Moved on to New York, implementing Social Networking and Web 2.0 for UNDP

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Being here in New York for already 1 month, it is high time to give an update on this site, which has been painfully abandoned by the author due to major stress caused by a change job and location. I've concluded my assignment as JPO with UNDP in Bangkok, funded by the German government, and moved on to a full staff contract with UNDP headquarters in New York. Since mid June I'm now with the Knowledge Management Group of UNDP's Bureau for Policy Development as Knowledge Services Specialist.

My main area of work is the implementation of UNDP's new Knowledge Strategy, which entails as a major component the development and roll-out of a UNDP-wide Social Networking Platform, similar to Facebook. This is indeed something I was wishing for since I'm with the UN, as networking across countries and units is a critical factor not only for UNDP's work, but also for my own professional development. After having been able to comment on first concept stages of the project during last year, I'm now very happy to be at the heart of its conceptual development. And I'm looking forward to all the change that the introduction of Web 2.0 in a bureaucroacy like UNDP can bring to teams, project, relations with partners and finally development results.

My major responsibility will be the liaison with users, both from internal teams and external partners, as well as partnership building with organization which might be interested to connect to the Social Networking Platform and engage in collaboration with UNDP entities. Although the scope of my work now seems a bit more technical than my work on Communities of Practices in Asia-Pacific, it's major part will actually be change management, advocacy and partnership liaison. Exciting new tasks, and I'm very much looking forward to the next months and the new services and business cases that will emerge out of this project.

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