Collaborative Research

Thank you for the initiative. Whilst voting I was wondering if it was not biased as there were always only two options and the one discarded got then repeated again. Laurence Haddad from Sussex University posted a good article in his blog regarding Binary approaches:

http://www.developmenthorizons.com/2013/10/its-binary-binary-binary...

It is different from the voting system but worth reading.

Thanks again

Hello Patricia,

Thanks for that question. I will try to address it as good as I can.

They might be presented in a binary way but you were also able to say I don't know, or suggest another idea (that might lie half way inbetween the two). Thus, there are at least for options in my eyes.

Additionally, you are not the only one to respond and other people get different pairs (and you get different pairs if you do it long enough). Thus, an idea gets compared to many different ideas by different people and the algorythm (where the decisions about rankings are made) then puts all these things together into one single ranking.

Hope that clarifies this. John has also send about an interesting paper on the tool a few days ago. That goes into more detail than I can do.

Thanks.

Best wishes,

Philipp

Hello Philipp and John,

Excuse my ignorance. It was just a question on the methodology, I ll go back to John's paper but I was just wondering where you place the context in the results that you get from the survey?.

Disregard if my question is already answered in John's paper.

Best wishes,

P

Hello Patricia,

I see. I am not sure. I think that the tool is only suited to exploring the context of the original question (the one that stays at the top at all times). I do not think that it is suitable for exploring the context of the actual ideas.

Other methods, tools, etc. would be necessary for that I feel.

I hope this helps.

Best wishes,

Philipp

Here are 2 blog posts about the All our Ideas tool exploring how to use it and what some possible applications might be:

• http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2013/09/03/what-should-the-u...
• http://dartthrowingchimp.wordpress.com/2013/08/11/using-wiki-survey...

Martina Hetzel wrote this in the mailing list:

Hello Phillip,

I am especially interested in the topic: 

Strategic KM4Dev – examples, analysis, orientation

because I feel I need other strategies than the ones I know so far. 

Lets keep exchanging.

One recomendation: please consider in your work other topics which influence a lot the daily work of development agencies, local organizations and their projects. May be its even an entry point for you to reflect about the strategic KM4Dev we need.

I give you two examples:

- Indicators: In organizations where indicators are very strong and there is a rather "conservative" indicator management (formulating indicators before process starts, managing indicators like a control instrument etc.), the indicators can prohibit open learning processes (result is more public relations).

- intern team work organization: in organizations where colaboration between north and south headquarters are managed by work process systems calculating per hours and "tangible" results it can also prohibit open exchange processes and cultures.  

So you see: the topic for me is not only the strategic KM4Dev paper - the topic is where are the elements in the organizational model which restrain a KM4Dev culture. It would be a good step if those who decide about such systems at least know what the decision means for the KM culture in their organization.

Many times I heared that KM4Dev is thinking about the "outside world" of an international organization (e.g. their results with target groups). Its right, but who doesnt practice KM in an intern sphere, wont know how to do it externally. 

Saludos! Tina

Hello Tina,

you make  some very important points there. The connections you see between the daily workings in international organisations and the strategic decisions made (with impacts on KM) are indeed crucial. 

Someone on twitter (cannot remember who) quoted Peter Drucker yesterday: "Culture eats strategy for breakfast". I could not agree any more with this. Working with culture is something that cannot be addressed appropriately by writing strategies, policies and procedures. Cultural change is a gradual process of framing and sense making, probing and testing, etc. And since we cannot start from scratch highly depended on the individual situation and context one tries to address and work with.

Finding replicable lessons in this area has thus limited feasibility and is maybe not the most effective thing to do? What becomes important is that the right people have the right sort of knowledge and skills (and maybe mindset; since you refer to it) to nudge things into a desirable state whenever the possibility comes along their way. At a strategic level that would mean that the people making those decisions have internalised the values and importance of KM and live their career in that spirit. Creating that awareness, again, is in my eyes not a fact of writing down why KM is (strategically) important but for those people to experience (and being aware of) how knowledge makes a difference in their strategic decision making. Crucial to this is understanding the status quo in the organisation because only this can bring to light the workings of the organisation and create the knowledge necessary to be able to work in a way that fosters welcome developments and hinders unwelcome ones.

