A Note on Information and Knowledge Management for

Sustainable Development
Calin Alexandru Toma1, Information Systems Expert
Version 0.8 as of August 21st 2015, sections 1, 3-6.1 completed, 2 and 6.2, 6.3 and appendixes to
complete

Contents
Executive summary ................................................................................................................................. 2

1. Background: Sustainable Development in 2015 and short review of UNOSD mission statement,
founding documents and activities up to date ....................................................................................... 2

2. Different perspectives on I&KM in SD ................................................................................................ 4

2.1 Stakeholders in I&KM in SD ...................................................................................................... 4

2.2 Frames of analysis of socio-economic-biophysical systems ..................................................... 6

2.3 Different perspectives in the structural-technical frame ......................................................... 9

2.4 Culture and metaphors: the good, the bad and the ugly ....................................................... 11

3. The global information and knowledge management landscape in 2015........................................ 18

3.1 Information and knowledge management: the why .............................................................. 18

3.2 Information and knowledge management: the classical how ................................................ 19

3.3 Review of Some Recent Interesting Sources in I&KM ............................................................ 22

3.4 Some other interesting trends in I&KM .................................................................................. 25

3.5 Recent Technology Ideas and Changes Affecting I&KM ......................................................... 31

4. Other significant inputs..................................................................................................................... 39

4.1 Surveys .................................................................................................................................... 39

4.2 Analysis of the existing platforms. .......................................................................................... 40

5. Issues with IM and KM in SD ............................................................................................................. 42

1
Disclaimer: While this essay was written as I was working for the United Nations Office for Sustainable
Development, the opinions expressed are strictly mine and do not necessarily reflect those of UNOSD or the UN
in general, and the responsibility for any error is mine. Without intending to write a 99F or Extension du
domaine de la lutte, there was little attempt to being politically correct. The quotes and images from various
sources have always been given credit and used with what I consider being “fair use”; changes can be made at
the request of copyright holders. Given the very wide variety of topics treated here, each area will seem
oversimplified to a specialist; however I believe there is some value in bringing all this together.

1
 5.1 Issues ....................................................................................................................................... 42

5.2 Possible Solutions ................................................................................................................... 44

6. Strategy and implementation guidelines .......................................................................................... 44

6.1 Strategy: clients, I&K activities ................................................................................................ 44

6.2 General implementation guidelines ....................................................................................... 45

6.3 Implementation scenarios for the Web presence with estimated costs ................................ 48

Appendix 1: UNOSD mission and I&KM activities up to date ............................................................... 49

Appendix 2: Description of the dataset gathered in 2013-2015 .......................................................... 51

Appendix 3: Some additional references .............................................................................................. 51

Executive summary
Attempt at simplification
Complex I&KM and complex object – perspectives. Political and symbolic dominate de facto
but are pushed by structural-technical points of view.
With Google, who needs I&KM?
Main issues with I&KM – abundance and trust. Awareness, compatibility (in terms of
paradigm, context, frame and taxonomy), what can I trust.
A lot of traditional models in I&KM are more or less applicable and enlightening. Some new
tools, concepts, ideas.
What the data that we gathered is (prototype and input for supervised machine learning for
automated data gathering, to be coupled with crowdsourcing).

1. Background: Sustainable Development in 2015 and short review of

UNOSD mission statement, founding documents and activities up to date
The main purpose of this document is to analyse the state of the art and paint a landscape of
information and knowledge management in (I&KM) in the field of Sustainable Development
(SD) in 2015. As this research was produced while the author was working for the United
Nations Office for Sustainable Development or UNOSD (2013-2015), a secondary purpose is
to reconsider the knowledge-related activities of UNOSD after the first three years of its
activity and define an information and knowledge management strategy for the office that is
actually possible to implement together with implementation guidelines and scenarios. This
introductive background section therefore presents UNOSD mission, summarizes some of the
accomplishments up to date (and in particular the aspects related to knowledge activities) and
introduces the rest of the paper. In order to keep this part short before analysing the present
landscape of I&KM the interested reader is referred to a more detailed presentation of

2
UNOSD in annex 1. The paper was also written in the context of the Rio + 20 conference and
the post-2015 or SD agenda. Even a high level definition of the field of SD is beyond the
scope of this paper – and it is hoped that the potential audience would anyway be familiar
with SD. However, Appendix 3 lists some verified, short references on the history and
evolution of SD if the reader feels it needed. Based on the largely used (and at the same time
largely used and largely criticised) model on the figure below (from Wikipedia), we consider
SD synonym to the study of the dynamics of complex biophysical2-socio-economic systems,
steering these systems3 towards a path allowing to satisfy the needs of today’s population
without endangering the future generations.

Figure 1: classic SD schema (from Wikipedia).

As detailed on the institutional Web site 4 , the mission is of UNOSD was defined at its
creation as to "support[s] U.N. Member States in planning and implementing sustainable
development strategies, notably through knowledge sharing, research, training and
partnership building." When UNOSD was created, highly experienced consultants were hired
to produce a set of documents, including inception documents and inception risk assessments
for management (by Alan AtKisson), a review of knowledge, capacity building and networks
for sustainable development (also by Alan AtKisson), an “UNOSD KM strategy” and an
“UNOSD KM scoping” document (last two by Nils Ferrand). The knowledge, capacity
building and networks review5 defines itself as “[…] a selective, summary scan of the current
“state of the art” in sustainable development (“SD”) knowledge, capacity building, and
networks, in a SD context, with resulting recommendations to UNOSD." These “founding
documents” of UNOSD, dealing with information and knowledge management in SD, will be
reviewed in detail as part of section 3 (The global I&KM in SD).
During the next years (2012-2015) the UNOSD organized a series of activities – in particular
CB events, multi-stakeholder meetings, and expert group meetings. About 800 persons
participated in those meetings, roughly half of them experts in subdomains of SD and the
other half government officials. Released a prototype of what could be a knowledge platform,
publishing information essentially related to the AtKisson document referenced above, and
gathered additional data manually.

2
The term “biophysical” seems to me more relevant than “environmental” by its connotations. I first
encountered this term in David Leblanc’s paper (reference). I will continue to use the word “environmental”
when treating separately this aspect and “biophysical” when treating the integrated, systemic three aspects.
3
To blend with the Brundtland definition of SD.
4
www.unosd.org
5
Available online at
http://www.unosd.org/content/documents/90UNOSD%20KST%20Assessment%20Report%202013-03-04.pdf

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In parallel, the rest of the world did not stay unchanged. Political processes – post-2015
agenda. Development of KM platforms for SD. Organizations which continue to conduct
large development and SD projects and gather invaluable practical knowledge. Scientists and
academia who continue to develop theoretical models, more or less connected to reality.
Social media explosion.
The rest of this note is organized as follows. Section 2 analyses the importance of looking at
information and knowledge in SD from different perspectives or through different frames.
Section 3 paints the present knowledge and information landscape by presenting some simple
models relevant for the terminology used in the following sections, summarizing some older
ideas of knowledge management and sharing some relatively recent literature and trends in
knowledge activities. Section 4 presents other significant inputs (mainly surveys and analysis
of existing “knowledge platforms”) allowing us to identify the issues with information and
knowledge management in SD (section 5) and to define a general strategy to deal with these
issues (section 6). In order to actually implement this strategy section 7 presents
implementation guidelines (targeted at the particular case and limits of UNOSD) and he
possible implementation scenarios and their associated costs.
It is believed that this note should be useful as a starting point for anyone interested in SD –
that’s why the introductive section and section 8 (implementation scenarios) were kept short.
However I do understand that the two themes (state of I&KM in SD in 2015 and a practical
strategy for a precise organization) have different potential audiences and half lives; I
attempted to privilege the general question of the state of the field to maximize the potential
audience.
2. Different perspectives on I&KM in SD
"This old wood cut of the story of the blind man and the elephant is a reminder that any
complex subject can be studied in many ways.” With this words (and the associated image
and metaphor), the famous linguist and language philosopher Steven Pinker started his talk in
Authors at Google in September 2007. While I assume everyone agrees that socio-
economico-biophysical systems that embody the concept of SD are indeed extremely
complex, I think the answer to “why consider different perspectives on SD” needs to be
elaborated further from the point of view of I&KM. This excursion in the psychological,
social, economic and political aspects of SD might be perceived as somehow lateral – even
irrelevant – for the I&KM in SD, which is my central subject. However, like in any activity
dealing with human communication – information and communication are intimately linked
and it is not possible to separate them. I start by explicitly defining the categories of
stakeholders in I&KM on SD as referred to in this document, then present a frame model
adapted from management literature and finally some different perspectives (“discourse
universes”) on SD at the interior of the technical-rational frame.
2.1 Stakeholders in I&KM in SD

The figure below is a crude model of matter, energy and information flow in biophysical-
socio-economic systems, at the national scale. As already mentioned, the purpose of this
model is to make explicit some of the often implicit assumptions and not to define a working
model. While it is obviously very incomplete, it is more detailed on the socio-economic side
(because what we are looking for is information and knowledge). Even in the socioeconomic
sphere it does not take into account the distinction between elected politicians and career
administrators, political activism and parties, financial flows (in particular who finances
science, technology, mass media), markets etc. Also does not take into account the

4
international scale (where the financial flows towards least developed and developing
countries are essential for any type of development, including sustainable development).
However this can also be useful for defining roles in the knowledge cycle as well as
understanding the potential “clients” for a I&KM platform.

Figure 2: a simplified model of matter, energy and information flows in SD

Based on the dynamic in figure 1 above, we could define at least three interesting categories
of stakeholders in the I&KM process: the general public, less interesting, but still would need
education

Contributors (government employees): main target, need access to knowledge, CB,

communities…

Facilitators (experts): can help with knowledge brokering and validate our ideas

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Figure 3: schema of stakeholders in I&KM

These categories have been defined with the UNOSD “clients” for I&KM in mind. Primary
clients: government officials from developing countries (contributors, as they contribute
directly to SD policies design and implementation). Secondary clients: domain experts (in
either areas of SD or information and knowledge management). Third level: general public.

Why this third category is still relevant? Because of two reasons:

- Each person, by the individual decisions made, is a consumer and will influence the
global pattern of consumption. While each person’s share is infinitesimal and might
seem irrelevant, the aggregated effect of consuming patterns is very large. While
these decisions can be influenced by policy lever (actions of our primary clients), the
behaviour is also influenced by the education of the final consumer.
- At least in democratic systems, politicians (who would ultimately decide the policy
levers) get elected by the general public. It has been argued that policies that are
sustainable are not necessarily popular as they might have negative economic
consequences in the short term; it is much easier for politicians to have a sustainable
agenda (and to be elected and re-elected) if the voters are educated and convinced of
the necessity of this agenda. (Quote Thierry Schwartz from ASEF)

2.2 Frames of analysis of socio-economic-biophysical systems

While there is a comprehensive scientific literature treating construction of discourse in at the

interface between politics and science (with application for example to climate change), it did
not seem as practically useful for this level of analysis. Building on postmodern theoretical
developments (ie Foucault, Derrida, Latour), while intellectually stimulating, seemed less
applicable than importing management science concepts (in particular frames and
metaphors).
I think more useful is a model from management – based on the idea of framing, and
described in detail in Boland and Deal’s Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice and
Leadership, (Bolman, L. G., and Deal, T. E., Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice and
Leadership, 4th edition. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008). The most important aspects of
the four frame model are synthetised on the image below (Source:
http://www.slideshare.net/PhilVincent1/fourframe-model).

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Figure 4: overview of the four frame model from Boland and Deal

Basically, the idea is that we can look at organizations in four different ways – and each of
the ways emphasizes some aspects of the organization and hides (or neglects) some other
aspects. This is not necessarily a new idea in management or “organization science” – one
other very prolific current in the 80s was to consider different metaphors for organizations,
and some traces (in evolutionary terms) can be identified in the figure above on the first line.
Metaphors are in themselves an interesting and rich concept – and their contribution to
communication in general and SD – related communication is important, so I will return to
the power of metaphors later in this section. However the concept of frames is easier to
operationalize and also easier to “sell” to engineering, economic or scientific audiences, as it
is (itself) framed more like a model than like a metaphor; for this reason I will use it in
defining the different perspectives on SD.
From the four frames that Boland and Deal consider important in management and
organizations, I think three are valuable for looking at SD:
- What they call “structural” frame I will rename the “technical-logical” frame. It is
actually this frame that most of the authors pretend to use most of the time, and
consists of scientific modelling of the biophysical, economic, social systems (and
possibly the interactions between these systems). This frame supposes that the
models used to understand the real complex systems are objective and do not
privilege an actor (territory of the political) or make ethical judgements (territory of
the symbolic). The complexity of socio-economic-biophysical systems (on which I
will come back later in the idea of “the fractal nature of knowledge”) as well as the
complex contexts of previous research and knowledge, making experience difficult to

7
 generalize, leave a lot of place for cherry picking and symbolic interpretation of
“objective” results.
- The politico-economic frame can be summarized by the questions: what interests are
at stake, how do I push my own interest? This frame is generally less acceptable,
except in explicit political science or mass media. Science and technology are
(implicitly) supposed to be apolitical, to serve (some kind of vague and undefined)
greater good (which actually relates to the symbolic sphere below). This is the case
pretty much in social sciences and management, with most of the textbooks show-
windowing some kind of positive thinking and political correctness, to the point that
in justifying the choice of Machiavelli’s Prince as a relevant business book, a
synthesis 6 concludes: "It is currently out of fashion to talk about power. We are
constantly reminded that in the knowledge economy, capital wears shoes and goes
home every night. No place here for the blunt instrument of power politics? But
would Sumner Redstone, Bill Gates, or Rupert Murdoch agree? What is interesting is
that after nearly 500 years, Machiavelli is still in print. What modern volume on
leadership will be gracing bookstores in the year 2500? Does Machiavelli’s longevity
tell us anything about what are the deep, enduring truths of management?"
- The symbolic frame deals with what is “good”, has meaning, I should believe in
(including the more complex, self-referential concept of “belief in belief7”). It deals
with the explicit role of metaphors, with what is “natural” (and hence “good”) and
from a sociologic (or evolutionary) point of view is mostly related to religion as a
social phenomenon. Traditionally, this was the territory of (organized) religion,
which can be justified by evolutionary thinking analogic to evolutionary biology (see
for example Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon).
It is maybe neither coincidental nor negligible that most of the producers of the
scientific discourse are not participants in an official religion8; if we agree on the
existence of a spiritual need of the human being (the need of being part of something
bigger that the self, or the “purpose” drive in terms of Daniel Pink’s Motivation 3.0),
we can justify (sociologically) the apparition of organized movements in that space,
deep environmentalism being only one possibility.
Politico-economic frame seems to be the dominant
Technical and symbolic arguments seem to be used to push politico-economic agendas

Bolman and Deal frames + metaphors.

