The colloquium was conducted by Dr. Sujata Gamage. She began by giving an overview of the project, Knowledge to innovation in solid waste services through Linkages. Now, focus on peer2peer linkages and public-private partnerships. The research looks at linkages that work. What is the sustainability of the project aftre the money runds out. We found out that people are more interested in knowledge produced by mode 2.
The project hopes to do a ranking survey done. This maybe done by the government now as they are now looking to find the 5 best and 5 worst muncipal councils. Sujata then went on to describe some of the literature of knowledge management and practioner networks and communities of practice. Most of the literature is at an enterprise level.
Networks as the communities of practice (CoP): How does one recognise a CoP? According to the literature, it has a has a domain of share interest (in this case solid waste management), it is made up of practitioners, promotes and safeguards the profession, Seeks information from others, responds to others information, Improve one’s practice using new knowledge, Share good practices, Document good practices, engages in capacity building and joint initiatives. But these are not seen empirically in Sri Lanka and it isnt very common in the developed world either.
Therefore the research looked at self organising systems. The literature speaks of the following conditions; At least one of the components in the system must exhibit auto-catalysis, At least two of the components in the systems must be mutually causal, The system must be open to the environment with respect to the energy and matter [or knowledge and people], The system must operate far from equilibrium conditions
Networks as self organising sustems are governed by power law, characterised by hubs and rich get richer.
A survey was conducted on the 119 local authorities in 3 provices. The question asked was, who did you contact in the last 12 months to seek information you needed to improve your practice. Lcoal authorities are conneted. Most of the information were from peer to peer interactions. The most number of interactions were with the Balangoda local government authority with 31 incoming linkages. Balangoda is also a high performer and contact . Networks are not flat and there are prefereantial attachments. A geography matters.
She concluded that emergent patterns ahve to be looked at before attempting to engineer netowrks. As future work, the project will look at to see the emergent hubs in the next year.
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