Director of the MENON Network, a Brussels-based research and innovation network; finalising a PHD on ICT for Development in the Knowledge Society at the Universidad Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona.
Among the buzz concepts of the International Development Cooperation (IDC) sector, amidst technical assistance, capacity building, empowerment, ownership and partnership, a new idea is gaining ground in the last years, that is the one of knowledge networking. This is linked to the understanding by more and more IDC agencies and by some national development agencies of the fact that a new model for IDC is needed. Using the words of Fukuda-Parr, Lopes and Malik, "the old-style linear forms of technical cooperation will to some extent be overtaken by events. Globalization - and the counter-reactions to it - is creating multiple new links, networks and alliances that change the topography of knowledge. In this globalized environment, the idea of being propelled along a linear development path by knowledge emanating from a single distant country will increasingly be seen as antiquated and irrelevant. New institutional forms of global support to capacity development are becoming possible" (Fukuda-Parr et al, 2002 Pag. 17). In line with this understanding, most of the major donors are including networking and knowledge sharing as key components of their development cooperation strategies. As suggested by Henry, Mohan and Yanacopulos, "Networking (...) has become central to the self-image of most development agencies" (Henry et al, 2004, pg. 5). To make an example, the World Bank claims to be a "Knowledge Bank" and has created a set of units and programs devoted to networking, ICT and knowledge-sharing, practically in all sectors and regions. Most of these initiatives are supporting what Diane Stone defines as global knowledge networks, that are global aggregations of professional associations, academic research groups and scientific communities that gather around specific issues, with the main aim of sharing and spreading knowledge, often with a strong advocacy and policy focus (Stone, 2002).
In parallel, development practitioners seem to have understood that working in networks, both at the level of international agencies and of development experts and consultants, can increase the efficiency of the system and counterbalance the decreasing of funds that governments devote to development aid. Specifically, civil society seems to have being learning the lesson on the importance of working with networks as much as public donors have. As Peter Plastrik and Madeleine Taylor note, "for many decades, the overriding organizing principle of the social-change sector, as with business and government, has been the stand-alone organization. (...) But hierarchical, organization-centric is losing its sway. Many people, even in the largest, most venerable organizations, recognize now that to gain greater impact they have to let go of organization-centric ideas about how the world works, and they are adopting network-centric thinking" (Plastrik and Taylor, 2006, Pag. 5).
In our opinion, the justification for the importance of networking activities in IDC starts from the fact that in present societies the value in any productive chain, this being valid for business as well as for development cooperation, does no longer depend either on labour or on capital, but on the collaboration or exchange process among individuals that produce knowledge, goods and services (Benkler, 2006). The concepts of reciprocity and exchange, which are at the very basis of the most ancient modality of social regulation that was there before the State and the Market and that has been relegated to a marginal role in industrial society, seem to be acquiring again a fundamental value in present social innovation and dynamics. In other words, value creation is deeply embedded in extended social relations. Moreover, due to the fact that knowledge is a non-exclusive good, knowledge networks are in principle capable of multiplying the knowledge of the individual agents by facilitating information sharing and dialogue: as noted by Marvin Minsky, collective intelligence is a complex function of many little parts, each mindless by itself, which, when they join, create a stronger intelligence (Minsky, 1986).
In more detail, the added value of knowledge networking in IDC activities can be expanded in three directions. First, networking is a way to overcome mere knowledge-market logics, where market is intended in its broader sense. IDC actions respond in fact to a logic quite similar to the one of commercial markets, since they derive from open or tacit negotiations and do work in a limited resources scheme. Networks facilitate exchanges (market model of social reproduction), redistribution (non-monetary model of social reproduction) and reciprocity (non-monetary collaboration-based exchange). In this last mechanism the focus is on the actors rather than on the relations, since they are the ones who drive the process, not the market or an external authority. Second, networking is a way to better predict peers' moves based on open sharing of knowledge. This is particularly important in IDC settings in view of avoiding project failures due to cultural differences and to different understandings of a specific IDC action logic, objectives and expected impact. In this line, a normally neglected value of networking stands in what is called the "long tail of networking": apart from doing better what could be done alone, by working in networks an actor can get access to new ideas and activities. Third, networking is a way to facilitate both cooperation among the involved actors, therefore increasing the efficiency of the system, and transparent competition among different stakeholders. Both donors and aid recipients in fact share the same objectives and risk to run overlapping actions and to compete for the same resources when complete information is lacking.
