Before travelling to the colloquium, I consulted my electronic dictionary to figure out the meaning of the word ‘colloquium’ and it said: an academic meeting or seminar usually led by a different lecturer and on a different topic at each meeting.

Embracing a conversational tone, Professor Mbulelo Mzamane from South Africa set a fitting rhythm for the colloquium. According to Prof.  Mzamane, the invention of language mediated dialogues and contributed to knowledge construction in the world.   While there seems to be an obsession with codifying knowledge, oral forms are more concrete in Africa with orality representing diverse forms of dynamism and consciousness.  The introduction of writing in Africa was a setback to orality, enabling subversive knowledge to find its way into African classrooms and communities.

In Africa, we are ignoring epistemology to our detriment. Many African forests and areas around mountains like the Drakensburg in South Africa have over 2000 plant species that are beyond the description of Latin Nomenclature.  Universities do not even have this kind of knowledge.  Ironically, we have foreign scientists coming to Africa with the belief that they can teach African farmers inter-cropping and Conservation Agriculture, among other concepts.  All this is happening at the detriment of local knowledge which remains outside formal education systems. Traducture can assist in correcting this anomaly.

He added that the 19^th century was the golden age of African literature and this was linked to political maturation:

I am a classical product of the Bantu education system in South Africa which was designed to take away our power of self definition so that we would become perpetual hewers of water. After 1994, following a realization of what had been taken away from us, we officialized every South African language.  Because we had been all colonially compromised, we had to constitutionally elevate African languages.  It is interesting to note that different African languages are closer to each other than assumed.  A number of words are found in many different African languages, e.g, Umfazi, which means a woman in many African languages.

Language and development are very close to each other, according to Prof Mzamane. There is a definite correlation between language and democratization.  Empowerment outside a language dispensation is impossible. This is why the African language movement is an African Renaissance.  However, a missing ingredient is inter-African translation.  Few works are translated from one African language to another.

Professor Ghirmai Negash, the Director of African Studies Program at Ohio University, weighed in by saying we cannot talk of culture outside a language.  He added that the existence of various types of English such as British English, American English, Kenyan English, Ethiopian English, South African English, Indian English and so on, shows that English has become part of many people’s lives and cultures.  However, there is need to empower African languages through producing tangible products like poems, among other artefacts. We cannot leave everything to European languages which are associated with colonialism and Christianity. Prof Ghirmai lamented the tendency for African languages to cannibalize each other which results in the disappearance of knowledge around languages that are cannibalized.

A translator and literary critic, Dr. Tomi Adeaga said, based on her experiences, many African intellectuals are not literate in native languages and this means they are not able to translate into those languages.  A lot of knowledge can be generated though translating works by such titanic literary icons like Chinua Achebe whose work speaks to many languages.

Firstly, the EADI Information Management Working Group (IMWG) has organised two panel discussions on Improving access and demand for knowledge in a new era of development: shared values and new alliances, supported by Mobilising Knowledge for Development (MK4D) and IKM Emergent. The panels comprise:

Panel 1: Shared values: advocating new approaches to a global development knowledge ecology
This panel will be looking at how linked open information, new open technologies and open standards, and the knowledge commons may have an integrating effect to bring together knowledge from different domains and contexts to solve development problems. Speakers confirmed: Duncan Edwards, IDS; Tim Davies, Co-director of Practical Participation; and Sebastiao Mendonça Ferreira, formerly of Community Innovators Lab, MIT.

Panel 2: New alliances: the role of intermediaries in bridging policy, research and practice
This panel will be exploring the role of information workers (as brokers of knowledge) in stimulating demand and facilitating supply of research knowledge. The session will look at new initiatives to bridge the knowledge divides between the domains of policy, research and practice. Speakers include: Dr Shamprasad Pujar, Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR), India; Dr Ananya Raihan, Development Research Network (D.Net), Bangladesh;  Josine Stremmelaar, Hivos.

In addition to the IMWG sessions, there are a number of other panels in which IKM has an interest:
How are digital technologies transforming development?, organised with Parminder Jeet Singh of  IT for Change, India
Participatory knowledge building for development: including voices, changing values organised with Isa Baud, Amsterdam Institute of Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam and
Translation and traducture: promoting partnerships, building and adding value in international development practice through dialogue, organised by Wangui wa goro, SIDENSI

You can see the full panel list and  details of registration. There will also be an IKM installation at the venue.

