KM4Dev Journal: Stewarding technologies for collaboration, community building and knowledge sharing in development

This edition of the Knowledge Management for Development Journal explores how international development practitioners find new ways to work together using Internet technologies. The lens used in all the articles foregrounds human processes; technologies take a complementary and interdependent role. In the framing of this space between design and deployment of tools, we pay attention to both technology and social practices that groups and communities use in their application of technologies to their work.

This practice of working the relationship between technology and social practices is called 'technology stewardship'. In the forthcoming book Technologies for Communities of Practice (working title), Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John Smith describe technology stewarding as a way of adopting 'a community's perspective to help a community choose, configure, and use technologies to best suit its needs.' In paying attention to a community's perspective on its choice of technologies 'stewarding attends both to what happens spontaneously and what can happen purposefully, by plan and by cultivation of insights into what actually works.'

Through stewarding, specific technological expertise is provided to a community, based on its particular needs. This could be anywhere along its life, from initial to mature states. It can be a critical part of community development, facilitating the emergence or growth of a community, for instance when a tool allows people to connect for the first time (Wenger et al., forthcoming).

The potential of technology stewardship in international development is limited only by our imaginations. Theoretically, technology allows people not just to acquire information, but to produce and share it. It enables people to work across organizational, geographic and national boundaries. It facilitates connections between people who can share knowledge and create meaning and understanding together. But to fulfil these possibilities, we need to learn how to build bridges between the technology and our human needs.

In a development context, such bridging involves a set of specific challenges, not only in terms of technology deployment: dealing with diverse access to technology and infrastructures, fostering collaboration between different cultures, languages and discourses. In this context, the technology steward serves the community, attentive to the cultural biases and power relationships that are embedded in the tools and the practice.

Such a task is challenging. Technology stewardship is rarely the role of one person, but rather is fulfilled by several people within communities. As such, the art of technology stewardship is both a technological and a process one, fostering technologies for communities that allow people to work together across time and distance.

In the articles included in this issue, the specific issue of technology stewardship is explored, in different contexts. In many of the contributions, technology stewardship is implicit, and the term is rarely used explicitly. Nonetheless, the practice is described in every article.

Technology is with us. It is increasingly important to know how to steward its use effectively in international development work. By defining this new practice, and, more importantly, sharing our experiences, we edge towards the use of tools and technology in ways that can support and extend the work of the communities we serve. We hope you enjoy this edition of the KM4Dev Journal and perhaps even start envisaging yourself in ways both large and small, as technology stewards for your own communities.

The Journal and separate articles can be accessed here: http://www.km4dev.org/journal/index.php/km4dj/issue/current