Stepping Higher - Reflections on the Knowledge Age

It's amazing how quickly knowledge management ideas have become a natural part of how I reflect on issues. I just finished an online training on 'Learning Management' and during the training was asked what opportunities I see for United Nations organisations to build capacity through learning. In an instant, I came up with three items most important to me: In my view, most organisations underestimate to a large extent the potential of knowledge management mechanisms for learning on the individual, but especially on the team level and organisational level. Three mechanims could be highlighted which would support organisational learning in any organisation (including UN agencies): 1. Introduction of Peer Assists A Peer Assist is a process where one indivudal or a team which faces a particular problem or is about to start a project, calls a meeting to seek insights from other people or teams on the issue. This is part of the "learning before doing" in a knowledge man...

Since a few months I get the feeling that public (or media) opinion is shifting towards a more critical position regarding online social netwoking applications like Facebook , MySpace , Orkut , etc., mostly because of privacy and security issues. To one extent the emphasis on a more considerate approach to communicating his own data is definitely desirable. Privacy is an issue and we need to be careful to whom we tell what about ourselfs and where we store and publish which data for which purpose. On the other hand however, I have the impression that there is a current tendency to throw out the baby with the bath water. I actually meet more and more people who in a very strict way say that they would never register on any of these networks, sometimes referring to media news about identitiy theft like recently about Facebook . In my opinion, there is a problem with this thinking, at least as far as security is concerned. The issue with the current security cases rather is that lots of ...

Just want to seize the opportunity to distribute this announcement for an internship in Knowledge Management & Research in my office department at UN Volunteers . The intern would support our Research and Development Unit in a variety of research and knowledge management related tasks which would include: Researching, collecting, analyzing and editing documents related to Volunteerism for Development (V4D), volunteers management and UNV organizational procedures. Assist in tasks related to mainstreaming V4D within the UNV volunteer management cycle and support the cross-sectional house-wide Task Force. Assist in identifying and creating new content related to UNV, including the development of a UNV online glossary and research on external online resources. Assist in maintaining the UNV Knowledge Platform using a web-based Content Management system. This includes upload and updates of documents and articles, changes to navigation and structure as well as collection of in-house knowl...