I argue that businesses are encountering the effects of our current demographic situation. China and India both have many people who will soon retire, but they also have many young people who can take over vacant jobs. Europe and North America also have many people who will soon retire, but they do not have a new workforce to fill in the empty spaces. This means that businesses should find ways to work with a limited workforce; a workforce that is no longer constrained to the location of the business.

Phillip Longman also summarize some critical facts about this population bomb the world is facing. He argues that:

1. There is a 50 percent chance that the population will be falling by 2070, according to a recent study published in Nature. By 2150, according to one U.N. projection, the global population could be half what it is today.
2. Those who predict a coming Asian Century have not come to terms with the region's approaching era of hyper-aging. Japan, whose *lost decade* began just as its labor force started to shrink in the late 1980s, now appears to be not a exception, but a vanguard of Asian demographics. South Korea and Taiwan, with some of the lowest birth rates of any major country, will be losing population within 15 years. Singapore's government is so worried about its birth dearth that it not only offers new mothers a "baby bonus" of up to about $ 3,000 ....

Especially point 2 shows a different view of what worldmapper.org is showing with its data from 2002 (which I used for my article). Data should be seen through the eyes of intellectual reasoning, like the article written by Philip Longman. Then we are really generating new knowledge.

Foreign aid and migration forced powerful transnational links, but nothing demonstrates better the sheer speed of change than the advances made in telecommunications. The delta had long been neglected in this respect. For example, in the 1970s it was a familiar experience to see a high official pick up one of several brightly coloured telephones on his desk and start shouting at the top of his voice in an attempt to make his words reach a colleague in the same city over the crackle of static and cross-wired conversations. Thirty years later, it was almost as common to see an illiterate village woman saunter over from her hut with no electricity to a neighbour's house, switch on a mobile phone and talk quietly to her son in Dubai. Within a generation, the way information travelled around the Bengal delta had been revolutionised. In the 1970s most Bangladeshis depended on word of mouth, newspapers, letters, telegrams and radio. A non-local telephone call took hours to arrange, and television was beyond the means of middle-class families. By the 1980s television came within their reach and began to spread to the rural areas, followed by mobile phones and all kinds of portable electronic devices. Even now electricity had not reached many parts of the countryside - but towns were connected and information about the outside world spread much more rapidly than before. Today the Bangladesh middle classes also have  become enthusiastic participants in global cyberspace: numorous Bengali founts are now available online, and Bangladeshi websites and discussion groups are multiplying rapidly. 

-----------------------

Last couple of months I have been working on rolling out social bookmarking in an organisation. You would probably think: why social bookmarking? Luis Suarezonce labelled social bookmarking in his post The Business Case for Enterprise Social Bookmarking: $4.6 Million a Year in Cost Savings as "one of the fundamental pillars from Enterprise 2.0". And I believe that it is a powerful tool which organisations can use to enhance both internal and external knowledge sharing.

After rolling out a start-up programme in using Delicious as social bookmarking platform for a couple of the client's staff members, I moved to a part in which I offered them a way or strategy how they should re-use personal social bookmark collections in order to enhance internal and external knowledge sharing.

To me social bookmark tools - together with all the other social media tools - can only become a success when staff members are using these tools from a personal point of view. If the staff member can answer the question:"what is it in for me?", it could become a big success.

So, will a staff member answers the question 'what is it in for me' positively when an organisation imposes many rules and restrictions on the use of social bookmarking (like you need to include this tag, or you cannot add stuff that is related to things outside working hours). No, the adaptation to social bookmarking will not be embraced and therefore organisations should give staff members to social bookmark what they want.

Another issue why organisations should not impose rules & regulations on the use of social bookmarking, is that it will then become fun to social bookmark, but also messy and fragmented. In particular these two elements are crucial for a learning culture. Dave Snowden once listed the 7 principles on rendering knowledgeand three of them relate to the messiness and fragmentation. He argues that:

1. Knowledge can only be volunteered, it cannot be conscripted;
2. we only know what we know when we need to know it, and;
3. everything is fragmented

So this means that organisations should let staff members do what they want to do with their PERSONAL social bookmark accounts. With regard to Delicious, this means that organisations should not ...:

1. ... ask staff to add a unique tag when it is organisational-related;
2. ... ask staff to forward the specific social bookmark directly to someone in charge of keeping organisational bookmark accounts clean;
3. ... ask staff to mark bookmarks as private if not related to the organisation
4. ... ask staff to social bookmark in a common social bookmark account (i.e.just one account for the whole organisation)

