In this post Sula Batsu co-ordinator Kemly Camacho talks about  the work her organisation is doing with communities in Costa Rica. Kemly gives a very good account of the value of reflection and reflexivity, as well as setting out her ideas about the importance of knowledge, self-knowledge, in communities.

About Sulá Batsú

Sulá Batsú is a co-operative of new-generation professionals, which has now been going for five years.  We are a group of 20 and are also interested in exploring the co-operative model though sustained reflection. Our organisation is partly a response to the unemployment problem in Costa Rica where graduates are unable to find jobs locally, or are sucked out to work in northern countries and institutions or multi-nationals. The co-operative offers employment opportunities for young professionals from two principal domains, social science and ICT.

When co-operative members reflect on the model they stop working and talk about the group interactions and what these mean for the work, since we all own the enterprise. We use a mentor who sits with us to collect our reflections twice a year during the two to three days that we sit together. We also take account of power relationships between us. There is a 12 month trial period before people can apply to be new members of the co-operative, which involves asking the existing assembly of members to be accepted. The collective decides everything. Currently we have more women members than men, since men seem to prefer to have more things under their own control and to manage contract workers rather than work with other co-operative workers. We also have a strong social dynamic in the co-op and spend time eating and partying together.

In the interim we have a strong capacity development programme for associates which can involve teaching languages, research training or supporting them to do MAs or PhDs. We have yet to decide as a co-operative whether putting people on academic courses means we should then oblige them to stay with us for a number of years.

Sulá Batsú is a research organisation that works as a collection of projects. We use a project management model that will draw on 2-3 people at a time according to what the project needs: no one ever works by themselves, and no team will ever be the same from project to project. We are action research oriented with a focus on knowledge sharing and connecting multiple knowledges. It is our intention to connect multiple knowledges by creating spaces for this to happen. Our goal is always to produce something: a policy, an action, a programme of work. Our aim is to enhance the collective, to amplify the social nature of communities and to develop new methods for achieving this. Our intention is to develop training methods and trainers who can work with these approaches and to be conscious of the centrality of power to these discussions.

We are not naïve that sharing knowledge is always a good thing for communities. For example Big Pharma has a habit of eliciting knowledge from indigenous communities and then commercialising it. We have to keep coming back to the question as to whose knowledge we are dealing with and how to respect it and not get caught in the middle of a conflict. We are interested in the question as to how to do business with open knowledge. On the one hand we publish everything we produce, put it online and believe in the creative commons: on the other hand we have to be a sustainable organisation. We have researched this topic and have explored our own model but we are still talking these issues through.

Nor do we think that local content is particularly helpful because the idea of content says nothing about the processes which have produced it: these are just as important. We are interested in the process of local knowledge production because we are concerned that local communities should come to understand themselves better and perhaps increase their self-esteem through hearing their own voices. The idea of local content is one aspect of this but is the product. In helping communities to develop more self-knowledge we are aware that ICT is only one medium for doing so. We are concerned also to help communities strengthen their own media.

Sulá Batsú and IKME

To do this we work with local infomediaries so that they can assist with the transformation of their own communities. With IKME we have three projects: in the first project we have been working with a group of children aged 7-11 in an urban area for the last nine months or so. In the second project we are working with housewives in a peri-urban area which has a large Nicaraguan immigrant population, and in the third project we are working with young people in a mixture of rural, peri-urban and urban areas which focuses on what life is like for young people in these areas.

One aspect of this project is to encourage research about how these communities became: who is there and how did they get there? What are the most important events and places as far as they concerned in their community’s history? The intention of the projects is to develop the capacity of infomediaries both to research and retell these community histories. Because they are discovering information that is relevant to them and retelling it in their own way it has more meaning for them. In order to identify these infomediaries,  Sulabatsu has been working through local organisations which have an established presence and are recognised and respected by the local communities.