In line with these considerations, Nath suggests that knowledge networks not only provide an added-value in terms of better flows of information, but can become an alternative institutional model for the promotion of IDC, overcoming the limitations of the model of 'counterpart expert' from North to South. Whether formal (institutional) or informal, knowledge networks serve to share knowledge, experience and relevant information, good and bad practices, connecting people regardless of their place and promoting collaboration between individuals and institutions (Nath, 2000). It must be noted that networks are not adding value through new activities, but rather they multiply the positive value of the activities that their members run through them. Even if it can be demonstrated that networks of goodwill and motivated people working in development settings can generally increase the impact of IDC (Plastrik and Taylor, 2006), this does not mean that the logic should be to "build network" in a blind way. In a number of cases and conditions, fostering networking in a problematic area can result in a worse situation. For example, it can happen that a development network set up by well-intended development agents increases the resources availability for local strong actors (the local "big men") and affects negatively the whole IDC process. To avoid these potential problems, it is important that the networks that are fostered consider a number of conditions, such as the presence of multiple stakeholders' categories.
A call on the importance of networking in IDC comes also from the area of social capital studies, where many researchers claim that social capital should be considered as a main component of development projects: "Where poor communities have direct input into the design, implementation, management, and evaluation of projects, returns on investments and the sustainability of the project are enhanced" (Esman and Uphoff, 1984, quoted by Woolcock and Narayan, 2000, pag. 19). Woolcock and Narayan suggest that, even if research-grounded examples are not many, a consensus is emerging on the importance of social relations and networking in development as a fundamental resource to mobilise other growth-enhancing resources and as a way to facilitate the interactions between development communities and donor institutions (Woolcock and Narayan, 2000).
As noted by Henry et al (2004), the main functions of knowledge networks include the collective production, accumulation and dissemination of knowledge and the subsequent enhancement of the participants' capacities. Stone, in line with the main organisational studies mainstream thinking, claims that "a network amplifies and disseminates ideas ... to an extent that could not be achieved by individuals or institutions alone. Moreover, a network mutually confers legitimacy and pools authority and legitimacy in a positive sum manner. In other words, a network can often be greater than its constituent parts" (Stone, 2002, pag 3).
The management of knowledge in networks must be seen as an evolutionary process, comprising the phases of knowledge generation/construction, knowledge dissemination, knowledge use, knowledge embodiment and knowledge storage (Schultze, 2006). To achieve this, Knowledge Management practices must adapt to the specificities on networks, since most Knowledge Management approaches appear in fact to be primarily concerned with knowledge that can be quantified, codified and stored - an approach more deserving of the label Information Management. Even if recently there has been recognition that some knowledge cannot be quantified, the predominant approach to the management of this tacit or relational knowledge remains to try to convert it to a form that can be handled using the 'traditional' approach. One possible way forward is offered by the approach adopted by many Communities of Practice, which focus on providing an environment for people to develop knowledge through interaction with others in an environment where knowledge is created, nurtured and sustained.