It is clear that all of the four potential strategies are harming a learning culture in which internal and external knowledge sharing improves. Because how nice would it be to find out that somebody in the organisation is also bookmarking about fishing and you like this too. By letting staff bookmark what they want an organisation is certainly improving internal knowledge sharing / communication. Social bookmarking is then becoming the organisational water cooler where conversations flow. But on the other hand, when you let everybody bookmark what they want, an organisation cannot automatically re-use and re-mix it on, for example, the organisational website or publish it on Twitter through whichFlipboard can make a content-specific magazine uniquely to the organisation. Ways that improve the external communication and knowledge sharing

To make sure that social bookmarking is helping on both sides (internal and external knowledge sharing) I propose a social bookmarking adaptation strategy.

Not surprisingly I argue that there should be a moderator. This could be someone who already made his or her living to filter information. In organisations they are often known as librarians, or in modern times they are called information professionals or brokers. These people should moderate the accounts of colleagues and filter the ones interested to the organisation into an organisational account. This is how an organisation can maintain a clean list of high-valuable resources.

This strategy is about that the organisation is pulling the content from staff instead of that staff is pushing content to the organisation. 

In April 2001, human rights groups reported that a tramp steamer, MV Etireno, was heading for the Ivory Coast with as many as two hundred children on board destined for forced labour on the cacao farms. The story played all around the world. Journalists headed for West-Africa and found how easy it was to gather evidence of child labour. (p. 18)

The chocolate companies buckled. They pledges to identify and eliminate the worst forms of child labour in 50 per cent of the cacao farms in West Africa by July 2005. The agreement became known as the Harkin-Engel protocol” (p. 18)

Hawksley went back to the Ivory Coast in 2005 to find out whether the cacao industry changed.

Kante (a local representative of the Canadian organisation Save the Children) and I sat under a shaded area under the outside steps coming down from the first floor. I showed him a copy of the Harkin-Engel protocol. We translated key parts of it to him, telling him that the chocolate companies had promised to end slavery. Surprise and disbelief spread across his face. 

‘I don’t know anything about this, he said’. 

‘So nobody has been here to talk to you about it?’

‘Nobody’ (p. 20)

Kante was a representative of a Canadian organisation! Still, this kind of crucial information that can make people like Kante stronger in battling child labour did not reach them. Therefore it is crucial that NGOs, research insitutions and other types of global development organisations should find ways to create and share knowledge. This is exactly what the Focuss.Info Initiative aims to do:

promoting the use of the latest information sharing and collaboration tools, technologies and skills in order to improve the exchange and access to information and knowledge in global development studies and research.

Tip: by printing it out double-sided it is an easy-to-use instruction leaflet

Take Pablo Andres Rivero Morales from Bolivia for example. For his workshop he used many different collaborative tools. YouTube to spread videos, Slideshare to spread his presentations, and Scribd to spread and collaborate on producing documents.

All these tools are crucial for the success of networked infrastructure. However, people should know how to use these tools before it can benefit cross-border, cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary information & knowledge sharing. That's why the Focuss.Info Initiative is encouraging peers from all over the world to use this tools, as well as Focuss starts collaborating with institutes and NGOs from all over the world. Focuss cannot make this change alone; Focuss needs to work on this together with the institutes and NGOs. 

Therefore I want to say to the institutes and NGOs out there: start rolling out workshops and ongoing educational service on how to use the latest tools and techniques to improve the access to information and knowledge in global development studies & research.

But what does this exactly mean? Why should institutes or NGOs be bothered? When using these tools, we can improve information and knowledge sharing because the information and knowledge is saved - and thus available - on the Internet. Is this a benefit? Yes! Let me show you this through one example.

Richard Heeks, professor at the University of Manchester, recently shared an Excel sheet via Google Docs. Google Docs is similar to all the tools I just summarised: it is social. With social I mean that you share it with others, and others can re-use and/or re-mix it. The Excel sheet is a large data-set that compares mobile and Internet penetration from 1998 to 2009 in the rich and poor countries. And because this data is available on the Internet, I downloaded the file and used parts of the data because I wanted to know how good or bad Bangladesh is doing in comparison to its neighbouring countries regarding mobile and Internet penetration. Within 30 minutes I got the following results:

In this image of Internet penetration we can see that Bangladesh (yellow) is not doing good when you compare it with neighbouring countries. 

