Stepping Higher - Reflections on the Knowledge Age

During the last three years, I have been working in a small team at UNDP's Knowledge Management Group working on a number of KM initiatives such as connecting UN agencies with regards to KM topics, supporting UNDP's communities of pratices on development topics related to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and on establishing the social collaboration platform " Teamworks " for UNDP and its partners. I am therefore quite proud that UNDP as an organization has now received the prestigious "Column of Knowledge Award 2012" by Knowledge Management Austria (KMA) in Vienna, Austria , for its “outstanding efforts and achievements to promote the idea of knowledge societies”. The UNDP website features a respective article here , quoting the Managing Director of KMA, Mr Andreas Brandner, highlighting “UNDP’s role in connecting UN Organizations with Knowledge Management" and in particular emphasizing  Teamworks as “the most promising knowledge management...

Many of you know that I work for the United Nations, but usually I don't talk so much about the specific UN-nature of my work as my thoughts regarding Knowledge Management can have a live by themselves, regardless of whether I work for the UN or not. As of late, however, my team was working on a project which is so interesting (and still very much KM-related), that I definitely want to share it here. I need to give background information though... 20 years ago, all UN nations met in Rio de Janeiro to discuss for the first time as part of a world summit issues around sustainable development: the idea that we as societies and economies need to develop without jeopardizing the health of the planet and the development of future generations. This July, 20 years later, the  Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development  will review the status of the world and progress made, and discuss further measures. In preparation to this conference, the go...