To achieve this, and more generally to foster knowledge exchange within networks, ICT is fundamental. But, to be successful, the role of technology must avoid technology-driven approaches, since they tend to ignore the "soft side" of networking: experience shows that when ICT is not supporting the development of tacit and relational knowledge, networks tend to grow and live with more difficulties. Furthermore, another role of technology in knowledge management is to make the implicit visible, for example by applying Social Network Analysis methodologies. The ability to bring to the surface implicit assumptions, and the role that this can play in developing a shared understanding around specific issues, is perhaps one of the best means of building an appreciation of what is tacit without going through the effort of making it explicit. This also means that, for knowledge exchange to be as effective as possible, the knowledge and capacities of all network members should be identified as precisely as possible in order to combine them into a desired result; missing parts have to be developed internally or generated from outside the network. This process is normally fostered by facilitating, through the network structure, opportunities to combine the existing specialized knowledge (the "distinctive competencies" of the network nodes), in order to create new knowledge that ultimately guarantees sustained success for knowledge-intensive networks. An important distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge is provided by Nonaka (1991). According to the author, explicit knowledge is knowledge that is easily expressed, captured, stored and reused. It can be transmitted as data and is found in databases, books, manuals and messages. In contrast, tacit knowledge is: "highly personal, hard to formalize and therefore difficult to communicate to others, deeply rooted in action and in an individual's commitment to a specific context, it consists partly of technical skills [and partly] of mental models, beliefs and perspectives so ingrained that we take them for granted and cannot easily articulate them" (Nonaka, 1991, pag. 98). For Nonaka tacit and explicit knowledge are not separate but mutually complementary entities, which interact with each other in the creative activities of human beings, that is, finally, a knowledge conversion process. This conversion process consists of four stages: socialization, externalization, combination and internalisation. The first step, socialization, transfers tacit knowledge between individuals through observation, imitation and practice. In the next step, externalization is triggered by dialogue or collective reflection and relies on analogy or metaphor to translate tacit knowledge into documents and procedures. Combination consequently reconfigures bodies of explicit knowledge through sorting, adding, combining and categorising processes and spreads it throughout an organisation.
Applying these reflections to the IDC field means looking at the role that knowledge, considered as a valuable good, is playing in developing cooperation, and at how this role has been changing. When cooperation was concentrated on infrastructure and economic restructurations, the role of knowledge was mostly ancillary and mainly linked to some training actions that were conducted to improve the skills of aid beneficiaries. With the rise of the "human development" concept, issues like education or health became cornerstones of any development process, bringing knowledge and knowledge sharing to the centre of the process. Furthermore, the impact that ICT and the internet have had on the importance of knowledge in international development cooperation is paramount. Many observers agree that ICT has the potential to uncap the potential of knowledge for development, by making it storable, replicable, easily sharable: it is often claimed that ICT can offer the developing world the opportunity to 'leapfrog' several stages of development by use of frontier technologies that are more practical, environmentally sound and less expensive than undergoing the traditional stages and cycles of progress to the Information Society.
In a few words, knowledge sharing is becoming more and more important in international development cooperation policies and programmes, thanks to a new approach to networking, a more participatory and multistakeholder vision of international cooperation, and to the introduction of ICT. Nevertheless, when we move from policies and programmes to grassroots practices a question remains unanswered: has this rise of the importance of knowledge contributed to solving some very well known problems of international development cooperation or it has only provided the possibility of making the old mistakes in a new way? The urgency of giving an answer to this question stands in the fact that this is not an academic discussion, but rather a way to improve aid to developing countries and therefore to improve quality of life for people in need.
The above question can be articulated along different dimensions, which refer to some very well known problems of international development cooperation:
To try to accommodate the dimensions above, and at the same time to be able to advocate at the same time for a stronger role of networking and knowledge building in IDC settings, we are proposing the concept of Networking for Development In broad terms, networking for development (ND) can be defined as the professional application of networking methods and tools in IDC contexts, with the aim of valorising, documenting and exploiting the creation of new knowledge in the IDC process. Following the ND approach, projects and development activities should be built on and around development networks: open and multistakeholder aggregations that should include donors, receivers and intermediaries as well as other involved actors. They should be in charge of defining their own priorities and of monitoring and evaluating the impact of development actions they are concerned with. These networks should be the drivers, the monitors, and finally the owners of the whole development cooperation process, and should be based on concepts such as trust, ownership of results, and continuous involvement of users. The novelty with respect to the present situation, where development projects are sometimes run by networks of actors, stands in the fact that development networks must be built before the definition of the projects, and not as ancillary elements to development actions, making sure that the knowledge sharing element is present throughout the whole cooperation action and representing the sustainability and transferability guarantee of the whole process. The model is strongly based and relying on ICT, and gives priority to knowledge management, canalisation of social capital in and through the internet and implementation of multilateral actions with the participation of policy actors, civil society, companies, universities and other agents.
