Stepping Higher - Reflections on the Knowledge Age

Since the World Bank published its report early this month which states that over 30% of its policy reports have never been downloaded even once (!) and only 13 percent of policy reports were downloaded at least 250 times, a fascinating debate on the purpose and value of knowledge products is flourishing the web, and the posts from KM practitioners all over keep pouring in. It’s not just the World Bank, but most international organizations Interestingly, I have been thinking about exactly the same questions for the last 9 months now as I was drafting UNDP’s new Knowledge Management Strategy for the upcoming years. Here’s a passage which captures UNDPs own dilemma regarding knowledge products: “ The current process of knowledge product definition, development, dissemination and measurement does not yield the quality, reach and impact that is needed for UNDP to be a thought leader in development.” The Strategy goes on to stress that UNDP intends to revise its process of planni...

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...

Today Google announced the launch of the new standard OpenSocial for tomorrow, which should enable third-party programmers to develop widgets which could be integrated in any social software application observing the standard. By requiring external applications to exchange a standardized set of metadata between the networks, Google is hoping to connect a wide range of different social networks under one framework. The opportunity to plug into these networks with accustomed widget application has already propelled the recent success of Facebook and is what developers were waiting for. The end result could be a global standard which would connect all existing networking applications and form one single global network. This is actually exactly what I was waiting for. However, I am curious to which extent this network standard will deserve to be called open, namely to which extent Google will control and monitor the data which is exchanged. The fear of course is that privacy standards migh...