The 1st tab of this page has been modified as a contribution to the Blog Action Day 2014.

It takes a brief look at how to use social media, especially hashtags and wikis as a means to reduce the inequality in the access to knowledge.

Enjoy reading! And if there are too many blogs to read and videos to see today, then come back another day.

Please get to know and use the #tags that match your content!

Those tags will make your content discoverable for months, years to come.

For content with a long useful life, for instance for use during collaborative planning and decision making, these "wikiworx" components are introduced for collaboratively editing during consultation and collaborative decision making activities:

Enjoy reading. If something is unclear, don't hesitate to ask.
At the page concerned, by a tweet to me, or via my Google+ page.

Yours,

Jan Goossenaerts (Twitter:@collaboratewiki)


1- The World Is Not Small for Everyone: Inequality in Searching for and access to Knowledge

From a recent article in Management Science1 it appears that whereas:

  • The "small-world" argument in social network theory emphasizes that people are, on average, only a few connections away from the information they seek.

there seems to be empirical support for the argument that:

  • such a network structure does not benefit everyone: some (employees) may have longer search paths in locating knowledge in an organization—their world may be large.

It is important for achieving development outcomes that the drivers for societal inequality in the access to knowledge - are neutralised (ref: two mechanisms - periphery status and homophily2 - jointly operate to aggravate the inefficiency of search for knowledge).

By introducing systematically defined hashtags (as in the #Tag pivot below) one facilitates heterophilous search behaviours3 that cross social boundaries.

Alongside the hashtags, wikis are defined with a reference page for each tag, and a pivotal page for each series of tags.

When browsing these wikis you will notice the utility of pivotal pages such as for:

Together, the tags, the wikis and additional systematized content commons have this purpose: contribute to make the world of knowledge smaller for all members of society.

Further suggestions in support of the creation of local inclusive knowledge economies are in the Convention on Knowledge Commons.


#Tag Pivot in the Actor Atlas