Knowledge sharing through collaboration in development studies: The Focuss.Info Initiative by Richard Lalleman

Information Development http://idv.sagepub.com

Knowledge Sharing through Collaboration in Development Studies: the Focuss.Info Initiative Richard Lalleman and Michel Wesseling Information Development 2008; 24; 151 DOI: 10.1177/0266666908091129 The online version of this article can be found at: http://idv.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/24/2/151

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KNOWLEDGE SHARING IN DEVELOPMENT STUDIES

Knowledge Sharing through Collaboration in Development Studies: the Focuss.Info Initiative The Focuss.Info initiative is being developed to meet the needs of researchers, practitioners and students of development cooperation who ﬁnd that generic search engines produce too many irrelevant results. Richard Lalleman and Michel Wesseling INTRODUCTION

The number of websites on the Internet is still increasing rapidly and there is no prediction that this trend will change in the near future. Practitioners, professionals and students in the international field of globalization cooperation are using search engines such as Google, Microsoft Live or Yahoo. These search engines are the common tools for starting a research. The Internet is an important source to information and it is also a place where people distribute and testing new ideas. In addition, a growing number of Internet tools are available with which Internet users share information and information sources. This is also known as Web 2.0. It is time to examine whether the international field of development cooperation and global studies can add new value to this way of information sharing. Content specific gateways have existed since the introduction of the World Wide Web. Some well known gateways are Renardus, Intute, DMOZ and WWW Virtual Library. These gateways contain websites which have been located and classified manually. Via a menu with an underlying tree structure the user browses through the supply of websites which eventually results in a selection of one or more interesting websites. Finally, the user visits the selected websites and continues searching for information inside these websites. These content specific gateways have an important disadvantage. After locating the websites, somebody has to classify the websites by adding characteristics. This improves the resource discovery. The inclusion of these characteristics, known as metadata, is a labourintensive activity and arbitrary. For instance, how

many keywords or classification codes do you include, in which language or languages, and who is the authority? These are disadvantages or challenges for the international development cooperation organizations, which probably can be solved by enough financial and human resources. Another important characteristic is that these content specific gateways are more or less about browsing. However, practitioners, professionals and students are ‘searchers’ rather than ‘browsers’ when they start their research for relevant literature. Whether this is their nature or whether they have been shaped by Google, is another discussion. This has been observed by the authors of this article and on that basis they have looked for an alternative. This article describes a practical example of a content specific gateway developed for the international field of development cooperation and studies: the Focuss. Info Initiative. Focuss.Info aims at practitioners, professionals and students. The search engine is an initiative of more than 30 international organizations which are all active in the international field of development cooperation and studies. The strength of the initiative is the way how the organizations are cooperating with each other. There is no formal cooperation agreement, which makes it easier to participate. FOCUSS.INFO

During the annual general meeting of Euforic – an organization that brings together European information professionals who are active in non-governmental organizations in the field of international development cooperation – in June 2006, the authors presented the first prototype of Focuss.Info. The intention of this first step was to see whether the idea of starting a content specific search engine in the field was viable. The launch of the first prototype was meant to check the temperature of the water before being thrown in at the deep end. The enthusiasm and support for Focuss.Info was enormous and from that time the initiative developed into a valuable platform for

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KNOWLEDGE SHARING IN DEVELOPMENT STUDIES researchers, students and other individual practitioners in the field. As suggested before, an important characteristic is that Focuss.Info has not been set up as a project, but as an initiative. The initiative is originated from the department of Library and IT Services of the Institute of Social Studies (www.iss.nl/library) in The Hague, The Netherlands. Organizations with interest are easily able to join the initiative on a voluntary basis. The decision to follow the structure of an initiative is that people immediately can start in a lean and mean environment. The selection of relevant websites within the Focuss. Info search engine is based on the input of the librarians working for the participating organizations. These are organizations which are working in the international field of development cooperation, studies and research. The prototype started with 2,000 websites which were simply extracted from the websites of the partners. The idea behind this approach was that those libraries are presenting hyperlinks to websites which are important to their audiences, like researchers, students and practitioners. By implementing this approach the Focuss.Info search engine contains quality websites that have been pre-selected by human professionals. After the presentation in June 2006 the Focuss. Info Initiative had its second feasibility test during the Annual Meeting of the Information Management Workgroup of EADI (www.eadi.org) in September 2006. In the period between the first contact and this conference the Initiative grew from 12 to 15 partners. The collection of indexed websites increased to 2,500. Additionally, Focuss.Info received support and suggestions for improvement from the participants during the EADI meeting. The most important suggestion was to include the individual practitioners as content providers for the collection of websites in the Focuss. Info search engine. GOOGLE CUSTOM SEARCH ENGINE

