Summary fourth week: How can we scale up KM?

The topic ‘What can we do next for effective KM for water and sanitation programmes / organisations?’, in other words ‘How can we scale-up?’, turned out to be a difficult one. The discussion on constraints already resulted in the finding that the ‘one size fits all solution’ was unrealistic. Instead of the silver bullet, the following amalgam came out:

• More and effective advocacy on KM
• Close digital and language gaps
• Define in local / organisational context
• Low value of knowledge, no incentives and poor communication
• Bottom up; start small in the villages with the people living there
• Awareness on KM
• Grant fund and examples that are easy to familiarise with
• Stories instead of models
• First do KM then call it KM
• Re-vitalize local organisations
• Support from local stakeholders

Mixing the above, scaling down, as in getting away from starting with models, the abstract and relate to the local, first practice then label, seems the way forward. Start with bottom up (local knowledge / organisations), awareness raising, effective advocacy in the right language / right medium (story, oral) and connect to stakeholders.

I quote Dave Snowden here: “Just connecting or linking people can be a major knowledge management activity... ... shared context is vital to knowledge exchange, and such context always involves some human trusted validation.”. I guess ‘connecting’, ‘shared context’ and 'human trusted validation' are the keys mentioned in our E-conference to scaling up effective KM.