DCoPs, policy development, and blogs

As Rick noted, I am at the workshop on Building Distributed Communities of Practice for Enhanced Policy-Research Interface hosted by the International Centre for Governance and Development. It is actually just after the adjournmjent of the second day of proceedings right now, and my brain is exhausted. I have taken too many notes to dump here, but I will dump them into a wiki or something within a few days.

The format was great – each half day was organized around a theme and there were various speakers around each theme. Speakers represented the U of S academic community, as well as national and international agencies.

I just want to comment on one theme that was found throughout the workshop so far, and that is the need to make the knowledge from people’s experience and their tacit knowledge available to a wider audience in a usable form. I had a tremendous discussion with someone from CIDA who told me about all the knowledge and wealth of experience that is lost when CIDA development officers return from overseas assignments and are placed into positions right away working on other countries. Because of the rapid need for them to get up to speed on their new assignment, much of the rich practical knowledge is lost. There really needs to be a mechanism to harvest all that experience. I know that this shows my bias, but I think that blogs could actually be a great process for recording that experience as it happens to overseas development officers.

Stay tuned for more thoughts.