6
The Best Business Books Ever: The Most Influential Management Books You'll Never Have Time To Read
7
Daniel Dennett, in Breaking the Spell, distinguishes belief in God from belief that belief in God is a good thing
both for the believer and the society. He assumes that the number of believers in the fact that belief is good
largely outnumbers the number of believers in God.
8
" In 1998, Larson and Witham polled the cream of American scientists, those who'd been honored by
election to the National Academy of Sciences, and among this select group, belief in a personal God dropped
to a shattering seven percent. About 20 percent are agnostic; the rest could fairly be called atheists.
Similar figures obtained for belief in personal immortality. Among biological scientists, the figure is
even lower: 5.5 percent, only, believe in God. Physical scientists, it's 7.5 percent." (From Richard Dawkins’
TED talk on militant atheism Compare to 100% (self reported) God believers in US politicians and about 65%
Americans participating in religious congregations
https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_dawkins_on_militant_atheism/transcript?language=en ).

8
2.3 Different perspectives in the structural-technical frame

Without going into defining SD or re-caping the history of SD (some references are given in
Appendix 3), there are alternative perspectives even in the structural – technical frame. This
is particularly important today, in 2015, with the very high momentum of SD (because of the
definition of post-2015 development agenda or SDGs).
The complex biophysical – socio – economic system. Simple is more convincing (especially
for politicians). Also complexity allows cherry picking.
“Sustainable development is a very complex “object” with a lot of possible definitions and
perspectives. SD itself can be seen at the intersection of different as well as the different
points of view or “discourse communities”, "integrative clusters" or "lenses"9, important for
the social dynamics of the SD field. Some examples of these (with prototypical Web sites of
organizations standing for) are:
- green economy http://greeneconomycoalition.org/
- green growth http://gggi.org/
- sustainability science http://www.pnas.org/site/misc/sustainability.shtml
- education for sustainable development "ESD" http://desd.org
- sustainability transitions http://www.transitionsnetwork.org/
- additional discourses structured around a topic (water, climate etc).”
An interesting enumeration of different assessments on SD state can be found in the
Prototype Global SD Report 201410 (p.56):
“The following statements are typical:
a) Elements of a sustainable future are already visible. Corporations and NGOs are showing
the way. What is needed is to quickly scale up these initiatives;
b) While we are not yet on a sustainable development path, we know what should be done,
and we have the means to do it. All that is needed is political will to implement commitments
in terms of finance, technology and capacity development;
c) Current environmental trends are unsustainable. Markets are the most efficient way to
guide us on the right path. What is needed is full internalization of environmental
externalities, and expansion of markets for ecosystem services;
d) We are on a fundamentally unsustainable path. Drastic changes in behaviour and lifestyles
are necessary to achieve the necessary transition towards sustainable development;
e) Humanity has transgressed the Earth’s carrying capacity decades ago. Only an immediate
stop to ecosystem destruction, as well as population control and large-scale restoration of
ecosystems might restore global biotic regulation and prevent total collapse of ecosystems,
including the human species.

9
"All such discourses tend to develop their own story lines (“narratives”) and lexicons (“ontologies”) to create a
shared sense of understanding and to explain why this particularly way of framing the complexity of sustainable
development is good (or even “best”)." – Alan AtKisson – Knowledge, capacity building and networks review
document mentioned.
10
Available online at
https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/1454Prototype%20Global%20SD%20Report2.pdf

9
At first glance these statements look mutually contradicting. More in-depth analysis shows
that none of them is necessarily wrong. Different conclusions are reached by choosing
different scopes and completely different time scales. In fact, system size and time scales
increase greatly from the focus on local, current actions to the comprehensive view of the
Earth’s biota and thousands of years.” Personally I find the list of points of view very
accurate as a representation of what is “out there”, but I think the Panglossian idea that the
points of view are reconcilable because of different scales is more wishful thinking in a
romantic search of the idealized win-win instead of the more grim zero sum; I do however
(as I will analyse further) the symbolic and diplomatic value of such a predicament.
From Alan AtKisson’s blog I would like to quote this relatively recent post11 (May 2015) on
the different “theories of change” he associates with different prototypical actor groups:
“Where would you look to understand and analyze that world’s theory of change? Well,
logically, you might start with the United Nations. The processes going on there, right now,
suggest the following theory of change: We will work as nation states. We will set voluntary
goals together. Then we will set up a number of voluntary processes to finance and resource
that change, and to monitor progress. These processes will encourage each nation to change
its policies, which will change behavior, so that we achieve sustainability. Losses of people
and ecosystems along the way are probably inevitable but will be minimized.
But if you keep looking carefully, you quickly see that not everyone subscribes to that theory.
The large business and financial organizations have another one: We will continue to grow
our power as a parallel governance process that controls most of the resource and monetary
flows. Without risking profits, we will engineer changes in investment, manufacturing and
marketing so that sustainability eventually emerges, while those core monetary flows remain
undisturbed. The technology advances and market dynamics will carry us past the risk of
catastrophe. Losses of people and ecosystems along the way, maybe big ones, are inevitable;
but the world will adapt, and that is an acceptable trade-off for increasing our overall material
quality of life.
Civil society — meaning, everyone outside of government and business that is trying to make
change — approaches its theory of change very differently. We will awaken the awareness
and passion of the people. We will generate ideas, enthusiasm, and occasional large
gatherings. Ideas and awareness will spread and enlighten the people, and they will do
various things, in their various contexts, to implement small changes, all of which will add up
to big change. Losses of people and ecosystems along the way are unacceptable and are to be
avoided at all costs.”
Some bias towards environmental preservation (actually the global SD by DSD is much more
balanced, as World Bank also is; report distinguishes areas “to conserve” and “to develop”,
but a lot of initiatives around sustainable development are stressing “sustainable” rather than
“development”, which actually privileges the point of view of the so called North or rich,
developed countries, and the social and economic arguments are actually used more to push
environmental agendas).

11
http://alanatkisson.com/2015/05/14/the-worlds-theory-of-change/

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Figure 5: currents toward SD

Categorisation of sustainable development12

Figure 6

Some of the different frameworks (discourses, schools of thought) and their associated
indicators, from radical (de-growth) to mainstream (Growth as Usual), from an analysis by
AtKisson Sustainability13.
Some specific SD aspects (Complexity and integration – “Administrative, social and political
decision processes about SD are complex” Ferrand, know-do gap and boundary domain,
context dependency, importance of practical tools, MDG -> SDG switch, fuzzy definition,
competing discourse communities, political or politico-economic aspects impeding open
communication)
2.4 Culture and metaphors: the good, the bad and the ugly

Metaphor in itself can be a powerful instrument of framing (Lakoff) also the metaphor of

12
Natasha Grist – Positioning Climate Change in Sustainable Development, J. Int. Dev 20, 783-803, 2008.
13
Reproduced from Life Beyond Growth – Alternatives and Complements to GDP-Measured Growth as a
Framing Concept for Social Progress.

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popping rivets out of an airplane’s wing. And a topic in itself, but for the brevity of this
section in a document which in itself primarily targets information and knowledge and not the
different facets of communication. Some amount of irrationality – to quote Dan Ariely – with
some examples (alternate views than technical-rational).
Word choice (framing): maybe the most obvious in sustainability is “subsidy” vs “tax cut”
(while less charged emotionally than “terrorist” vs “freedom fighter”).
Communication – human communication – is more than exchange of information, and that’s
why, as author Steven Pinker explains in his book (which?) people play complex language
games rather than sticking to the quantity, quality, relevance of “correct” communication.
Role of culture and the power ratio between culture and policy
Why are culture and behavioural economy important? Because what we need is changes in
behaviour by decision makers – be it individual decision makers (citizens), politicians (who
can use regulatory instruments, policies, to change behaviour of citizens and businesses) and
businesses themselves.
Cultural and behavioural economy approaches infer that behaviour (of individuals and
businesses) can be influenced by regulatory and economic levers, but also by culture,
different types of media. In addition – at least in democratic countries – politicians are elected
by citizens, so this feed-back loop has at least two types of effects: 1) politicians who take
unpopular (economic) measures for sustainability tend not to be re-elected 2) if the level of
awareness of sustainability (and the comfortable economic level) are high in the population, it
is easier to elect politicians with higher concerns in sustainability.
Culture (and in particular culture’s impact on sustainability practices, like sustainable
consumption and production, or attitude towards climate change) can also be explained
historically and/or geographically. While the following excerpt 14 is mainly exploring the
“code” of quality in American and Japanese culture, it can be applied to abovementioned
sustainability practices. "Because our country [US] was so vast and underpopulated when we
developed it, we have grown accustomed to a certain level of disposability. If the land we
farmed didn't produce enough, we got new land. If the environment in one part of the country
proved inhospitable, we moved. There was no need to improve the quality of one's house,
because it was easier simply to get a new and better house.
This is fundamentally different from the way many other cultures learned to survive. Take,
for instance, the Japanese. Their country comprises only 146,000 square miles (compared to
the more than 3.7 million square miles of the United States). There was never a vast frontier
to explore. The Japanese couldn't "dispose" of their houses of their property if they grew
disenchanted; they needed to make the most of their land and to keep it as productive as
possible. In addition, because so many people live in such a small space (the population of
Japan is more than 125 million; that's 43 percent of the American population in 4 percent of
the space), efficiency is critical. There's no room for wasted products or wasted process.
Mistakes are costlier. Quality is a necessity. Perfection is premium.
Americans, on the other hand, find perfection boring. If something is perfect, you're stuck
with it for life, and that doesn't sit well with most Americans. We want a new car every three
years. We want a new television every five. We want a new house when we have kids, and
another new one when the kids grow up. [...] The 'perfect' car would be useless for us,
because we wouldn't have the alibi that our old car doesn't work well enough anymore and
we need to change it. On the cortex level, we scorn planned obsolescence (the practice

14
From Clotaire Rapaille - The Culture Code.

12
manufacturers employ of building something that needs to be replaced within a relatively
short period), but planned obsolescence is on Code with the American culture. We want
things to become obsolete, because when they do we have the excuse we need to buy
something new."
Culture – see Rapaille and http://mahb.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/2-
2010_PREMAHBinconvenient-truths.pdf Also Global SD report15 includes – in addition to
traditional policy instruments, regulatory (bans, limits, standards) and economic (taxes, fees,
subsidies) – information-based instruments (such as eco-labelling) and behavioural
instruments ("A behavioural approach represents a non-regulatory means to influence human
behaviour towards more sustainable choices. It is an essentially demand-side instrument. A
policy innovation in itself, it contains elements from cognitive psychology, behavioural
economics, and cultural studies. Behavioural instruments aim to understand fundamental
drivers for behaviour and use those to encourage consumers to change consumption
behaviours, which can also create a stronger market demand for sustainable and innovative
solutions. In a broader context, this approach is sometimes referred to as 'nudging'").
Also original Bolman and Deal was on metaphors.
Memetics (very interesting as a metaphor and/or symbolically, but disputable as a formal
“proof” or analysis method). Temes (technological memes). See
http://www.fastcoexist.com/1681526/using-memes-to-improve-climate-change-
communication
Paul Grice, quoted by Steven Pinker in chapter 8, Games People Play of The Stuff of
Thought. It's not only for political reasons, but also for face saving, that the maxims of
communication (quantity, quality, manner, relevance) are often transgressed. Quote Pinker
and his variant of game theory, and the diplomat. Publication bias: we would tend to report
positive examples (best practices), not what did not work, even if that could also be
interesting (one can learn from failures). Wildly different contexts, as well as issues which
are rarely spoken of openly (politics, corruption, and more prosaically Steven Pinker's
reasons for interpersonal roundabout communication, which can be generalized to mass and
social media) make experience and "best practices" difficult to transpose from one context to
another. This is however essential, rather than scientific articles, which are too narrow and
victim of the fractal nature of knowledge. That's why, among other things (boundary
problem) knowledge translation is needed.

Capacity Building: official point of view vs south-north-south cooperation or guy from Jeju
meeting.
Some examples of exaggerations (religion-style):

Beware of overload (picture).

15

https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/1758GSDR%202015%20Advance%20Unedited%20
Version.pdf

13
Figure 7: a finite pool of emotion and worrying

Text:” It may be tempting to conclude that an effective way to communicate climate change
information is to place a greater emphasis on its possible consequences. Some go even
further, accentuating the risks by declining to mention the uncertainties involved. Such an
approach evokes strong reactions in audiences, including fear of worst-case climate change
scenarios and even heightened interest in what can be done to avoid them. But while an
emotional appeal may make people more interested in a presentation on climate change in the
short run, it may backfire down the road, causing negative consequences that often prove
quite difficult to reverse.”(Source: The Psychology of Climate Change Communication 16 )
Finite pool of worry, emotional numbing.
A French cartoon from the 80s. A politician, reading polls showing progress of ecologist
opinions, says: "Let's fill the detergent bags with fish food that does not make clothes too
dirty." Contradicted by the romanticized idea of the "win-win" negotiation.
The "identifiable victim effect". Statistical vs identifiable victim - Ben Parr in Captivology:
“Small and her team call this the ‘identifiable victim effect.’ Personal identification
intensifies emotional empathy, which in turn increases generosity and attention. We also
believe that we can directly affect Rokia’s situation. On the other hand, we can’t empathize
with a statistic, even if it is a horrendous statistic. Telling the story of a starving girl or a
heroin addict who lost everything forces us to put ourselves in their shoes.”

Parr, Ben (2015-03-03). Captivology: The Science of Capturing People's Attention (Kindle
Locations 3106-3109). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Deborah A. Small, George Loewenstein, and Paul Slovic, “Sympathy and Callousness: The
Impact of Deliberative Thought on Donations to Identifiable and Statistical Victims,”

16
http://guide.cred.columbia.edu/guide/sec4.html

14
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 102, no. 2 (2007): 143– 53.
Dan Ariely on “it’s not information that is missing” (which actually joins some ideas on the
know-do gap below). “Information clearly isn’t the problem in the sustainability realm. We
are inundated with statistics on global warming, water conservation, fuel efficiency, and
myriad other environmental concerns. This information is right at our fingertips, readily
available and sometimes even shoved into our ear canals. Yet it doesn’t seem to get results.
While we may be able to change beliefs through informational appeals, igniting action is a
different story. If we want to influence behavior, we can’t assume that providing information
will do the trick.” Future discount, cognitive exhaust and drop-in-the-bucket effect (see for
example How to Turn Consumers Green17).
- selling renewables to the population where they are not really economic (see French class
action suites)
- carbon tax as selling of indulgences
Is knowledge really “essential” in building capacity for SD or development in general? Yes,
but in equilibrium with finance and technology

Figure 8: where capacity building fits in a higher level strategy

Capacity development as a part of a development process18

The vast and fragmented (metaphorically even fractal) corpus of knowledge (on which I will
come back in section 3) also generates the paradoxical situation in which different
participants to dialogue have hugely different levels of understanding of the dynamics of
socio-economic-biophysical systems and/or of the information and knowledge mechanisms
needed to support them. As the simple message is the one who always is better understood, in
particular by political or ordinary decision makers, it is very probable that even honest
decision makers will be influenced by the message who is the most attractive, not necessarily
the most anchored in reality.

