As I have previously argued in a recent post, many NGOs have quite conventional organizing forms, facing the challenge of openness and often not founding a way to deal with open networks and a two way conversation. A key step to openness and different understanding of roles such as an organization, its members and stakeholders comes from a cultural shift towards learning.

NGO as learning organizations

Mariëtte Heres wrote an interesting article called “Aid is a knowledge industry.” She emphasizes on the importance of knowledge sharing and learning within and between NGOs and states that, “although NGOs are taking more interest in knowledge management, they have so far failed to recognize that they are part of a knowledge industry, of which the delivery of goods and services is only a part.”

If an NGO wants to become a learning organization, it is important that – in addition to acquiring substantive knowledge – it learns more about learning. ‘You need a learning attitude in this sector. And if you want to learn, you have to experiment. Even if the experiment is a failure, you still learn from it. Knowledge is the result of reflection’.

The ICCO alliance is in this regard quite progressive. It established publicly available “Learning and Sharing Spaces.” This ambitious attempt for a learning organization results in better understanding and innovation through transparency.

Open source everything

Mark Surman marks in his post, “Open, philanthropy and a theory of change,” a step further and argues for radical transparency, which “means opening up not only your yearly books, but also openly sharing your planning, learning and relationships as you go along.” In an inspiring visualization he describes his vision for an open knowledge society filled with possibilities. All organizational boundaries diminish — a key is to listen, learn and evolve with the community. The result is open philanthropy with a constant flow of ideas.

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For the “I collaborate, e-collaborate, we collaborate“  blog, I wrote a post about internal organizational blogging, as an example of how web2.0 can be used to change communications and enhance knowledge sharing. Behind “e-collaborate”, there is a great community of pratice to exchange experiences for online knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Blogging changes communication. This post is an attempt to summarize my group blogging experiences since the last two years. In the post, I describe the implementation, crititcal factors and results. What really strikes me is that internal blogging can change communication, lead to a better knowledge sharing, and from my experience, it can also become sustainable. The blog has become a community of its own which is driven by the users, who are equally readers and authors.

Check out the post: Roadblogs: GTZ Egypt’s experiences of introducing blogs for internal exchange

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While reading “everything is miscelleanous“, I found a quote by Michael Gorman, president of the American Library Assiciation, in Library Journal back in 2005:

“Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs.”

Of course it contradicts from my own experience and organizational blogging. In my opinion, the communicative and networking aspects of blogging are often underestimated in how it contributes to personal learning by writing thoughts or “just” linking and commenting on other sources. Stephen Downes describes how blogs and other web tools enhance personal and networked learning in a video. Even more intriguing to me is Weinberger’s argument: “Knowledge – its content and its organization – is becoming a social act.” With the example of wikipedia, he argues that the web enables us to interpretate, define, express and link knowledge in a new way. Simple said knowledge is not given in a top-down approach like the Encyclopedia Britannica, “knowledge exists in the connections and in the gaps; it requires active engagement.”

Knowledge sharing and learning through the web is horizontal and with a steady flow. So an article has not date when it is finished and corrected. It is constantly edited, because of new facts or other perspectives from people. A blog post is a node in a network, which has comments or counter arguments in other posts. And wikipedia proves that knowledge, created by many people, is possible. Check out the book “The Age of Conversation” made by 100 authors. Imagine this in an organization. The intranet top-down communication would make no sense because the employees make their own web (e.g. wiki). One consequence would be that people, who know best, write the document and not necessarily the person in charge of it. In his book, Weinerger quotes Jimmy Wales talking about the neutrality of an article: “An article is neutral when people have stopped chaning it.” I wonder whether Michael Gorman would think the same today. Just last week a German journalist called Hans-Ulrich Jörges, from Stern social media, (e.g. content from blogs) “loser generated content“.

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