The training of infomediaries involves developing their ability to use Web 2 and oral and visual languages. They experiment with how to create stories using research methods which depend upon interviews and group interpretation. We accompany them so that they can do this. There are three stages: the ‘capturing’ of knowledge, the valuing of it, then the ‘return’ of this knowledge to the local communities who produced it. The infomediaries choose the topic of research: for the young people it was the history of the river which runs through the community. The housewives haven’t yet chosen their topic. To ‘capture’ knowledge there is a lot of work with digital cameras and other digital capture devices. To value it infomediaries organise community meetings to ask people what they value about what has been collected through discussion and argument. Each community has a blog and a research diary which tries to reflect the language and format which is appropriate to the community. The infomediaries and communities decide what is most relevant to them.

The children have chosen games as a topic. With them we have created three different games using photos which tell the history of the community. They have also been working on a performance as a way of ‘returning’ the knowledge to the community. Elsewhere we are using radio and big format photography. The young people want to develop a video but we are still negotiating how this might be ‘returned’ to the community. It is usually the ‘return’ to the community which is the weakest aspect of what we are doing.

The credibility of the local organisations ensures our credibility when we are working with local communities. In the project with children we are working with 3 schools and an environmental organisation. In the second project we are working with a development CBO and in the third project we are working with an organisation concerned with issues of liberty. The community blogs are linked to the websites of the local CBOs/NGOs.

One step of the project informs the next step, so in that sense we don’t know where the projects are heading, although we have a much better sense of what we are doing than we did when we first started. We need to spend time writing up what we are doing since we finish next August. We are developing emerging local knowledge-scapes. There are two degrees of reflexivity: we work with the communities to establish what has changed as a result of the work we are doing together, then as a cooperative we reflect on the work we are doing and the way we are doing it as a way of changing our own practice.

How Sulá Batsú became involved with IKME

As far as the IKME project goes, I came into this from meeting Mike Powell at a conference in Europe. He remembered me when he put the programme together and asked if I would be interested in joining. It is important for each of us in the programme to become more aware of what the others are doing – perhaps when we next meet up we could do a museum exercise with each of us exhibiting what we have been involved in. Would it be useful to develop a glossary of terms as a programme to try to explain what we mean by what we say?

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’.

The second occasion was when I met Kemly Camacho,  who is President of the Sula Batsu co-operative based in Cost Rica, in the British Museum cafe. She told me about the work her organisation is doing with digital story-telling as a project of WG1, which will be the subject of a separate post. One of the things that most interested me about the way her co-operative works is the premium she and her colleagues place on reflexivity. Every six months they sit together for between two and three days to reflect on their work and the way they are working together to do it. So the meetings are not just about monitoring progress, although this is important, but about their day to day working relationships and how power relationships between co-operative members enable and constrain the work. Their way of working together becomes an object of discussion as much as the projects they are undertaking. Not surprisingly, the projects they are undertaking for IKME also involve a form of community reflexivity. Sula Batsu members are working with infomediaries in three separate communities so that they can reflect on their own histories, how they have become. The hypothesis that colleagues are working with is that self-knowledge generated in ways that local communities shape and recognise, leads to them understanding themselves anew and a greater power to act according to their own rediscovered needs. We might think of Sula Batsu members performing a kind of second order reflexivity: they are reflecting on how their working relationships are affecting their ability to support community members to reflect on their working relationships.