17
http://voices.mckinseyonsociety.com/how-to-turn-consumers-green/
18
From a World Bank Institute document: The Capacity Development Results Framework, A strategic and
results-oriented approach to learning for capacity development, 2009.

15
Metaphors can be powerful, convincing and false. Climate change as Religion. (This will –
for reasons exposed by Daniel Dennett – be repugnant both to scientists and religious people,
but for different reasons). “Cults and prophets proclaiming the imminent end of the world
have been with us for several millennia, and it has been another sour sort of fun to ridicule
them the morning after, when they discover that their calculations were a little off.” CC has
everything of a good religion: clear villains, white knights, good stories, good symbols (the
drowning polar bear), suffer now for later redemption, great priests, excommunicated
heretics, relatively simple story (although the models and numbers are complex), discounted
time reward (quote Dan Ariely). Large scale sociologic phenomena with polarized opinions
(SD and CC debate, religion, the Arab Spring).
Non traditional thinking (behavioral economy, black swans, storytelling, non apocalyptic
messaging)

This also brings the issue of symbolic positioning: what is “good” and what is “bad”? It
should be noted that a lot of the technological developments in I&KM (that we will detail in
section 3) are idealized, even romanticized: networked governance, universal access to
knowledge, intrinsic motivation, the knowledge worker and the knowledge society, open
source and crowdsourcing, win-win over zero-sum negotiation etc. All these “new”
characteristics or strategies are often shown in a candid, even Panglossian view (all is for the
best in the best of the worlds, "a Feel-Good Age where everyone is empowered.”). In general
in technology, Sherry Turkle’s phrase19 sums it up: “The triumphalist narrative of the Web is
the reassuring story that people want to hear and that technologists want to tell.” This is a fact
– attributable to the optimistic human nature, or more prosaically to the publication bias20
(you cannot publish results that are not significative and somehow spectacular and disruptive;
being enthusiastic helps). Some more dark criticism is however shed on by authors like
Morozov (see below the hierarchy of cyber-needs on Fig. 9) and Jaron Lanier’s view on the
downsides of open sourcing.

19
From Turkle, Sherry - Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other,
Basic Books, 2011.
20
Neatly illustrated by the “green jelly beans cause acne” xckd cartoon at https://xkcd.com/882/ ; in any
complex subject it is always possible to find, by cherry picking, something which can be published.

16
 21
Figure 9: Morozov’s hierarchy of cyber-needs

A good illustration of the polarization of the debate (with the mainstream having the
romanticized view) is given by Bill Wasik22: “Web 2.0 boosters celebrate the power of the
collaborative many, who are breaking the grip of the elites (and corporations) over the
creation and distribution of culture. Detractors fret that the rise of the amateur portends a
decline in quality, that a culture without professionals is a culture without professionalism—
a world of journalism without regard for fact, art without regard for craft, language without
regard for grammar, and so on.” A similar point is made by Marius Lifvergren23 in a different
domain – the Arab Spring – about the role actually played by electronic social media: “This
study springs out from the observation that the protests in Egypt have been labelled both the
Facebook- and Twitter revolution by western media. In academic circles the debate has been
fairly polarized between the optimists and the pessimists, in regards to what role social media
played in the protests. Scholars such as Evgeny Morozov argue that social media get
underserved credit for its role in social uprisings, while too little emphasis is put on how it
benefits authoritarian regimes to lock down civil unrest. Clay Shirky has a more optimistic
approach and advocates the power of private communication between people, which social
networking sites such as Facebook facilitates. However, the debate has reached a stalemate,
which is not unusual when strong arguments meet.”
We have started this section with a “why” question: why different perspectives on SD and
I&KM in SD are important? (ending the section) why do organizations do I&KM in SD.
From a structural-technical point of view, collaboration and compatibility between the
providers of information and knowledge should be the privileged. The fact that this does not
really happen (lots of duplication or use of incompatible frameworks, taxonomies, knowledge
structures and search mechanisms) can either be interpreted as competition (from a politico-
economic frame) for limited mindshare and more prosaic financial resources, or as a purely
technical problem, possible to overcome (in principle) for example by using unified
taxonomies and Semantic Web.

21
From http://michelletiedje.com/2011/11/16/so-what-are-your-cyber-needs/
22
Wasik, Bill (2009-04-15). And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture (p. 10). Penguin
Publishing Group.
23
Marius Lifvergren, The Facebook Revolution: A Content Analysis on the British Mainstream Media
Coverage of the Protests in Egypt, MA Dissertation, University of Leicester, 2011.

17
3. The global information and knowledge management landscape in 2015
In this section we start by wondering why we still need I&KM in the Google times (the
“why” of I&KM), followed by defining some terms and presenting some historical models of
knowledge and information that we consider useful for I&KM in general and for SD I&KM
in particular (the classical “how”). We then summarize some recent analyses and
developments relevant to the information and knowledge landscape. There is some
overlapping with section 5 (issues and solutions) as the analyses are often mentioning the
limitations and issues of present knowledge management strategies, and some of the new
tendencies are potential solutions for these issues.
3.1 Information and knowledge management: the why

With the popularity of the world’s dominant search engine – and the perception of the
younger generation that most questions can be answered by it 24 (or if not, by specialized
question answering sites like Quora), the first question to ask is: Who needs I&KM now that
we have Google? The question can actually be broken in two sub-questions:
- If we are aware that some piece of information or knowledge exists, can we retrieve it
using some general-purpose search technique or engine?
- Can we retrieve a relevant piece of information or knowledge that we are not (yet)
aware it exists?
Search can be difficult even if we know what we are searching for. I would like to illustrate
this by two examples, extracted from recent books. The first is from a book explicitly dealing
with technology and information, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing
Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson:
"One day last fall, my wife and I were working in a café, each of us on a laptop, when she
looked up.
“Hey, what’s the name of that red-haired singer who plays the piano?” I knew who she was
talking about but drew a blank. I could visualize the singer sitting at her piano and playing,
something I’d seen on several videos. I remembered that she’d done a piano cover of
Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” But I couldn’t attach a name. I sat there stupidly,
mentally paralyzed, until suddenly I hit upon a strategy for finding the name. “Google this,” I
told Emily. “‘Piano cover, Smells Like Teen Spirit.’” She bashed her keyboard and laughed:
“Tori Amos!” The exchange took no more than fifteen seconds."
The second example is from Scott Adams’ (of Dilbert fame) autobiography. Scott Adams was
plagued by a medical condition that apparently was not recognized by medical specialists,
and he eventually turned to a Web search: "...how could I find a name for a condition that
was unfamiliar to two ear-nose-throat doctors, two voice specialists, a psychologist, a
neurologist, and my general practitioner? There was only one creature smarter than all of
those doctors put together: the Internet. I opened a Google search box and tried a variety of
voice-related key words. I found nothing useful. My searches were too broad. And then
something interesting happened. It's a phenomenon that people in creative jobs experience
often, but it might be unfamiliar to the rest of you. Suddenly, out of nowhere, two totally
unrelated thoughts - separated by topic, time and distance - came together in my head."
24
The query “Respect your parents… they passed school without Google” (without quotes) returns 36 million
hits. While this is about half of what “sustainable development” returns, the presence of such a strong meme as
humor in the popular imagination seems to indicate its prevalence as an opinion.

18
Deconstructing these two search examples reveals some interesting memes; I will only
concentrate on those relevant to I&K. One which I find particularly attractive and dangerous
is the idea that experts can be replaced (or at least complemented) by searching the available
information (and in particular, the un-curated medium that is Internet). It is true that the
motivation of experts can be sometimes discussed as there can be a hint of the agency
problem, as Levitt and Dubner 25 point out: “'Experts' [their quotes - not mine]— from
criminologists to real-estate agents— use their informational advantage to serve their own
agenda." And further: "If you were to assume that many experts use their information to your
detriment, you’d be right. Experts depend on the fact that you don’t have the information they
do. Or that you are so befuddled by the complexity of their operation that you wouldn’t know
what to do with the information if you had it. Or that you are so in awe of their expertise that
you wouldn’t dare challenge them." And it is also true that experts tend to have simple and
unambiguous judgements, as this quote from the same authors suggests: "The typical [...]
expert [...] is prone to sound exceedingly sure of himself. An expert doesn’t so much argue
the various sides of an issue as plant his flag firmly on one side. That’s because an expert
whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn’t get much attention." (Doug
Johnson, in Machines are the Easy Part; People Are the Hard Part: Observations About
Making Technology Work, puts it even better: "An expert is someone who has a somewhat
defensible position but can state it with extraordinary confidence.") However, the tendency to
just use Google (or Wikipedia for that matter) instead of relying on a curated media or
credential-based authority is a dangerous, if more and more present fact.
The second point that can be made is that search on a general purpose engine can be
frustrating and some kind of “creative inspiration” is needed, which Scott Adams seems to
insinuate is not available to everyone. Finally, these are Web searches; searching I&K on a
defined subject is not the same, but that’s exactly the idea, that general purpose search
engines do not solve the problem, and there is some value in specialized media (be it
repositories, knowledge platforms or social media) for a domain like SD.
As far as the second question is concerned, I think in a lot of cases we might even not be
aware of what exists, in particular in the moving present landscape. We did review (and
inventory) some of the non-traditional sources of information and knowledge in SD (videos,
social network influencers, data visualisations, online courses) that we recap in annex 2; I
think most of the readers – however knowledgeable in the subject of I&K on SD are – did not
know about most of these.
Additionally to the two sub-questions at the top of this sub-section there is the question of
trust: can we actually trust the information that we found? Interestingly, for general purpose
searches, the question of “quality” of results (or ranking), which should be correlated with the
amount of trust in the results, was what separated Google initially from the other search
engines. We will also see (when David Weinberger’s book Too Big to Know is discussed)
that trust is indeed one of the issues of an uncurated medium like the Internet.
In short, this sub-section is hoped to have convinced you that I&KM in the domain of SD is
still needed – and that general purpose search engines can only be a complement to
systematic, expert-driven I&KM. We now move to a historic view of knowledge
management and some of the models that I find most relevant.
3.2 Information and knowledge management: the classical how

The purpose of this sub-section is not to present the whole history of I&KM – that would

25
Freakonomics Rev Ed: (and Other Riddles of Modern Life)

19
easily fill a large book, as a lot of models and classifications might exist – but to clarify our
domain of action. For the reader more interested in an overview of formal definitions and
history of KM models and tools I would recommend chapters 1-4 of Knowledge
Management in Theory and Practice by Kimiz Dalkir, MIT Press, 2011.
Defining knowledge is, in itself, a non trivial task; we do not attempt to do this here in a
general manner, but we quote some simple definitions which stress the practical rather the
philosophical angle, are appropriate in the specific context of KM in SD and in an inter-
organizational rather than intra-organizational context. One of them is “Knowledge is, what
works” (tagline of a Knowledge Management Academy from Vienna, Austria). Another
representative mini-definition would be “Knowledge is: awareness of things, facts; in
context, i.e. understanding of relations” (from a presentation 26 by a former UNOSD staff
member). One of the “founding documents” of UNOSD by Nils Ferrand 27 interestingly
defines the (types of) knowledge usable in SD as “data, models and social knowledge
processing”. The same author also enumerates (in a somehow different view) the producers
of knowledge pertinent to SD:
“For the future development of UN-OSD, five categories of knowledge providers should be
considered:
1. the existing institutions or infrastructures distributing knowledge through web
portals, database access or other query systems […],
2. the scientific communities producing through the relevant research projects, and
publishing in scientific journals,
3. domain or operations' experts, public or private, sometimes publishing through
reports (“grey literature”), sometimes not publishing for contractual reasons,
4. administrative and operational practitioners, the “makers”, who rarely publish but
own an empirical knowledge,
5. “crowd-sourced” knowledge, from citizens.”
I think this is a pretty good definition of what is interesting on the continuum between peer-
reviewed scholarly articles and LOL cats (some possible intermediate steps being trade and
professional reviews, established science and practical trades, general public interest news).
However, in practice the scholarly (peer-reviewed) articles are relatively difficult to
assimilate by policy makers or the large public without some form of “knowledge
translation”. I will come back to this in a subsequent discussion of what I call “the fractal
nature of organized knowledge”.
From a structural point of view there is another classification related to the knowledge
domain that we find useful: the classical model of hierarchical structure (also called the
knowledge pyramid) as follows:
- The basis of the pyramid is data – simple facts. These facts are ubiquitous, extremely
abundant and in itself lack signification. For example, light between 495 and 570 nm
wavelength is interpreted as green light whereas light between 620 and 740 nm
wavelength is interpreted as red.
- In the context of a traffic light, the change of colour from red to green or the reverse

26
Francois Fortier, Sustainability Transitions: Knowledge and Capacity Gaps, presentation at the Strengthening
Planning and Implementation Capacities for SD in Post-Rio Context Incheon, 14 November 2012
27
Toward a knowledge management and training portal on sustainable development policy for decision makers,
Nils Ferrand, consultant for UN-DESA-DSD, 2011

20
 is information that something is happening (a difference that makes a difference).
- Our background knowledge related to traffic lights and traffic patterns informs our
action in this context; without this knowledge the data or even the information is
useless.
The model is visualized on the below image28. While – like any model – this is a convention
and the distinction is not sharp and precise, and in most situations can be interpreted in
different ways, it is useful to note that a lot of relevant facts in SD – related contexts (in
particular on the Web) “knowledge” can be information or even data. Hence, the main
purpose of this paper is to define an information and knowledge management strategy for
improving the access of our clients (mainly government officials from developing countries)
to useful facts for their work in SD-related contexts. In particular I will be referring to
extraction and dissemination of what is called in information science “metadata” or data
about data which – as mentioned below in a quote from David Weinberger’s “Too Big to
Know” – is a potential solution to the information abundance problem.