Knowledge networking in IDC settings refers to four broad categories:
In the following table the main characteristics of the above four categories are presented.
|
Category |
Reach |
Benefits |
Examples |
|
Networking among donors and IDC agencies |
Global |
Agenda simplification Overlaps minimisation Higher efficiency in aid delivery |
GAID, OECD Development Assistance Committee |
|
Networking among IDC professionals |
Global |
Knowledge sharing Expertise consolidation |
Development Gateway, Global Development Network, InfoDev |
|
Programme-related networking |
Global/Local |
Stronger sustainability |
@ LIS, ALFA |
|
Project-related networking |
Local |
Local community strengthening Ownership of results |
|
In all these cases, networking for development is about recognizing the fundamental role of social capital in IDC processes. The most important long-term added value of networking activities has to do with the capacity to increase the social capital of a group of stakeholders, intended as the sum of the relations that grants access to a set of resources (in our case both knowledge and IDC resources). On the other hand, social relations have taken a long time before getting considered as important dimensions of IDC; in their comprehensive review on the implications of social capital for development studies and practices, Woolcock and Narayan state that "for the major development theories social relations have been construed as singularly burdensome, exploitative, liberating, or irrelevant" and that modern societies call for "a more sophisticated appraisal of the virtues, vices, and vicissitudes of the social dimension as it pertains to the wealth and poverty of nations" (Woolcock and Narayan, 2000, pag 5).
The @LIS Programme, its acronym meaning Alliance for the Information Society, is one of the results of the political dialogue established between the Heads of State and Government of the European Union, Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) at the Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1999, where the promotion of the Information Society was adopted as a priority of the EU's cooperation policy with the LAC region. Starting from the 1990s the EC launched a number of multilateral "regional" programmes - in parallel with its bilateral and subregional cooperation operations - to develop relations between actors from the EU and from Latin America. Examples of these programmes are AL-INVEST (funding for meetings between SMEs), ALFA (cooperation between higher education establishments), URB-AL (exchanges between local authorities) and ALBAN (programmes of high-level training bursaries), EUROsociAL (social cohesion).
The @LIS Programme covered a wide spectrum of objectives, aiming to promote the benefits of using Information and Communication Technologies at national and regional level in Latin America, to fight against the digital divide and to create a long-term partnership between European and Latin American countries in the field of the Information Society. @LIS financed 19 demonstration projects run by consortia composed of European and Latin American partners in the fields of eHealth, eInclusion, eGovernment and eLearning 1 ; most of these projects started operations at the end of 2003 and finished at the end of 2008.
1Apart from the 19 demonstration projects, @LIS also supported some transversal actions (called networks and dialogues), focusing on ICT connectivity, on telecom standards, on telecom regulation, on Information Society policy, and on stakeholders networking. In the analysis of this paper, these actions will not be taken into account; due to their nature and to the whole programme structure, this will not damage the analysis.
Many innovative aspects can be observed in the way the Programme was constructed. First, in comparison with other cooperation programmes, @LIS presented a multisectoral approach to development cooperation, therefore addressing the development of the Information Society as a whole. Furthermore, @LIS was a regional programme, rather than a bilateral one, as it covered both the European Union and Latin America Regions with a spirit of reciprocity. Finally, the programme gave great importance to three fundamental aspects of the Information Society: transfer and sharing of knowledge among practitioners and users, political and regulatory dialogue, and increased connectivity between the two continents. These few considerations make @LIS an innovative and quite different cooperation programme and reflect the many, ambitious levels at which the Programme deployed its objectives. Considering the cooperation approach adopted, @LIS was addressing in an integrated way the diverse contexts in Latin America and the use of standard models and theories to interpret these situations. In this sense, the @LIS model is different and more articulated than that of, for example, the World Bank or other international financial institutions, that normally prioritise a case-by-case and country-focused approach. Furthermore, the many actions and projects supported by the @LIS Programme and the very nature of their breadth and depth were able to give and guarantee adequate importance to the equilibrium of some important institutional factors, such as formal rules and regulations, organisations, knowledge sharing and social relations; which lately, with growing recognition of validity, are being acknowledged as being amongst the most important factors for successful development cooperation.