However, many would argue that this is what strategic mgmt is all about. Arguing for strategic KM is maybe not as effective as underlining how strategic management is all about having a holistic understanding of an organisation. On a strategic level, KM is not a separate thing.

Does this sound related to what you are talking about? Is this the sort of thing you mean? Would that help with what you understand as strategic KM4Dev? Is this an avenue to pursue in your eyes?

Best wishes,

Philipp

Dear all,

I just wanted to get in touch letting you know what I am up to (I have offered the resources and I intend to be transparent and accountable).

At the moment I am spending my time on deciding how to take this forward. Particularly, how much of the work I do on my own and how heavily I "touch base" with the group/and through which medium.

I think that as it currently stands it is not ideal and I have planned a few activities that will help me think about how to proceed. 

As always, if you have any thoughts on the matter please let me know.

Otherwise, I will be in touch next week.

Best wishes,

Philipp

Dear all,

I am making progress on deciding how to continue with this. I had an interesting discussion with some people last week with whom I 'walked around the problem' regarding this collaboration. 

This is a method that John is involved with and in a discussion of two cases various facilitator tried to trigger ideas and potential avenues forward in the minds of the people they were trying to help. I was one of them and the recordings and notes from the meeting can be found here: http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2013/11/29/recap-from-nov-20-2103-mvp-... 

Any thoughts, comments, ideas?

Best wishes,

Philipp

Philipp, I just want to say, I"m drowning in my own work and research now and can't lend a hand. But I wanted to also say "I hear you" because I'm frustrated when I post someplace and no one answers....

Thanks Nancy, as I stated in the online conversation I posted below, this is an experiment about how collaborative resaearch (actually: PAR) with a CoP can be carried out. I thought KM4Dev was a good community to try this out with since, overall, it is fairly collaboartive and engaged anyways. However, some cords have not be tuned to the right notes as yet (or maybe never will) and I am grappling with the question about how to continue. Any ideas of yours would be highly appreciated!

Create the eighth day of the week!

I will see what I can do :) 

So far so good.

In the discussions we had on PAR on this mailing list since the wikisurvey it was emphasised that these sort of projects are usually started by “practitioners” that confront a certain problem (what I called improve understanding of a phenomenon); not surprising really since research shows that problem-solving is the single most important motivation for information seeking to occur.

The wiki-survey is a fair attempt at starting something like this without imposing a researchers agenda but it is not sufficient involvement for people to invest time into a continuous exploration of a problem at hand. It lacks the intrinsic motivation at the practitioners end that is inherent in a practitioner starting such a project.

What is the problem with a single practitioner starting a PAR?

As I see it, the problem is that these processes usually end up looking at only one context (project/organisation/ etc.)

In my mind, the single most important thing that keeps PAR from going mainstream at this point in time is concerns about “objectivity” (and with it scalability and transferability). After all, what implications has one case for another? ‘None’ and ‘everything you dare to imagine’ are both equally valid answers.

The idea that I wanted to try out with the collaborative research project I started with KM4Dev (after encouragement from John Smith) is; what if we ran action research projects in a community? What if we address the problems academics and practitioners face in a PAR way AND get something that is more than a single case? What if this sort of collaborative PAR would work and we would improve practice, our understanding of the phenomena we study, AND could claim that what we tried is applicable in more than one context?

This was the idea. I know that this is not a straightforward read (something else academics tend to do). However, if academics want to do more meaningful and applicable research and practitioners want to base their actions on critical reflection rather than assumptions I think we have to find ways of talking and working with each other.

These lines are as much for the purpose of my own contemplation as for triggering ideas.

Feel free to make of this whatever you deem appropriate.

