Main Page
From IKMEmergent
Main Page Visual Navigation
Welcome to the IKM Emergent Website. It, like the programme it is part of, aims to explore, through multiple lenses and a variety of perspectives, what information and knowledges are used in the international development sector, how they are expressed, handled and received, and the possibilities for change if we are to make best use of emerging informational developments in the way we understand our work and communicate with others.
For further information about IKM Emergent and what it has produced, see 'About the programme' or 'Documents'.
For everything else this is a working website. What is here now is only the start of what will grow over the coming years, illustrating the many aspects of the programme and the issues it aims to cover. We intend to use it to display news and information about the programme; to collaboratively build workspaces, dedicated to exploring particular issues; and to map out the subject areas of the programme and collectively build an annotated bibliography. All spaces on this site are moderated by section editors but we welcome all contributions to the development of this work, or references to related work being done by others, and will indicate on the appropriate pages the contact details of the relevant editor.
What's new
'Knowledge Platforms'
Dutch development policy is being re-shaped in response to a report, 'Less Pretension, More Ambition' by WRR, the Scientific Council for Government Policy, which was published in English in 2010. The report and the response calls for greater geographic and thematic focus and for a far more knowledge-based approach for which, at least in the report, the importance of detailed local knowledge over time is emphasised. In late 2011 a 'knowledge letter' was presented to the Dutch parliament outlining the steps being taken in relation to knowledge and to research in response to the report. As far as we know IKM is the only programme looking at knowledge management within the development sector funded by the Dutch Foreign Ministry and the report and the response to it cover issues which have been at the heart of IKM's work over the last five years. As such we feel well able to offer what we hope is a constructive response to the proposals.
Visual Notes
As part of our experimentation with different ways of presenting ideas, we asked artist and graphic facilitator Roberta Faulhaber to produce a visual representation of a panel we helped to organise at the EADI conference in York in September 2011. The two session panel was entitled panel 'Participatory Knowledge Building for Development, Changing Values: experience of participatory knowledge building processes'. Details of the panel are available here. The visual notes themselves are in large files which take some bandwidth to see - these are the notes for Session 1 and these for Session 2. Roberta also developed the notes in the form of a Prezi. These might be easier to access. We apologise for the delay in posting these notes.
IKM Evaluation 2 The final (for the time being) evaluation summary of the programme is available here
IKM Evaluation
How do you evaluate knowledge-based work? How do you evaluate non-linear and emergent processes? These questions are central to the idea of development as a process of mutual learning and co-creation of knowledge amonst all stakeholders involved, whilst also being a process which should, for both political and financial reasons, be accountable in the public domain. They are also very relevant to IKM in the more practical sense of it being a funded programme with an obligation to be evaluated. Chris Mowles of Red Kite Partners and Anita Gurumurthy of IT for Change have been accompanying us as evaluators throughout most of the programme's life. The Fourth IKM Evaluation Report (2011) is their most in-depth report to date. It covers the period up to the end of the fourth year of the programme. A final, summary report will offer a briefer and more up to date overview of progress up to the end of 2011.
ICT in Development
IKM has been increasingly critical of the impact of ICT use within the development sector. We argue that it has mainly been applied to make the organisations which were already 'information rich' even richer and that there has been very little investment in creating valuable local information spaces, which might enable and empower local decision making. As changes linked to the emerging Web 3 gather force, we think new approaches are urgently needed. IKM Working Paper no 16, ‘ICT for or against development? An introduction to the ongoing case of Web 3.0’, written by Mike Powell, Tim Davies and Keisha Taylor is intended to explore these issues. It is still in final draft stage but a summary of its argument is available here.
