘Oh, I’m a member of a network of would-be megapolicy strategists.’

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.

Our findings to date will not really surprise you but they are interesting, I think:

• Only 20% of authors in three top development journals on the Web of Science come from developing countries

• Of the top 10 institutional affiliations, only one of these journals, namely Development and Change has an developing country institution (University of Delhi) in the top 10.

For this presentation, Iina also generated a number of semantic maps from publications from the domains of research (academic journals), policy (the newsletter of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and from the media (newspapers) in the Netherlands to consider and compare the emerging patterns. Preliminary conclusions include:

• The research domain appears to be fragmented, emerging and unstructured (with geographical location being particularly important).
• The media appears to focused on popular issues (pop groups, television programmes) and political spectacles, with high numbers of articles being repeated in multiple locations. The opinion pages also generated a high-level of negative words in the headlines.
• Not surprisingly, the policy domain shows a focus on relevant Ministers (Balkenende, Koenders) and current events.

One of our other conclusions was that the field of practice appears to be the ‘neglected child’ (we translated this from the Dutch ondergeschoven kindje) because the outputs of the practice field are less accessible, often being grey literature. The presentation above gives a little more background to how we reached these preliminary conclusions.

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]

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.

For Peter and I, it was very interesting to have the opportunity to interact with colleagues from the private sector. And one of the most notable observations we made was that many knowledge managers seem to be struggling with attitudes and behaviours of individual knowledge workers: “experts want to keep their knowledge to themselves”, “sharing is not taking place”, and “competition stops people sharing knowledge”.  This seems to be in striking contrast to the development sector where, sharing via knowledge networks and communities of practice, is really taking place, although limited by time pressures and other practicalities.

When I mentioned this stark difference between sectors, the reaction of the other participants was  “Oh, it’s because your sector is non-profit…” but I wondered if there is not a deeper explanation and went further with my probing. I came to the conclusion that the difference is that many development organisations are seriously committed to becoming learning organisations: without organisational learning, they can’t do better development. This commitment takes, of course, various forms, but there is usually a general agreement that it is necessary. Although I am, of course, making generalisations, this appears to be in stark contrast to the situation in the private sector where there seems to be the rhetoric of the learning organisation but that commitment of management does not always carry through: in good times, there is no need to change, and in bad times the resources aren’t there. I think that another difference is the common understanding within development – despite natural organisational rivalries and a host of other impediments – that we are all working towards the same objective, and the same humanitarian objective at that.

Kindly note that I am here not trying to bad-mouth my fellow participants here: they were all very committed and are grappling with the same issues. When I explained about IKM Emergent, and told that it was funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, one participant reacted:

Oh, there is commitment to knowledge management at the top, no wonder knowledge management is more accepted!

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/

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.