Summary and seeking more contributions with a few more days to go

Looking at the interesting contributions received so far a picture is emerging that we share the knowledge we manage in many ways. The activities that have been mentioned can be clustered at different levels:

Personal level which was mentioned, but not much discussed. In my view this comprises the talks around the coffee machine, your responses to questions and emails, sharing contacts, supporting apprentices

Organizational level mentioned in a few contributions. Organizations share knowledge internally with different levels of effort and through different mechanisms. These include:
 The personal (solicited of unsolicited) exchange of information mentioned above
 Different types of internal meetings (annual, monthly, weekly, brainstorming etc.)
 Structured presentations to colleagues on selected topics
 Share travel reports with a pre-set format to structure the information sharing
 Using an Intranet to share the information you have with others in your organization
 Arrangements to store the reports and information in a retrievable and accessible way

This internal sharing is more difficult if the organization comprises different offices such as is the case with Mvula and it needs strong support of the management.

Other levels were also mentioned and depending on the type of organization include: project, community, intermediate, government and network level. Meetings, publications, newsletters and Websites are mentioned at these levels, with a stronger focus on meetings, exchange visits and demonstrations when talking about projects, communities and government and the Web and training for content management when talking about the network level.

Contributions in this area included some very interesting experience where sharing of local and external knowledge was encouraged between different stakeholders, particularly seeking contributions from the communities on their experience with traditional technologies. Other examples were the meeting on quality control of handpumps in Pakistan and the meetings arranged by SEUF to facilitate the effective participation of women in water and sanitation activities, using participatory tools to identify action points.

It is interesting to note that although we have several partners in the conference list so far formal (university) training has not been mentioned. But this is an important mechanism many of us use.

Sharing information wisely
Several contributions struggle with the issue of sharing information wisely. In fact so far almost all contributions deal with ‘supply driven’ information sharing that may cater to a real demand or to our perception of a demand. It is argued that there is a lot of information available and so people become more selective. This was for example one of the reasons why IRC started its new series of Thematic Overview Papers that give a nutshell overview of specific themes.

An important question that was raised is whether the information we share is relevant. In fact this is a very interesting question, because it assumes that presently both relevant and irrelevant information are being shared, whereas it could be argued that sharing information needs action on both sides otherwise it is not shared as it will not be adopted, adapted and used.

In this context the experience in the legal sector in Pakistan where court decisions are being documented, published and sold. Here the level of selling (or the level of use of these documents in libraries) may give some insight in the level of sharing.

Taking the stand that sharing requires action both at the producer and the receivers end makes it essential to explore the fact if receivers really acquire the information and can do something with it.

In this context I would be very interested to learn from you about mechanisms you use to check if the sharing process indeed takes place or that you just provide information to others in the hope that they will use it.

We have a few more days so I look forward to further contributions

Jan Teun