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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

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

Lost in translation (Part 1)

The recent colloquium on Traducture & Translation: Creating intercultural dialogue in International Development held at Cumberland Lodge in Windsor, London, United Kingdom from 27 ? 29 May 2011,  resembled an African gathering where elders share their wisdom and insights with curious young people around a fire place.  Here Charles Dhewa shares his impressions of the [...]

(Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:26:37 +0000)

IKM Emergent at the EADI General Conference

The 2011 General Conference of the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI) will be held jointly with the UK Development Studies Association (DSA) at York University, UK, from 19th to 22nd September under the title Rethinking Development in an Age of Scarcity and Uncertainty: New values, voices and alliances for increased resilience.  [...]

(Tue, 24 May 2011 13:51:13 +0000)

Linked data experiment

Linked data – the machine readable web, as the inventor of the Web Tim Berners Lee explains here is the next layer of the web. He developed a five star rating to describe information which is fully compliant with the semantic web and allows it to become part of the growing web of linked data. [...]

(Wed, 09 Feb 2011 08:26:04 +0000)

Development knowledge ecology: another visit to the KM kitchen?

We’ve been talking recently with colleagues about the development knowledge ecology – with an implicit understanding that we all know what it means – but we’ve never really tried to define it so I’m going to have a go here.  Or in any event to outline some key influences, key ingredients. In fact, given that [...]

(Thu, 03 Feb 2011 15:42:36 +0000)

Define: traducture

While writing an earlier post on this blog, I realised that we didn’t have a short piece on traducture which is one of the cornerstones of the IKM programme, and that when I googled the term, there was not a  clear definition available. For this reason, I am adapting part of a 2009 Newsletter and [...]

(Thu, 03 Feb 2011 09:47:40 +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

Promoting peace? with a pen

By Frederick Noronha It’s the kind of book(let) you wouldn’t even look at twice. but dip closely into this tiny, pocket-sixed 46-page book, and you could well be glad that you’ve read it ‘Engendering Peace Journalism: Keeping Communities Whole’ is a booklet that comes in from the Philippines. It calls itself a guide on gender-sensitive [...]

(Tue, 17 Jan 2012 21:56:14 +0000)

Eye-candy? but of a serious kind: Tips on how to display figures Visualizing Information for Advocacy:

Visualizing Information for Advocacy: An Introduction to Information Design By John Emerson Tactical Technology Collective http://tacticaltech.org Creative Commons License DOWNLOAD FROM: http://backspace.com/infodesign.pdf Reviewed by Frederick Noronha You’ve got data. Now what do you do with it? Can you tell an effective story with the information you have? Can you “move your audience”? This is a [...]

(Tue, 17 Jan 2012 21:40:40 +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)