In the autumn of 2006 Google offered within the Coopproject the beta version of the Google Customized Search Engine (Google CSE). This development was important for the Focuss.Info Initiative, primarily because this showed that, in addition to some individuals, an important player in the industry also recognized the importance of content speciﬁc search engines. This felt like a helping hand, even though the authors realize that Google is primarily looking for as 152

many options as possible to let users use their services, with the objective of increasing Google revenues. Secondly, the launch and implementation of Google CSE within Focuss.Info also resulted in new opportunities. One of the many options within Google CSE is to invite partners to cooperate with the development of the content collection for the Focuss.Info search engine. This perfectly linked with the suggestion to include individual practitioners for the content selection through social bookmarking: • Google offers social bookmarking through Google Marker. The individual practitioners select websites with only one push on the button and include these websites to their own collection of favourite websites and to the content collection of Focuss.Info , and; • Del.icio.us offers individual practitioners to select websites and include these websites to their own collection of favourite e-resources. Google CSE is able to create a RSS feed of these social bookmarkers which is automatically indexed in the content collection of the Focuss.Info Initiative. Social bookmarking is a platform that helps Focuss. Info to include the suggested individual practitioners in the international ﬁeld of globalization cooperation in the process of selecting websites. Through this, Focuss.Info makes available not only institutional ‘knowledge’, but also individual ‘knowledge’. Currently the Initiative is encouraging individual practitioners to join. For many this means that they would need to change their way of working. Instead of saving favourite websites locally on their work station, the favourite websites are now available on public websites, such as del.icio.us. The advantage is that the bookmarks are accessible in many different work places with an Internet connection. One of the frequent concerns is that everybody can see what other people are social bookmarking. Focuss.Info is depending on what the Google Coop is developing. This does not mean that the initiative is bound hand and foot. Since the transition of technology to Google many interesting functions have been added which would have been impossible to realize with the partners inside the initiative. The most important improvement is that the content collection of individual practitioners of the search engine can directly be maintained through del.icio.us accounts, or other similar social bookmark platforms.

KNOWLEDGE SHARING IN DEVELOPMENT STUDIES COOPERATION

Thanks to the standard technology of Google CSE, the initiative can completely focus itself on cooperation rather than technology. This is particularly useful because it is easy to introduce Focuss.Info to possible partners. Additionally, the human and ﬁnancial resources are 100 percent devoted to cooperation. Since December 2006 Richard Lalleman has been working one day a week for the Initiative. His main task is to disclose Focuss.Info to the wider audience of researchers, practitioners and students in the international ﬁeld of development cooperation and studies. Increasing the reputation of Focuss.Info was relatively the easiest part of the task. Soon more organizations established a connection with the initiative and currently the initiative consists of more than 30 organization spread all over the world, recognized by the Development Gateway Foundation – a platform of the World Bank with more than 40,000 participators. The content collection has increased at quite a fast pace to more than 6,000 indexed websites, together with an increase in total queries. Finally, various partners of

Figure 1.

the initiative have integrated the Focuss.Info search bar into their own website, or partners announced the existence of the Initiative through their websites or newsletters. The inclusion of the individual practitioners in Focuss.Info is less successful because the field of social sciences is not yet familiar with social tagging or bookmarking, and practitioners in the field seem to be protective against the exploitation of ‘their’ information. Luckily there are some professionals and researchers who underline the advantages and include their favourite websites in the Focuss.Info Initiative. By maintaining a register of social bookmarkers on the website of the initiative, individual practitioners can see who are adding their websites and within which domains within international research and cooperation. This simple register gives the individual practitioners the power to control the quality of the content collection of the initiative. Individual practitioners make themselves known on Focuss.Info, preferably with profile and picture. This visibility is important to encourage others to become

The euforic search page.