As a result of participation in the IKMemergent Workshop in Oxford, UK, in November 2010, IFPRI has taken the Global Hunger Index (GHI) as an example and published it as a linked data RDF files and documented the experience. We worked with Practical participation to develop the initial files and seek guidance on the options and approaches for publishing linked data. This is the first stage of the project to make the data available and then monitor its use and look at ways to promote and integrate it with more datasets.

Groups have already used the original data of the GHI to produce new mappings of the data, see the examples from Tableau and Chartsbin. By publishing the linked data we hope others will integrate the information with other visualizations and disseminate the results of the report.

Linked data has already been used by the international community to bring together different datasets, for example comparing Aid from the UK and USA.

The process of initially setting up a process to publish linked data sets is involved, but obviously with a recurring dataset such as the Global hunger Index it is easy to update.

Although the datasets prove challenging to convert, information on many of the organisations outputs is already available in Linked data form. The hundred or so wikipedia pages featuring links and descriptions of IFPRI output are already part of the web of linked data through Dbpedia. A sample of metadata describing IFPRI presentations, collections and twitter accounts can be seen through Sindice.

Get the data

At present the GHI 2010 data is made available in two different forms and is available in raw RDF/XML and N3 files. http://data.ifpri.org/rdf/ghi/

Chris

|Chris Addison|Head of Web Communication IFPRI

There are a number of key ingredients to the development knowledge ecology as we see it:

Firstly, there are many different disconnects in development knowledge. One key element of this is the fact that many organisations are concerned with their own internal survival and less concerned with how they share critical information about what they do with the people it effects. I’m not talking about businesses here but rather development organisations funded by public money. There are many examples of this but my favourite example comes from the ‘Where are the ripples?’ process during which Steve Kirimi and Eliud Wakwabubi in their 2009 paper,Learning from, promoting and using participation: The case of international development organizations in Kenya, noted that knowledge about what NGOs are doing in Kenya ‘is not only inaccessible to most people but … it is also stored in formats that are not user-friendly.’ I’m sorry to mix metaphors but this always reminds me of the Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy where the earth gets destroyed to make way for an inter-galactic superhighway because nobody on earth objected to the plans which were displayed somewhere in another part of the milky way. I hope it’s clear that this is a comment on what is horribly called downward accountability.  Another disconnect is that between practitioner and academic knowledge but also the low status of local knowledge.

A second key ingredient is the concept of the knowledge commons and here we are very much affected by the thinking of Sebastiao Ferreira and some resources he has shared with us. What is the knowledge commons?

a new way of looking at knowledge as a shared resource, a complex ecosystem that is a commons – a resource shared by a group of people that is subject to social dilemmas (Hess and Orstrom 2006 in Understanding knowledge as commons: from theory to practice)

A third ingredient – and the reason we have chosen to call this developing idea the knowledge ecology and not the knowledge ecosystem which Hess and Oorstrom obviously did – is a paper by Andrés Bucio of the University of East Anglia on The ‘knowledge ecology’ we need: are the core assumptions of the knowledge economy sustainable? In this 2009 paper, Bucio argues that:

A comprehensive reframing of the core assumptions and values of the knowledge economy is in order, away from monopoly in knowledge and perhaps more in line with the values of competition and cooperation observable in the ‘knowledge ecology’ of the natural world. For a governance of knowledge to happen society must use its institutions, governance capacity and creativity to replace its knowledge economy with a ‘knowledge ecology’.<

Fourth, another basic ingredient comes from an IKM Working Paper, Power and interests in developing knowledge societies: exogenous and endogenous discourses in contention by Robin Mansell and what she writes about the endogenous approach to ICT4D which is concerned with ‘human beings, decision-making processes, and encouraging the poor to make their own society through participatory and inclusive processes of development.’  This is opposed to the mainstream of ICT4D which generally follows an exogenous (or externally generated) path.

