Pearltrees (http://www.pearltrees.com) offers an attractive way of mapping sites and creating links between sites that you use.  A “pearl” is a web site that you have discovered and found to be useful; a “pearltree” is a collection of such sites.  Having created a “pearltree”, it can be shared with others, thus providing a quick and convenient way of conveying the results of a search.  It is simple to use: the main benefits become available by registering and opening a free account.  Phil Bradley, an Internet consultant who writes a monthly column for Library and information update (the official journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals <http://www.cilip.org.uk/update>), has created a web tutorial illustrating the use of Pearltrees — < http://bit.ly/cL6Wjh >. In it, he shows how to set up an account, build and share a “pearltree”.  This approach to sharing of web resources is typical of a social networking approach to information use and one that has great potential benefits for all types of library and information service.

We are noticing a trend especially in public sector organisations here in South Africa to institutionalise knowledge championship roles as part of knowledge management implementation initiatives. Part-time or full time KM champions are appointed at divisional level to create awareness and interest in KM; assess and communicate knowledge needs; match and connect knowledge requirements with sources; build or augment repositories: and act as links between divisional and institutional KM activities. Several government institutions have already trained KM champions and have completed full blown KM strategies. Leaders in the field include the City of Johannesburg and the Eastern Cape Provincial government. In both cases formal Innovation and KM groups have been established at the institutional level to provide leadership, training and support. Having been involved in providing some of the training we would be interested to learn about other instances of and approaches to formalised public sector KM not only in Africa but elsewhere as well.

Although the world financial crisis has abated and the global economy is recovering, this recovery remains brittle and volatile. Sub-Saharan Africa, although initially not as hard hit has not escaped the effects – particularly countries like South Africa, where our financial markets are extensively integrated into global financial markets. What can Governments in Africa do to speed up this recovery? The Knowlead Team suggests that, other than the financial amelioration that is already being instituted, Governments in Africa can fruitfully engage with Knowledge Management practices to not only bring about a more rapid economic turnaround, but also to confront the many patent inefficiencies in government.

It is heartening to note that some positive signals, such as provided by Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi^1, have been sent out from the public sector in Africa:

The 21st Century African public service has to be a learning organisation, a learning organisation in which people at all levels, individually and collectively, are continually increasing their capacity to produce results they really care about, where the organisation encourages new ways of thinking, where the collective vision of creating the best is liberated, and where everybody continuously learns how to learn together.

Developing countries are thus not necessarily reluctant to embark on implementing KM in the public sector, but as the World Bank has stated, wary of the challenge and their lack of experience and knowledge to do so. This provides a clear signal to encourage African Governments to proactively engage with KM training. We should further strategise innovatively and, as Sinclair (2006) puts it, adopt “stealth KM” by alerting African Governments of the many KM success stories from other parts of the world and the benefit of leveraging a country’s embedded knowledge.

¹Address in 2007 as South Africa’s Minister of Public Service and Administration to the African Management Development Institutes Network Conference

Wolfram|Alpha was launched in May 2009 as a computational or “answer engine”, which may point to the future of searching.  It was developed by Wolfram Research as a completely different approach to presentation of search results — the results of a search are intended to be a set of answers rather than a set of documents that might contain answers.  In this, it begins to move beyond the pattern-matching approaches used by search engines towards the intelligent, “inference” engine, which has been the goal of artificial intelligence.  Thus, a search on Wolfram|Alpha for “what is the current population of Uganda?” provides an answer of 31.7 million people, based on  2008 population estimate, graphs showing short and long-term population trends, demographic information and comparisons with world population.  The developers warn that it takes some experimentation to become familiar with the approach to searching and that the development of the search engine and its algorithms is very much a “work in progress”.  Maybe this is the future of searching!  Try it.