Thirdly, in Amsterdam last week the Steering Committee considered two reports, one from the programme director and one from the programme evaluator as a way of reflecting on the programme and their own oversight of the programme. Both reports drew attention to programme achievements but also to some general trends, the patterning of ways of working which were giving the programme its particular shape and direction (both reports are available on D groups). The way the committee chair, Cees Hammelink, conducted the meeting was a significant factor in the way that discussion evolved around the reports, since he was intent on continuously opening up discussion and exploring the consequences. This is a very different way of working to what one might more usually encounter in such groups where there is sometimes a rush to reach a conclusion, or to push the discussion into some kind of dualism (‘was this intervention successful or not, are we on course or not, are we doing the right things or the wrong things?). Rather the discussion might be more accurately called dialectical, where the chair encouraged  interventions from participants as a way of continuously opening up what were talking about. Questioning and observation would lead to more questioning and observation. There was no premium placed on reaching consensus, particularly on the first day, and this sometimes meant our exploring our differences. This was not always easy and sometimes demands sitting with others’ expressed views beyond the point of comfort. One of the reasons that the process of exploring difference can be uncomfortable is that it can challenge the way we see the world, our identities: power relations do not just exist between ‘North’ and ‘South’, but arise between us as we sit in the room discussing together. Another aspect of difference was introduced by the presence of two ‘outsiders’ to the first day of the meeting, who are supportive of the programme but not part of it, nor are they formally part of the Steering Committee. They play an important role in introducing perspectives that those more actively engaged in the programme may be unable to see, and is part of the process of the programme developing its own discourse and engaging with the ‘outside world’ at the same time.

The second half day of the Steering Committee was spent more formally considering the business and planning aspects of programme work, although the tone of discursive reflection continued as we continued to explore difference.

More theoretical bit

What is it that is different about privileging reflection and reflexivity as research methods and how does it link to the idea of emergence? Starting briefly with the idea of emergence first, one definition of emergence is that the general global patterning which arises from an emergent process is not reducible to or predictable from the interactions of agents that contribute to that emergent process. The analytical sociologist Peter Hedstrom describes this as ‘the uncommon combination of common events and circumstances’. It is not that any outcome is possible, since a process is constrained by its particular history and context and by the characteristics of the interacting agents: however, outcomes are probabilistic, and the exact outturn is unpredictable. Novelty is likely to arise in ways which are unforseen in advance of emergent processes running their course.

Working with this definition of emergence produces two important differences between what might be understood as hypothesis testing in a natural science setting and a research project such as IKME which have implications for the choice of research methods. Firstly, in an emergent process there can be no expectation of linear cause and effect and of the ability fully to isolate variables in the experiment to test a hypothesis that one would strive for in a natural science setting. Secondly, in an emergent social process such as the IKME programme, there is no ability to guarantee the objectivity of the researchers, since the programme  researchers are participants in the experiment which is the object of study. Interpretations that researchers are forming as they contribute to the programme begin to shape the programme itself as  participants take up these interpretations in their activities, which the sociologist Anthon Giddens referred to as the ‘double hermeneutic’.

If objectivity is unachievable in the way it is understood in the natural sciences, and the exact outcome of the experiments are predictably unpredictable, how might one proceed in terms of research methods?

One way of understanding the value of reflection and reflexivity in a research programme such as this where we are both subjects and objects in what we seek to explore is as a process of paying attention to the emergent patterning of our interactions as we are engaged in them. Even drawing attention to what we think is happening will affect the outcome that we achieve together because the act of paying attention will both amplify and dampen aspects of our interaction. There is no claim  here that pointing to and describing our emergent inter-patterning will necessarily be either ‘true’ or complete, but the dialectical process of discussion described in the Steering Committee meeting above sets out a way of exposing our interpretations to each other as a way of leavening them, or allowing them to be sifted, tested and moved on. One might consider this a kind of hypothesis testing as a way of producing a more developed group interpretation of what is happening in the programme. Together we are, in Norbert Elias’ terms, trying to become more detached about our involvement. This greater detachment also involves exposing the developing arguments and descriptions to the sometimes chill winds of outside interpretation about whether what participants are engaged in is or isn’t useful. Bumping up against the outside world obliges programme participants to define and articulate what it is they think they are doing more clearly and in doing so they might make their arguments more robust.

One of the things that I am pointing to as the evaluator, then, is what seems to me to be an emerging theme of reflection and reflexivity as a key research method of relevance to the kinds of new ways of working which the programme was set up to explore. If working with multiple knowledges implies a better understanding of emergent social processes and the ways in which different perspectives on the world ineract, what methods are most appropriate for researching these? Does systematic reflection and reflexivity help?