Figure 10: simplified knowledge hierarchy

From a dynamic point of view, a popular image is the “knowledge cycle”, which had
different incarnations (apparently starting with a World Bank idea in the 1990s). The figure
below is extracted from one presentation by a former UNOSD staff member:

Figure 11: knowledge cycle with UNOSD activities

28
From http://jgollner.typepad.com/.a/6a00e54f8d091388330133f1fd373e970b-800wi .

21
The figure 2 (on page 5 above) also offers an image of knowledge fluxes – between experts
(in KM or subdomains related to SD), general public (consumers, voters) and contributors
(government officials designing and implementing policies). While all these models look
great on a Power point presentation, it’s difficult to say if there is really an operational benefit
from them.
Very useful tools in knowledge management are different forms of controlled vocabularies,
including but not limited to taxonomies, ontologies and thesauri. They are very useful to
ensure – among others – indexing of knowledge artefacts based on keywords, that would help
retrieval. Anticipating a later discussion I would mention that one of the issues in SD I&KM
is the lack of an universally accepted taxonomy – each Web site or document (including
UNOSD SDTW site and documents by AtKisson and Ferrand) using slightly different such
hierarchical list of subjects, themes, sectors or keywords. While this is an issue for
information and knowledge categorization and retrieval, there are intrinsic reasons for that;
depending on the focus of an organization the level of detail can be different. For example,
while in a database of a general SD organization “disaster reduction” can be a sufficiently
detailed topic, for an organization that deals with disasters explicitly (like UNISDR or the
Red Cross) the keywords would include different categories of natural (earthquakes, floods,
hurricanes,…) or man-made (war, terrorism,…) disasters.
Finally, an important distinction is between intra-organizational KM and more global, inter-
organizational KM. Most of the models of KM have been designed in the 90s for internal
KM, and this is why I do not insist here on some models particularly pertinent for intra-
organizational KM (like those making use of the concepts of explicit and tacit knowledge).
Some recent developments question the idea itself of KM equating it to a fad 29 or –
equivalently – split it recursively, fractal-style, in a series of more precise notions,
particularly pertinent for inter-organizational and inter-cultural knowledge activities. These
precise notions include KM, knowledge transfer, knowledge translation, knowledge
exchange, knowledge mobilization in an umbrella named “K*”. A detailed example,
containing also 8 relevant case studies, is the United Nations University publication
“Expanding our Understanding of K* (Kt, KE, Ktt, KMb, KB, KM, etc.) - A concept paper
emerging from the K* conference held in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, April 201230”.
To sum up: what is of interest is (mostly) the continuous flow of publicly available
information – all the research and practical experience that is published in different formats
(text being the principal but not only) by a large number of organizations and networks, but
also news as reflection of relevant economic, social and environmental events. The question
is how to ease access to it; in the next sub-section I examine some recent ideas in I&KM that
I find relevant for easing this access.
3.3 Review of Some Recent Interesting Sources in I&KM

One of the interesting books on the recent changes in I&K in recent years is Too Big to
Know, by Daniel Weinberger. The author is an expert in information and library science,
librarian at Harvard University and had already published an interesting book on the
challenges and difficulties of classifying information artefacts (“Everything is
Miscellaneous”). From our point of view (I&K) the most interesting idea is that the
characteristics of the information and knowledge in the present landscape are: abundance,
networked instead of hierarchical, lower barriers to entry, less filtering, trust issues.
29
See for example Wilson, T. D. - The nonsense of 'knowledge management', Information Research, Vol. 8 No.
1, October 2002.
30
http://www.unosd.org/content/documents/2012%20-%20KStar%20Concept%20Paper.pdf

22
The first characteristic (abundance) hardly needs any discussion, as it’s recognized that the
quantity of information and knowledge on any subject is overwhelming. Because of the links
that can be followed immediately for most of the sources of information, as compared to
references in books which would need at least a trip to the library, and because a lot of
knowledge artifacts are available permission-free, a lot of the knowledge is in a network
rather than a hierarchical model. There is also less filtering, more precisely the previous
authority curation of information (in libraries, peer reviewed journals) has changed in a lot of
instances with a link filter31, with effects on the “quality” and trustworthiness. While the
landscape has become global, there is also increased tribalization in the form of cultural
relativism and “echo chambers”, the tendency of online communities to gather groups of
similar persons (with all of the negative consequences of lack of diversity). While a
community can share most of the ideas, the presence of different communities makes possible
to find “everything and its contrary” and hence unresolved knowledge.
Anticipating the discussion of issues and solutions in I&KM, here is a quote on abundance
and how metadata can be used to mitigate this issue:
“The strategy of abundance has two main risks: First, we won’t find what we’re looking for.
Second, we will find lots of appealing stuff that panders to our lowest desires. A single
practice addresses both concerns, although imperfectly.
The solution to the information overload problem is to create more information: metadata.
When you put a label on a folder, you’re using metadata so that you can find the papers
within it. Providing metadata for what you post in the new public of the Net enables it to be
found more easily. We can also make more sense of it, just as a caption helps us make sense
of a photo.
Metadata also helps with the second problem inherent in an open, superabundant system:
Most of what’s posted will be crap. So, we need ways to evaluate and filter, which can be
especially difficult since what is crap for one effort may be gold for another.”
Another (meta)-question the author tries to answer is the ethical judgement; is this “new”
landscape of knowledge “good” or “bad”? Here is his opinion:
“So, we are in a crisis of knowledge at the same time that we are in an epochal exaltation of
knowledge. We fear for the institutions on which we have relied for trustworthy knowledge,
but there’s also a joy we can feel pulsing through our culture. It comes from a different place.
It comes from the networking of knowledge. ”
Summing up, the knowledge has (according to Weinberger) the following characteristics:
Abundance, links, Permission – free, Public and Unresolved; the main issues that we retain
are awareness and trust.
Another interesting (relatively) recent book is Story Wars (Jonas Sachs). Jonas Sachs (and
Free Range Studios) is behind short movies like The Meatrix (a parody to the highly
successful movie, attempting to unmask the world of factory farming) and Annie Leonard’s
The Story of Stuff, which on Youtube have a respectable number of views of the order of
millions. The essential argument of the book is that stories are important – people will not
buy statistics or arguments, but will buy stories (relates to the aforementioned “identifiable
victim effect”). Sachs also implies that there is actually no need to invent new stories, and
that most successful stories are genetic descendants of the “archetypal” story 32 of the
improbable hero succeeding with the help of a mentor (illustrating the point with successful

31
This topic is also the subject of The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser.
32
Based on Joseph Campbell. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968.

23
movies like Star Trek or Matrix, but also with debates in the US political sphere). Another
idea particularly relevant to I&KM is the history of the different “communication eras”.
According to Sachs, we started in an “oral” era, followed by a “broadcast” era; the latter was
characterized by survival of the richest, transmission as one to many and proprietary ideas.
The “new” (or, as Livfergren puts it in his MA dissertation quoted above, the ‘new’ new)
media opened what Sachs calls the “digitoral” (portmanteau of digital and oral) era, in which
ideas follow the survival of the fittest as everyone can own ideas and transmission is a web.
Hence, in the digitoral era, networks (in all senses) are essential; how information and
knowledge circulate and accumulate, as well as formal collaboration, social networks etc.
Here are some of the general statements about the knowledge landscape from AtKisson’s
initial report on knowledge, networks and capacity building (also referenced above):
- relatively new trends like networked governance / hierarchic to flat or network , boundary
work, including the role of facilitator for government officials
- information and knowledge explosion33, as well as the transition from treating knowledge as
a stock to treating it like a flow. In addition, new – less traditional in terms of media and
volume – types of knowledge did appear: transition "from large-scale formal reports to
“micro-content” in the form of blog posts, one-page fact sheets, slide presentations".
- "UNOSD needs to avoid the trap of just aggregating sustainable development knowledge as
it accumulates (treating it as a stock)." Knowledge mediation (analogous to Jeff Jarvis’ idea
of "do what you do best and link to the rest34") seems to be the answer.
The report also describes the SD (explicit) knowledge ("state of the field") and a (yet another)
taxonomy of subdomains. While the conceptual structure of the SD knowledge corpus is
important and in particular the author warns against privileging one or another of the
“discourse communities”, the SD knowledge corpus itself will not be discussed further, as the
mission of UNOSD (or knowledge brokers, aggregators or platforms in general) is not to
contribute to this corpus by either adding or reorganizing it but to help government officials
make practical decisions using elements of this corpus of knowledge.
Ben Parr’s book, Captivology (subtitled The Science Of Capturing People’s Attention) makes
another interesting point: in the modern world, where we are submerged by messages,
attention is the new currency. In order to attract it he recommends the following 7 “triggers”:
“Authenticity: Using specific sensory cues like colors, symbols, and sounds to capture
attention based on automatic reaction to certain stimuli.
Framing: Adapting to or changing somebody’s view of the world so they pay more attention
to you.
Disruption: Violating people’s expectations to change what they pay attention to.
Reward: Leveraging people’s motivations for intrinsic and extrinsic rewards.
Reputation: Using the reputations of experts, authorities, and the crowd to instill trust and
captivate audiences.
Mystery: Creating mystery, uncertainty, and suspense to keep and audience intrigued until
the very end.

33
"[…] there already exist ample sources of support, tools, methods, models, good examples, knowledge
platforms, capacity building programs, and networks for sustainable development."
34
Jeff Jarvis – What Would Google Do?

24
Acknowledgement: Fostering a deeper connection, because people tend to pay attention to
those who provide them with validation and understanding.” (list35 extracted from a summary
of the book). Ben Parr is a former editor of the site Mashable, and a well known venture
capitalist; most of his points are targeted at for profit companies. However, even a non profit
can use these principles, in particular the “acknowledgement” trigger.
3.4 Some other interesting trends in I&KM

This sub-section enumerates some other significative trends/aspects and elaborates on their
importance in SD I&KM:
• Boundary work and know-do gap
• New types of content – microcontent, multimedia
• How people act (and in particular use information) is new information
• Concentrate on flow, not stock
• Open source and crowdsourced micro-activities
• The fractal nature of knowledge
• Widely variable contexts and context dependency for tools and policies

Boundary work and know-do gap.

The boundary work “provides one potential point of departure for designing research
programs that better link knowledge to action” 36 . This approach has been useful at the
interface between science and policy (more generally, between knowledge and action), as
well as between science branches. Boundary issues can indeed be considered one of the main
issues in the application of science-based policy. For example, a book 37 on Knowledge
translation (a part of the aforementioned K*) describes the following reasons for the know-do
gap:

“In the context of evidence-to-policy, there can be only four reasons for the “know-do” gap.
People with the ability and authority to use good information to design their action either:
1. Don’t know – that the information exists, or what action to take, or
2. Don’t understand – the information, what it means, why it is important, or
3. Don’t care – see the information as irrelevant, not beneficial to their agenda, or
4. Don’t agree – think the information is misguided or false.”
Interestingly, with respect to three frames defined in section 2 (rational-technical, political
and symbolic) only reasons 1 and 2 are in the rational-technical frame (and can be at least in
principle addressed by some form of I&KM, or maybe even K* from translation); reason 3 is
clearly political and reason 4 can be either logical-rational or political. It is important to try to
use the right tool for bridging the type of know-do gap; rational-logical arguments (which we
mostly tend to use) are mostly useless in political contexts, when on the other hand symbolic
arguments (the identifiable victim effect, the drowning polar bear) can be effective.

35
http://blog.thelettertwo.com/2015/03/01/ben-parr-captivology-the-book-review/
36
Clark et al. - Boundary work for sustainable development: Natural resource management at the Consultative
Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0900231108
37
The knowledge translation toolkit: bridging the know-do gap: a resource for researchers, edited by Gavin
Bennett and Nasreen Jessani, Sage publications, 2011.

25
“New types of content” – microcontent, multimedia
While actionable knowledge is still mostly contained in what David Weinberger calls “book-
length arguments”, the rise of electronic media in the private sphere of our lives has brought
to the foreground two types of content that start to have influence in the professional sphere.
The first type is what could be called microcontent; mostly consisting of short stories, short
movies, blog post, down to tweets, very often consumed on small screens and/or in contexts
where it cannot totally command attention. (As a microfact illustrating this tendency, at a
meeting on formulating SDGs, one of the presenters came up with a check item “is your goal
tweetable?”). The temporal expression of microcontent are nanostories 38 (Wasik 2009). A
nanostory is a miniature spike, a vertiginous rise and fall (mainly through the social media).
Just like electronic trading in stock exchanges has created the potential of a new type of
disaster, the acceleration of social media has conditioned the users to look for spectacular
instances that propagate rapidly and then die, managing sometime disastrous effects (as I
mention elsewhere on the e-lynching of Justine Sacco for example). This is also relevant –
according to Wasik – for “serious” subjects like SD: “Indeed, when we do manage to focus
on some crucial, fundamental story, we are often able to apprehend it only as a series of tiny,
meaningless nanostories. This has been the case with global warming, an indisputably
enormous problem that succeeds at staying in the popular consciousness only by way of
scores of short-lived stories or controversies : cannibal polar bears, heightened hurricanes,
ice-shelf collapses, the various exploits of Al Gore, etc. Even an especially hot day can
occasion some well-intentioned fearmongering on the subject. The problem with this
approach is that it is so easily countered by sowers of doubt. Many of the splashiest stories
about global warming tend, unsurprisingly, to be those that are the most speculative or even
false in their factual basis. Even the global-warming nanostories that are true can simply be
rebutted with other anecdotes.” (Wasik, 2009 : 151-152). One of the possible causes of this
miniaturization tendency (or maybe a self-enforcing effect) is superficiality or short attention
span. On the other hand, the tendency of nanostories to focus on one spectacular, but often
irrelevant detail (self-propagating meme) of a complex reality can be illustrated by what we
could call “the Microsoft Goldfish Attention Span” of May 2015. In May 2015, Microsoft
Advertising Canada published a study39 on digital media consumption, focusing on the young
generations, and (somehow unfortunately) titled “Attention spans”. The study is a 64 pages
document, which presents a lot of interesting findings, and basically debunks (or at least
moderates) the idea that young generations have a shorter attention span. The first phrase in
the Introduction is "Think digital is killing attention spans? Think again." However, the wave
that propagated through digital media, blogs and social networks only extracted one factoid
from the study – the 8-seconds human attention span in 2015 compared to 12-seconds in
2000 and 9 seconds for a goldfish; the meme that propagated like wildfire was “we now have
less attention span than a goldfish”. The point that I’m making is not that this extraction of
sensational and its propagation are inherently “bad”, but that they are a characteristic of the
present media ecosystem and this needs to be factored in any strategy of communication and
ultimately I&KM.
In addition to the microcontent, another characteristic of I&K in the “new” media ecosystems
is the increased presence of non text (what could be called multimedia) information and
knowledge. This type of I&K is explicitly targeted at humans in the form of images, movies,

