Technology for KM4DeV

Comment

Comment by Dr Paradza Paradza on August 26, 2011 at 4:22am

With technology now pervading every aspect of our lives, how can we protect the vulnerable security wise. Some people use technology blindly and the effects of such are devastating. Some cannot afford security software and hardware. There is need to educate users of dangers of technology if used blindly. Of late there are mesages churned out of internet congratulating people that they have won certain amounts and they need to do certain steps to claim their prizes. With poverty all over some people fall prey to such gimmicks.

Comment by Shubham Nagar on February 1, 2011 at 12:45am

For Knowledge Management our experience with Open Source has been particularly gratifying. We have developed Open source integrated platforms for Knowledge Management in particular for International Development and AID management. Using JCR Content repository standards implementation of "Knowledge Networks" and "Spaces" around Communities of Practices is possible. Collaboration can be just a pattern on top of it all in the form of a social network or similar collaboration themes. One other element of KM using open source is semanticaly enhanced search algorithms that are tuned to search knowledg products. Moreover a lot of "mailing list" discussions can be captured into a open standard dynamic repository and then converted into searchable knowledge products such as community updates or firmed up replies or even reports.

So open source choice does exist and it is not neccessary to go down a sharepoint route. Infact sharepoint in my opinion is an older and more cumbersome and costly technology.

 

Regards

Shubham

Comment by Mehmet Korkmaz on January 28, 2011 at 11:34am

Hello Everyone,

First of all I would like to thank Gabriele for creating this group. Choosing the right technology can be quite challenging in KM activities. Therefore, I would like to ask you for your advise on the following:

We are currently working on a capacity development project in Southeast Asia and will be training local partners in food security issues (online and f2f). The blended learning programme starts with a two-week online course and is followed by a one week f2f-training. Our facilitation team consists also of a photographer who captures workshop activities and outcomes in order to create a photo documentation of the training. After the workshop is completed, participants obtain the photo documentation and can retrieve any necessary information they need. Unfortunately there has been a few issues like legibility of material and time-consuming process of compiling material and hence delay in sending out the documentation to participants.

We are now exploring new ways of workshop documentation which we can also use for our online learning programmes. Are there any tools that could replace our photo documentation besides high-tech flip charts and whiteboards?

I am looking forward to your comments on this.

Mehmet 

Comment by Daan Boom on October 30, 2010 at 3:25am

We have implemented Sharepoint late 2008 and have explored its functionalities by doing and experimenting. One of the advantages we found of SP is its relatively low costs of the out of the box application, especially when you are already a user of the windows environment. We found it relatively easy to implement and build specific business applications without the help of external consultants. Its true that if you want to design your own user interface, more advanced functionalities you may need external consultants to build and customize . Happy to make my contribution to the discussions and share our experiences with SP in this group!

Comment by Gabriele on October 28, 2010 at 8:23am

Hi Peter,

You are absolutely right! There are too many new things to keep an eye on, and I hope that the wisdom of the crowd will help us. Even on well established products, like SharePoint, there can be many things to consider... but let's get started with its cost.

SharePoint is clearly expensive, since you have to pay the licenses, and you probably need to hire highly-paid consultants. Open Source solutions, on the other hand, are entirely free, usually they are not very hard to setup, and in my experience consultants do not charge you so much. I think that the reason for it is that the learning curve for SharePoint is way steeper than for an Open Source system (the latter are developed by those who use them, and if the solution is mature the community creates the documentation, too). However, the ROI may still be in favour of SharePoint. (By the way, since I joined the project when SharePoint was already part of it, all these consideratons are entirely my own.)

For the end user, SharePoint is quite simple to use, and if a system is easier to use than another, I can reduce the time it takes me to train the users, and the help desk will receive less requests. If, for example, the training takes one hour less, we are saving 40000 hours, and we do not need to hire new people for the helpdesk. For us, it pays itself just with the hard ROI, the part that is easy to calculate.

Also, a simpler, faster (eg: save to a document library is just like saving it to a folder) system is more likely to be accepted, hence the benefits are higher, and capturing knowledge from the field workers is one of the main purposes of our project. (We are currently looking at third-party solutions to allow easy access from low bandwidth areas, too.)

On top of this, we have the opportunity cost of having the integration with MS Office, and all the other features.

For a large organization, with an internal team of developers, I think it can be very cost-effective. For a smaller, one, this may not be the case. A partnership may be a way to go, if you think it may be flexible enough, or you could also search for organization willing to create and mantain the service for you (and I do not see why we wouldn't!)

Comment by Peter J. Bury on October 28, 2010 at 2:38am

Thanks Gabriele for starting this potentially very useful discussion. I like your 'close to your heart', though I'm not sure about the first one (on Sharepoint).
Why and this comes to my biggest problem, being an adventurist and hence interested in discovering new things that may be responses to my needs: the rate of emergence of new applications on ever new platforms is so immense that it's virtually impossible to follow them all. One has to rely on other trusted experience and discovering those takes time as well. Not forgetting that each context of realities is different almost every time!

On Sharepoint my perception is that it is expensive and requires an organizational and probably in the IRC (WASH) case (my organization) a multi-organizational / partnership based decision?

True?

Comment by Gabriele on October 27, 2010 at 12:24pm

Dear Shariful,

It is great to have your words as a baptism of this new group! I believe that a KM practitioner _needs_ to know what tools are available to be more effective, but also to be able to calculate the ROI of a KM strategy.

I look forward to everybody's contribution, and I will do my best to jump start the discussion about some topics that are close to mye heart: Sharepoint for KM, Mobile KM, what you need in a website for an effective KM, and low bandwidth design (the wiki page needs an update). I would love to see sections about managing taxonomies, social networking tools, and data mining, too, but anybody is welcome to contribute!

Comment by Md. Shariful Alam on October 26, 2010 at 5:07am

'KM4Dev' is a new as a word. But knowledge is used for development from the beginning of stone age. Now mass communication and information technology are reaching almost everywhere in this planet. Digital divide is getting thinner every day and we are not living in an individual country. We are now living in a big village; the Global Village. When I am writing this article and share my feelings with Mr. Gabriele (and others who join this group) with the help of technology and join a discussion group "Technology for KM4Dev", it represent and describe the glory of technology that will accelerate the KM4Dev. Thanks Gabriele. I am looking foreword to here from you...