| |
 |
 |
Quick Link to this page: www.unesco.org/shs/migration/diaspora
|
|
|
| Diaspora Knowledge Networks |
|
| Migration of skilled and educated human resources from developing to developed nations has long been identified negatively as “brain drain”, a serious problem affecting developing countries in their capacity for development. However, evidence produced over the past decade has lead to a more positive perception of migration as a potential source of brain gain. Migrants who are successfully integrated into the working world of a receiving country often have a strong commitment to work for the well-being of their country of origin. The potential for “brain gain” lies in the capacity of migrants to mobilize the knowledge and skills available to them in their host countries for country of origin development. In order to help migrants assist their home countries without necessarily returning home permanently, the DIASPORA KNOWLEDGE NETWORK project was set up in the summer of 2005. |
Project description
Computer supporting diaspora knowledge networks
The way forward
Active DKN projects
Project Description
The specific purpose of the DKN Project is to supply UNESCO decision-makers with evidence justifying growing optimism in the idea that the mobility of the highly educated can provide their countries of origin with the skills and knowledge they need for development.
Each of the three following issues are addressed in building the social-informatics approach to supporting “brain gain”:
1) From technical to social networks
The evidence shows that migrants are using ICTs – email, forums, blogs, wikis – to get and stay connected with their countries of origin. However, from a sociological point of view, forging a network and consolidating its capacity for collective action over time requires more than just being connected. It requires confidence as well as mechanisms for collective sense-making and social capital construction. A research field in computer science – the field of social informatics – has been developing the conceptual and methodological tools for computer supporting collective efforts to build solid social ties through the use of Internet. The DKN project is firmly anchored in this research tradition.
2) From managing knowledge to structuring “knowing organizations”
Knowledge is often considered in organizational studies as being embodied in the practical skills of individuals, as corresponding to their formal levels of education or as being reified in the databases serving to register the results of their activity (publication databases, project databases, skill databases, etc.). From this perspective, connecting migrants to their country of origin can be considered as a problem of adequately managing knowledge about human resources abroad. For example, among the questions which have to be asked when building a diaspora project are the following: who is available, what are they doing, where are they working, how can they be contacted? The DKN project offers an information infrastructure for doing this type of groundwork for network building, however, its goal is much more to computer support the process of network building itself.
How are knowledge and skills mobilized for country of origin development? The starting point for answering this question lies in the straight forward observation that migrants abroad know how to contact others who share their national identity; they know how to work out collective procedures for doing things with one another; and, finally, they know how to use the information infrastructures of Internet in order to accomplish their collective goals for their countries or origin. A “knowing organization” is one that is able to put this know-how into practice smoothly, working out specific problems as they arise through discussion and on-going negotiation of constraints, priorities and resources. Social informatics takes as its goal to computer support the “knowing in practice” dynamics of this type of social organization. The DKN project offers an interaction space for people to initiate, build and consolidate the learning dynamics of a “knowing organization”.
3) From “brain drain” to “brain gain”
Migrants know how to mobilize the skills and knowledge available to them in their host countries for use by their countries of origin. The DKN project identifies over 150 Diaspora Knowledge Networks and discusses the conditions of their usefulness as instruments for host country – home country cooperation. Together with this bottom-up, grassroots activity, many government, NGO and other development agency initiatives are also being taken to engage diaspora in country of origin development projects. That said, one of the major difficulties in evaluating the contribution of diaspora communities to country of origin development lies in the ambiguity of the diaspora concept itself. The definition of this concept oscillates between two poles.
· On one side, diasporas are often defined in substantive terms as being composed of people who live abroad but who share a common attachment to their country of origin, its values, its culture and its development. From this perspective, doing things for the home country is often seen as paying back a debt to the country where one was born, raised and educated, leading to the idea that “brain gain” is in fact the sum of all these individual “pay back” initiatives.
· On the other side, diasporas are defined less by what they are than by what they do and, in principle, this “what they do” consists in building networks over national borders. From this perspective, diasporas contribute to home country development by structuring the conduits through which skills and knowledge flow not only from the host to the home country, but in the opposite direction as well. Their utility lies in enlarging the frame of reference, moving brain gain out of a context defined uniquely in terms of the needs of a Nation-State towards one which focuses on the social dynamics of knowledge production in its own right. Knowledge production knows no borders, however, it requires a space where people can meet, interact and learn how to do things together. Diaspora Networks contribute to brain gain by building these interaction spaces.
The DKN project aims at developing indicators extending from quantitative measures of individual efforts aimed at assisting countries of origin to more qualitative measures of social network solidarity.
Back to the top
Computer supporting diaspora knowledge networks
Support for DKN projects can be obtained through the site (www.dk-network.org). This site contains a “Public Space”, a “Private Space” and “Plug-in” services for assisting in the development of document-mediated interactions.
THE DKN PUBLIC SPACE
The project’s public space is designed to assist in adjusting offer and demand for diaspora participation in country of origin development.
· On the offer side, many highly qualified members of scientific and technical diaspora living abroad are more than willing to do things for their country of origin. The DKN public space will allow them to set out their ideas, provide information on their skills and on the social networks which they would like to create.
· On the demand side, development agencies in countries of origin, receiving countries or working internationally can post information on projects, funding resources, events or other opportunities of network building for country of origin development.