38
Wasik, Bill, And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture, Penguin Books, 2009.
39
http://advertising.microsoft.com/en/WWDocs/User/display/cl/researchreport/31966/en/microsoft-attention-
spans-research-report.pdf For a more balanced analysis than most of what the media reported, see
http://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2015/05/no-smartphones-are-not-reducing-your-attention-span-to-less-than-a-
goldfishs/

26
audio or complex data displays. Production and publication of multimedia content has
become extremely easy compared to even the last decades of the last century, and because the
users (and in particular younger generations) consume this type of media much easier than
text there is a huge potential to use it for I&KM (with the limits of Morozov’s pyramid of
cyberneeds). In addition, as discussed in the next subsection on technology, multimedia is
much more difficult to index and search than textual information, unless it has been tagged
with textual information (words).
How people use information is new and very valuable information
Nowadays, on most Web sites and social media platforms it is possible to track exactly what
users are doing – and example of how this data can be used to infer user behaviour is the
book Dataclysm40 by Christian Rudder (he used mostly data from OKCupid.com and Twitter,
but most social sites, including but not limited to facebook, Reddit, pinterest, digg,
del.icio.us, Amazon, goodreads allow some level of tracking of user activities; moreover,
some of this data – in the form of tags or reviews – is accessible not only to privileged
administrators of the site – which was the case of Rudder – but can be harvested freely). The
interesting part here is the fact that the way people use information is new information, in
particular when they tag complex objects (multimedia or just bigger chunks of text, difficult
to classify automatically) with keywords. This has two advantages; on one hand it exploits
what is called “the wisdom of crowds” (from the homonymous book by James Surowiecki,
which argues that a large number of diverse, independent, decentralized opinions when
aggregated are largely superior to even expert “guesses”). On the second hand, some human
knowledge by either explicit tagging or use of non textual artefacts can be exploited by
software artificial intelligence (this is the case of a whole family of “recommender systems”,
which are now popular on all e-tailer sites like the prototypical Amazon). In the SD space it
seems Reegle (www.reegle.com) has developed an automated tool for “auto-tagging” (which
could actually be just a text classifier, based on NLP techniques described in the next
section), but I was not able to obtain a copy or more detailed description.
Another possible niche is opened for the content aggregators – which add value not by
creating new content, but by aggregating links and some information compression (minimal
description and indexing) to existing contents; the mantra of the aggregator is “Do what you
do best, link to the rest” (formulated for example in Jeff Jarvis’ What Would Google Do).
There is of course the “low end” counterpart of the aggregation pushed to its extreme – what
has come to be called the “listicle” (think “Top 10 ways to <random verb phrase>”), which –
while entertaining and exhibiting meme potential – is, in line to the critic of microcontent and
nanostory above, not an ideal vehicle for I&KM. Yet another limit of aggregation is the
choice of what is referenced – the prototypical critic being “The Filter Bubble” by Eli Pariser,
arguing that we all (eventually) live in our own filter bubbles.

Concentrate on flow, not stock

40
Subtitled Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking), Crown/Archetype, 2014.

27
Figure 12

The idea of this point – as illustrated for example by figure 13, extracted from(Fortier 2013,
http://www.unosd.org/content/documents/108Fortier,%20SD%20Knowledge%20Mapping%
202013-03-06.pdf ) – is that I&KM should concentrate on the flows of knowledge, not on the
stocks. The figure correctly points the problem of large stocks, as well as the bottleneck
between knowledge development and knowledge sharing. One can however wonder if flows
can be improved, ie if the model can scale up (even without considering the symbolic and
political aspects of knowledge sharing).
Open source and crowdsourcing human microactivities
Daniel Pink’s 2009 book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us opens with a
thought experiment, involving Encarta (Microsoft backed, paid expert created encyclopaedia)
and Wikipedia (which should not need any presentation). In that thought experiment, an
economist is asked in 1996 which of the two would be more successful in 2011. While
looking back we know that “on October 31, 2009, Microsoft pulled the plug on MSN
Encarta”, the rise of the open source movement could not have been predicted based on what
Pink calls “motivation 2.0” and the extrinsic rewards system. Wikipedia is indeed the poster
child 41 for what crowdsourcing can achieve by the non paid, non coordinated, non
architectured work of a large number of independent persons of dubious qualifications. Clay
Shirky, in his book Here Comes Everybody, is also an enthusiast for crowdsourcing, and
there have been a lot of other books written and even classifications of the different ways of
doing crowdsourcing, including using micropayments not only intrinsic motivation. Given
the idea of intrinsic motivation, crowdsourcing seems very interesting for nonprofits, maybe
in adding an element of gamification (at least in the form of feed-back or acknowledgement).
The point is made by Jane McGonigal: “Not all crowdsourcing projects are so successful.
Working together on extreme scales is easier said than done. You can’t crowdsource without
a crowd — and it turns out that actively engaged crowds can be hard to come by42.” The

41
At least for the nontechnical reader; for IT professionals, Linux or Apache are even more striking.
42
Jane McGonigal – Reality is broken, Penguin Books 2011, p. 224.

28
author suggests engaging techniques similar to large scale games, and presents some
successful examples of applying crowdsourcing together with game mechanics to non-profit
projects.
The fractal nature of organized, academic knowledge.
Dealing with an extremely vast corpus of knowledge, fragmented by disciplines, it is
obviously not possible to know everything even at a superficial level (the proverbial inch
deep, mile wide). It is surprising how often a different domain (for example social sciences,
or game theory) holds simple and elegant solutions for practical problems plaguing concrete
field situations, that are not known by practitioners because they have a different specialty.
Interdisciplinarity (or transdisciplinarity) is still a myth, because of (among other things)
incompatible paradigms, politico-economic turf disputes, or simply ignorance. Scientific
research (peer reviewed) is generally too narrow (and often holds a high barrier to entry in the
form of specialized vocabulary) to be used by practitioners (who are the ones we target, as
the scientific communities achieved a good degree of information and knowledge exchange
by itself, at least in domain-specialized communities). An illustration of the academic hyper-
specialisation of scientific research (in a Malthusian - Darwinian “publish or perish”
academia) is the xckd cartoon43 on the BDLPSWDKS (Bernoulli – Doppler – Leidenfrost –
Peltzman – Sapir – Whorf – Dunning – Kruger – Stroop) effect. Scientific knowledge, in
particular, keeps splitting the studied object in an almost fractal44 manner, in a way that looks
at smaller and smaller parts of the knowledge sphere in a self-similar way. This explains why
some writers who consider themselves “vulgarisers” have a huge success – the names of
Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman come to mind: although highly contested by the
scientific community, this type of writer seems to be filling the need for some kind of
“knowledge translation”, even if that type of “translation” includes sensationalism and/or
sheer errors (the Malcolm Gladwell “Igon Value45” effect is an example). The point – for
I&KM in SD – it not necessarily that we need such translators, but yet another (possible)
explanation in terms of impedance mismatch of why knowledge does not flow naturally from
those who have it (and are willing to provide it) to those who might need it. The very
different contexts of SD in different countries might also be a reason for the difficulty of
transfer, even of information with the same degree of practical applicability; finally the
politically charged communication patterns do not help either. The final effect is an often
reinvention of the wheel.
Another type of impedance mismatch appears between the modelling of socioeconomic and
biophysical systems. Both types of models have errors, but mostly for different reasons. The
theory behind biophysical models is mostly known and agreed upon (in Kuhnian terms, the
sciences behind these models are mostly paradigmatic) and the imprecision comes from the
numeric limits (space-time complexity that limits of the models) or the difficulty of
determining the parameters of the models. On the other hand, socioeconomic models are

43
See https://xkcd.com/1531/ “Randall is also mocking the complicated, or even convoluted, setups often used
in these experiments.” (http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1531:_The_BDLPSWDKS_Effect ). This
cartoon actually also applies to the complexity of the context of SD, making “good practices” difficult to
transfer.
44
Fractals are self-similar mathematical objects, best described in one phrase by the following quote from
Thomas Friedman: “Fractals are beautiful images produced at the intersection of art and math.”
45
According to Steven Pinker: “[…] I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a
topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.”
(from a review of Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw. The Igon Value meme comes from the fact that
Gladwell did not understand the (mathematical) term “eigenvalue” and took it for the name of a person (Igon
Value). Pinker’s original review can be read at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinker-
t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

29
usually based on competing theories (a-paradigmatic sciences), with additional imprecisions
due to the factors mentioned for biophysical models (limited complexity and empirical
parameters). This impedance mismatch not only makes coupled modelling more difficult, but
also the knowledge exchange between scholars and technologists educated in the two
different traditions46. The social sciences (including those at the cornerstone of SD, political
science, economics and sociology) are also divided by ideologies, if we are to believe the
philosopher Daniel Dennett: “Similar [to anthropology] if less extreme divisions can be found
in psychology, economics, political science, and sociology. With Freudians and Marxists and
Skinnerians and Gibsonians and Piagetians and Chomskians and Foucauldians—and
structuralists and deconstructionists and computationalists and functionalists—waging their
campaigns, it is undeniable that ideology plays a large role in how these putatively scientific
investigations are carried out. Is it all just ideology?”
The difficulty of extrapolating from one context to another
Still in the technical-rational frame, even if we ignore the politico-economic aspect of not
wanting to publish projects with bad results (or more subtly, just to embellish the results of
applying some policy or measure, or to ignore negative consequences and just bring to the
front positive ones), an obstacle to the reuse of SD knowledge is the wildly variable context
between different countries or even different regions of the same country. This had been
observed by Nils Ferrand, who in the data model for a policy and tool system proposed in his
initial review, considered a complex entity “context” characterizing the tools or policies to be
applied.
In chapter 4 of his book The End of Poverty47, Jeffrey Sachs proposes a “clinical economics”
diagnostic which takes into account the following dimensions to describe the context of a
particular country:
• is the country in a poverty trap (insufficient money to do anything) ?
• do we deal with bad economic policies, financial insolvency of government?
• physical geography (landlocked, relief, diseases, climate...)
• bad governance (even if it has good policies), includes corruption
• cultural barriers (gender, fertility rates...)
• geopolitics (relations with neighbours, foes and allies)
These dimensions are targeted at understanding why a country is in a situation of poverty and
how it would be possible to evade it. More generally I think a context evaluation should
include the following dimensions:
• Degree of danger to living
• Degree of democracy
• Degree of freedom of speech
• Degree of corruption
• Richness
• Economic inequalities
• Cultural factors (in particular what is "good" and "bad")
• Levels of government

46
A quote that expresses this idea is "[...] differences in the standards of proof in the social as opposed to the
biological or physical sciences – that is to say, such standards are lower in social sciences and higher in
biological sciences [...]" (Robert Aunger – The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think, Simon and
Schuster, 2013).
47
Sachs, Jeffrey D. (2005). The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time. New York: Penguin
Books.

30
 • Legal environment
• Impact on environment (environmental stress)
• Pressure groups
• Embodied (formal and informal) networks
Extrapolation of any good practice or policy tool from one context to another should be made
only after careful comparison of the two contexts.
3.5 Recent Technology Ideas and Changes Affecting I&KM

The recent years have seen the development of technologies which existed since the middle
of the last century in a research form, but were not applicable in industrial contexts. While
these technologies can only be useful from the rational-technical frame (as they do not solve
organizational obstacles to collaboration, which are mostly politico-economical), they can be
successful additions to I&KM. I found that some of them are already actively applied in some
domains like military intelligence, medical, legal and pharmaceutical I&KM but are still not
largely used in SD I&KM. Some of the trends and/or tools described here tend to overlap
with ideas from the preceding subsection, as technology (the object of this subsection) cannot
be completely isolated from the more general conceptual and social trends presented above.
The most interesting of these technological developments are:
• Semantic information to deal with complexity and ambiguity
• Mashups and linked open data
• Gamification and serious games
• Natural language processing and other forms of artificial intelligence
• Democratization of video, e-learning and MOOCs
• The mobile revolution
• The social revolution
Adding semantic information to the Web
The World Wide Web that somehow developed wildly and in an unorganized manner was
pretty different from initial ideas on hypertext, as exposed by Vannevar Bush or Theodore
Nelson. In particular, the Web stack of protocols (and essentially html) are targeted at human
beings and make it difficult for a software to infer the nature (or genre) of a Web site or page.
The semantic web initiative – interestingly headed by Tim Berners Lee, the person who
probably bears the most responsibility for the Web actually being what it is – tries to solve
this by including in addition to presentation markup (what essentially html and other CSS
are) a form of semantic markup. An “alphabet soup” of standards has been developed – and
while even a summary description of those is beyond the scope of this document, I present a
schema on the following image48:

48
Extracted from a page on Semantic Web Core Technologies (http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~jain/cse570-
13/ftp/semantic/index.html ) which can be a reference for the interested reader for more information.

31
Figure 13: Sematic Web technologies

Semantic Web technologies also make use of an older knowledge representation idea,
ontologies. An ontology (in information science) is “a formal naming and definition of the
types, properties, and interrelationships of the entities that really or fundamentally exist for a
particular domain of discourse” (Wikipedia). It is more precise and detailed than a taxonomy
(including not only hierarchical inheritance but also properties) and can be implemented in a
thesaurus if we add definitions (glosses). Some examples of thesauri are Wordnet (general)
and MeSH (Medical Subject Headings).
In general, Semantic Web techniques and ontologies are what we could call a “top-down”
approach. Experts (both content experts and semantic Web engineers) need to agree on
definitions and then build the semantic infrastructure according to the complex stack of
technologies presented above. This has at least two limitations: a technical-rational one and a
coordination issue, pretty much of politico-economic nature. As I alluded when first
mentioning taxonomies and ontologies, different organizations may have good reasons for
using different families of taxonomies, as their interests in different areas have different
needs of granularity (this is particularly true in SD, with the numerous different social,
economic and biophysical dimensions of which different organizations concentrate49). The
second, more practical issue – of both rational-technical and politico-economic nature – is
that once some common vocabulary or taxonomy would be agreed upon, all organizations
adhering to it would need to undergo the process of semantic marking of their Web sites and
knowledge platforms. This is obviously not going to happen in SD.
The top-down view of ontologies and Semantic Web has a strong critic in professor and

49
The database of organizations and networks working in SD, available at
http://www.sdtweb.org/index.php?menu=246 , was a first attempt to some mapping of interests of organizations
including their relations. Despite its limitations, it is an interesting prototype.

