Sarah Cummings and I are writing a paper for the European Knowledge Management Conference in September 2010 with the ambitious title "Knowledge management for development: the “state of the art” and some crystal ball gazing." For both an analysis of the 'state of the art" and, of course, for the crystal ball gazing, we would really like to receive your input and help. Lots of the debates on this list are relevant to this (including the brown bag lunch one which is live at the moment) but we would particularly like your help in identifying literature and your opinions of the future of KM4Dev.

For the "state of the art", we have put together a list of the literature which we think is key to this - and we realise that we will need to make a distinction between this community and the field of KM4Dev - but you may know of the other things. In particular, we want to refer to literature which is looking at the broad field of KM4Dev and this community.

We would also appreciate your help with crystal ball gazing about the future of KM4Dev and to the extent that it differs from "mainstream" KM. It seems to us that there are two parts of the future: how we think KM4Dev as a community and as a field will develop; and how we want it to develop. We did think we might try to put these ideas into a questionnaire but actually these would have restricted the range of responses. So these are our questions:

1. How do feel that KM4Dev as a field differs from "mainstream" KM?

2. How do you think that KM4Dev as a community and as a field will develop in the next 5-10 years?
3. How do you want KM4Dev as a community and as a field to develop in the next 5-10 years?

Please feel free to answer one or all of these questions.

The honest thing now, of course, is to give our own opinions about these questions, not to influence what you write but to show that we are willing to share too. So my personal responses to question 1 is as follows:

Although KM4Dev as a field has many similarities to "mainstream KM" - and it follows the general generational developments (from initial ones of ICT-centric and based on knowledge as a resource to more recent understandings of KM as a community-driven and based on practice), I think there are fundamental difference which are a result of the ''development" focus: looking wider than the organisation and at knowledge as a global public good.

One final point, if you are willing to answer these questions we will certainly acknowledge your personal input in the final paper and will also share it with you all on completion in April.

The abstract and our current list of core literature are to be found below.

Abstract

Knowledge management for development: the “state of the art” and some crystal ball gazing

This paper will be looking at the “state of the art” of knowledge management for development in the sense of international development cooperation efforts. Based on this “state of the art” assessment, we will also be making some predictions based on the identification of emerging trends. KM for development entered the international development sector at the end of the 1990s with World Bank identifying itself as the “knowledge bank”. Although original approaches were very much taken from “mainstream” KM in the private sector, the past decade has seem the emergence of more specifically development-focused approaches which focus more on the role knowledge can play in socio-economic and cultural development as a global public good. In this paper, we will make a first effort at mapping how development KM has diverged from mainstream KM. This will be done using a literature review but also through interviews with leading figures in the field. The literature and interviews will also form the basis of predictions of how we think that KM for Development will continue to emerge in the next 5 years. Some implications of this generally for mainstream KM will also be deduced.

Core references

1. Ferguson, J. and S. Cummings. 2007. Knowledge management in practice: the case of international development. In: A. Koohand (Ed.) Knowledge Management. The Informing Science Press. Santa Rosa, California.

2. Julie E. Ferguson, Kingo Mchombu and Sarah Cummings (2008) Meta-review and scoping study of the management of knowledge for development. IKM Working Paper No. 1, March 2008, 45pp. http://wiki.ikmemergent.net/files/80310_IKM_Working_Paper_No._1_Meta-rev...
3. Ferreira, S.D.M. and M. Neto. 2005. Knowledge management and social learning: exploring the cognitive dimension of development. Knowledge Management for Development Journal 1(3): 4-17. http://journal.km4dev.org/index.php/km4dj/article/view/35/31
4. Ferreira, S.M. 2009?. The new enlightenment: a potential objective of the KM4Dev community. Knowledge Management for Development Journal 5(2) 94 - 107 http://pdfserve.informaworld.com/762834_751317769_916991424.pdf
5. King, K and S. McGrath. 2004. Knowledge for Development. HSRC, Cape Town.
6. Mansell, Robin (2002) Constructing the knowledge base for knowledge-driven development. Journal of Knowledge Management 6(4): 317-329
7. McFarlane, C. 2006. Knowledge, learning and development: a post-rationalist approach. Progress in Development Studies 6 (4): 287-305.
8. Powell, Mike (2006) Which knowledge? Whose reality? An overview of knowledge used in the development sector.
9. Development in Practice 16(6): 518-532
10. Quaggliotto, G. 2005. Elective affinities? Reflections on the enduring appeal of knowledge management for the development sector. KM4D J. 1(3): 41-45.
11. World Bank. 1999. World development report 1998/999: Knowledge for development. World Bank/Oxford University Press.

Kind regards

John Woodend Ph.D.
Programme Co-ordinator
EU-ACP Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA)
Agro Business Park 2, 6708 PW Wageningen
The Netherlands