This series was concocted in a joint effort by Paul
and myself, building on previous collaborations in 2012 before the birth of our
group, the Sudanese Knowledge Society. We were in the planning of the KM
workshop during 2011, and I had just obtained the contact of a Sudanese
expatriate whose expertise was very important to the KM in Business component,
Dr. Abdel Aziz Mustafa, a leading figure in human resource management and the
development of the private sector in the region, in addition to being behind
some of the early KM work in some of Sudan’s large corporates. Dr. Abdel Aziz
was very gracious to accept our late invitation. He not only donated his
effort, but also considered our bad financial situation and used his own funds
to participate at the workshop. Dr. Abdelaziz assisted us further by
introducing us to Paul Corney with whom he had worked for many years. Paul
ended up a keynote speaker and a vibrant presence at the KM workshop in January
2012. He came back in February to speak at a workshop focused on KM for
business organised by Elfatih Wadidi, a founding member of SKS.
To come back to the “orchestrated serendipity” that
led to this series, let me briefly mention that the Sudanese Knowledge Society,
since its establishment in June 2012, continued to work in collaboration with
many of the entities that came together to organise and/or sponsor our
important gathering in January 2012. This we consider is one of our strength,
the ability to network and work with others, and value those relationships. Now
5 years on, this series builds on those old collaborations with the University
of Khartoum, Future University, National Information Centre, and Morgan (now
Morgan Zone), and developed new ones, the World Bank and DAM. DAM, that
organises monthly forums for HR professionals, our newest friend, is the
creation of none other than Dr. Abdel Aziz Mustafa. It was Paul who connected
us back with Dr. Abdelaziz’s to learn about his new project after retirement,
developing the HR profession in Sudan. Was it orchestrated?
In any case, thanks to serendipity, orchestrated or
not, to our guests, Paul Corney (Knowledge et al) and Taha Osman (Nottingham
University), who will be travelling from the UK to be with us. While Paul will be with us for the whole
series, Taha --a friend of the SKS since the seminar on semantic knowledge
bases he gave for us at the National Museum in 2014 will only be able to stay
for the duration of the workshop. We are profoundly grateful to all the
co-organisers and sponsors of the series events, and honoured that among them
is Education without Borders who is the co-organiser of the Virtual Teams and
Communities session that concludes the series. Needless to say that this
series, most of all, builds on existing efforts by organisations who are
working on the ground on the topics of this series. For example, Morgan has
long worked on becoming an information content provider. The difficulties they
faced to do that fuelled their interest in exploring the problems of, and
relationships between, ecosystem and content, and eventually led to this
collaboration.
We are very excited that we have global players in
knowledge work among the co-organisers, like the World Bank, and important
local institutions like the National Information Centre that has the mammoth
task of taking us into the information age. From higher education,
co-organisers include the University of Khartoum, noting the efforts of the Administration
for Information Technology and Network that contributed to improving the global
ranking of the university; and the Future University, which is the first higher
education institution to introduce departments for knowledge management and
knowledge engineering. The private sector is represented by Morgan Zone that is
implementing appropriate technologies to expand telecommunication services in
rural Sudan; and H.A.M. for Information Technology that is specialised in media
and communication services. Complementing these important institutions and
companies, the co-organisers also include smaller and voluntary-work bodies
like EwB, DAM, and ourselves, SKS, who are concerned with the filling of those
KE pillars, education, human resources, and the knowledge society,
respectively. While the smaller bodies can be considered agents of change, it
is the larger ones that can really make change happen, at scale and faster.
A possible future, say Sudan 2030, is a flourishing
and inclusive knowledge society in Sudan as the result of an increasing trend
of knowledge sharing and use in organisations and communities. If the discussions
continue after the series about how a Sudan’s knowledge society can come about
and what it should constitute, we would walk several more steps towards that
desirable future.
Gada Kadoda
Khartoum, 20 December 2016
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