Laszlo Z. Karvalics view complete profile

When dealing with under development, poverty reduction, rural communities or modernization issues, the dominant government (and local government) narrative is to “give” something to help, as a humanitarian mission, or as an “investment” to maintain the social peace, order and building roadblocks to the escalation of crime. The logic of “giving” implies the “source lost” feeling (we had to give them money, because it is the “prize” of our socio/economic sustainability, but if there is no such a political pressure, we would have been able to spend this amount in more effective way… ).

How to overcome and change this approach? How to find other benefits of “community investments”?

If we use the terms and methodology of the discipline of knowledge management (KM)¹, we have to realize, that there is a growing chance to re-formulate the strategic edge of this policy segment, in an offensive (competitive advantage generating) way.

Let’s see the poor communities as owners of a special and complex knowledge asset (even if this asset seems to be very small). If we can detect, multiply, manage and use this asset, inserting its holders into different kind of value-(re)production cycles, the gain (as an impact of our advanced KM-policy) could be described even by well known accounting terms: i.e. profit-making or substitution of additive investment.

Anyhow, it is not an easy way to a policy making paradigm shift². First of all, we have to describe these communities in the standard terms of KM. We have to develop the most useful and effective methods of knowledge mapping³. We have to understand the role of different types, “axes” and “productivity rates”of their (local) knowledge. As doing so we identified four main types of knowledge in the following table.

Along with the need for a paradigm change in policy the telecenter movement also taught us to pay sufficient attention to the emerging “civil society face” of social/network capital development (bottom up, communities).

If we agree with Francis Fukuyama’s “big picture” on current “Great Disruption” (Fukuyama, 1999) we have to accept his approach regarding to the “reconstitution of social order” as well. This emerging reconstitution is based on the new lap (or renewal) of social capital production. Coleman (1988) and Fukuyama emphasizes the pivotal role of communities in this process. Thanks to the growing size of communities, the social capital is currently more or less equal with the “network capital”. The ability to become a member of a (community) network and a chance to be interconnected has a growing importance.

Phillips Cutright described the correlation between democracy and communication almost 40 years ago (Cutright, 1963). He found the communication index (which is no more than the rate of interconnectivity) to be “a better predictor of political development than economic development is”. Christopher R. Kedzie is joining to it with a stronger statement (Kedzie, 1998):

The less developed countries, regions and communities can realize and deeply understand the strategic role of multipurpose community telecenters only from this point of view. It is interesting to see, that taking this step, the debate has arrived to that point, where it was started 85 years ago. The term “social capital” was first used by Lyda Hanifan Judson, speaking about the rural schools as community centers. ( Judson, 1916 )

1. The knowledge management is traditionally used in and for the business sector. Other organizations (universities, government units and agencies, international NGO’s) have started to apply and implement the KM approach only in the last four years.

2. It was Horn (2001) who described how knowledge maps can improve public policy discussions – they help the experts to learn the roles and expertise of people, to identify constraints to the flow of knowledge, and to highlight opportunities to leverage existing knowledge.

3. The knowledge map is a navigation aid to explicit (codified) information and tacit knowledge, showing the importance and the relationships between knowledge sores and dynamics. The knowledge map, an outcome of synthesis, portrays the sources, flows, constraints and sinks (losses or stopping points) of knowledge within an organization (Grey 1999)

4. Asset mapping is a term coined by John McKnight, of Northwestern University, based on his research of successful communities and neighborhoods (Madii, 2002)

5. The indigenous knowledge mapping approach was used among circumpolar peoples by the University of Manitoba’s Natural Resources Institute (Madii, 2002)

6. As people share their stories, develop their abilities, and discover their local resources, they create new local knowledge. They form and strengthen relationships to create opportunities for themselves, their families, their organizations and their community. People find local solutions as they act on their hopes and dreams for improving their quality of life in all dimensions. (Madii, 2002)