Newsletter, September 2011
The most recent newsletter, covering forthcoming events and current work, can be found here. (Wed, 14 September 2011)
Workshop on Practice-based Change planned for 29-20 November 2011 London, UK
IKM is in the process of organising a workshop on Practice-Based Change, with CARE International, which will include reflection on the practical implications of the multiple strands of IKM’s work to date for development operations and their management, as well as inviting ideas from other sources. To find out more about the workshop, please see the announcement here. (Mon 12 September 2011)
Two new papers on monitoring and evaluation of knowledge
Two new papers on monitoring and evaluation of knowledge management for development were published in August 2011. The first IKM Working Paper No 12 Monitoring and evaluating development as a knowledge industry: ideas in current practice has been written by Simon Hearn, Ewen Leborgne and Valerie A. Brown. It offers an overview of the field of monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of KM4D and where it might be heading. It has summaries in English, French and Spanish. The second IKM Working Paper No 13 Monitoring and evaluating development as a knowledge ecology: ideas for new collective practices by Ewen Leborgne, Simon Hearn and Valerie A. Brown proposes a collective enquiry approach as a possible way forward. Summaries in English, French and Spanish (Mon 12 September 2011)
Exploring the relationship between knowledges, development and management
On 6 May 2011, Mike Powell made a presentation to the Knowledge Management Impact Challenge (KMIC) unconference in Washington DC. The presentation is available here. The IKM Emeregnet entry to the KMIC, Evaluation of the IKM Emergent Research Programme: taking a complexity perspective to evaluation was rated as one of the top finalists in the competition by a team of external experts. (Mon, 9 May 2011)
IKM Update
The March 2011 IKM Update is now available. (Wed, 2 March 2011)
IKM Leaflet
The new version of the IKM leaflet, produced in December 2010. It provides an overview of the programme's core arguments and activities.
As well as its various research outputs, the programme is discussing with practitioners the implications of its work for innovation in daily programme management. It is trying to do this through posing a series of challenging questions which were posed for the first time in this leaflet. These challenging questions include:
• How do you communicate with the local communities you aim to support? What work is done in the relevant (local) languages? How can such work be supported?
• How do local knowledges influence your work at local level? How do you support and value their role in underpinning capacity for locally led development?
• Can your procedures for planning, process management, monitoring and evaluation recognise and adapt to unpredictability and emergence?
• What alternatives exist to assessment based on compliance with pre-existing plans? If flexibility is to be welcomed, how can accountability to both donors and affected communities be assured?
• What information do you make available about your programme work? How do you try to make it accessible and useful to other development practitioners? (Wed, 26 Jan 2011)
Linked Open Information for Development - 2
The Draft Report from the workshop is now available. It is planned to produce two forward looking working papers based on this material - one about the implications for the development information environment, the other reflecting on the processes involved in creating and using such information - in early 2011 (Mon, 13 December 2010)
Linked Open Information for Development
On 15th and 16th November,IKM organised a workshop to discuss both the positive and negative potential of the widespread adoption of linked, open information within the development sector. Discussion continued at the Open Government Data Camp in London later in the week. A full report of the workshop will be published soon and followed by working papers considering both technical and development policy aspects of the subject. In the meantime, this IKM Discussion Note is intended to provide a brief explanation of what linked open information is and why it might matter. (Wed, 24 November 2010)
New on other websites
Our reflections on the process
These reflections are derived from a blog being used by IKM Emergent to document the process of undertaking an iterative programme
The process diary...
- Exploring linked open data for development with a Young Lives dataset?
- Exploring linked open data for development with a Young Lives dataset… For the upcoming IKM Workshop on Linked Data, taking place in November in Oxford, I’ve been exploring the process and possibilities of putting a development-focussed social science dataset online as linked open data. What is linked open data? We can work through a definition [...]
- (Mon, 01 Nov 2010 16:52:35 +0000)
- Sharing knowledge with blogs
- Looking at pingbacks from The Giraffe, I came across this blog post from Joitske Huslebosch about The giraffe blog used by IKM and colleagues. I didn’t know where to store this so I have decided to put a link here. It was posted for a group of Dutch civil servants – the link is to [...]
