Knowledge Management. A revision.
Knowledge Management plays an important role within the overall outputs of the project Learning by Doing. Given that the project does not assume at the outset what the outcome will be, it places a great deal of importance in the process of learning. As the more discussions and interactions there are, the more focused the output is expected to be.
Towards that aim it has built in a mechanism which seeks to track the learning pathways and progression of the project as it evolves, allowing it to map out the thematic evolution of the project across time but also within country teams. In addition, the project has been able “to learn as is does” by continuously feeding back the “learnings” emerging from the data to the teams’ discussions.
Sonja Klinsky and Snigdha Nautiyal were instrumental in setting up the foundations of this work, from the choice of software to the development of the assessment framework.
Nvivo and the codebook
The key tool used as part of this integral part of the project was a qualitative research analysis software called Nvivo. With a relatively straight forward interface, this software allows the coding or tagging of all material emanating from the project, written and oral, thematically. In other words, through the process of tagging words, sentences and/or paragraphs, most of the discussions and written outputs from LbD have been captured and catalogued in Nvivo.
In essence the key purposes of this workstream were to:
• Understand what themes were emerging from the project
• Track thematic evolution of project across time
• Compare/contrast topics between countries
• Find thematic intersections
• Understand how the project was learning
The Project, in its three years, has accumulated almost 100 documents (transcripts of meetings/interviews, written outputs etc…) which have been coded according to some 50 cases and almost 250 codes [1], this constitutes the codebook. A very methodical process was followed to create the codebook, as the addition of new codes was discussed amongst coders before being entered into the codebook.
The process followed is schematized in figure 1 below:
Figure 1. Inputs
The interface is shown in figure 2 below. On the left hand side of the screen is the document that is to be coded and on the right hand side the coding depth of the documents. In other words the codes attributed to each of the sections of the document. The length of the coloured lines reflects the length of the text in the documents coded against the particular code.
Figure 2. Nvivo Interface
One of the most innovative aspects of the Project is that by coding all the material being produced, and analysing the data, country teams have been able to identify themes not immediately apparent. This has supported their own work in refining visions, by feeding into the scrum processes. This is particularly the case for South Africa who has distilled the information coming out of Nvivo to nourish its own reflective process.
Data extraction/ Analysis example:
For the LbD meeting in Santiago, Chile at UNECLAC the Knowledge Management team carried out an analysis to find out what project participants talks about when they talk about “A good life”. For this analysis, we merged a number of codes which were related to the notion of a “good life” and created a “super code” called CHILE_GOODLIFE. Figure 3 below shows some of the codes used to create this supercode.
Figure 3. Inputs to Supercode
Following this, we carried out a crosstab between this “super code” and other high level themes. We found that there a number of themes discussed when touching upon the notion of a good life. These notions are for instance “living with nature”, the “nature of work” and “inclusivity and equity” to name just a few. The results are depicted in the figure 5 below:
Figure 5. Good Life thematic intersections
Delving deeper into the intersection of notions, we find the underlying text which captures this intersection of themes. For example, we extracted a paragraph from an interview carried out on a member of the core team, and one from a Lebanese report which showcases the intersection of a “good life” and “the nature of work”. The extracts are below:
“….this should include very drastic change in the way people live and in the way people work. In the way that we’re producing the economy and the trade relationships between countries, the countries themselves. ” (Core team interview)
“In the delivery of these aspects, topics to be considered may include consideration of welfare as well as on the roles that work and skills, social living conditions, natural endowments, institutional settings and living arrangements can play, including within circular approaches, what technology can contribute or detract to these approaches.” (Lebanon)
There are many ways to analyse the wealth of information captured by Nvivo. The KM team is planning to elaborate an end of project report capturing in more details some of the learnings from the project as well as analysing how the project has evolved thematically over the last three years. Similarly, the end of project report will highlight the different themes discussed throughout the in each participating countries and compare these across countries.
[1] Cases are broader categories such as: year; country; speaker etc. While codes are more granular and topic/theme based, they are terms such as: economics, social, diversity, inclusion, “good lfe”.