Kindest regards,

Philipp

Dear all,

I would like to offer some reflections on what John refers to below because at this time I consider the project failed.

Peter Bury wrote a while ago that: “What we could promote maybe more is the formation of (temporary) working groups around a topic of common interest.” He thought that this is something that the community could do more. I thought so too and offered some of my time as a researcher to support such efforts.

You might recall that I offered 3 hours a week for a few months to be dedicated to something of a PAR project. The idea was that instead of doing PAR in only one organisation looking at only one context we could look at similar problems across different projects with the PAR methodology in mind. Now, getting to my reflections:

As a researcher it is difficult to do meaningful work.

For me this is a fact; you are not only working in a system and environment that is set up to only “produce” “knowledge” but you are also in a system and environment that incentivises talking to each other more than it incentivises talking to people in adjacent systems; encouragement for being a boundary object is minimal.  

This in principle is not a problem. I assume this is the case for every social system that has such a long history, etc.; they all tend to be inwardly focussed. Thus, I generally support claims of academics sitting in their ivory towers. Maybe, this is why thinking out of the box, innovation and creativity happen so seldom (especially in academia).

Practitioners have a draw back position that gives meaning to their work, which is that they are “doing stuff” that they imagine has an impact. They struggle to prove it but the famous ‘leap of faith’ (and the assumptions underlying it) is more embedded in a practitioners work than they usually like to admit (to their bosses and funders in particular). However, when I worked as a practitioner I found that I struggled with a similar problem to the one academics struggle with. I was incentivised to get things done. Since we were in the business of doing stuff we were never given much time to rethink our approaches, question our assumptions, and, every once in a while, ask ourselves if we were actually (still) providing more benefits than we caused harm.

What I am trying to say is that doing things differently is as difficult in academia as it is in the practice domain.

Participatory action research and other approaches with similar philosophical underpinnings have evolved to address some of this. Trying to tear down the borders between thinking and doing, knowledge and action, etc. Some people are trying to overcome the (in my view) misunderstanding that we can happily know stuff without acting upon it and happily do stuff without questioning what we base those actions on. However, in modern western societies we still believe that we can have separate sub-systems that deal with knowledge production and application. All that stuff regarding knowledge brokering, knowledge translation, etc. are our desperate attempts to overcome those boundaries that we created ourselves in the first place.

The reason why I like participatory action research is that it tackles the problem at its core. Rather than adding further independent actors, roles, etc. and maybe introducing new sub-systems it makes the bold claim that knowledge and action should never be separated in the first place.

Thanks for your reflections, Philipp. From where I sit, objectivity is not the barrier. It is finding the shared value proposition to prioritize the PAR. It is that basic for me. So a single practitioner starting may be a big challenge because the shared value proposition is not there, out front, from the start. 

I"m hoping to read your reflections more carefully, Philipp, but one thought that keeps popping up for me is that the "system convener" model that Bev and Etienne were talking about doesn't require that "nothing counts" till project begins.  I keep wondering whether the PAR model that you are exploring requires a clear starting point.  A system convener might step into an inquiry midstream and attempt to move it forward.  But they might not get credit in an academic context, so the importance of that role might be easily missed.

Pardon the half-formed thought but this question has been nagging at me.

Hello you two,

I see and agree with what both of you are saying. What Nancy outlines is the issue that I am thinking about. 

What John says is a way out of the "problem" by re-framing the issue in terms of system level (encompassing PAR processes in communities).

I do not think that a PAR needs a clear starting point. I mean, people can commit to things without having a contract or some sort of formal agreement. If the point at which people let each other know that they commit to something that might take a while is a starting point, I do not know. In the end, nothing ever starts or ends. :) 

In a way systems convening is what we all do with every single contribution to the social structures around us. We can put down a flag everywhere and claim that this is the centre or define and that the boundaries are over there but this is not an answer to the question at an "essence" level.

This, as well, is a half-formed thought.

