Like minded organisations

Global Sensemaking (GSm)

Global Sensemaking (GSm) is a group of people dedicated to helping humanity address complex, interrelated global problems—such as climate change, energy policy, poverty, and food security—by developing and applying new web-based technology to assist collaborative decision making and cooperative problem solving.

Humanity faces an emerging mess of global challenges (often called wicked problems) — such as, climate change, poverty, peak oil, population pressure, water shortages, declininexternal-linkg biodiversity, and failing food supply — that are the product of patterns of thinking and behavior that no longer make sense. We need new tools of thought if we are to adapt to the scale and complexity of these challenges; tools that augment individual intelligence with the structured insights of many minds. We are building those tools. To realize our vision, we are creating a web portal, developing open source software, and fostering international standards to create a scalable, collaborative, deliberative, and global discourse environment (e.g. web-based global sensemaking platforms) for addressing the most pressing problems of our time.

See also: Sense-making and mind-mapping tools

IDS Knowledge Services, Institute for Development Studies.

IDS Knowledge Services aim to reduce global poverty and injustice by supporting informed decision making by those in a position to influence change. Decision making is strengthened when it is underpinned by timely and relevant information that reflects a diversity of viewpoints. We contribute to this by acting as an intermediary between researchers, policymakers and practitioners. We identify and bridge knowledge gaps and use innovative knowledge-sharing approaches to provide better access to the global pool of knowledge on development. And we create tools and resources to help development professionals be more effective in their work.

Solutions Exchange

While “expert” knowledge is often well documented, valuable tacit knowledge gained through practitioner experience is typically lost or ignored. Furthermore, practitioners can not always access knowledge they need, such as whether a particular idea was tried before or where to turn when facing a bottleneck. To harness this knowledge pool and help development practitioners avoid reinventing the wheel, the United Nations offices in India created Solution Exchange – a free, impartial space where professionals are welcome to share their knowledge and experience. Members represent a wide range of perspectives from government, NGOs, donors, private sector and academia. They are organized into Communities of Practice built around the framework of the Millennium Development Goals. Through moderated e-mail groups, members interact on an ongoing basis, building familiarity and trust, gaining in knowledge that helps them contribute more effectively – individually and collectively – to the nation’s development challenges.

Today eleven Communities are up and running: Maternal and Child Health, Water, Gender, Food & Nutrition Security, AIDS, Decentralization, Education, Work and Employment, Microfinance, ICT for Development, and Disaster Management. Since starting up in April 2005, membership has grown dramatically – between 80 to 90 a week – and currently stands at over 21,000 subscriptions (12,000 members subscribed to one or more Community) from across the country.

2013 Update: “Solution Exchange is a UN-sponsored space for development professionals with similar interests (“Communities of Practice”) connect to share knowledge & experience towards the common objective of problem-solving.”

The original Solution Exchange in this compendium appeared to be a free-standing Indian NGO. It is now a distributed network of Solution Exchanges across countries; and within each country, it has a set of COPs on issues such as water, gender etc, each COP appears to be hosted by a UN agency in that country such as UNICEF etc. See Solution Exchange Facebook page, and UN Solution Exchange

Rockefeller-InnoCentive Partnership

The Rockefeller-InnoCentive Partnership will provide a web-based platform to organizations, institutions and companies that are developing products and services for poor or vulnerable people so that they can access InnoCentive’s network of more than 100,000 registered “solvers” – scientists representing a wide variety of disciplines – from 175 countries. InnoCentive is the first online, incentive-based scientific network created specifically for the global research and development (R&D) community. Launched in 2001, InnoCentive is an unbiased knowledge broker between major global companies and the worldwide scientific community, enabling them to collaborate and solve difficult R&D problems. Scientists or researchers who deliver the solutions that best meet the company’s requirements receive a financial award for their work.

Project coordinator: Richard Tanter
Updated: 11 November 2008