I'm currently working in a large UN agency on knowledge management, and am facing a particularly difficult challenge which I will write about here.
While our organization regularly speaks about the importance of evidence and knowledge in our work, our systems, tools and practices are not well set up to share knowledge internally and externally in the way we need them to be. We are just putting together a first version of a draft strategy, but at the same time the organization is under a lot of pressure for funding and so we have very little resources to be able to make the kind of changes we need.
We have a small team, and a few in house tools but notably what we don't have is:
1. Money to develop new KM tools or to enhance existing ones (and which still need some enhancements to be where we need them to be).
2. No money for travel to speak to our colleagues in the field or in other organizations.
3. No money to buy equipment or software.
4. No money for participating in training or conferences.
5. No money to support us with internal communication.
This blog will be about our exoerience as we try to overcome some of these obstacles as we try to meet the high expectations on us with little more than our limited staff time (and whatever we are able to beg, steal and borrow).
I might also make the occasional digression into good donorship and aid effectiveness since these are two topics that I'm also passionate about.
