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.

Presentation about social bookmarking with the Danish Development Research Network

I recorded the whole presentation and I was planning to share this together with the presentation. However, the recorded part was not compatible with my work station.  Therefore I am uploading the different slides with some of the information I shared during the presentation.

"One of the reasons why we have breaks in our working days is that we believe that it is good for the brains to give it a small break where it is not being overloaded. The brains need to be rebooted in order to let it work effectively in the second half of the day: the afternoon. Additionally, we need to think of our energy level. Therefore, a break should preferably exclude work-wise things and should preferably include food. Unfortunately, I am going to use your break to introduce a information sharing and collaboration tool which could improve the effectiveness of your daily work in order to contribute to the inclusion of research and research-based knowledge in development assistance. However, before I am taking all the pleasures away of a break, I was thinking of offering you a piece of cake"

"As you already have seen on the first slide, my name is Richard Lalleman. Originally I am from the Netherlands, but since January 2009 I moved to Copenhagen. In the Netherlands I attended a BSc in Library and Information Science. After that I executed projects/initiatives in information management within departments. So, what does the library needs to do in order to push and pull information. However, if organisations want to become innovative and smart, information management principles should be embedded from an organizational point of view. Therefore I moved to London for two years and attended a MSc in Information and Knowledge Management. This education has helped me to implement information and knowledge mgmt initiatives on an organizational level"

"So, currently I am working as independent consultant in the areas of learning, innovation and knowledge management. So how do you create a space where people can make sense and decide over new opportunities with the latest knowledge in a fast way. One of the initiatives I am currently working for is the Focuss.Info Initiative. This Initiative is being facilitated by the Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands."

"The Focuss.Info Initiative is a portal to information and knowledge in the field of global development studies and research on the Internet (www.focuss.info). This information and knowledge is not selected by one person or organisation, it is a collaboration between students, researchers and individual practitioners established through the usage of social media tools."

"These tools deliver high deliverables against a low costs; the tools are freely available and enhance collaboration between individuals who never would have met before without those tools. Furthermore, the tools also promote efficient working methods, such as blogs, search engines and social bookmarking." [I also gave a live tour through www.focuss.info]

"We have all heard about and perhaps used bookmarking techniques while we are researching. [I showed a book that I read with many bookmarks just for me to remember some of the useful parts in the book]"

"In this respect is social bookmarking not rocket science. You have a book, there is a items we want to remember in the future, and make a bookmark by highlighting it or adding post-its. However, bookmarking has been reinvented with the latest Information and Communication Technologies. Therefore, social bookmarking is rocket science because with an overload of information and knowledge, we can easily create our own collection of bookmarks, which is visible to everybody so by maintaining a personal collection, you can automatically share it with people who have the same interests."

[I showed why it is important to use tools on the Internet to make sense of the information overload] "If you only see how many sites FAO.ORG contain (more than 9.000.000), you can imagine the importance of smart tools that can help you to manage your knowledge."

"Now we will look into delicious.com. This platform is one of the platforms that let you collect your favourite sites on the Internet." [I gave a live tour through Delicious.com and highlighted the following items: (1) how to log in, (2) what does the collection overview show us, (3) how to save bookmarks manually and with bookmarking tools, and (4) why is this way of bookmarking 'social'?]

"Firstly, while using social bookmarking to save your internal knowledge of useful websites, you automatically can see who bookmarked the same item, and from there, you can click and see what that person has more in his/her collection. As a result, DDRN is also learning from others and is improving its domain knowledge. Secondly, everybody within DDRN can add easily add bookmarks to the collection with the bookmarking tools. And because everybody can do this, DDRN will create more diversity in its collection of valuable websites. Thirdly, DDRN knowledge can be re-used and re-mixed by themselves on the DDRN website, but also by initiatives like Focuss.Info"

[end of the presentation and after that we had a discussion about how to open up or close down bookmarks from others which have been saved by DDRN. In other words: more using it is as an internal knowledge management tool]

Lunch meeting with Danish Development Research Network about social bookmarking

Next week I will introduce social bookmarking to the staff members of the Danish Development Research Network (DDRN) in Denmark. DDRN is a network linking research-based knowledge and development within the sectors of agriculture, environment, and governance. The overall goal of DDRN is to contribute to the inclusion of research and research-based knowledge in development assistance and in partner countries' development activities.  As a result, the website contains a great collection of valuable e-resources that is being maintained by the staff members.

The presentation, which I will soon upload to this weblog, will kick-off with what social bookmarking is. This will be done in just a couple of minutes, because social bookmarking is not different from what we always did when reading documents/books/papers (highlighting important text and adding bookmarks on the pages which were interesting to you). This activity of bookmarking crucial elements in a book, journal or document can also be done on the Internet.

Within the first Internet browsers, the option to save bookmarks from the Internet was better known as 'bookmark this page' or 'add to favourites'. You could have found a really interesting page on the Internet after complex searches with Google, Bing or other search engines. But what would happen when you log off your computer, could you still find the same e-resource back? In order to make sure that you could retrieve it again, people were bookmarking the pages via the browser. As a result, favourite websites were saved locally on your computer. One of the disadvantages was that the more favourite websites were being saved locally, the more complex the structure of folders became within your Internet browser. Another disadvantage was that when you were not behind the computer where the favourite websites were stored, you could not access the collection of favourite websites. As a result, bookmarking services were being launched on the Internet. Delicious.com is one of the platforms where people save their favourite websites on the Internet. Thus, via Delicious.com you can access your favourite websites wherever you are. The only requirement is that there is an Internet connection.

But what makes bookmarking platform on the Internet, such as Delicious.com, social? The social aspect is that it lets you see the links that others have collected, as well as showing you who else has bookmarked a specific site. In order to make sense of this, I will browse through a test account for DDRN on delicious (http://delicious.com/ddrntest).

First of all, the presentation about social bookmarking in general and Delicious.com specifically will result in showing the staff members of DDRN that by doing an individual and administrative activity - saving a favourite website for the DDRN resource collection - it is automatically being shared with other people than only the users of the DDRN website.  This improves the visibility of the DDRN.

Secondly, the DDRN can also follow other users on a social bookmark platform who have the same interests and perhaps can lead to a better overview of valuable e-resources within DDRN's themes.

Thirdly, the data in DDRN social bookmark account (the favourite websites) can easily be merged/integrated in other social media tools or the own website of DDRN. For example, Focuss.Info is embedding an open-source search engine from Google. This search engine is indexing the accounts of peers from all over the world who are only bookmarking in the field of global development studies and research. As a result, Focuss.Info generates specific search results and results in less noise for peers than generic search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo.  Furthermore, the e-resources indexed by Focuss.Info are not only selected by librarians, but also students, researchers and individual practitioners.

So, if DDRN is dedicated to contribute to the inclusion of research and research-based knowledge in development assistance, they would be better off to continuing to save favourite e-resources on (open) social bookmarking platforms, rather than to maintain this in their closed content management system.  It is the task of DDRN to facilitate ways that push information to as many people as possible in a low-cost and efficient-friendly ways, and pull valuable information which could be mentioned on the DDRN website.