This is also a hypothesis that, in writing about it, I am exposing to comment, reflection and refutation by the reader as a way of ‘testing’ it, exploring it and moving it on.

Over to you.

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

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.

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

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…

Our own experience, working in ActionAid on participatory approaches and methods, since then as consultants in other contexts and, in Kate’s case, researching for a PhD on similar issues, we were aware that there are many institutional and cultural blocks to this type of information flowing appropriately, and being used effectively, in large international organisations. Not wanting to focus on the many problems and frustrations that people like us have felt in trying to promote better use of this type of knowledge and information, we set out to identify and explore some case studies of people, teams and organisations attempting to tackle this problem practically.

Participatory processes is a very broad term, encompassing a huge variety of practices in very different contexts so we had to narrow it down to something practicable and useful, while still leaving the research open enough to really pick up and follow up on the concerns of our peers and colleagues in international organisations.  So we began with a literature review, looking at participation and knowledge management, bottom up learning and downward accountability, as well as the history and main critiques of participatory theories and approaches. From this, and our own experience, we set up a few issues we thought may have an impact on the effective flow of information from participatory processes into the planning, analysis, decision making and policy formulation of international organisations.  We shared this, and the basic thrust of the research with networks and peers, and identified a few case studies. We developed some reflection questions and tools, conducted interviews and developed our analysis further.

It was an emergent process, and through it we narrowed down our focus to the flow of information from grassroots engagment / participation into, through and beyond the international development organisations. We shared the process information and outcomes on the IKM wiki-based website, and in particular on a co-created workspace there on Participation, and have written a paper with our analysis and conclusions.  We are now looking into working with the network we have built through this research to develop further opportunities for sharing and exploration of the issues, and in particular, strategies and products which have been, or could be used to improve the flow of infromation generated through engagement with people and groups at the grassroots.  This will probably take the shape of a workshop, and possibly the outcome of that will be more articles and papers, hopefully including  some practical support and ideas.  The good thing is, this is already really linking in to the work of other networks of international development NGOs in the UK, as well as the parallel research done in Kenya.  The research process also supported and influenced the thinking and planning of some of the participants who provided case studies, helping them to reflect on how they could encourage their colleagues to take the information generated by participatory processes more seriously in their own internal processes.

What has happened to your plans?
We have managed to talk to 5 organisations to generate case studies and understand further the ripples. The time period of the research has been longer than we expected because it has taken longer than we anticipated to get participation from different organisations, (and feedback from IKM) but the final product is what we expected.  We were able to narrow the focus and narrow the question so that we could actually bring the case studies together, and have ideas how to take the work forward.  The nice thing about the programme is that we were allowed to expect an evolving and emergent research process, and that is what we got!

What has happened that you did not expect?
The number of people interested was very high – showing that it is obviously a very relevant question; but many were worried about sharing their own organisation’s experience – and had more to say on the problems than the solution(s).  It was harder than we thought to get people to write up their experiences.

The initial meeting in Cambridge in July 2008 was a little confusing (and frustrating?) as it seemed as though Working Group 1 weren’t sure what they wanted. We thought that there would be more participation from the Working Group but it seems that they just wanted us to go away and do it.  It was a bit disappointing not to get more leads and support/ contacts from them.  At the same time, it was good that they had confidence in us and let us get on with it, supported our process etc.

What has happened that you didn’t want?
Using the wiki as a collaboration tool didn’t really work; we had to write up the case studies, had to chase people a lot to actually get participation. Lots of people were interested, thought the questions were important, but didn’t really want to put in the time, while others wanted to contribute but did not have relevant experience instead were more interested in learning from others.