In the following two images we can see that more people are connected to the internet via mobile communication instead of broad band (which is not a very shocking outcome). However, by re-using data like these we can better understand or motivate people on what we should focus on (should the Focuss.Info Initiative focus on social bookmarking via a stand-alone computer connected to the broad band, or should we focus on social bookmarking tools on the cell phone?). Additionally, these graphs also show that the field of global development aid cannot forget Bangladesh. That's one of the reasons why the Focuss.Info Initiative is planning a two-day conference in Dhaka, Bangladesh in the beginning of 2011.

Another remarkable development in this graph is the fact that the Internet is far more penetrated in the Maldives than in its neighbouring countries. It is clear that as of 2004 the Maldives increased its penetration to Internet substantially, and 2004 was also the same year in which a Tsunami hit the coastal region of the Indian Ocean. My first thought is that after the Tsunami the Maldives invested heavily in Internet penetration, because at the time of the Tsunami the Maldives experienced a lack of access to information. As a result, people at the Maldives couldn't responds faster. And this slow reaction had catastrophic consequences for the Maldives. Besides the deaths and dislocations, the Maldives faced serious damage to critical infrastructure. The total damage was estimated at more than 400 million US dollars, or some 62 percent of the GDP. As a result, the international community (under the leadership of the UNDP) established the Aid Coordination Project which supported the government in strengthening government owned information management systems, assessing the capacity need of key ministries, identify training need, and facilitating the implementation and delivery of external resources.

Knowing all this, the next interesting step would be to figure out whether my gut feeling about (a) the increase of Internet penetration was due to the lack of access to information and knowledge, and if this was the case (b) did the increase of Internet penetration improve the access and exchange of information and knowledge?

The Focuss.Info Initiative aims at improving the exchange and access to information and knowledge, a fundamental human right that strengthens democracy. In order to improve the exchange and access to information and knowledge in the domain of global development research and studies successfully, the Initiative assists individuals and institutes in the developed as well as developing countries in advancing an information infrastructure by inducing skills and abilities to create and share information and knowledge in a cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural and cross-border network. 

To keep it more simple: the workshops cover social networking approaches, strategies and tools in general and induce students, researchers and practitioners in the field of global development studies and research how they can best use the latest information sharing and collaboration tools specifically. There are many reasons why this is needed. One of the arguments is that these tools let us form social networks in which individuals act, but the network of individuals also provides resources such as social memory that individuals and groups can exploit. However, there is also another less-known argument which is, according to the Australian political scientist John Keane, a development-in-the-make.

He argues that there are experiments going on in the age of the Internet- and he believes that China is at the cutting-edge -where governments cleverly are developing tools for using the Internet, to control the Internet for undemocratic ends. For example, through the recruitment of - what he calls - Internet debaters, or 50 cents bloggers. If on the Internet a firestorm develops - a protest - against the authorities, the communist authorities, then one way of dealing with it is to recruit a million of two who respond and who swamp the protest with their own pro-government views. It is a very 21st century cutting edge development.

We are more and more moving to this development, because governments cannot censor people anymore. One reason is because they want to pretend that they are good leaders and when they arrest someone on the Internet, for example Han Han from Shanghai who only in 2009 had 330 million visitors, it will create a revolution. That’s why China - and perhaps other countries - are looking for other ways to influence the public opinion.

 At the same time, the Internet is a crucial way for individuals to share information globally in an instant. This is a pressure that those regimes have been confronted with before. So these regimes are investing a lot of resources to come up with ways to tackle this problem. And these regimes are very capable in also using the latest technologies. For example, even though individuals or a protester can document a violation of human right with a cell phone, the same cell phone is also leaving a finger print, your whereabouts, your contacts, your social network, and that can be used against you by these regimes. That’s why I believe that indivuals should become better to use the latest information sharing and networking tools by making them: 

• information literate (how can individuals evaluate information so that they can judge their decisions on qualitative information);
• computer literate (how to use device and tools which are connected to the Internet and which are connecting the world as a whole)
• network literate (a crucial competence of individuals is that they should occupy roles such as brokers and/or facilitators and therefore they should also have networking competences).

After mentioning in the previous weblog post that there are two incentives in global development aid why they should embrace global KM initiatives and in the other weblog postabout how institutes, NGOs and many more of these clubs should roll-out a global KM initiative, I will now show you an example of global knowledge sharing initiative in the field of global development cooperation. 

The Focuss.Info Initiative

The Focuss.Info Initiative is a cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural community in the field of global development cooperation who are collaborating on sharing knowledge.

Cross-disciplinary because everybody who is a part of this platform are somehow involved in global development cooperation, but each of them have specialised him or herself in a different topic in this domain. Focuss includes - for example - researchers in food security, individual practitioners in women empowerment or students in climate change issues.

