IFLA 2010: A case-study of a global knowledge sharing initiative (3/3)

This blog post is a part of a presentation I gave at the 76th World Library and Information Congress and has already been published on www.richardlalleman.com.

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.

Why should we roll-out global KM initiatives?

This blog post is a part of a presentation I gave at the 76th World Library and Information Congress and has already been published on www.richardlalleman.com.  

In this weblog post I describe two incentives why there is a need for global KM initiatives in particular global development aid. The first one is a domain specific incentive within global development aid and is known as the brain drain of countries in the Global South. The second one is a specific incentive to the domain of KM which argues that organisations should move from managing knowledge stocks to distributing knowledge flows.

Incentive 1: brain gain vs brain drain

To develop as a country, people open doors that were locked before, and they need therefore explore new territories. To make sense of these new territories and decide over the new things they see, feel and hear, the newest knowledge is required. So, what I want to say is that every country is in this process of developing itself and entering new territories. But it depends on the level of knowledge within the countries to successfully make sense of and decide over these new situations. 

And when you are successfully steering your country through new developments, your country will most probably become more developed than the others, and the developed country ends up in a state of prosperity. This prosperity in often wealth, but also happiness and health, creates a magnet to the ones who live in less developed countries and who want to come enjoy the same prosperity. And the ones who can make such a move are often the intellectuals or well-resourced people from a less-developed country. So, you can see that through this the already well-developed countries would then get a brain gain and the less-developed countries a brain drain. 

The brain drain is not only something that is typical to global development cooperation. It is also something that happens among businesses in - especially - Europe and North- America.

On one side, businesses experience that many people will soon retire and, on the other side, there are not enough people to fill in the empty spaces because young people are studying longer. So even though technology is connecting the digital world as a whole through the Internet and mobile communication; the current situation in - especially - Europe and North America - is disconnecting the real world as a whole. 

That’s why there is an increasing notion that we all need to become better in knowledge sharing in a network-based working environment - with the assistance of technology. 

Most people can nowadays get information at very low or no cost without any difficulties. They then can make sense of this information through their social networks. The one who can run this process most successfully will generate new knowledge rapidly and eventually make decisions faster which can be more innovative than others. This shows that information sharing and collaboration tools are crucial to be successful.

Incentive 2: Knowledge Flows

This brings me to the second incentive why organisations should focus on a collaborative platform to share and create knowledge between the global North and South. This has to do with the way how we share knowledge.

Around 15 years ago we experienced the first big focus from organisations in the discipline of KM. Nonaka and Takeuchi introduced a first generation of KM by arguing that tacit knowledge could be transferred to explicit knowledge. And in the same period, computer technology was seen as the solution to every organisational problem. That‘s why organisations started implementing computer technologies for capturing and codifying all of the staff members’ knowledge. But the degree of transfer from tacit to explicit knowledge depended on the necessity; Nonaka and Tackeuchi did not argue that all of the knowledge in the heads and conversations had, should or could have been made explicit. Nonetheless, at that time, IT companies jumped in this new market of KM and promoted a strategy that was aimed at changing knowledge from an organisational liability to an organisational asset by focussing on knowledge stocks.

These knowledge stocks grew out into massive databases in which users increasingly experienced problems finding an answer on their information query, and the database administrators were using excessive resources to keep running the databases. So, KM became a failure and more and more organisations did not understand the added-value of all the financial and human resources it had used to stock the knowledge.

But years after that and with the introduction and implementation of social technology, KM luckily attracted much of the attention back. A reason of this upheaval was that these social technologies, or I prefer to say information sharing and collaboration tools, let us work collaboratively by means of relationships. Because through these relations we can easily start with cross-border and cross-cultural conversations.

Just think about platforms such as MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. Through all of these initiatives, people share knowledge through conversations - even though these people are spread over the world. That’s why the newest technologies enhances knowledge sharing by not focussing on knowledge stocks, but on knowledge flows. I therefore want to argue that in order to be successful in launching a KM initiative, we should apply these latest technologies.