So the developing recipe of the development knowledge ecology puts muliple knowledges, the knowledge commons, the knowledge ecology and endogenous approaches into the mix. There will be a lot of other ingredients before we have any sort of recipe but it will be interesting cooking…

Although we are only beginning to chart the dimensions of the development knowledge, it does have the potential to pull all the elements on which IKM has been working over the past 4 years together, as well as a lot of different strands within knowledge management for development. IKM’s work to date has been focused on bringing different development knowledge components together – for example, multiple knowledges and knowledge domains -  but the concept of the development knowledge ecology places more emphasis on the more holistic view which may be necessary to bring about more fundamental change.

Maybe the reason that I particularly like it as a potential framework is that it gives an expression to what has been implicitly been motivating members of IKM Emergent for a long time, often even before IKM was in existence, as well as for example other ‘positive deviants’ such as many members of KM4Dev.  This shared vision had never been expressed explicitly but has been present behind the scenes all along.

Since its inception in 2007, IKM Emergent has become increasingly aware of the importance of translation to the issues it raises about the exchanges of knowledges across the various boundaries and layers which exist within the development sector. These extend far beyond the literal translation of language, although this remains fundamental, to cover the expression of ideas and meanings, formed in one context, and received and interpreted, in very different ones. The difficulties of this process still plague cross-cultural, inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary discourse about development amongst ‘experts’ and play a still larger role in communication between ‘experts’ and the rest of us, and the communities on whom development is performed. For some of the issues, please consult the article Lost in translation, one of the resources on the KMIC website.

The introduction of the word traducture by Wangui wa Goro, coined originally in 1997 as part of her doctoral thesis where she explores issues of translating inequality (wa Goro 2005), drew attention to the inadequacy of the term translation. Traducture enabled recognition that our explorations of development issues raised could be limited by too literal an interpretation of the words used. In this context, traducture better encompasses the range of ‘translations’ that the programme wishes to explore, as well as the science, art, technology and craft of making them.
Traducture is based on conceptual frameworks of translation, which offer a variety of avenues for engaging from different standpoints, including perspectives which seek to unravel dominant discourses, particularly where they distort reality through misrepresentation, such as stereotyping or exclusion. It seeks to re-centre humanity in its fullness or create new discourses or draw attention to existing discourses in varied locations. This enables the possibility of bringing various knowledges, experienced through diverse locations, to bear on what is already known and of articulating them in ways that are or are not known or that are known elsewhere. Additionally, it enables unknown knowledges to surface, reflecting a desire to assert different discourses, which take into account cultures, locations, ideologies, different and multiple ways of knowing, the environment, the past, the present and also possibilities for the future, either from within the discourse or through connections or discoveries within our own knowledges as well to those of others. It is derived from the deconstructive uses of the words traduction and ecriture, which encompasses the deconstruction or critical consciousness in craft, style and content of writing and transfer through translation as rewriting.

Here is an audio file of Wangui wa Goro talking about traducture at the EADI General Conference in 2008 during a presentation on Knowledges, dialogues and translations.

Sources
wa Goro, Wangui (2005) unpublished thesis “Hectorosexism in translation: A comparative study of Ngugi wa Thiong’o's Matigari and Devil on the Cross, Middlesex University.
wa Goro, Wangui (2006/2007) Problematizing the gaze through traducture. Does it matter if you’re back or white? In: White matter/Il bianco in questione. Athanor 17(10): 52-61

To be honest, I don’t care if we win the challenge. Instead, I’m just delighted that the IKM story is there with the others. And have a good look at them – I think there are about 45 entries – because I think you will find them as interesting and fascinating as I do. I’m also really looking forward to the synthesis of the findings.

This has led me to reflect a little on the methodology of the challenge which seems to be an excellent way of collecting stories from those who are undertaking evaluation of a wide variety of KM4D initiatives. I’m also hoping that the people behind the challenge can be encouraged to write up the approach they have used because it is such an inspiring way of facilitating learning across the development sector – such an important thing to do and one which doesn’t happen often because it’s so difficult. I won’t say it’s a best practice, I wouldn’t dare. After all, I’ve just submitted a story influenced by complexity and some proponents of complexity don’t believe that such a thing as best practice is possible at all. But I will say that I think it’s brilliant and something to be adapted and used again by others.

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.