However, the most important consideration in terms of policy innovation has to do with the knowledge-sharing component of @LIS. From the very beginning of @LIS, it was clear that in order to be successful and to respond to the logic of a multilateral programme, the initiative had to generate much more than what could be funded directly through the projects. In order to reach this, two objectives were set. First, that the highest possible number of stakeholders should have been made aware of the Programme achievements and possibly take benefits from them either as users or partners or supporters for further developments. Second, that the whole @LIS community, meaning the sum of the actors officially participating in the @LIS projects, should have been supported to facilitate knowledge exchange, synergy and collaboration. Differently from many European Commission Programmes, where specific knowledge sharing actions are either absent, or present in an extremely limited way (normally in the form of stand-alone "support actions"), @LIS decided to devote a part of its budget to a specific multistakeholder knowledge sharing network, called @LIS International Stakeholders Network (ISN), that represented one of the most crucial components of the whole operation. @LIS ISN aimed at supporting the programme development as far as sustainability, dissemination, concertation, results exchange and validation are concerned, and at the same time wanted to become the "public entrance" to the @LIS programme for all the interested actors in Europe and in Latin America, therefore enlarging the @LIS community to all interested actors, be they directly linked with the Programme or not. In other words, the @LIS International Stakeholders Network wanted to constitute the core of the "knowledge connecting web" that the @LIS Programme needed to establish between the organisations that directly participated in the @LIS projects and the group of external actors that by definition have a stake in the project activities, from the policy maker that might want to adopt an @LIS project outcomes to the community of users that might want to take advantage of a specific result.
For this reason, the @LIS Programme represents a perfect example of a network of stakeholders working in an IDC context, and can be used as a testbed to prove the validity of the concept of Networking for Development that was presented earlier. In our analysis, we will look for the relation between collaborative knowledge production and networking along a number of dimensions of interest such as sustainability, openness and impact; to try to sketch the impact that a proper and well-guided activity of collaborative knowledge development can have on an IDC programme.
We will analyse the @LIS programme in terms of network development, meaning the way the @LIS network has been created, has grown and has changed during its lifecycle, and the way knowledge has been collaboratively built, exchanged and documented along the way. Following the latest development in Social Network Analysis (see for example Barabasi, 2002 or Watts, 2003), each network has its own development history, but at the same time some general rules seem to exist that most social networks have in common. For the sake of our analysis, we can distinguish four phases in the @LIS network development: a) Network setup, b) Network emergence, c) Network consolidation, d) Network replication and sustainability.
Phase 1: Network Setup
This is a very critical phase in the life of every network, because it somehow determines the way the network will further develop (Barabasi, 2002). In the case of @LIS, the starting "picture" of the network was a highly clustered one, since the 19 demonstration projects were composed by actors connected around the 19 @LIS projects; nevertheless these clusters, apart from some very sporadic cases, were not connected among themselves. A first knowledge building activity that was carried out was the facilitation of the emergence of a common knowledge base among the different nodes, through the production of some yellow pages and through the creation of a discussion mailing list where nodes could introduce themselves and their role in the different projects. The first weak connections were established, resulting in some parallel light clustering that followed - rather logically - two main patterns. First, a geographical pattern: a typical example is the organisation, under the initiative of a specific partner from a country, of a meeting with other partners from that country. Second, a stakeholders' logic, meaning that actors with the same background (local governments, civil society, academia) clustered with actors of the same kind. This results in 19 strongly tied clusters, accompanied by some very weak national or stakeholder based clusters.
