I have been quite absent writing in my blog and as always it feels overwhelming the conversations that are going in in the space around. One of the works that reflects my current work and thinking is about two streams of communities of practice, for development and strategy in the public sector (I have to admit that for practical reasons, my work just focuses on the public sector in The Netherlands for the time being). The thinking about development is much in line with where Maja van der Velden has gone with in 2004 with her paper for the Society for International Development: "From communities of practice to communities of resistance" (PDF) The result is a neutered, harmless version of knowledge, a commodity that is perceived as objective non-ideological, neutral and credible,located in networks, communities of practice,documents and databases. Knowledge in this defi-nition is most decidedly not creative, diverse andgrounded in people and communities.
Maja's earlier papers of 2002 about communities and development, available from the same site, show where the KM + ICT and development thought from her come from. My other thinking has raised several questions about the role of information networks, knowledge-sharing network and communities of practice in the public sector today: below are two of them:
- Project Management and communities of practice; within the public sector there is a very strong tendency to apply project management principle and techniques which many times conflicts with some of the basic principles of communities. Project management defines strict roles and responsibilities (~reporting) which leads to clear-cut decision making. Communities on the other hand are organic groups of people with distributed, even emerging leadership and shared decision making, and no formal reporting. When does the project management become process management ? How can these two, or even three (when proces management is considered) co-exists and strengthen the decision making capabilities of bodies within the Public Sector.
- Communities of Practice within public-private partnerships. There is a lot of attention for making PPP's succeed in the Public Sector. The role of knowlegde networks and communities that span partners involved in the PPP and beyond that has been paid little attention to; the boundaries of the scope of the partners in the PPP seem to inhibit necessary knowledge sharing through expertise networks and communities (at the interfaces), especially for legal and financial reasons. Risk or opportunity for the Public Sector to act as facilitating party?
This happened at 9:49:51 PM or
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