What have you have found of value in the process?
It was good designing the reflection exercises as it help us focus the discussions more and generate relevant info; also hope that orgs reflect further when we’re not there, and go on to think about how they can build on what they’ve identified as positive etc.  I had a small opportunity to meet others conducting resaerch within the IKM programme during the wiki training and that was very valuable – to see the linkages between the different areas of work and how we could strengthen and learn from each others’ work.

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.

The development environment in Sri Lanka is full of activists, all of whom have their own particular understanding of what the country needs for its development, and some of whom are prepared to be very militant in putting forward their ideas. This will always constrain what Michael can and can’t say in public, whom he invites to his workshops, and with whom he is seen to be forming alliances.

Michael’s interest in KM4Dev is informed by his view that local politics is constrained by limited ways of understanding. He feels he can make a developmental and a political contribution to the situation in his country if he can broaden people’s understandings of ways of seeing, can facilitate their access to different knowledges. Being fluent in English, for example, can open up whole new worlds. He is also modest in his aspirations: he realises that he is not going to change the world, but is feeling his way forward gradually, with others, pursuing his enthusiasms.

The meeting with Mike Powell at an OU conference on KM4Dev was an ideal opportunity, for bringing two experimental entrepreneurs together and to direct another resource to help further Michael’s long term thinking and activities.

The IKME project

Michael is taking an experimental approach to developing digital story-telling (DS). Having worked for many years as a journalist and in radio MD became interested in pictures and moving pictures. He is sceptical that many of the reports that get written ever get read, not just by the communities they often concern, but even by the institutions that are involved in development. He was keen to think about a YouTube type space for digital storytelling but one which was an independent platform.

Being unclear about how to proceed with this Michael agreed with Mike to organise a conference in Bangalore through IT4Change, an Indian NGO with experience of KM4Dev. It brought a number of practitioners together to help focus discussion on some of the important themes around digital storytelling. Two important ideas emerged for Michael to inform his thinking.

1)     as a medium of expression DS promotes collective reflection and discussion: it aids local politics. Unlike in the West where a three minute video may elicit barely a flicker from those who have watched it, where DS has been used extensively in Asia it can stimulate debate for days.

2)     Where in the domain of international development there is usually a push to disseminate information as widely as possible, communities engaged in DS have been very aware of the need to safeguard against intrusion. Communities are much more conscious of the power of the medium for disruption.

Michael has been working long term with a community in the hill country of Sri Lanka where he helped them develop a radio station. They have already been doing some DS funded by another agency and he wanted to discover what skills they have been developing as a consequence. He has always been interested in how such initiatives can be financially sustainable: how might skills transfer be a way of generating income for the community?

From these discussions and combining his interest in radio and pictures, Michael has developed the idea of telradio, internet radio accompanied by pictures which would make the radio station ‘sticky’ . In order to explore these ideas with others interested in similar areas of work, Michael organised a two day workshop in Colombo on DS for knowledge management and invited a wide range of participants. Some of these have already been doing DS and felt they had learnt nothing new, while others were inspired by what they heard and determined to push forward with their own initiatives.

The workshop highlighted three themes of work for Michael which he wants to pursue: 1) DS, 2) DS and internet radio 3) digital storytelling and maps. He has started working with a group in Kandy to develop telradio  and has been discussing this with Sri Lankan activists in Canada, London and Paris to see how to take it forward. The idea is to provide content in local radio then to research what happens as a consequence. How do communities take up the offer? Michael describes his research method as ‘nebular’: finding a cluster of people interested in what he’s interested in then helping the nebula to rotate to see what happens and what it throws out. For example, a group at a university have started their own telradio as a consequence of the workshop and Michael will follow up with them to see how it proceeds. Another group intend using internet radio for their project on Aids. Some university teachers have started enquiring how they might us DS to publish their work and make it more available to the public. A group of librarians have become interested in how DS might promote story telling and access to traditional stories. Some surplus funds left over from the tsunami has allowed a group to think how they might use DS to assist with risk mitigation.