Cross-cultural because the people who are targeted by and involved in the Focuss Initiative are from the whole world. From Europe to Africa, to Asia, to North America. From Bolivia, to Nepal, to Zimbabwe, to the United Kingdom. From Nyanza in Kenya, to Götaland in Sweden, to Sabah in Malaysia.

So, the Focuss Initiative is trying to impact a global discipline through local engagement.Focuss aims at enhancing the exchange of information and knowledge between the Global North and Global South, and improve the access to this information and knowledge.

Let me illustrate this by showing a screenshot of one of the pages on Focuss. On first sight it looks like a regular search engine. But appearance deceives. It is more than only a Google type of search engine because this search engine is only indexing the qualityselected websites on the Internet. As a result, the search results consists of hand-picked resources from not only librarians, but also students, researchers and individual practitioners from the Global North and South.

This generates added value to global development cooperation, because local resources are becoming more visible. Google - for example - let’s us search through all the resources it can index on the Internet. And this is quite something, because in 2008 Google announced on their weblog that - at that time - it had indexed 1 trillion unique URLs (1.000.000.000.000). You can imagine what kind of noise it generates when searching for domain specific topics.

But how does Focuss indexes the quality-selected websites of all these peers? This all has to do with the first ability that people should possess in network-based work environments: structural knowledge.

Social bookmarking as structural knowledge

Focuss encourages peers to start using social bookmarking. The main reason why peers should start with social bookmarking is not that they should do it for the benefits of Focuss. Focuss encourages peers to start with social bookmarking as a way to work more efficient for themselves, because if peers are social bookmarking, they can then always access their favorite websites, as long as they have a computer connected to the Internet.

Focuss also encourages social bookmarking because this information sharing and collaboration tool makes it possible to work more effectively in the domain of global development cooperation because personal knowledge can be fed into collective knowledge base. And Focuss is becoming such a collective knowledge base, because by indexing the social bookmark accounts of peers, it is making the hand-picked resources accessible, and therefore enhance the exchange of information and knowledge. This is the reason why the Focuss Initiative passes on structural knowledge regarding social bookmarking to its peers.

Local empowerment as cultural knowledge

As the Focuss.Info Initiative is promoting the usage of social bookmarking on a global level, it cannot induce every individual - from Sweden to Nepal to Botswana to Bolivia - exactly the same way. Cultures and the conditions under which peers share knowledge are very different from each other. But, as mentioned earlier, in order to become successful in a global KM initiative, we should promote a real and transparent culture in which peers from all over the world are willing to share their domain specific knowledge.

Saving your favourite websites, your knowledge of valuable resources, on the Internet, can give an uncomfortable feeling, because knowledge was seen as power and as your competitive advantage. This way of thinking and working does not fit when using social bookmarking, and therefore individuals should change its culture. In most cases learning how to use the new collaborative technologies cannot be done without changing the culture. And this change cannot be realized by giving the same workshops or presentations from the shelf. In every culture people induce each other in an other way.

Additionally, Focuss is coordinated on limited resources. In order to coordinate this Initiative, we only use 15 hours per week. This limitation shows that it is not possible to facilitate workshops all over the world. Therefore, Focuss supports the work of workshop facilitators from Africa, Asia and South America both financially and intellectually.

Workshop facilitators are getting the opportunity to organise a workshop in their own local area. Librarians, researchers, students or others who are interested in the latest information sharing and collaboration tools - and who are from Africa, Asia or South-America - can apply for a workshop grant. Because the workshops are facilitated in different continents, countries and regions, we give the workshop facilitators the freedom how they organize this workshop. However, they should describe this in a workshop proposal.

Even though I say they will have the freedom, the workshop facilitators from Africa, Asia or South-America should still have to comply with two minor requirements. They need to focus on social bookmarking as a way to share and create knowledge, and they need to document everything on their own weblog.

The requirement to include social bookmarking within the workshops is because - as I told you before - the search engine incorporated in the Focuss website is only harvesting and indexing the websites that have been selected and stored in social bookmarking accounts (such as Delicious.com) from peers in global development cooperation.

The requirement to maintain a workshop dairy on a weblog is that through this the workshop facilitator can get more information and knowledge from the readers and connect with workshop participants before and after the workshop, but it also gives the workshop facilitators a platform to show how they persuade a local community to use social bookmarking and change their culture in order to work and learn in network-based environments.

Conclusion

So, if we want to start a knowledge sharing initiative, we should think of 3 crucial elements in order to make a success out of it.