First of all, the subject was really interesting – monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of knowledge – and the content was great. There were presentations by IKM colleagues, Simon Hearn, Valerie Brown and Ewen le Borgne, who talked about their work on M&E of knowledge, and also about previous work on this subject, particularly papers written by Joitske Hulsebosch and colleagues on Monitoring and evaluating knowledge management strategies and Serafin Talisayon on Monitoing and evaluation of knowledge management for development. This was followed by an update from Marie-Ange Binagwaho, Louise Clark and Norma Garza of the findings to date on the KMIC. Main findings comprise:

• Stronger stories are those that incorporated M&E from the beginning of processes and / or used M&E assessment to generate actionable data which informed project development.
• Assessment processes designed to promote learning and improvement are stronger than those which respond to reporting requirements
• Simplicity is key, too much data makes things confusing
• There is some ambiguity between KM / M&E because both require information exchange and both are strengthened by functional feedback loops

Like @ithorpe wondering how presentations at #KMImpact and IKM webinar apply to my practical knowledge sharing work. Another webinar maybe?

I think this is a good point and something with which we are grappling at IKM Emergent. Out of this concern has come an initiative on Practice-based change which we are currently developing with Hannah Beardon, Ewen le Borgne, Mare Fort and others – which looks at the implications of the findings of IKM research directly in practice. One of the areas which we will be focusing on will be M&E, along with the implications of complexity and emergence, using and supporting local language processes, and also traducture. By the way, I’ll write another blog post on traducture as when I googled it, I only found a link to IKM Newsletter No. 3.

In the meantime, this tweet from Peter Ballantyne got me thinking about multiple knowledges – presented by Valerie at the webinar – and wondering about the relevance of this perspective for knowledge sharing practice. I think it is very relevant because it reminds us that there are many different sorts of knowledges with different values and different prejudices, and much more. Yet another blog post perhaps?

You can see Ralph Borland describing the Geneva installation on this Youtube video:

The next tri-annual EADI conference will be taking place in York in September 2011 and plans are afoot for the design of a new installation to be used at EADI and at other conference. This new installation was on display for the first time at the ICTD2010 conference which took place in December in London.

The new installation is slightly different to the original one in that it comprises computer screens playing IKM-related digital stories (see photograph).  Here is a slide show featuring photographs of the new installation at ICTD2010.

And why is IKM Emergent concerned to have installations at large conferences? If you consider that IKM is a campaign for slow knowledge and a space for innovation and reflection, both installations are designed to encourage new ways of thinking about information and knowledge. The installations are important in terms of both content and form. As content, they highlight diverse issues and, as form, – visualisation – they aim to facilitate innovation and new perspectives. They also represent – again as form – a new way of doing things at academic conferences.

The first one represents an interview with Hannah Beardon and is based on her IKM Working Paper No 7 Where are the ripples?, written with Kate Newman in 2009:

The next is based on an interview with Julian Jenkins, and is concerned with  the very recent IKM Working Paper No. 10 Things can be better than they:

And, the third and final digital story, is concerned with a paper by Iina Hellsten and myself on Using semantics to reveal knowledge divides in Dutch development cooperation

The Knowledge Management Impact Challenge, sponsored by USAID and conducted in collaboration with KM4Dev, aims to accelerate this discovery process by creating a space where this dialogue can thrive and we can gather and exchange stories and explore different avenues of what works and what doesn’t. Over the coming months we invite you to share how you tackle this challenge, reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of the tools used, and compare lessons learned across an international community.

From 1st December until 30 January we will be collecting case stories to capture the diversity of practitioner experience in this area.  To get the Challenge moving we are offering an early entry award, with all case stories submitted by 31^st December eligible for a USD $1,000 professional development grant.  In addition at least five case story authors will receive a travel award to share their experience at the upcoming KM Impact Challenge unConference in Washington, DC

We know that this is a busy period for everyone but hopefully it is also a time of reflection, as you write your end of year reports think about the types of data and evidence you would like to have at your fingertips and please share your thoughts on this topic with us.  Case stories collected will be featured on the Challenge web site and reviewed by a diverse Technical Advisory Group to help make sense of what’s happening in practice. Discoveries from the review of case stories and pre-existing literature will feed the peer-learning process both online and at the KM Impact Challenge unConference proposed for March, 2011.  We also invite you to explore our collection of online resources relevant to these questions and would welcome your contributions of relevant documents that you feel are particularly pertinent to these questions.