Next steps and what we might evaluate

By July Michael wants to have developed a workplan which will aim to map out the development of certain products as a result of the work and thinking to date. One of these products will be a series of interviews he would like to commission with people already engaged with DS which can be published on ChilliMango, the project blog.

When we discussed how we might evaluate what Michael is doing we agreed that the method he is using, developing his thinking in an experimental way with others, is something worth documenting. Rather than starting out with a plan in advance of undertaking the work, Michael is incrementally developing a plan. How is his thinking changing over time? It would also be worth keeping track of some of the spin-offs from the workshops that he has held to date: who has approached him as a result of these and why does he choose to work with some groups rather than others? At the point where he decides to develop certain products it would be worth paying attention to how they develop and thinking about how we might assess their impact.

We also began a discussion about how we might contract a researcher in Sri Lanka to help with this assessment of impact at a later stage. Michael and I will keep in contact over the period, infrequently but regularly, to review how the project is developing.

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.

While at the Athena Institute, I also received an introduction  to their work from one of Iina’s colleagues, Jacqueline Boerse. Although it is not a complete mirror image, much of the work of the Institute has very great similarities with IKM Emergent in the sense that it is looking at the boundaries between different sorts of knowledge. Just one example: Jacqueline gave me a copy of a PhD thesis in which she was involved on the subject of  ‘Transcending boudaries: interactive learning and action at the interface of HIV/AIDS and agriculture’, by Cornelis Swaans, which is looking at interactive approaches to agricultural innovation in the context of HIV/AIDS. Interestingly, Jacqueline also told me that she had been involved in work on the Triple Helix which had led to the acceptance of the Quadruple helix which recognises the role of civil society organisations.

The Athena Institute focuses on inter- and transdisciplinary expertise to share mutual types of knowledge (e.g.  academic life science knowledge and experiential knowledge of consumers, patients and end users) to address key issues in globalization, sustainable development, social corporate responsibility and system innovation. This also involves work in Vietnam, Bangadesh, India, South Africa, Ghana and Benin.

Cees Hamelink, IKM Emergent’s Chair, also teaches at the Athena Institute, which perhaps makes similarites between IKM and the Athena Institute less surprising.

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?

Wikipedia defines a wiki as:

A wiki is a web page or collection of Web pages designed to  enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content (excluding blocked users), using a simplified markup language.

A wiki – as the basis for the IKM website – was chosen for a number of reasons.

Co-created website
Firstly, the fundamental advantage of the wiki is that it can be co-created. The IKM website is therefore able to host thematic workspaces, both for the programme itself and for other related initiatives which are being edited by individual workspace editors. These workspaces are currently focused on:

1. Information artefacts
2. Intellectual output from the South
3. Intermediaries
4. Local content
5. Participation
6. Translation

There is also a seventh workspace on complexity which will be used to post material on the relevance of complexity to development policy and practice. These thematic workspaces are currently in the process of being created: the ones above with the live links are further on than the others.

Visualisation tools
In addition to this, IKM Emergent is planning to introduce visualisation software so that it is possible to see dynamic, visual links between concepts and contents on the website. A wiki appears to provide a better basis for forming such connections than other website software. This is part of IKM Emergent’s experimental approach to knowledge mapping. The current plan, on which IKM Emergent’s web designers are working, is to map the content of the website using mind mapping software although this is very much work-in-progress.

The Brain is mind mapping software, now only possible to use on a stand-alone desk top, which shows the potential of such dynamic links.  Below you can see a web map generated by TouchGraph which visualises virtual links to the IKM Emergent website. However, at this scale, it is not possible to read the links but does seem to be a powerful way of visualising them.

More on wikis and visualisation
At a recent network event on wikis, hosted by Euforic and ICCO, in February 2009, I got the opportunity to chat to David Weekly the creater of PBwiki, a hosted wiki. When asked if PBwiki had ever considered linking with mind mapping software, he said ”not yet” and that he had so many question about this in the past 24 hours this was something he was going to look into…

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.