Empowering Communities Through Knowledge Management Initiatives

1. Who am I? • I am Barry (hear me roar) • Used to be in EWB Cardiff, did the whole branch president thing etc. • Got a Vodafone Foundation World of Difference Award to work full time for 2 months for a charity of my choice. Can you guess which one I chose? • 6 weeks down, 3 weeks remaining

2. What have I been doing? • Knowledge Management: Looking at how the 6 Communities of Practice are disseminated throughout each of the Programme Areas • Introducing two new Communities based on Healthcare and Mobility Technologies, and Food and Agriculture

3. What are 6 CoP? • Water and Sanitation • Energy • Habitat • ICT • Industry • Transport

4. What did I find when I arrived? • They weren’t used for much • The general enthusiasm was there but technical problems surrounding the organisation and definition of the Communities impeded things • Communities = Groups of people. There were none

5. How could they be used? • Organise ourselves • Knowledge sharing • Internally and externally • Website structure • Quality control on placements, research, training • Organise contacts etc. • Fundraising

6. Research Team Water Co-ord. Placements Team Training Team Bursaries Team Outreach Team Education Team Energy Co-ord. Habitat Co-ord. ICT Co-ord. Transport Co-ord. Industry Co-ord. HMT Co-ord. Food & Agriculture Co-ord. Placements Co-ord. Training Co-ord. Research Co-ord. Bursaries Co-ord. Outreach Co-ord. Education Co-ord. Chief Executive Officer

7. Time to enter a new plane of thought...

9. Have I missed anything? Any further thoughts?

10. Healthcare and Mobility Technologies • Why? • It’s a neglected area in international development • Leads to social exclusion • There are numerous organisations that could benefit from an engineering input

11. Go back to that other plane of thought...

12. HMT Workshop • Saturday June 5 • Imperial College. Tell all your friends • Jump-start session to enable collaborations between ourselves and other groups/organisations • Placements, research, training etc.

14. We are faced with a series of options • Option 1: • Alter the organisational structure of EWB-UK • Thematically as opposed to programmatically

15. Research Team Water Co-ord. Placements Team Training Team Bursaries Team Outreach Team Education Team Energy Co-ord. Habitat Co-ord. ICT Co-ord. Transport Co-ord. Industry Co-ord. HMT Co-ord. Food & Agriculture Co-ord. Placements Co-ord. Training Co-ord. Research Co-ord. Bursaries Co-ord. Outreach Co-ord. Education Co-ord. Current Structure Chief Executive Officer

16. Water Co-ord. Water Team Energy Team Energy Co-ord. Habitat Team Habitat Co-ord. Information and Communications Technology Team ICT Co-ord. Transport Co-ord. Transport Team Industry Co-ord. Industry Team Healthcare and Mobility Team HMT Co-ord. Food and Agriculture Team Food & Agriculture Co-ord. Placements Co-ord. Training Co-ord. Research Co-ord. Bursaries Co-ord. Outreach Co-ord. Education Co-ord. Alternative Structure Chief Executive Officer

17. What say you?

18. Case Study: ISF France • Each branch is independent which takes care of their own programmes • ISF France is a federation which provides guidance to the branches • This guidance and resulting framework is in the form of Communities of Practice • Water; Energy; Agriculture; Engineering citizen

19. Branch Projects • Community of Practice structure would be beneficial to EWB-UK branch projects which are happening overseas • Hybrid structure, cos everyone loves the word hybrid, has benefits

20. Have I missed anything? Any further thoughts?

22. Option 2 • Annual Review • Arranged programmatically? • Or thematically?

24. What now? • Presuming that you all booed and hissed at everything suggested so far, here is what I propose...

25. Community of Practice Co-ordinators • Co-ordinators or points of contact for each Community of Practice • Preferably 2 per community

26. What would they do? • There needs to be a project or task • As a counterpart to “Engineering in Emergencies”, I am proposing that we, as EWB-UK and anybody else that wants in at some point, develop a counter-part “Engineering in International Development”. It will be released under Creative Commons license

27. Why? • Most of the knowledge and experience of EWB-UK is in people’s heads • The purpose of this is not to write a book, but to disseminate everything we collectively know • It will give the PN something to do • Generally have more experience to impart than time to do actual overseas work

28. How do we go about it? • The Community co-ordinators task is to distil the knowledge within their community • Wiki-like structure where anybody can edit, but co-ordinators and any other admins they appoint can approve • Google groups under google apps used for entire mailing list to discuss topics • All emails archived back to a central point for later reference

29. Each community can develop organically, and split into sub-communities as necessary • i.e. Energy splits to wind, hydro, stoves etc.

30. Your thoughts please? • Do we go ahead with CoP co-ordinators?

31. Do we use wiki-like structure?

32. Do we use google groups structure?

33. Do we aim to do the “book”?

34. Everyone should be involved, but should it be spearheaded by the PN? • “Get Creative Campaign”

35. Challenges • Creative Commons licensing current online material • Revision control • “LIVE” revision • Minor revisions • Major revisions • Food and Agriculture Community

36. Development/Citizenship CoP?? • Micro-enterprise • Education and training of partners • Participatory processes • Security • Personal health • General cross cutting themes

37. The most pressing issue of the day • New CoP logos

38. Thanks for coming