Best wishes,

Philipp

@Nancy: 'letting down' can only occur when someone commits to something or if the other for some other reason has certain expectations. Since that was not my position with regards to this no such thing could have happened :) 

Just sayin "YEAH" to this:

"In a way systems convening is what we all do with every single contribution to the social structures around us. We can put down a flag everywhere and claim that this is the centre or define and that the boundaries are over there but this is not an answer to the question at an "essence" level."

I have a real split personality reaction to the role of systems convener you mention John. I totally see the value. And I worry that this is just another excuse for all of us to not take responsibility.  Does that make sense?

Oh, and may I say, I hate a discussion tool that sends me alerts but not the content of the message. Grin.

AND... I want to contradict my own crazy self. The PAR I'm working on now would stop dead if two of us did not keep plugging away. The really great thing about that is she and I are learning a lot. The bad thing is we are creating dependency on the part of others. They see value, but they have no vested stake in the game. We are a gift. And in two weeks, we are presenting our initial findings and saying that the gift is going away. If they want more, than have to put something into the game. 

One critical element that I saw in that System Convener idea was that such people seem to have some kind of power or social base from which to operate.  They manage to keep at it "after the report" and were observing the landscape of practice "before the project."  So not many consultants for hire get to play that role because we come and go so readily.  (That's one reason I have a strong commitment to roles where I am not a consultant and therefore my learning is not curtailed when the money runs out.)

Both Nancy and Philipp are talking about deliberate, conscious commitment.  It seems to me that a lot of learning happens when we are looking the other way, where our commitments "have us" rather than "us having commitment."

Scroll down to "A new way of learning" http://reports.p2pu.org/reports/assessment_on_the_web/part_1/index.... and read...

"

Participating is learning. By observing and chiming in with your ideas in an online community, over time you’re learning several things: the domain of the community (i.e. code, techno, lolzcatz), and how to communicate within it (i.e. communication tools, but also etiquette, are emotiji appropriate?). An online presence is a blend of “soft” and “hard” skills, and they are interconnected.

Communities decide what’s acceptable. Voting an answer up-or-down, liking a post, or remixing a project--these are different levels of granularity, but anyone in the community can give feedback on any project. The community decides what’s good and what’s not, and folks who make stellar contributions are celebrated.

Feedback is key. It’s actually a core skill in a community of practice. Whether it’s leaving a comment on a post, suggestions on a project, or answering an open question, giving feedback is a way to apply the norms and values of a community. Giving feedback is also a kind of learning--in and of itself."

Hello all,

Nancy, I am in a position where I think that I do not want to engage in something where I feel I foster dependencies. Whenever we do not address unequal relationships we are (unconsciously) reinforcing them and I think there is plenty about without me adding. So, if PAR does not happen on an equal contribution basis I just feel I should stay out of it.

This is where John's comment comes in; not many consultants get to play that role. You are making this call now (we will go away if not...) but that is possible because you can!

I agree with John and would say that actually most learning happens when we look away. The things we take for granted are the things that have the biggest impact on who we are. But then how do we imagine a different future and change things if conscious commitment does not play a role?

Isn't this what movements like Transition Towns are all about? Living it, vs making something an empheral project? 

I think so. Their underlying philosophies and values are very similar to what we are looking for I believe.

However, they struggle as much with conventional thinking as we do (funding, demonstrating impact, etc.). It is those boundaries where different ways of thinking meet that I think the magic happens. I am trying, sort of, to find the middle way.

Living. Magic.

Short and readable: Collective impact. On collaboration:

 http://www.ssireview.org/blog/entry/rereading_collective_impact_thr...

Hey Guys,

just thought about having been eager to take this forward a few months ago.

I have to say, I made a few more attempts offline to engage people at the boundary of academia and practice to come up with some new ways of going about things but I have been remarkably unsuccessful.

I was wondering if anyone else here is actually doing some stuff at that boundary with regards to KM4Dev?

If so, are you doing it with more than one organisation at a time? Is there an element of cases feeding from each other?

Just curious.

Cheers,

Philipp