Phase 2: Network Emergence
In network sciences jargon, the transformation that leads from a scattered number of connections to a healthy and vibrant community is called emergence, and is characterised by the increase of local connections, leading to the creation of a few global relational patterns. In the @LIS case, this second phase started with the first Programme Coordination Meeting, a gathering of all the European project coordinators and of a number of Latin American partners. During this meeting all the projects were presented, and some thematic collaboration sessions were run. The themes of these sessions were open source, connectivity, sustainability, and had been chosen following a consultation among all the @LIS projects. This was the first moment of collaborative knowledge building, since the whole network discussed to reach a consensus on the most important themes to work on. In large networks, the selection of themes of common interest is an important knowledge building exercise, that can - if properly supported - increase the feelings of trust and belonging among participants. In our case, most of the actors - at least the ones that took part in the consultation - started to feel part of the network, since they had shared their needs and concerns with peers from other projects. This helped in what is probably the most important condition to have a health emergence phase, that is the need to build trust among the network members, and facilitated the natural identification of networking leaders. Some actors did in fact take the lead in the preliminary online discussions and gained more prestige and connections throughout the network. Also in this second phase the patterns that had started to emerge in the setup moment appeared: actors belonging to the same country kept on communicating among themselves more than with actors from other countries, and actors with the same background worked to strengthen relations. At this point, it is important to note that @LIS was composed of two broad kinds of projects: some were clearly limited to a single sector (such as school education, primary health care or electrification) while others had a more transversal nature (dealing with issues such as e-health in general or with use of e-learning for inclusion): projects from this second groups were the ones that at this stage facilitated networking across sectors and stakeholders groups.
Phase 3: Network Consolidation
The third phase was supported by the organisation of two more general Coordination Meetings as well as by eight national Workshops, targeted to the @LIS actors of a specific country and open to other relevant stakeholders from that country and of a Ministerial Forum where the @LIS projects were put in contact with European and Latin American Ministries in charge of Information Society. In this phase we can say that the network took its "mature" shape, through a number of important developments.
First, the network developed a strong multistakeholder nature, meaning that the clusters that had developed among actors from the same background started to get more and more in touch, somehow considering the different approaches and visions on the issues at stake more as points of discussion than of points of differentiation. To give an example, a number of rather stable connections were created between local governments and NGOs, or between civil society associations and private companies; this required both a lot of work by the network animators but was very important in terms of collaborative knowledge creation, since the different visions brought by the different stakeholders created a rather rich debate around a number of key topics. A clear example of multistakeholder knowledge building was the Ministerial Forum organised in November 2004 in Rio de Janeiro, where high level policy makers from all LA countries were exposed to the results and applications of the @LIS projects through presentations, videos, demonstrations, and then discussed how to increase the benefits coming from these applications to the whole LA region.
Second, the multistakeholder nature of the @LIS network facilitated the common understanding of the networking attitudes of the different stakeholders categories, and therefore a learning process at the network level. It clearly emerged that policy actors - both at national and local level - consider networking as a fundamental component of their work, while private sector actors look at networking as a means to increase efficiency of their activity and tend to devote to this activity the minimum effort needed to reach this objective, and civil society actors consider networking in a human dimension and tend to invest more time and energy in this activity without expecting direct and immediate benefit from this.
Third, in this phase some nodes emerged as thematic hubs due to their open attitude and recognised leadership in a specific field. The early identification of these hubs is very important to facilitate smooth communication across the network, since hubs can facilitate connections between actors that are quite "distant" in the network but at the same time can act as information gatekeepers.
Fourth, thanks to the knowledge networking developed, a number of practical collaborations aimed at the extension of some services to other areas took place, increasing the impact of the whole programme. For example, the Telemed project was able to extend its services to the Tabuleiro, an area where the pilot by the Link All project was developed; this meant high savings in terms of money, time and bureaucracy. In the same direction, the projects INTEGRA, Cibernarium and E-LANE have been sharing tools, methodologies and outputs. As a third example, the radio programme developed by the ATLAS project was broadcast in the rural areas covered by the ADITAL project, with great benefit for the two actions.
Fifth, the national clusters did consolidate. Specifically, the @LIS Latin-American partners of 6 countries (Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Peru, Guatemala, Ecuador) were actively and enthusiastically involved in a number of workshops where they had the possibility to present their work, their successes and their needs to national institutions, creating collaborations and improving the visibility of the partners and the project in their national environment and at the same time the usability of the project results. Just to mention a couple of success stories in this sense, thanks to the contacts made in the Costa Rica workshop, the TechNet project represented the basis for an UNESCO cathedra, while thanks to the workshop organised in Brazil, the Telemed project might be supported in the future by the Brazilian Ministry of Development.