First of all we should embrace network-thinking, because the world is increasingly being shaped by organisations and network of organisations, and therefore individual system thinkers are, ultimately, of little significance. Staff members will increasingly be working at many levels, within and beyond organisations, in teams and networks that span industry and communities. In the Focuss example network-thinking is important, because the move from educated and well-resources in developing countries to developed countries is a fact, and cannot be stopped so easily. Therefore it is crucial to create cross-border networks to maintain the access to information and knowledge.

Secondly, organisations should focus on knowledge flows rather than knowledge stocks. This means that organisations should change themselves from controlling what is happening in the organisation to distributing. Focuss is therefore not an initiative that is controlling the quality-selected content on the Internet. It is facilitating a way to distribute it to others.

Thirdly, and finally, organisations should induce peers with structural knowledge - how to use the social technology to ease the connection - and cultural knowledge - how to create a human culture to enhance the willingness to connect. Focuss is doing this by encouraging peers to adapt to social bookmarking - which is the structural knowledge - and by creating a culture where people still have the ownership over what they are doing on the Internet - which is the cultural knowledge.

After mentioning in the previous weblog post that there are two incentives in global development aid why they should embrace global KM initiatives, I will now continue to explain how institutes, NGOs and many more of these clubs should roll-out a global KM initiative. It will be a bit of theoretical background to the third and final weblog post in this collection, which is about the Focuss.Info Initiative and will be submitted at the end of this week.

Moving from knowledge stocks to knowledge flows

By focussing on knowledge flows we manage to get the latest information and knowledge that is available. Let me give you an example.

Think about the old fashioned KM way. We work on a project and at the end of this project we write a report that describes the process. After writing such a report it is often stocked in a database, and will be made retrievable to others who might be interested in this specific knowledge about running a project.

A year later, a colleague is starting a new project. She accesses the database and uses some time to find and evaluate documents that could help her to manage her project in a good way. She finds the document from this colleague, but it is already one year old, and what was the context of that particular project? Is it applicable to this project, because in a year time some things could have changed a lot.

So, in this so-called old-fashioned KM way, people are creating stocks of knowledge which is time-consuming. We need to make knowledge explicit, phrase language so that it can be understood by others, and eventually others should retrieve the knowledge in a database.

And by making knowledge explicit we also lose a lot of context: the context we need to know in order to judge whether it is applicable in an other situation. Dave Snowden, one of the major KM thinkers of this time, argues in one of his most-cited weblog posts that "we always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down". So, he argues that the process of taking things from our heads, to our mouths to our hands involves loss of content and context.

Therefore it is important to focus on knowledge flows. Get in contact with the person who managed the project, follow her, and tap into her current knowledge base. And by starting conversations, we can create a stimulus for recall, because we only know what we know when we need to know it. Small verbal or non-verbal clues can provide these ah-ha moments when a memory is recalled.

Cultural impact on knowledge flows

Snowden also argues that knowledge can only be volunteered and it cannot be conscripted. We cannot go to someone - virtually or physically - and ask him or her to share knowledge. We cannot make someone share their knowledge. We first need trust someone fully before this person will share his or her knowledge. Therefore KM initiatives should create a culture of trust and transparency.

And when we start to embrace the latest information sharing and collaboration technologies, we often do not know each other because we can be someone from the other side of the world, and by using these technologies we are often missing the physical contact.

We therefore need to obtain new skills or conditions in order to be trusted in networks and to be successful in knowledge sharing initiatives. We need to change our culture where we are working in, because for decennia we created trusted bonds by looking straight in the eyes. By using these new information sharing and collaboration tools we often cannot do this, and this can give an uncomfortable feeling (sharing something without knowing the other person). In order to make sure that people are not becoming uncomfortable with these situation - situations which will be more common than rare - we should also focus on the cultural issues when launching a KM initiative.

2-folded strategy to roll-out global KM initiatives

Working in a network-based environment is indeed requiring new cultural abilities. KM initiatives should therefore focus on two abilities. I describe these abilities as promoting structural knowledge and cultural knowledge. 

Structural knowledge means that people should have the ability - or the knowledge so to speak - to use the new information sharing and collaboration tools. This ability helps people to benefit the ease to connect, which eventually helps them better to collaborate and tap into ongoing conversations.

But what are technologies that improve the ease to connect worth when there is no willingness to connect? Therefore, people should also have the ability to work in these new cross-border and cross-cultural collaborative environments. And in my view this kind of culture should feel real and enhances transparency.

This two-folded approach of structural and cultural knowledge has successfully been adopted in the field of global development cooperation with the Focuss.Info Initiative. The third, and final, weblog post will describe more about this