32
author Clay Shirky. In a short piece titled Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links and
Tags50, Shirky presents the critic of hierarchical, fixed classification (which actually applies
to any taxonomy, not only to ontologies), sums up the contexts in which an ontology could be
useful (basically small corpus, stable entities with clear edges, expert and authoritative
catalogers) and goes on to suggest another form of categorization, that he calls “folksonomy”.
A folksonomy arises when a large number of (not necessarily expert) users categorize (tag) a
knowledge artefact (what I have been alluding at in “how people use information is valuable
new information” above). According to Shirky, this “self-organization” (by either explicit
tagging or usage mining) is better than a top-down categorization. This is actually one of the
ways in which some of the recommender systems so popular on e-commerce platforms like
Amazon work. All this supposes that a large number of users do interact with information
artefacts and that they either explicitly tag them (think Pinterest, Facebook) or their behaviour
can be recorded digitally (page views and buy operations at Amazon).
Anticipating the discussion on issues in I&KM in SD, we state that some type of indexing
(helping in information and knowledge retrieval) is essential. So what would be the best way
of adding some semantic information to artefact repositories (and allowing a centralized
search over different platforms belonging to different organizations)? I think both approaches
(top-down semantic Web and bottom-up folksonomies) have a high potential of adding
valuable indexing. The question is more which one is technically and economically feasible
in a given context, because the top-down approach is obviously difficult to implement in a
decentralized environment and crowdsourcing (as explained in the “open source” discussion)
doesn’t “just” happen at higher level of the Morozov pyramid.
Gamification and serious games
While both these ideas are based on observations made in the game industry, gamification
and serious games are two different approaches. Gamification can be defined as the use of
game mechanics (and possibly other elements) in non game contexts to improve user
participation. The most used game mechanics are points, badges and leaderboards (PLB);
maybe the oldest and most familiar example of attributing points is the case of loyalty (such
as airline) points or miles. A lot of classical and digital enterprises use heavily PLB
mechanics; this has been also used a lot on online communities of practice or collaboration
forums. A good introduction is professor Werbach’s For the Win51 book and his gamification
online free Coursera course. While the implementation of game mechanics is relatively easy
to accomplish, the critics of gamification consider it a fad that uses the mostly superficial
aspects of games and does not engage users deeply.
The current of “serious games”, illustrated by Jane McGonigal’s book Reality is Broken52,
draws on the positive aspects of games and earlier work by Mihaly Csickentmihaly, author of
Flow. Somehow controversial and going against the common wisdom that games are a waste
of time and energy, McGonigal argues that we need to play more games, or more precisely to
engage more in activities that bring us in the “flow” state (in her words, “providing the world
at large with a better and more immersive reality”). Games are defined by activities having
clear goals, clear rules, precise feed-back and voluntary participation. By reverse engineering
what actually creates the flow state in games53 –satisfying work or “goldilocks” (not too easy
50
Available at http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html
51
Werbach, Kevin and Dan Hunter - For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business,
Wharton Digital Press, 2012.
52
McGonigal, Jane – Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World,
Penguin, 2011.
53
There is here a considerable overlap with the ideas of intrinsic (3.0, as compared with 1.0 and 2.0) motivation
from Daniel H. Pink’s Drive. The reader might have noticed also that this book’s discourse can be deconstructed

33
nor too difficult) tasks, experience (or at least hope) of being successful, social connection
and “meaning” (being part of something larger that yourself) – we can (re)design reality so
that it offers a comparable experience. She finally describes “ten games designed to help
ordinary people achieve the world’s most urgent goals: curing cancer, stopping climate
change, spreading peace, ending poverty.” One of the most relevant of those (from an SD
perspective) – World Without Oil – was a massive multiplayer online game that went online
in 2007 by asking “what if” the oil crisis just started. About 1900 players brought very
interesting ideas, concerns and real life expertise to the game.
Mashups and linked open data
With what was called Web 2.0 (which is already a thing of the past), among other things (like
participatory Web sites transforming viewers in content creators) was introduced the concept
of mashup. A mashup is a Web page that will pull information in real time from different
sources. There is also a similarity with the artistic concept of remix – a very interesting series
of videos on remixing all sorts of information artifacts can be found on the site called
“Everything is a Remix54”. From the point of view of SD information and knowledge, there
are two types of interesting potential applications of mashups:
Linked open data, which allows graphical representation of social, economic and
environmental data, often as function of space and time. There are already a lot of sites
offering complex data visualisations, often using linked data from other providers; the
prototypical site is the World Bank data visualizer, from which we show a snapshot below
(Life expectancy at birth as function of GNI per capita, by country, with bubble size being
population, and with the possibility of playing through annual data). The data collected by
UNOSD includes 17 such platforms of data visualisation, often pulling data from different
sources. The main difficulty of linked open data projects is not the graphical or storage part,
but defining the data unambiguously; while generally simpler than defining a taxonomy or an
ontology, there needs to be agreement between different organizations on data definition.
This issue would be often underestimated by non specialists in data modelling.

differently from the technical-rational (engineering), politico – economic (game propaganda) or symbolic
perspective (giving meaning to people).
54
http://everythingisaremix.info/ . The reader might have noticed that this note makes heavy use of remixing in
the form of reusing fragments of textual and image information artefacts.

34
Another spectacular application of mashups are search aggregators, which put together
information from different providers. The most successful are the ones in the tourism
industry; nowadays most people would book travel related products on the Internet and with
the large number of providers, it’s much easier to use a search aggregator like Kayak or
Hipmunk to search for a flight. One can wonder why it is so difficult to use a similar search
aggregating technique to search for SD related artifacts; my reading is that the ontology of
travel (or at least the part of the ontology that is leveraged by search aggregators) is much
simpler than the SD ontology. For this reason, a search aggregator would need to “know” the
search criteria used by each of the knowledge platforms that allow search, and to be modified
each time any of the sources is modified. The alternative – metadata extraction – has its
advantages and disadvantages; I will come back to this comparison in the implementation
guidelines.

Natural Language Processing and other data mining techniques applied to information
artefacts
The open (as in freely accessible) Web contains a wealth of data and information that can be
mined or aggregated: social networks, mainstream media and blogs, existing sharing
platforms, organizational Web sites and search engines. Web mining or web intelligence55
sifts through volumes of unstructured data that are not possible to treat manually, hence
would need either semantic web information (if provided) or extraction of information from
unstructured (text) data; the latter can be accomplished under an umbrella of techniques
known as Natural Language Processing.

55
“Web intelligence is the area of study and research of the application of artificial intelligence and information
technology on the web in order to create the next generation of products, services and frameworks based on the
internet.” – Wikipedia. Some typical companies are Palantir Technologies and Recorded Future. At this point
Web Intelligence seems to be limited to very big budget organizations, in particular national US national
defense and counterterrorism but this could change quickly.

35
The following image – extracted from a presentation from the Stanford course on NLP56 -
gives an idea of the different types of problems that can be addressed by NLP, and their state
of advancement. Note that Named Entity Recognition is one of the most developed and is
very pertinent to extracting information from Web sites on partnerships, projects, artifacts.

Figure 14: state of NLP in 2015

Other applications shown on the slide – less advanced at this point, but which would largely
help to deal with the abundance issue in I&KM – are summarization and question answering.
At this point, question answering works pretty well in commercial systems for what are the
so-called “factoid” questions (questions with a simple and relatively non ambiguous answer),
as proven by the IBM Watson system beating its human opponents in the Jeopardy TV show.
Yet another application not mentioned on the slide is topic mining and/or text classification /
categorization, which would allow some level of automated tagging of SD related artefacts.
In addition, NLP can allow definition of (paradigmatic or syntagmatic) similarity between
words or tags, which can highly improve information retrieval in terms of relevance and
quality. While a general purpose engine like Google has already gone through an extremely
complex optimization with regard to the relevance of the results, specialized queries in SD
would not give the best results when launched against the whole Web, as argued in
subsection 3.1.
One of the sources (or by-products) of NLP are structured vocabularies like taxonomies,
ontologies or thesauri, already mentioned in the context of Semantic Web, but which existed
long before electronic text processing or the world wide web. Interestingly the existing
thesauri are either general (WordNet) or specialized (for medicine MeSH – Medical Subject
Headings), but not for SD. Semantic Web with triplets (or xml, rdf, rdfs, owl, …), DBPedia
(rdf “translation” of Wikipedia). Own query language. Limitation: it is based on an
universally accepted ontology. Alternative: folksonomy. Allow defining distances between
“words” (actually more complicated, but for the purpose of this it should be enough,

56
https://class.coursera.org/nlp/lecture but this is just an example, there are at least 5 courses on text mining,
retrieval, analysis on Coursera, and these techniques are used by Web intelligence.

36
E-learning and MOOCs, democratization of educational video
This is a very recent tendency, which has the potential to change tertiary education and also
adult education. Given the relatively low cost of producing and distributing educational
video, as well as the creation of software packages managing the whole cycle of teaching
(Learning Management Systems) there was an explosion of online courses. In particular there
is the phenomenon of MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses), in which not only videos and
text educational materials are delivered, but also evaluations, interactive foras and some basic
follow-up by teaching personnel. Given the fact that MOOCs can easily have tens of
thousands of people following them, the community management cannot be of the same
quality as a normal university course, however using evaluations that scale with the number
of participants (in particular quizzes and peer evaluation) allows to obtain some good courses.
These courses are offered either by universities or by other specialized institutions, and
centralizing platforms like Coursera, Udemy, EdX are highly successful. The offer is very
substantial in the field of SD, and one of the main areas in UNOSD data collection (see
appendix 2) was collecting information (metadata) on online courses.
The main limitation of online courses is the low percentage of completion, which is generally
lower than 10% and more of the order of 5%. There are a lot of studies on how this could be
increased; the advantage of Coursera-type platforms is that all activity of the participants is
tracked (in a Facebook or Amazon fashion) and can be analysed. There is also a huge (and
growing) corpus of text data from the interaction of participants on the fora, that can (at least
in principle) be analysed using NLP techniques. From the point of view of collecting (and
publishing) the metadata on these courses (what UNOSD did), one of the issues is the speed
at which this changes, as courses end and others are added. As it will be hinted in the
implementation guidelines, manual data collection by staff members or interns is
unsustainable; if metadata is to be collected, this should be done either via Web mining,
crowdsourcing or a blend of these two options.
The social and mobile revolution
It might seem that the effect of both the social and mobile revolution are most prevalent in
the private spheres of our lives; however I am arguing that these changes are so radical (in
particular for those who have been named digital natives) that there is an effect on how
information and knowledge flow in our professional lives.

Figure 15

The social aspects of computing evolved from what was initially named “computer-mediated-

37
communication” (CMC) and the analyses, in the early 90s, of what were then “multi-user-
dungeons” or MUDs57. It was then first understood that online (later called “virtual” by a
language abuse) interaction is fundamentally different from face-to-face interaction. Fast
forward to 2015, when mobile (phones and tablets) overcame PC and notebooks (see above
figure 15 from a tweet58 by analyst Benedict Evans in 2013). Smaller screens, and use while
walking, driving or in public transportation necessarily reduces the attention span, and
enhances the microcontent effect mentioned before: "Fifteen hundred years ago, we had the
patience to sit in the Baths of Diocletian and discuss the finer points of Roman politics and
philosophy. Today, we can’t go through dinner without somebody pulling out his or her
phone and checking Twitter." (Ben Parr – Captivology). While this is not exactly true (we
always tend to idealize the past, in what I would call the “midnight in Paris” effect), the
attention span is getting lower and lower, and most of the interest in social networks is the
LOLCATS – water-skiing-squirrels effect, as proposed by the Morozov pyramid of cyber-
needs (presented above). Sherry Turkle, in Alone Together, argues that the big difference
brought by the mobile and social revolution is that before we had two separate aspects of our
personality – the online and the offline one – while now the frontier is blurred; we don’t need
to sit down to our desktop, we are almost continuously connected. The main implication of
her theory – that we search an optimal, reduced connection with other persons – are less
pertinent for the professional life; however the part on reduced attention and participation is
also pertinent in the professional life. The syndrome of “there, but not there”, for example in
the case of conferences, seminars and workshops – is something everyone can relate to59:
“I remember my own sense of disorientation the first time I realized that I was “alone
together.” I had travelled an exhausting thirty-six hours to attend a conference on advanced
robotic technology held in central Japan. The packed grand ballroom was Wi-Fi enabled: the
speaker was using the Web for his presentation, laptops were open throughout the audience,
fingers were flying, and there was a sense of great concentration and intensity. But not many
in the audience were attending to the speaker. Most people seemed to be doing their e-mail,
downloading files, and surfing the Net. The man next to me was searching for a New Yorker
cartoon to illustrate his upcoming presentation. Every once in a while, audience members
gave the speaker some attention, lowering their laptop screens in a kind of curtsy, a gesture of
courtesy.”
On the other hand, social networks have a huge potential in leveraging an idea mentioned
before – crowdsourcing micro-activities (Clay Shirky, in Here Comes Everybody, is a
proponent of the idea; similar optimism is shown by Jane McGonigal, in Reality is Broken on
the potential of collaborative games); however in reality it is difficult to engage mass
participation for “serious” activities.
Due to social and mobile networking, ideas will move much quicker – as proposed by the
discipline of memetics, which is application of genetic evolutionary ideas to the transmission
of ideas, and originates from Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene book. There is however
strong criticism of the idea of memetics, in particular from evolutionary biologists, who
imply that memetics ignores the characteristics of the human brain as host for the viral ideas.
Nevertheless propagation can – at least metaphorically – compared to viruses and/or genes
(which actually are two different things, genes reproduce themselves AND the host, while
viruses only reproduce themselves although they need the host). Daniel Dennett (Breaking
57
One of the very early references is http://mud.co.uk/richard/mudhist.htm
58
“Benedict Evans: @BenedictEvans 10 Dec 2013 The number of smartphones in use on earth will probably
pass the number of PCs in the first half of 2014.”
59
Turkle, Sherry: Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (Kindle
Locations 507-513). Basic Books, 2011.