Phase 4: Network Replication and Sustainability
In the @LIS case, this was most probably the most delicate part of the network development. The reason for this is that during the four years of the @LIS Programme the network participants were financially supported to be part of the network, and therefore had a sort of institutional motivation to participate. This is in line with the concept of Resource Dependency Perspective, a neo-Gramscian theory that emphasizes the vulnerability and the need for adaptation of organisations to their environment, particularly their dependence on resources that are controlled by others within the environment (in our case the European Commission). In her analysis of this approach, Hatch states that the "dependency the organisation has on its environment is not one single, undifferentiated dependency, it is a complex set of dependencies that exist between an organisation and the specific elements of its environment found in the inter-organisational network" (Hatch, 1997). In the @LIS case, most of the participating actors decided, at the end of the European Commission support, to keep on working as a network, and created the VIT@LIS network, an association of European and Latin American and Caribbean institutions and individuals active in subjects related to the Information Society (e-learning, e-health, e-government, e-inclusion, etc.), committed to share information and results and to collaborate towards the creation of a more inclusive and open Information Society for all. VIT@LIS has kept on growing and counts today on more than 300 active members from Europe and Latin America, including all the categories of stakeholders of the Information Society: universities, actors of the civil society, governments and agencies, international networks, local companies, authorities. This fact shows that the participating actors were assigning a value to networking and to the knowledge sharing possibilities offered by being part of the network beyond the @LIS Programme lifecycle.
The experience of @LIS shows that networking and knowledge sharing can generate a real value in the context of International Development Cooperation, and at the same time that working on knowledge sharing and articulation, especially in the frame of large and multistakeholder networks, cannot be regarded as an ancillary activity but should rather be considered a central pillar of successful IDC programmes, whose costs must be planned in advance. First, supporting knowledge sharing takes time and energy, and this time should be accounted exactly at the same level as the work of researchers and development operators; second, the role of "professional community dynamiser" should be properly included in any knowledge intensive cooperation programme. Finally, attention should be paid during the whole process to the complexity of knowledge sharing and articulation activities: many of the most important, even if sometimes intangible, results of international cooperation, such as the appropriation of results for social change by the beneficiaries, the mind-set adaptation of all the actors, or the governance of the dynamic between funding and motivation and between excellence and inclusion are based on knowledge sharing, articulation and documentation processes.
The issue remains on how to measure the value created by the process of knowledge sharing and articulation among the network members. A way to look at the issue can be adapted by Creech (2004), who identifies four principal areas of investigation for network assessments:
Looking at these three dimensions, and taking into account the continuous changes in the knowledge base of the network, allows us to monitor whether the network is achieving one of the advantages of working collaboratively: joint knowledge-based value creation. Quoting Creech: "Knowledge networks create new knowledge and insights for use beyond the immediate membership, but knowledge can be created without working in a network. The network advantage is the collaboration of members on work, and the value gained from peer review and debate. Joint value creation is the creation of new insights and knowledge through the collaboration of members on research, on field projects and other activities." (Creech 2004, pag.4). In terms of effectiveness, the @LIS experience shows that the strategy of knowledge sharing changes along with the network life and has to be continuously fine-tuned to the needs of the network in a specific moment. As far as tools are concerned, for example, in the first years of its life the @LIS community has been relying on mailing lists and on small seminars, while in its last years it had to - in order to properly involve policy actors - organise high level policy events where discussion and knowledge sharing could take place. In terms of structure and governance, what could be observed was a clear decentralisation process: if at the beginning of the network life most of the inputs came from the central secretariat, already in early stages some peripheral nodes started to produce knowledge and to input it into the system. This process is not trivial and has to do with the decision making process of the network and its knowledge related processes; experience shows that only decentralised networks can support genuine knowledge sharing in the long run. In terms of efficiency, use of resources and sustainability, the @LIS experience shows that in a development context like the one of Latin America, the most significant barrier to success is not the transactional cost of knowledge sharing (in the specific case resources were available for this) but rather the need to strengthen the network members' ability to collaborate on knowledge articulation issues. If this is done continuously professionally, as suggested by the Networking for Development approach, networks can deploy a proper raison d'etre and can survive, as in the case of VIT@LIS, to the end of public funding.