Objectives
ENRAP (Knowledge Networking for Rural Development in Asia/Pacific Region), an IFAD-IDRC collaboration, leverages a growing body of useful information generated by development projects and made available o¬n the Internet. The program, now in its third phase and running until 2010, is designed to bring the benefits of accessing and sharing global information resources to IFAD-supported rural development projects in the Asia/Pacific region. Effective use of Internet and electronic communication by project staff and, ultimately, by project communities, will contribute to the empowerment of rural people and help them better address their development objectives.
If ICT technologies can help knowledge management and knowledge sharing, these rely primarily on human resources. Otherwise technically sound systems with well-designed interfaces may be neglected or misused if users lack the commitment or motivation to use them. People having the knowledge must have the time and the will to share it. EMAKINA sees processes and ICT tools as a way to decrease the time and effort needed to communicate and retrieve information.
ENRAP contracted EMAKINA to analyse their needs and devise a set of recommendations to implement knowledge sharing infrastructure and processes.
Description
People retaining and needing information knowledge-sharing networks often may not always have the time and resources to devise “ready to be used” pieces of information. They are primarily focused on other tasks. For them, information is either:
- a by product from the tasks they are focused on (OUTPUT);
- a resource needed to accomplish their main tasks (INPUT).
Moreover other members of the knowledge sharing-network must act as coordinators and reformat raw pieces of information into usable documents. Implemented processes, workflows and tools have to facilitate this transformation of raw data into usable information as much as possible.
The ENRAP community is organised into 3 different levels:
- Field workers (project level)
- Local coordination (country level)
- Global coordination (global level)
Each of these 3 levels has specific needs and missions in a knowledge ecosystem. As with biological ones, knowledge ecosystems thrive when the missions of all actors are clearly defined and complement each other as closely as possible. The recommended processes, workflows and tools clearly define the roles of the various actors and enhance their complementarities.
It was concluded that at this level of the project there was a need for a fairly light infrastructure enabling these field workers to:
- Push raw data to the country level (informal information transfer / very simple workflow / easy to use and lightweight tools)
- Easily find relevant pieces of knowledge existing in the ecosystem (simple and efficient search tools / clear mention of the related project, author and contact details)
- Contact and communicate directly with their peers about specific issues (peer to peer real-time communication channels / easy access to standardised contact details)
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