38
the spell) distinguishes three categories of memes – useful (symbiotic), neutral or destructive.
I will close this section by mentioning some authors who chose to bring to front the negative
points of view on the Internet (as an important new vehicle of information, knowledge and
social interaction). In addition to Morozov’s pyramid already mentioned (in a Maslow
fashion, the Internet fulfils our inferior needs before the superior ones), there is the hairy
issue of trust and truth on the Internet (also already mentioned in the discussion of David
Weinberger’s Too Big to Know. A funny illustration is the xckd cartoon on how citations can
arise (citogenesis 60 ); less funny are Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough book and Danny
Crichton’s Death and Life of Truth in the Internet Age61. “Fail early; fail often” may be an
interesting Google motto, but just like the more famous “Don’t be evil” this is not always
possible in a political context. Finally the worst example of negative phenomenon in online
communities is what could be called mobbing or cyber-lynching effect. Again, it is known
since the early 90s that online interactions tend to be more brutal than face-to-face, mainly
because people do not see their victim, just like killing by throwing bombs from a plane
flying at 40000 feet is different from using a knife. Some recent illustrations are the cases of
Twitter lynching of Saffyah Navaz, Natasha Leggero (who tweeted pretty innocent, slightly
childish jokes), and of Justine Sacco (that one was a dumb racist joke). In the words of
Christian Rudder: "[...] you can actually see the digital crowd become a mob. In short order,
the amused LOLs became OMGs became WTFs, and then stuff like ["Kill Yourself"] took
over[...]". In this cyberlynching "kill yourself", "bitch" and "whore" were the most printable
words, and he even talks about an encounter with a “past acquaintance and future former
Facebook friend”: “It was like running into a mob at a stoning, trying to drag people away,
finding someone you know— whew, finally, a guy you can reason with— only to have him
yell, wide-eyed, “Dude, check out all these rocks!” The stoning metaphor comes up again and
again when you read the commentary on episodes like these. It’s no coincidence that it’s the
death penalty of choice for the ancient religions: there is no single executioner; the
community carries out the punishment. No one can say who struck the fatal blow, because
everyone did together. The reach of social media makes the force of these gatherings
immense. Within twenty-four hours of her tweet, Safiyyah had been called down in front of
7.4 million people.”62
While these cases are probably still pretty rare, the effect of invisibility of the Other in online
communities can strike quickly; in any MOOC or online community of practice the presence
of a skilled, experienced community manager and a balance between censorship and free
speech is essential.
4. Other significant inputs
In addition to the above desk review, analysing the founding documents and up-to-date
activities of UNOSD, we conducted informal surveys of participants to previous UNOSD
activities and an analysis of some of the existing "knowledge platforms".
4.1 Surveys

In order to better assess the perceived needs of potential users of UNOSD platforms we
realized in 2014 two distinct surveys – one for the “contributors” and one for the
“facilitators” (terms as defined on figure 3, in section 2 above). We include here some results

60
The cartoon describes a scenario in which a fake citation propagates itself via a “rushed writer”. See
https://xkcd.com/978/ .
61
http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/06/you-cant-handle-the-truth/
62
Rudder, Christian – Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking), 2014.

39
from the survey for contributors (and the whole summary of the answers, including statistics
for the quantitative questions and individual answers for the qualitative questions, is available
as a pdf file).
Personalized emails were sent to 279 government officials that participated in the UNOSD
events mentioned in section 1. Out of those, 21 emails did not reach their recipient (the email
address was not / no longer valid). Out of the 258 remaining emails we received 59 answers
to the survey, which is a pretty high response rate (almost 25%). The survey contained
mainly qualitative questions, to elicit information about the perceived needs of the target
group in general (what they perceived hindered their productivity) as well as specifically
concerning information and knowledge gaps. In addition we asked questions about the social
networks they use as well as about favourite information sources in general and Web sources
in particular. This survey followed a discussion with almost 30 such government officials
during the Summer School organized in 2014, during which the main feeling was that
knowledge and information are not necessarily perceived as an issue by our clients.
The most revealing questions, from the point of view of the information and knowledge
needs, were open questions asking what hinders them from obtaining better results in general,
and specifically in terms of information and/or knowledge. Most of the answers confirmed
the above idea – the contributors do not perceive I&K as a serious limiting factor in their
work, compared to lack of financing and political/organizational obstacles. While we are
dealing here with the perception of these contributors, I think this is still significant in two
aspects. First, the idea that contributors from developing countries “just” lack knowledge and
getting them into a room and spoon-feeding them this knowledge is clearly not acceptable –
both from a technical-rational frame and a symbolic frame (this implies a certain hierarchy
and direction of the North-South dialogue, which is dated). The second aspect is that there
seems to be little perceived need from the part of contributors for knowledge products; this
does not mean that these products (including all sorts of K* mentioned above) are not useful,
but that there needs to be some kind of marketing of knowledge products. Once again, “if you
build it, they will come” is not a viable strategy, and the community needs to be primed. One
of the issues rarely mentioned (to my knowledge) is that onsite training at a site different of
the place where the contributors work has (relatively) high material advantages for people
coming from countries where wages are very low compared to per diems offered for
attending international events. This is just another example of conflicting technical-rational
and politico-economic frames, and makes it more difficult to efficiently deliver cost effective
training (such as e-learning) for which motivation will be lower; it can also have negative
consequences on the choice of representatives to be trained on site.
A somehow similar survey sent to the experts (in either knowledge management or domains
of SD) received a much lower rate of return and was not very useful.
4.2 Analysis of the existing platforms.

Another perspective on understanding the potential needs of our clients and how well these
needs are already fulfilled by existing “knowledge platforms” was taken by an inventory and
analysis of existing knowledge platforms. Under my guidance, during 2014 and early 2015
UNOSD interns proceeded to the identification of platforms, the identification of dimensions
used to classify information artefacts by these platforms, and to analyse how these platforms
can be accessed by users. From the hundreds of sites identified initially, and as a follow-up of
inventorying organizations and networks, we retained about 50 organizations for which an in-
depth analysis of the number of artefacts available, ways of search and navigation, and level
of user friendliness of the platform was assessed. I only present here a summary of the
findings; the more detailed research by the interns as well as the Excel file with the detailed
40
characteristics of the platform are also available. An attempt has also been made to contact
and network with managers of such platforms, with modest results. A further step could be to
request self- registration or actualization of information from managers of such platforms,
under the condition of being able to create a lively community of practice.
The first look at the so called knowledge platforms shows that:
• There are lots of sites (and physical repositories) containing information artefacts:
reports, studies, “stories”, case studies, organizational process documents, …
• These information artefacts are generally searchable (on each site!) using
incompatible criteria (no unified taxonomy of either artefact categories or search
criteria)
• Additional artefacts: organizations and their links, web sites, web pages, blog posts,
events, courses, CB programs, tools (software, data visualisation platforms), best
practices, people,…
In order to attempt a classification of platforms we asked the following questions:
- What type of content is it?
- Who produces the content?
- How is it updated?
- How can the content be navigated?
In terms of type, most of the content is classic documents (relatively easy to search and
index), but there is also data, visualisations, opinions, social network material, video and
audio, modern courses. We also privileged organizations that produce actionable knowledge
– this is to say projects or best practices based on real world implementations in mostly low
income countries, rather than academic research.
Who produces the content? The basic way there is publication of own research, results, data
or projects – which most large organizations do, as an important number of experts is needed
to produce a steady flow of research and project documentation. The next step is to allow
partners to contribute (an example being UNISDR’s Prevention Web), generally validating
the contributions before publication or restricting access to trusted partners. Finally one can
attempt to aggregate content from other providers – we did not find a lot of such sites; instead
of systematic aggregating (manually, automatic or by crowdsourcing) there are reports or
studies produced from time to time on what is done outside the publishing organization. Most
of the organizations are also very active on social networks – the usual suspects being
Facebook and Linkedin.
In most of the cases, the content is updated manually, as the production of the content is
much slower than the publication for an individual organization (the flow gets too high for
manual publication only at the scale of all organizations, and that’s where some automatic or
crowdsourced selection, metadata extraction and indexing is needed).
Finally, we found out that the content is sometimes difficult to navigate, potentially hidden in
pages that are accessible in 3-4 clicks from the home page and can be relatively difficult to
find via a general purpose search engine. In addition we had interns assess the usability of the
site both subjectively and using an automated tool, Nibbler. The results are added in the
Excel file dealing with knowledge platforms.

41
5. Issues with IM and KM in SD
Based on the analysis in sections 3 and 4, we start by describing the issues we consider most
important for information and knowledge management in SD, focusing on the point of view
of the categories of stakeholders defined previously (in section 2). We then try to match the
issues with some of the possible solutions.

In summary what we saw in sections 3 and 4 was:

- the quantitative information explosion, lack of curation leading to awareness and trust
issues;
- no unified controlled vocabulary (taxonomy, ontology)
- new forms of content (microcontent, open data and visualisations, democratization of
multimedia) ;
- social communities with their potential and limitations, limited attention span, mobile
revolution, Morozov pyramid of cyber-needs;
- technical tools (metadata, ontologies, folksonomies, Semantic Web, NLP)
- The overwhelming sentiment towards I&KM, technology, social is optimism. However,
some pessimism exists.
One important caveat when trying to organize SD information and knowledge for improved
access is to avoid re-writing a second hand Google. Indeed, we need to remember Google’s
mission: "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
(Compare also with Recorded Future’s mission statement): "Our mission is to organize open
source information for analysis." However I believe – as also explained in the “why” section
(3.1) that by focusing on SD and using some targeted sources (reliable, of interest) we can
add value.
5.1 Issues

The main issue can be summarized as the well-known concept of “Know-do gap” mentioned
above. From the pragmatic point of view, the main purpose of I&KM should be closing the
science-policy gap, as described in the quote from the K* paper, for which the authors
consider 4 possible reasons: 1. Contributors are not aware of a piece of knowledge that
would inform their policy or action 2. Don’t understand it 3. Don’t care as it’s not on their
agenda 4.They don’t believe that piece of knowledge). Based on the characteristics of I&K
identified above (abundance both in stock and flow, trust issues, lack of a central authority,
lack of organization of the I&K) we consider that the main issues that we can address via a
Web knowledge tool are numbers 1 (Lack of awareness – dynamic) and 4 (Trust issues).

To fight the abundance, as mentioned by Gleick63: “Strategies emerge for coping. There are
many, but in essence they all boil down to two: filter and search. The harassed consumer of
information turns to filters to separate the metal from the dross; filters include blogs and
aggregators—the choice raises issues of trust and taste. The need for filters intrudes on any
thought experiment about the wonders of abundant information.” The same author also notes

63
Gleick, James – The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011.

42
that what needs to be captured is also the interest and attention of the potential contributor:
"When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive. For the same reason, mechanisms
of search—engines, in cyberspace—find needles in haystacks. By now we’ve learned that it
is not enough for information to exist." Gleick the information

As mentioned by David Weinberger, the trust issue was less important in a pre-Web (and pre-
social media) world, where a lot of what was available was curated information; as long as
the quality of the curation is good (which can of course be debated in a totalitary state) only
trustworthy information and knowledge circulates. Peer review, as proven by academic
literature, is also a pretty robust system. In particular the young generation is more and more
relying on Google search and social. A very interesting case is a propaganda video 64 for
Youtube, whose tagline is literally "I checked out the books and they didn't tell me much",
while Youtube will provide the necessary knowledge for an important improvement in an
African village.

While issue 2 is certainly important in the context of SD knowledge for government officials,
it cannot be reasonably addressed with information technology-based KM and UNOSD’s
very limited resources, but they could be at least partially addressed via regular capacity
building activities. As for issue 3, that is a purely political one, that cannot be addressed by
any logical-rational approach, including I&KM. It is true that issue 4 also has political (and
symbolic) connotations, but by establishing a “web of trust” it can at least unambiguously be
resolved inside a school of thought (and in particular the UN-academic universe).
Still from a pragmatic point of view we can identify two reasons for the difficulty of
transferring what are called “best practices”: lack of unified ontology (or even an accepted
taxonomy, as stated in the analysis of the knowledge platforms) and context dependency.
Somehow like SDGs in general, the context is different in each country, in all aspects that
influence SD (economic, social and environmental). Priorities are very different for a fully
developed OECD country for which poverty is limited and environmental consciousness is
high, as opposed to a very poor country in which survival economy is important, social
inequalities are high, corruption is endemic and environmental issues are perceived as less
important. A small island developing country faces different issues than a landlocked
country, although both may be poor and underdeveloped; finally, cultural, religious and
political issues (such as continuing civil war) although may shift perceived priorities with
respect to economic, social and environmental matters. Both theoretical knowledge and
practical tools are therefore susceptible to be more or less useful for sustainable transitions
depending on the variable context.
We can also wonder – following the ideas of Frederik Brooks in one of the most remarkable
short articles on software engineering – which of the difficulties of I&KM are essential and
which ones are accidental (Brooks, going back to Aristotle, considers “essential” the
difficulties that are in the nature of the object of study – in his case, software engineering; in
our case, I&KM – and that cannot be solved, and “accidental” the ones related to the way we
see and use the object at this point, possible to solve). I think the fractal nature of knowledge,
(over) abundance and trust are essential difficulties, while the impedance mismatches due to
the lack of a controlled vocabulary could be solved (but of course this can be argued). It is an
interesting question what type of difficulty is the existence of a lot of different discourses
(clusters or interests – in addition to “business as usual” and SD there are green energy, green

64
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE63BYWdqC4&feature=relmfu

43
growth, de-growth, deep ecology etc); however this is a politico-economic issue which
cannot be solved (in my opinion) by I&KM.

5.2 Possible Solutions

One of the most promising solutions to solving the awareness and trust issue would be the
implementation of Semantic Web, as described above. The technical infrastructure (Semantic
Web stack of protocols) exists and would be in principle possible to implement. If all the
information and knowledge providers could use a similar semantic markup (ideally based on
a unified ontology) search and categorization will be relatively easily. While it has been
shown to work (for example in the health world, by MeSH) it has few chances to get
implemented in the SD world, mainly for politico-economic reasons.
Short of this ideal top-down industry-large solution the alternative is to organize access
and/or indexing to relevant sources, either through a search federator or metadata extraction
and publishing. Here, Web Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and crowdsourcing can
help with content extraction and indexing. Gamification and community management can
also help in attracting and retaining users for both helping with the publication/indexing and
as audience for the published materials.
6. Strategy and implementation guidelines
This part (in particular 6.1, the client and I&K activities) is UNOSD-specific, this is to say it
was designed with the specific mission of UNOSD in mind. The general implementation
guidelines
6.1 Strategy: clients, I&K activities

What can we bring that is not already there and has some relevance to our clients? We cannot
“make all the world’s SD information accessible” – that would be the equivalent of a SD
Google, which not only UNOSD with its one person devoted to KM and IT cannot do, but
even an organization with a more reasonable workforce would not be able to implement. (As
an aside, a colleague from another SD knowledge-oriented platform complained about the
difficulty of recruiting programming support – which we also found to be an issue). From
UNOSD point of view, it is also important that to support the TRANSITIONS to sustainable
development and SDG implementation (while the artefacts for which we collect metadata are
general SD artefacts, special attention should be dedicated to artefacts related to transitions).
We hope to answer to this by laying accent on practical aspects in the artefacts – in particular
tools, case studies, best practices. There is a need to link directly to the other activities – CB
events and keeping in touch with former participants to our events.
We would define UNOSD I&KM strategy as what services to deliver to what clients using
which means. We start by defining the clients, then the services and then the means.
Following the definitions on figures 2 and 3, UNOSD’s primary clients are government
officials from developing countries (contributors, as they contribute directly to SD policies
design and implementation). The secondary clients would be domain experts (in either areas
of SD or information and knowledge management), and at the third level we would address
general public and in particular youth.
How can we make a difference for these clients: fight the abundance (by tagging and
referencing relevant artefacts), try to make tagging relevant to practical transitions (both as
case studies and best practices rather than academic and theoretical knowledge, and by

