Knowledge Management Workshop

Introduction

A workshop on Knowledge Management (KM) for Water Management (WM) will augment the 6th Water Information Summit (WIS6) in Delft, Netherlands. The KM workshop aims to enable participants to apply KM tools and methods to improve the use of existing knowledge to better water management (WM). An international team of WM and KM experts are specifically designing the curriculum to assist staff from institutions addressing Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM), Transboundary Water Resources Management (TWM), Integrated Coast and Marine Management (ICMM), or Water Supply and Environmental Sanitation (WES) in developing countries and countries with economies in transition. Representatives from related regional capacity-building institutions would also benefit from this workshop.

The three-day hands-on training workshop will be held immediately following WIS6, on 15-17 September 2003. Prior to arriving, participants will interact and engage in several preparatory activities from their home offices. Upon completion of the workshop, they will then return with a concrete action plan to initiate or strengthen KM activities within their organization or across their community of partners and stakeholders. Plans may address, for example, increasing organizational transparency through improved interactivity on Web sites, promoting greater dialog through a suite of facilitated face-to-face meetings and electronic forums, sharing information content across partner organizations and Web sites, or extending organizational knowledge beyond those with Internet access.

The KM for WM Workshop is at this moment being co-sponsored by the IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre, the GEF International Waters:LEARN Project (IW:LEARN), CAPNET, UNESCO, the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council and the Water Web Consortium. Discussions with other sponsors are ongoing.

Further details on the Water Information Summit can be found at: Water Information Summit 6 or by sending an email to Ms. Marit Brommer at wis6delft@irc.nl

Objectives

In pursuit of the above goal, the KM for WM Workshop objectives include:

1. To understand and recognize characteristics of KM systems and identify how these can contribute to improving WRM at institutional through global scales
2. To develop a KM strategy to assess and address participants? organizations? priority knowledge needs (using Weggenman's Knowledge Value Chain (KVC)) to improve participants? internal, inter-agency or wider KM usage for WM.
3. To draft a short-term KM action plan to use KM methods and tools to initiate implementation of the KM strategy.
4. To test specific ICT-mediated tools for KM, information sharing and assisting peers to develop and implement each others? respective plans
5. To forge a community of practice (CoP) for transferring KM experiences and lessons among peers working on similar WM issues.

Pre-workshop

Individual preparatory work with support from IW:LEARN and IRC Before the face-to-face workshop in Delft, participants will engage in preparatory activities, shared via a Knowledge Management community-of-practice . Trainees will carry out preparatory work that includes

• Introduction to the workshop's KM approach by collecting basic organizational information, and participation in an electronically-mediated Community of Practice (COP);
• Characterize KM needs and constraints of participants? organizations. This includes a KM scan and profile and a description of organizations / project mission and vision;
• Discuss with management ideas to be developed during hands-on workshop and implementation follow-up phase.

The training team will use this feedback to customize face-to-face training sessions to incorporate needs and information from the preparatory interactions with participants.

Participation in the Water Information summit (WIS)

Workshop participants will participate in the four day WIS6 to deepen their understanding of the usefulness, benefits and tools for knowledge management. A special session on Wednesday evening September 10, will familiarize participants and training team with each other and with the work plan for the face-to-face training phase of the workshop, and to receive some homework to be carried out before the Monday morning session September 15.

Bridging Summit and Workshop (Plenary in WIS 6)

The last day of WIS6 (Friday September 12) involves in-depth preparation for the hands-on workshop, including the following presentations and exercises:

• KM in historic perspective, global context and latest insights, by D. Bedford (World Bank)
• Introduction of the Knowledge Value Chain as a model for applying KM to organizational processes
• To experience first-hand how KM can improve decision-making