Strategy to improve internal & external knowledge sharing with social bookmarking

This message is also posted on richardlalleman.com and highlights why organisations (or knowledge sharing initiatives such as the Focuss.Info Initiative) should adapt to social bookmarking

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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. 

Why we need to become better in sharing information and knowledge in global development aid?

I am reading the book ‘what’s so good about having to vote: democracy kills’ by Humphrey Hawksley. In the first 20 pages he describes an anecdote about the cacao industry and the cacao plantations in Ivory Coast (which is good for almost 50 % of cacao production). In the 1990s he was already writing about child labour on the cacao plantations. In 2001, child labour in this business got attention all over the world:

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.

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.

Creating a knowledge sharing community: Nobody's owning anything

Via Twitter I received the request to explain a bit more about the Focuss.Info Initiative. Unfortunately, such an explanation demands more characters than only the 140 characters we can use with Twitter. Additionally, such information can already be found on this website. However, let's elaborate on the introduction given to the Focuss.Info Initiative on the website.

The Focuss.Info Initiative’s knowledge sharing environment 

The Focuss.Info Initiative (www.focuss.info) is maintained by, on one hand, a collaboration between students, researchers and individual practitioners and, on the other hand, local, national and international institutes. These different parties have all in common that they are working in the field of global development aid.  The aim of Focuss is to promote new information sharing and networking skills among peers in the domain of global development aid. Through this objective Focuss improves access to information and knowledge, a fundamental human right that strengthens democracy, and supports human rights. This objective also correspondents to the work of UNESCO, which helps to develop effective 'infostructures', including developing information standards, management tools and fostering access at the community level. 

The knowledge sharing structure of Focuss consists of two social media tools. These are the Google Custom Search Engine (Google CSE) and social bookmarking. 

The Google CSE is a social media tool provided by Google that allows you - as a web developer - to include a search engine on your own website. Additionally, web developers can select which websites should be indexed by the search engine. As a result, web developers create a specialized search engine rather than a generic search engine. 

Social bookmarking is the second social media tool used by and embedded within Focuss.    Social bookmarking is a way to store, organize and share favorite e-resources on the Internet. By saving favorite e-resources on the Internet instead of on the local computer, the e-resources are also open to others who might be interested in the area(s) you are bookmarking in. 

By mixing these two social media tools in Focuss, the initiative offers a specific search engine that indexes e-resources from the social bookmark collections of students, researchers and individual practitioners in the field of global development aid.  

However, should students, researchers and individual practitioners actively be involved in selecting and saving their e-resources for the sake of Focuss? No! As Focuss is an initiative that is promoting new information sharing and networking skills among peers in global development aid, it emphasizes more on how peers should manage their valuable e-resources through social bookmarking rather than to promote the search engine. The search engine is just an example of how personal knowledge is re-used for the benefit of the group - the field of global development aid - and the creation of collective knowledge. Therefore, the initiative stresses that peers should acquire the newest information sharing and networking skills in order to work more efficient for themselves and more effective in their own domain of global development aid.

To make sure the field of global development aid is up-to-date with these new kind of information sharing and networking skills, Focuss is a collaborative initiative with partner institutes from all over the world. Through these institutes, the Focuss coordinators are influencing members of these institutes about what the new way of working is. However, as the initiative also aims at bridging the gap between the Global South and North, it is also required to induce peers from areas that used to be less accessible before.

That is why Focuss supports the work of workshop facilitators from Africa, Asia or South-America both financially - by giving out awards - and intellectually - by providing workshop facilitators with direct access to support via the Focuss coordinators and the visitors on www.focuss.info. After giving out an award, the workshop facilitators from the Global South will roll-out local workshops for scholars and professional in global development aid in the use of information sharing and networking tools.

There are only two requirements the workshop facilitator needs to comply to. Firstly, he or she needs to emphasize on social bookmarking with regards to information sharing and networking. This is a requirement, because the search engine incorporated in the website of the Initiative is only harvesting and indexing the websites that have been selected as value and stored in social bookmarking accounts (such as Delicious.com) by peers in global development aid. The ones who are social bookmarkers and who save valuable e-resources in their social bookmark collection are also being shown on www.focuss.info. This makes the initiative transparent, because everybody can see who is adding what to the search engine. As a result, the person who often saves something in his/her personal social bookmark collection, will automatically also become more visible on www.focuss.info and could become a knowledge broker among his/her peers.

News ticker on www.focuss.info indicating latest entry to search engine 

Secondly, the workshop facilitator is required to maintain a dairy of the workshop on a weblog located on the website of Focuss. Every workshop facilitator will have his or her own space on the website. Through this, the workshop facilitator can get more information 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.

The value that the initiative is getting out of this, is that an increasing number of peers in global development aid are starting to embrace social bookmarking as a tool to organize their favorite e-resources and they are indirectly sharing their favorite e-resources with everybody who is interested in these resources, because it is saved on the Internet.

Focuss is also a valuable tool, because it gives an overview of different ways to persuade people to use the latest information sharing and networking tools and technologies from local communities in Africa, Asia and South-America. This means that the area of global development aid gets a better understanding of how global knowledge sharing works best by engage peers intelligently in promoting the latest information sharing and networking tools.

Conclusion

The Focuss.Info Initiative is a good example of a knowledge sharing environment. By sponsoring peers to become workshop facilitators, Focuss encourages engagement. Focuss also reward engagement by giving workshop facilitators and the ones who start with social bookmarking a global platform - www.focuss.info - on which their contributions are visible. As a result, the reward of engagement is that the person who is actively involved in social bookmarking strengthen his/her position as an indispensable networker or knowledge broker within the field of global development aid. 

All with all it should be clear by now that a knowledge sharing environment can be realized by encouraging the use of the latest information sharing and networking tools, because these tools enhance information and knowledge sharing through networking. Additionally, because these tools are open, informal, direct and easy in use, the knowledge sharing environment - such as  the Focuss.Info Initiative - becomes transparent. And transparency is required in order to establish an impartial, proper and professional knowledge sharing environment.