Reflection, reflexivity and emergence

In the last three weeks I have encountered IKME programme participants’ ability to be reflective and reflexive on three separate occasions. I think it is worth describing these occasions and trying to draw out why methods based on reflection and reflexivity might be important to a programme that wants to develop ways of working which value emergent knowledge production. Might observations about and greater familiarity with reflexive social research methods be  one of the generalisable contributions to thinking in the km4dev domain that the IKME programme could make?

When WG2 met in Brussels at the beginning of October group members were able to reflect on what they had and hadn’t achieved over the course of the last year, as well as to spend some time thinking about how they were working together. For some working group members taking the time to think about this had led them to understand what they were doing differently: they were able to notice things that they might not otherwise have noticed and to recognise patterns and relationships between aspects of work in which they were involved. Not everyone agreed, however. For some group members, particularly those from a more orthodox IT background, were less used to reflecting on what they were doing and why, and were more used to having formal planning procedures that led to a product being produced to a specific time frame. They were neither practised nor particularly comfortable with ways of working which might appear to lack more formal discipline. Having such voices in the group is also important since it obliges those of us who might argue for more reflection to reconsider our positions and to articulate more clearly why we think it is important. There is a generative tension between what might appear to be contradictory tendencies in the group, between those who want to spend time reflecting on how our thinking has changed about what it is we are involved in, and those who are concerned that we get on and produce products that demonstrate what we are talking about and are useful to people in the ‘South’.

Reflections on a Local Content strand in IKMemergent

Peter Ballantyne and I are researching the state of play in Local Content and whether or how its importance can be moved up the scale of development priorities. The video included in this post summarises progress to date as well as my initial reactions and reflections on what we have encountered .

I find it hard to write concisely, although as you’ll see from the video, that’s probably because I find it hard to speak concisely.  I communicate best in diagrams but none suggest themselves to me to describe our progress and how I understand my thinking is evolving.  So this video contains a spoken narrative over a mixed media presentation.

Our work so far has been mainly preparatory. The next phase centres on a 1.5 day workshop in Brussels in October 09. The participants will also be participating in 2.5 days of the KM4Dev 09 workshop which we hope will mean that our discussions about Local Content are contextualised in a broader discussion around issues to do with Knowledge Sharing. It also means that we will be with the participants from the IKM workshop for four days in all, which will enrich our conversations. I believe the workshops are going to be the central element of our project.   I will post later on the aims of that workshop and after it finishes

This video is about 18 minutes long so you may want to get a cup of tea or coffee, or something stronger.

Pete Cranston

Inventory of networks

I just posted the inventory of networks which Joitske Hulsebosch compiled last year after the KM4Dev annual meeting – it was based on a list that a group of us had put together there – to KM4Dev as a Google document, allowing everyone to access (and even edit.)  This was the second time I had posted the link but I had heard from a few colleagues that they had no longer been able to access it.

When I went back to look for another Google document a few minutes later, I found to my surpirse that there were 5 people looking at the document – and more had already been and gone. The 5 included one evaluation guru – although he would hate to be identified as such -, one influential Web 2.0 consultant and thinker, someone from the World Bank and a very well-known information professional from Asereca. It was almost alarming to see such an amount of interest.

Who owns the truth?

On 24 June 2009, IKM Emergent Working Group 3 organised a afternoon-long public meeting at the Institute of Social Studies inThe Hague.

The objective of the meeting was to present some of IKM Emergent’s recent thinking and research to interested members of the development community in The Netherlands. Although we probably tried to present too much in too short a time, it has led to more detailed interaction with three organisations with interaction with another in the offing.

Two of the presentations, Martha Chinouya on Ethnographic research in the search of the truth and by Iina Hellsten on Scientometrics and semantic maps for development – and the overview slide – can be found as the Who owns the truth? event on Slideshare

Research into participatory processes: what happened?

Kate Newman and I have been working with the IKM Emergent Research Programme to develop some research into the flow (and use) of information generated by participatory processes, with a particular focus on international development organisations. This is the story of our experience to date…

Digital storytelling in Sri Lanka – a preliminary discussion of evaluation

Introduction to Michael and his environment

Michael David has been involved long term in community development projects in Sri Lanka and is part of a network of concerned family, friends and colleagues who do whatever they can to access funds, provoke discussion and thinking, or undertake projects. Michael and colleagues are maven-like in making applications to donors, bringing people together, starting debates. All of this takes place within a highly politicised and polarised environment in Sri Lanka, where the long-running conflict gets taken up in daily relations between people, and where every initiative can be perceived to be supporting this side or that side. To a large extent, all lives are governed by the war.

Visiting the Athena Institute

Last week I paid a flying visit to the Athena Institute at the VU University to talk about planned collaboration with Iina Hellsten. In the context of the research programme for IKM Emergent Working Group 3, Iina and I are planning to work together to investigate knowledge domains in development – research, policy and practice -  using some of the tools with which Iina is familiar, such as bibliometrics and science metrics.

Wikis and visualisation tools

IKM Emergent’s new website is based on a wiki, a mediawiki wiki which is a type of wiki which can be uploaded onto your own server. Mediwiki was orignally developed for Wikipedia. But what is a wiki?

Creating images from words

I just came across this really nice tool called Wordle  which I think may have some value for us in making content visible. To try it out, I used the text for a forthcoming article on IKM which will be appearing soon in the EADI Newsletter. This is not really a definitive version because I think the colours are not yet right - and I also I am thinking about how to keep terms like knowledge management together in the image. But I think you’ll have to admit that it is really great and has potential in the way it makes content visible. You can use it for any sort of text and then you copy and paste the image into Paint in your computer before saving as a jpeg. And then you can do whatever you like with it as long as your acknowledge that it comes from Wordle.

 I have also sent the image around to the IKM Programme members’ Dgroup but it has not yet arrived.

Complexity theory and the Steering Group Meeting in Amsterdam

A Mandelbrot set

The Broker online magazine recently had a couple of articles on complexity theory, one by Alan Fowler and the second by Willemijn Verkoren summing up a panel discussion of Fowler’s paper. Verkoren mirrors the panel’s ambivalence about the theories and demonstrates some scepticism, asking how we could possibly take up Mandelbrot sets in daily practice, for example. Are these concepts just confusing?

Mandelbrot sets demonstrate fractals, mathematical equations which give rise to self-same regular/irregular patterns which replicate similar shapes at whatever scale of detail you look at them. Many people used to have them as screensavers. The screensaver develops a pattern, homes in on one part of it and magnifies the view so that you can see the pattern developing all over again no matter how fine the degree of detail. There are lots of examples in nature, such as ice crystals or ferns, or even coastlines, for example.

A number of sociologists have made analogous observations about social phenomena, Pierre Bourdieu for example. So in order for a global social pattern to arise, there must be a requirement for those processes to be replicated in micro-interactions between people. We embody social phenomena and contribute to them at the same time: ‘the body is in the social world and the social world is in the body’ in Bourdieu’s formulation. The local interactions and the global social patterns are being formed by, and are forming each other contemporaneously. This is a paradoxical process.