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KNOWLEDGE SHARING IN DEVELOPMENT STUDIES contributors to the initiative. Slowly but surely more individual practitioners are signing up for the initiative, after which we also try to approach their colleagues. THE FIRST RESULTS

In May and June of 2007, Paul Matthews and Arne Wunder of the Overseas Development Institute in London (UK) conducted an independent research on the quality of Focuss.Info as compared to the standard search engine of Google. They presented the results of this research during the Web2forDev Conference in Rome in September 2007. In light of this research, 127 respondents conducted a search. This search displayed the results in two columns: websites that have been found by (1) Focuss. Info and by (2) Google. The layout of the display did not reveal which column belonged to which search engine; as is shown in the next image. Consequently, the respondents were asked to rank the quality of the each of the results displayed in both the columns on a scale from 1 (bad) to 5 (best). In total 127 respondents ranked the results in the result lists, collectively

conducting 1,152 queries. Within these 1,152 queries, the respondents used an average of 2.66 search terms per query. The two important conclusions of the research were: • The respondents scored the results of Focuss. Info (3.2 points) higher than the ones of Google (2.9 points). That is 10 percent higher and with the knowledge that the initiative had been running for just six months, and; • The relevance of the results of Focuss.Info while using precise terms (relevant within the domain) was much higher than that for the Google results. On a scale of 5 Google scored 2.9 and Focuss. Info 3.8. BACK TO THE PAST?

The participation of information professionals and libraries in this initiative is of great importance. They are making sure that the current interests of students, researchers and individual practitioners within the

Figure 2. The comparative search. 154

KNOWLEDGE SHARING IN DEVELOPMENT STUDIES field of global studies are covered by selecting and adding new websites to the search engine of Focuss. Info. Consequently, the collection complies with the demands of representing current affairs. At the same time, libraries are acting as ‘outlet’ for Focuss.Info. On the websites of the individual libraries, the Focuss. Info search bar has been made available; also, during information courses in these organizations, Focuss.Info is further explained. The development of a content specific search engine immediately raises the question whether this is not the same thing that libraries have done for many years: selecting the content which is interesting to the target group. A concern of this approach is that Focuss.Info makes a limited choice of websites available at a time when everybody wants to have the freedom of searching in all the content available on the Internet. The authors support this concern, but there are enough reasons to give the Focuss.Info Initiative a chance. The independent research conducted by the Overseas Development Institute (UK) has shown the added value of handpicked websites inside Focuss.Info in comparison with Google, that automatically harvests more websites. First of all the initiative is being developed based on the frustration of many researchers, practitioners, and students. According to them the biggest concern is that generic search engines like Google are scanning through all possible sources. This almost always produces a set of results that is too large (noise). To avoid this noise, selection and filtering are preferred. Secondly, in contrast with physical content collections, Focuss.Info does not have any financial or physical limitations. Every relevant website can be included in the search engine. Thirdly, multiple organizations and individuals can build the collection simultaneously. As long as these contributors agree on the content description and quality standards, they can profit from each other’s work through the content specific search engine rather than traditional union catalogue systems. Finally, there are no borders. The number of cooperating organizations, the individual practitioner and professional, the student, researcher and librarian: it does not matter in which part of the world they are, or which language they use. All of them are contributing to the ‘unlimited’ collection, because physical space and

budgets are no longer part of the game. Through this Focuss.Info has changed from a European initiative to a global cooperation with partners currently from Africa, Asia and the Americas. THE FUTURE

After a year of growth and positive feedback from regional, national and international institutions, the coordinators of the Initiative are looking into the possibilities of increasing the scope by increasing the activities of Focuss.Info. This increase of activities brings along extra financial resources. As a result of this, the coordinators are currently finalizing a new business plan for the next three years in which they outline the future of Focuss.Info in greater detail. Readers interested in the future of Focuss.Info, please contact Mr Richard Lalleman or Mr Michel Wesseling. Abstract This paper introduces a new research tool within the international field of development cooperation and studies: the Focuss.Info initiative. Focuss.Info facilitates a content specific search engine. This search engine indexes the favourite websites of partners in the initiative and individual contributors who are tagging their websites on a social bookmark platform. In this way, the field of global studies facilitates a valuable research tool in which institutions from all over the world collaborate and share their ‘knowledge of websites’ with each other. Keywords: Focuss.Info; knowledge sharing; social bookmarking; tagging; Google; development research; cooperation. Richard Lalleman is an MSc Information and Knowledge Management student at London Metropolitan University; c/o M.G. Wesseling, Institute of Social Studies, (ISS), P.O. Box 29776; 2502 LT The Hague; Netherlands. E-mail: Richard.focuss@gmail.com Michel Wesseling is Manager, Library and IT Services, Institute of Social Studies, (ISS), P.O. Box 29776; 2502 LT The Hague; Netherlands; Tel. +31 (0) 70 4260 447; E-mail: wesseling@iss.nl

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