Bridging the Knowledge Divide Using Social Knowledge Management Framework

Collaborating and Connecting: Social Knowledge Management in a Digitally Connected World
In a digitally connected world, collaboration through the use of social technologies and socially enabled applications create new forms of market where strangers exchange goods and services effortlessly. This notion has thus given rise to the concept of a sharing/collaborative economy, which includes shared creation, production, distribution, trade and consumption of goods, services and ideas by different people and organizations. The motivation and philosophy behind the collaborative building of value that results from sharing content and ideas is termed “sharism”. This contemporary sharing economy is predicated on peer-to-peer relationships rather than existing market actors to mediate exchange. Crowd-sourcing, an important tool of collaborative economy is commons-based peer production that is based on collaboration among large groups of individuals who are connected through internet and cooperate effectively to provide information, knowledge or cultural goods without relying on either market pricing or managerial hierarchies to coordinate their common enterprise. These connected individuals who can now actively participate in innovation, wealth creation, and social development are collectively contributing in fields of art, culture, science, education, government, and economy in surprising but ultimately profitable ways.
In this context, our research project seeks to apply and utilize concepts of sharism, collaboration, crowd-sourcing to create a distributed social knowledge management framework. This will allow us to create and modify content collaboratively using social technologies for the benefit of society at large. Traditionally, knowledge management provides the means to generate, distribute, and use knowledge in ways that add value to business activity and provide new opportunities for enterprise. Social knowledge management on the other hand can be defined as management of knowledge using social technologies- where the aim is more towards social development - not only promoting competitive advantages for companies.
The overall Model of Intervention is depicted in figure below:

A cluster of women self-help groups located in Kandi, Murshidabad, West Bengal has been studied closely for a few months to observe and evaluate influence of digital technology on social capital activation. We distributed 50 smart mobile phones with Internet facility to 50 women in the Self-help group Federation in collaboration with Panasonic India and Airtel. These women were rigorously trained with the use of smart phones and WhatsApp in Bengali language by our field workers.

Training SHG Women on using smart phones

After regular WhatsApp communication, it was observed that there were many women in the SHG groups who were previously not closely associated with the SHG federation as they rarely met each other. These women can now easily share their needs, their created products which were not possible earlier. Most of the women were previously unaware of what the other SHG group members produced and sold. This intervention created among SHGs willingness to replicate others’ products. They also share their own images, thoughts which indicate strengthening of “bonding social capital”. Regular communication with senior trainers and facilitators from Kolkata enhances sharing of information with regards to materials that are in demand in the market and about newer techniques of creating products that can be marketable. This indicates increasing “bridging social capital” that connects rural women of Kandi with facilitators outside the region. Here, social capital activation is possible in terms of access to social resources such as information with regards to availability of raw materials, market to be sold etc.

Publications:

Social Knowledge Management For Rural Empowerment: Bridging The Knowledge Divide Using Social Technologies

This book develops and examines the concepts and strategies for rural empowerment through the formation of a community-driven social knowledge management (SKM) framework aided by social technology. The framework is aimed at mobilizing knowledge resources to bridge the rural–urban knowledge divide while securing rural empowerment using digital connections and social collaborations built on strategies of self-sustenance and self-development. With key empirical findings supplemented by relevant theoretical structures, case studies, illustrative figures and a lucid style, the book combines social technologies and social development to derive a social knowledge management platform. It shows how the proposed SKM framework can enhance knowledge capabilities of rural actors by facilitating connection among rural–urban entities through formation of purposive virtual communities, which allow social agents to create, modify and share content collaboratively.

View on Routledge

Journals and Conferences

1. Parthiban, R., Jaikumar, S., Basak, J. and Bandyopadhyay, S. (2022), "Digital access through smartphones and well-being of BoP women: insights from a field study in India", Information Technology & People, Vol. 35 No. 1, pp. 1-26.
2. Parthiban R., Qureshi I., Bandyopadhyay S. and Jaikumar S. (2020) “Digitally Mediated Value Creation for Non-Commodity Base of the Pyramid Producers” International Journal of Information Management, Volume 56, February 2021
3. Bhattacharyya, S., Basak, J., Bhaumik, P., Bandyopadhyay, S. (2020). Cultivating Online Virtual Community of Purpose to Mitigate Knowledge Asymmetry and Market Separation of Rural Artisans in India. In the proceedings of 11th International Development Informatics Association Conference (IDIA 2020). Macau, China.
4. Sneha Bhattacharyya, Priyadarshini Dey, Jayanta Basak, Siuli Roy, Somprakash Bandyopadhyay (2019), “Building Resilient Community using Social Technologies: A Precursory Measure for Effective Disaster Management”, Proceedings of International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking (ICDCN), January, 2019.
5. Rishikesan Parthiban, Somprakash Bandyopadhyay, Jayanta Basak (2018). “Towards a Nex-Gen Cottage Industry in the Digital Age: Insights from an Action Research with Rural Artisans in India.22nd Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems, PACIS 2018, Yokohama, Japan, June 26-30, 2018
6. Jayanta Basak, Siuli Roy and Somprakash Bandyopadhyay, “Cultivating Online Communities of Practice as Rural Knowledge Management Strategy in India” Proc of the 18th European Conference on Knowledge Management (ECKM 2017), 7 – 8 September 2017, Barcelona, Spain
7. Rishikesan Parthiban, Jayanta Basak and Somprakash Bandyopadhyay, “ICT as a Driver to Improve Socio-Economic Performance of Self-Help Groups (SHG) In India: A Conceptual Framework and its Empirical Validation”, PAN IIM World Management Conference, 12th-15th December, 2016, IIM Ahmedabad, India.
8. Jayanta Basak, Rishikesan Parthiban, Siuli Roy and Somprakash Bandyopadhyay, “A Community-Driven Information System to Develop Next Generation Collaborative and Responsive Rural Community (NCoRe)”, Presented in ITU Kaleidoscope 2016 - ICTs for a Sustainable World, Bangkok, 14-16 Nov 2016.