[cross-posted from my weblog]

It’s nice to be a newcomer – you can go around, say that you are new and don’t know much and ask stupid questions. This is what I have been doing at KM4Dev meeting so far.

It’s always nice and strange to discover a network of people who do work and think on issues close to those of my own, but were pretty invisible from my perspective until now. Always a nice reminder that my worldviews are filtered by my own network and my usual practices. Glad I went beyond those.

I don’t have a coherent story about things I’m learning, so just bits:

* lots of development work involves funding that always flows in the same direction, creating all kinds of issues around power and taking responsibility
* what happend when the centralised funding runs out? how do we find a long-term intrinsic motivation and resources or a win-win situation within the network to make it sustainable?
* how centralised and decentralised processes could co-exist? how organisational and network structures can co-exist given that their dynamics and reward structures often contradict?
* newcomers moving from periphery to the center, taking responsibility – how do you facilitate the process when the practices in the center are implicitly negotiated?