- (Mon, 23 Aug 2010 15:16:00 +0000)
Our reflections on the content of the Programme
These reflections are derived from a blog being run by a core of members from Working Group 3, plus a number of colleagues from the broader field of knowledge management for development.
The giraffe
- Linking knowledge domains
- I’ve created a new blog on Linking knowledge domains: knowledge integration across boundarieswhich aims to act as an access point for work on cross-domain knowledge integration which I’ve been doing for IKM Emergent over the past few years in collaboration with Josine Stremmelaar of Hivos and Wenny Ho. In particular, it will link to the [...]
- (Thu, 08 Mar 2012 16:19:08 +0000)
- Journal update 1: KM4D and innovation systems
- The May issue of the Knowledge Management for Development Journal was on the subject of Beyond the conventional boundaries of knowledge management: navigating the emergent pathways of learning and innovation for international development with Guest Editors, Laurens Klerkx, Laxmi Prasad Pant and Cees Leeuwis. It comprises 6 articles and one community note: Content Unfolding the challenges [...]
- (Mon, 05 Mar 2012 10:17:26 +0000)
- Adaptive pluralism and intentions?
- In a recent meeting on Practice-based change for development, which took place in London, UK, on 20-21 February 2012, and blogged about earlier here by Ewen le Borgne, we discussed Robert Chambers’ work on Paradigms, poverty and adaptive pluralism. Chambers compares the dominant paradigm of neo-Newtonian practice in international development, oriented to things and ?imposed [...]
- (Mon, 27 Feb 2012 10:43:35 +0000)
- From the editor?s desk
- On 22 September 2011, I took part in a panel ”From the Editor’s desk”, convened by Wendy Harcourt and Kees Biekart at the EADI/DSA General Conference in York, UK. The session was conducted as an open discussion among 6 journal editors on the new publishing arrangements with the coming of the digital age among development [...]
- (Sun, 26 Feb 2012 23:13:17 +0000)
- What do we mean by development?
- I’ve been thinking about that we actually mean by development, and came across this really good presentation on Slideshare which, I think, sums up the main issues and approaches commonly used to define development: 14 Development Definitions And Measuring Development View more PowerPoints from Ecumene According to Kurt Maton’s 2003 article Pierre Bourdieu and the [...]
- (Sun, 26 Feb 2012 14:57:39 +0000)
Other related resources
Other blogs are being run by members of IKM Emergent to support initiatives on digital story telling and local content. They include:
ChilliMango
- Dipti Desai :Shooting Essays
- Dipti Desai describes herself as a freelance photographer, living and working in Bangalore. She got in to conversation with chillimango while displaying her latest photo essay ”Souvenirs? in a book shop located in the busy streets of Kandy, Sri Lanka. It may have been more appropriate for Dipti to describe her self as a poet. [...]
- (Wed, 15 Feb 2012 22:46:57 +0000)
- Book art with nails, bullets and bricks
- Kingsly Gunathilaka, an artist who explores alternatives ways of expression through his medium has come up with something refreshingly new: Book art that depicts the violence surrounding the exploration of knowledge and freedom of expression. Sitting on the floor of his gallery in the central hills of Kandy, Sri Lanka kingly holds books riddled with [...]
- (Mon, 13 Feb 2012 03:01:14 +0000)
our project
- News
- This week Kemly will be going to the last global meeting of the IKM Emergent Project, to share results with other members of the global team. We wish her the best. We are looking forward to have lots of useful information about other experiences around the world.
- (Sun, 11 Apr 2010 22:54:49 +0000)
- This project has meant to me?
- By Adriana Sánchez* What do we mean when talking about local knowledge? Why is it important? Why is it different from expert knowledge? Can we use ICTs to rescue, revalue and position the local knowledge? How a process like this can empower a community? We had all this questions at the beginning and probably our [...]
- (Mon, 05 Apr 2010 22:10:32 +0000)
del.icio.us