44
identifying the context of the artefact and its pertinence to a given national or socio-political-
environmental-economic context), finally evaluate trust in an online world in which content
is not filtered.
Means of delivering: Web presence through two distinct sites – UNOSD corporate site
(containing information on CB, advisory missions, partnerships – in short, activities directly
delivered by UNOSD) and the SDTW 65 dedicated to I&KM activities (containing
aggregation and summarization of significant activities and artefacts developed by other
relevant actors). Roughly the corporate site presents our (relatively limited in volume) off-
line activities and the publications reflecting them, and the SDTW metadata, information and
knowledge harvested from relevant organizations. The next steps will involve mainly
extending (based on above findings and according to below implementation guidelines) the
breadth and depth of SDTW and complementing with creating and nurturing CoPs for our
clients.
What do we need to deliver for SDTW? The model of container – contents – community will
be refined further in the implementation guidelines, but here is a first short description of the
three elements:
A knowledge platform containing what others do, organized in a way that makes sense,
structured information (container, consisting of a database schema and an interface).
Contents (of the database): general related to sustainability (not restricted to sectors or
themes, but privilege content relevant the idea of sustainable transitions, SDGs,
implementation of NSDS and brokering). Data collection - manual vs automatic, as described
by David Weinberger (Too big to know): “Some of this increase in metadata requires explicit
effort by humans: We curate collections, we rate items, we leave comments, we write
reviews. But much valuable metadata can be deduced by examining the trails we
inadvertently leave behind. Sites such as Amazon have become expert at this: By analysing
data about what people click on and what they buy individually and in aggregate, Amazon is
able to tempt visitors with other items they might be interested in. The data Amazon uses for
this purpose is not left by visitors on purpose. For that very reason, it tells a special truth.”
Web intelligence – mentioned before – which is actually a scaled-up version of the older
concept of “business intelligence” can help here, with a symbiosis between human and
machine and an added touch of crowdsourcing. This being said, crowdsourcing needs
motivation, either intrinsic or extrinsic.
Community – people benefiting from the information + those possibly editing the contents +
linked to the participants to the offline events.
6.2 General implementation guidelines

Alternatives: search federation (like the tourism software platforms), mashups, metadata
extraction and linking
Brokering and METADATA. Options for a knowledge platform: creating a mashup of
existing sites /search aggregation or federation versus importing the metadata and linking to
external information. Preferred option – local metadata (stability of container, see below).
Efforts dedicated to: 1. Container 2. Content extraction and update 3. CoP and online/offline
activities integration. Of course these three dimensions are inter-related
Container
65
www.sdtw.org . At this point (August 2015) the site is more a prototype of what we could be offering, with a
lot of other artefacts (than organizations, networks and documents) to be published, as described in Appendix 2.

45
Data architecture (actors, artefacts, events,…)
Visual presentation / search / navigation (all artefacts are related)
Graphical attractiveness and information browsing (see some examples from Recorded
Future, Palantir technologies). Alternatives to ridiculogram (nodes as lines instead of points).

Ex recorded future

46
Ex nndb
Contents
Most interesting objects (artefacts, events) change often
Extract information from the Web, social networks
Tag contents
Contents: Web mining / intelligence
Use NLP / data mining techniques
Identify / extract actors, artefacts, events, links…
Compress information and tag them
Some pioneering applications (military / intelligence): Palantir Technologies, Recorded
Future…

Community
Attract and retain users
Get users to help in maintaining contents by checking automatic extraction, tagging, adding
content
Community: use gamification / serious games / crowdsourcing techniques to engage users
Blend of automatic and manual/crowd sourced data extraction and maintenance. Try to use a
triangle (self-reported data - need to incentivize; human harvested data; automated harvested
data). Use gamification (or rather game-based techniques) for motivation
While we need to be realistic in terms of potential of mobilization (more on the Morozov
side, as we previously showed, than on the Clay Shirky side), even a 0.1% of time invested in
crowdsourcing from 0.1% of the youth population caring about sustainability

Content extraction and update poses two types of problems: the quantitative technical
problem and the qualitative curation problem, with both technical and political – curation
dimensions. The quantitative technical problem comes from the sheer size of the information
flow; every day there are new artefacts, events and actors or changes to the existing ones. The
qualitative – curation problem is related to choosing what to keep and what to bring to the
front: it is known that for example in a Google search, the typical user does not go over the
first page (10 results). Polarized debate: “An expert doesn’t so much argue the various sides
of an issue as plant his flag firmly on one side. That’s because an expert whose argument
reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn’t get much attention.” (Freakonomics, p. 130)
Integration between online and offline activities, support by actively nurtured communities of
practice
Use of semantic web technologies (container) as well as Web intelligence (contents)

Strategic choice of content (avoiding narrow niche content already covered and pushing for
political-economic groups)
Attempts to overcome lack of resources by using open source and/or crowdsourcing
techniques (limitations to that)

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For the Web presence, use a professional (yet simplified) development methodology and
keep documentation to trace decisions from strategy to functional architecture to functional
analysis to programming.
Game techniques and mechanics. While gamification itself (in the simplest form of points,
badges and leaderboards) has often been considered as a passing fad, taking into account
reasons for which games motivate people while most work does not can help in designing
collaboration and crowdsourcing environments (examples of epic scale game-like
environments, including “games for good”, are given together with some theoretical
background, in Jane McGonigal’s “Reality is Broken”, Penguin 2011). There are also authors
having expressed ethical reserves to crowdsourcing (Jaron Lanier in Who Owns the Future?
Implies that crowdsourcing and free sharing of data reduces the potential for a strong middle
class and concentrates wealth and power in a handful of “lords of the clouds”).
Also quote Dataclysm and Captivology.
6.3 Implementation scenarios for the Web presence with estimated costs

While it is difficult to put actual numbers on these scenarios

Establishment of different scenarios with associated costs (mainly consultant or contracting,
as the capabilities of the office are very limited for this type of development).

Zero scenario: give up the idea of a knowledge platform. Concentrate on CB activities both
online and offline and CoP nurturing using existing platforms.

Low: change STWeb to an information architecture driven site; move to a technically stable
and documented platform; choose basic added value functionalities* easy to maintain in
content; consistently market the site in offline events. Platform listing organizations (and
links between), aggregating documents (accent on best practices and case studies from
practically oriented organizations like development agencies), news and events manually
(using interns), with different views and some minimal graphical browsers / searches.

* what SD knowledge artefacts exist and are of interest? Documents of course, but also
review CB and in general training options; events; open data and visualisations; general
information sources on SD reviewed and tagged; networks; remarkable quotes. Particular
topics of interest are financing and communication. What should be implemented in what
stage?

Medium: Minimal plus container for aggregated/tagged knowledge with increased graphical
browsing and searching, crowdsourced aggregation/tagging. Paid crowdsourcing could be a
way of attaining a tipping point for the platform. + newsletter / news inventory. Who’s Who
in SD information and knowledge management (contacting information managers of
platforms if they want to be listed in our Who’s Who directory). Get the Who’s Who pushed
by DESA to gain traction. Newsletter, CoP for contributors, integrate with e-learning and
offline CB events.

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High: Low plus adding crawler/scrapper for aggregated knowledge/ studying and container
for a policy support system. Some research into TF/IDF analysis of Web documents on
identified (scraping) sites and linked ones (crawling). In parallel contact information
managers of existing platforms to establish a common Semantic Web standard and / or
tagging and follow-up of pull API and/or a dedicated CoP for SD I&KM. Mine social
networking data to consolidate

Not retained (too high): AI-type system for aggregating and compressing information
including NLP, plus managing the content for all subsystems. Multilingualism.

Review after 1-2 years. Need of review in view of KM done by other actors (in particular the
World Bank, UNU and other relevant actors).

Conclude with the next steps: approval, validation, need to define work packages and
deliverables.

Medium and high solution suppose high investments (250K and +).

Appendix 1: UNOSD mission and I&KM activities up to date

Before any other considerations related to UNOSD and its founding documents, it is useful to
quote the opening phrase from the self – description of the office from the Web page:
“The United Nations Office for Sustainable Development (UNOSD) supports U.N. Member
States in planning and implementing sustainable development strategies, notably through
knowledge sharing, research, training and partnership building.” Another particular
relevant phrase extracted from the “Introduction and Background” section of the Web site is:
"ease access to the vast and sometimes overwhelming knowledge on sustainable development
[...] facilitate connections between researchers and practitioners, notably for national and
local policy making and programming".
When UNOSD was created, highly experienced consultants were hired to produce a set of
documents, including inception documents and inception risk assessments for management
(by Alan AtKisson), a review of knowledge, capacity building and networks for sustainable
development (also by Alan AtKisson), an “UNOSD KM strategy” and an “UNOSD KM
scoping” document (last two by Nils Ferrand). Without attempting to summarize all of the
details of these documents (totalizing hundreds of pages), some of the most important (and
relevant for KM) ideas are presented below.
Networks and capacity building.
The knowledge, capacity building and networks review defines itself as “[…] a selective,
summary scan of the current “state of the art” in sustainable development (“SD”) knowledge,
capacity building, and networks, in a SD context, with resulting recommendations to
UNOSD." Some of the direct recommendations include:
- develop new tools taking into account recent developments (in particular IT/Internet/Web

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2.0/Web 3.0);
- KM strategy needs to be dynamic (flow), integrated (rather than domain based), push rather
than pull;
- define target group: national officials, define actions: capacity building, networked
governance, boundary work, organizational and institutional change processes
- Conduct a larger, more formal survey of SD capacity building programs and map those
programs on the UNOSD portal.
- Design UNOSD’s own capacity building programs with transition and change in mind.
- "knowledge of incentive and sanction systems" + nudge, behavioral economy as well as
Another set of documents – somehow disparate – was produced by Nils Ferrand, including a
“knowledge management strategy”. While the focus of these documents seems less relevant,
they do contain some interesting points. In particular, it is the only place I found reference to
a user survey (not clear if it really happened but there is a questionnaire AND something that
looks like results in a slide but no data could be found - in general there is no traceability
between the initial strategy and version 1 of the Web site). According to this survey the main
categories of needs are
"Supporting policy makers in organizing social and institutional planning processes.
"Providing more factual knowledge about specific sustainability policy options and
technologies
"Supporting the integration and coherency of different actions in sustainable development
strategies and plans
A list of “knowledge services” that could be delivered to a community, ranked by usefulness
and complexity to develop;
A data model and a prototype for a Web site
Idea that IT should be externalized (it's not ONE person that can do it)
Analysis of other UN entities and their involvement in KM for SD
Some concrete idea on what should be published: news / newsletters, a system allowing civil
servants to manage the tools for their cases and policies.
List activities for the first three years, including events, the institutional Web site, planning a
“knowledge portal” which followed up some of the ideas in the Atkisson report and the KM
expert meeting. These activities have undoubtedly established UNOSD as a major player in
the field of SD, in particular in CB for our main clients (government officials from
developing countries).
Space for improvement, in particular concerning the “Sustainable Development Transition
Web” (SDTW) initially marketed as a “knowledge portal”. The initial objectives were – in
my personal opinion – much too high given the very limited capacity available (one full time
staff plus intermittent junior consultants) and the complexity and just huge amount of
information and knowledge which is potentially useful for SD in general and national SD
transition strategies in particular.
While this is not a detailed analysis of how the “knowledge portal” originated and how useful
it actually is, we concluded that in the first step was based on a highly theoretical concept of
“mapping” organizations, knowledge facts, dimensions and flows. In practice although
interesting and graphically attractive, the implementation (“network mapping tool”) has

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limitations in terms of granularity (data at the organization level is too coarse without details
on usable artefacts), data collection (manual data collection by sifting through a huge volume
of Web sites) and scalability (the result of representing even a fraction of data is a “hairball”
or “ridiculogram”), not to mention technical issues related to the (unstable and
undocumented) technology and framework used to implement what was a very useful
prototype but by no means an operational site. No follow-up (in form of a community of
practice) of the participants to the events UNOSD organized has been done. E-learning was
planned, budgeted but not implemented for reasons related to limited internal capacity. While
initially e-learning was planned to be developed from scratch, a huge number of products
(including free open source) exist and hosting an e-learning site with a specialized provider is
a more robust and eventually less expensive option. We decided to complement and enhance
the “network mapping tool” as explained below in section 5, based on the additional inputs in
section 4, but not to continue to consider e-learning66 as part of the knowledge portal (or
SDTW as it was rebranded).
Ridiculogram + unsustainable data collection. Makes for nice Power Points but has little
practical utility, in particular for the clients and ends in view.
Positioning: “The UNOSD portal, in line with the Office’s explicit mandate, focuses on KM
for sustainability – not on a particular theme, but on KM support, such as mapping actors,
activities, resources, strategies, and connections between those actors and their
characteristics.” Unfortunately it is pretty difficult to end up with something useful for the
“contributors” as defined above (main clients).

Appendix 2: Description of the dataset gathered in 2013-2015

The data gathered by UNOSD interns in 2013-2015 follows and enriches the data collected
by Alan AtKisson for his initial report. The AtKisson consisted of two lists (called
“databases” in his report, but consisting each of an Excel worksheet) – networks and
training/capacity building courses, each list with certain significant attributes. (In technical
terms each of them would be a table in the database, although some additional normalization
would be possible but would increase the number of tables). It listed about 70 networks and
60 training institutions.
In order to continue the data collection
Description of Excel files
Appendix 3: Some additional references
SD in general
Before Rio: http://www.uncsd2012.org/history.html or
http://www.un.org/wcm/webdav/site/climatechange/shared/gsp/docs/GSP1-
6_Background%20on%20Sustainable%20Devt.pdf
After Rio: merging of MDGs (to expire in 2015) and SD in the “post 2015 process”,

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E-learning is planned to be combined with one of our flagship events in CB – the Summer School or Summer
Study and with the CoP building activities; a separate strategy for these has been proposed in another document.
While all these should be related to the I&KM strategy and Web sites, they are not discussed here further.

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essentially the SDGs67. More info on the SD knowledge platform, a site containing a lot of
information on the post-Rio processes, but relatively difficult to navigate unless you know
exactly what you’re looking for.
For SD and SDGs – Jeffrey Sachs’ course on Coursera, sustainabledevelopment.un.org
For each chapter
Other interesting books:
Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking) – Christian Rudder, 2014
The Filter Bubble, Here Comes Everybody
Jeff Jarvis – What Would Google Do?
“Bloggers, mashup artists, YouTube videographers, political ‘hacktivists’”
Wasik, Bill (2009-04-15). And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture
(p. 11). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

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https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgsproposal

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