Work on the initial design of the DKN Space has been done with teams from Colombia. For the moment, most of the information in the Public Space concerns the situation in Colombia. However, the list of countries will grow as people from other diasporas and other countries of origin become involved.
THE DKN PRIVATE SPACE
On the DKN Public Space’s Front Page a link "to the DKN Private Space" appears. When you click on that link you enter the DKN Private Space.
The private space is open to people (individuals, development agencies or others) who want assistance in mobilizing support for their projects. This assistance comes in the following forms :
· a WIKI interaction space which allows people to collectively define, discuss and analyze the specific conceptual, methodological and practical needs of their project ;
· a common information resource created by depositing reference documents, articles, data, bibliographies, etc. in an accessible document store.
· a listserv application providing direct Email contact with all the registered members of a project, threads for following the discussion of specific subject areas and archives for building up a memory of on-going collective action.
· a variety of project management devices which serve a project leader for :
o mapping out task assignments (who does what) and showing how they are interrelated
o text mining documents in order to assist in building a shared conceptual frameworks for the project
o project planning : establishing milestones, deliverables and "things to do"
DKN “PLUG-IN” SERVICES
Social informatics is driven by both theoretical and empirical research into mechanisms for building and sustaining distributed collective practices over Internet. On the basis of this research, software applications designed to carry out specific information processing strategies are “plugged into” Internet sites and evaluated in terms of their contribution to installing and consolidating distant, interpersonal relationships. Specific indicators are being developed in the DKN project for this evaluation such as the content richness of debates; faster and more relevant information exchanges, faster convergence on milestones, task divisions and other organizational procedures.
The idea of a “plug-in” implies that software applications can be replaced should they be poorly evaluated or completed if new theoretical and empirical research reveals the need to set off in new directions. In order to experiment this concept of DKN “plug-in services”, software is available in the DKN private space for the following tasks:
· corpus construction, validation and annotation techniques;
· indexing resources (natural language word extractions)
· cataloguing resources (clustering and automatic learning techniques)
· visualization techniques
Back to the top
The way forward
1) October 3-5, 2006 Workshop, Paris
One of the functions of the DKN – Project team is to organize on-going UNESCO sponsored workshops not only to take a critical look at current wisdom defining ‘brain gain’ politics at the present time, but to provide new perspectives for UNESCO policy-makers as well. The three axes of work on these new perspectives coming out of the October 3-5, 2006 Workshop in Paris concern:
- The implications of brain gain politics for managing a Nation’s human capital in the sense that management procedures are no longer restricted to efforts aimed at mobilizing resources located within State boundaries but imply, to the contrary, efforts aimed at reaching out over those boundaries to skills and resources located in other national contexts.
- The need for building up a social capital type of management approach as a compliment to a human capital approach because ‘brain gain’ is empirically defined as a network building activity. More precisely, members of scientific and technical Diasporas are expected to be able to mobilize the skills and knowledge at their disposal in their host countries for use by social networks in their countries of origin. The social science literature has shown the extent to which resource mobilization for network building relies on a specific set of behavior patterns which, often, do not obtain in Diaspora networks. The DKN Project Group is developing the sociological concept of ‘interessement’ to address this question, but much more work is required on the underlying dynamics leading to the constitution and stabilization of Diaspora Knowledge Networks.
- Finally, the ‘connected migrant’ concept explains to a very large degree the optimism generated by the ‘brain gain’ hypothesis. Migrants are using new information and communication technologies to stay connected with their home countries. But what does that mean effectively in terms, for example, of building the social bonds needed to work concretely for country of origin development?
The goal of the DKN-Project team is to make a call for proposals to social science research centers working on the three themes above in order to develop them into the subject matter of a book for UNESCO policy makers. The different partners that took part in the October Meeting have been asked to develop their contributions to that meeting as chapters for the book.
A second workshop will be held in 2007 in order to pursue these themes.
2) DKN and the OpenLearn LabSpace
The DKN Project brings together social scientists and engineers working in the field of social informatics. The Engineers in the DKN project will be gaining experience in using the OpenLearn LabSpace which has been opened by the Open University in England and adapting it to the purposes and needs of the DKN project. In addition, they will be obtaining user feedback on the DKN concept as presented through the www.dk-network.org website and the ergonomics of the navigation interface. Finally, they will gain experience with computer supporting research networks in Africa through a collaboration with the NETSUDS network, pursue collaboration with DKN networks in Latin America and finalize the “Facilitation Guidelines” for computer supporting Diaspora Knowledge Networks.
All this work takes on meaning from the assumption that the capacity to develop a ‘brain gain’ policy is highly dependent upon the way in which information infrastructures are configured to support bridge-building activity between host and home country networks. The social informatics orientation to the DKN project seeks to produce evidence confirming this hypothesis which can be readily understood and validated by UNESCO decision-makers.
Active DKN projects
· A French-Colombian project aims at improving the genetic resistance of cassava to Xanthomonas axonopodis pv. manihotis (Xam). This crop is the food base of more than 600 million people in the world and an important source of income in tropical regions. XAM is one of the main causes of crop loss.
· A French-Colombian project aims at better understanding the mechanics of volcanic ash soils. These soils are frequently responsible for landslides in Colombia causing loss of human life and high levels of material damage. The project aims at developing numerical simulation methods for studying volcanic ash.
Back to the top |
|
| |
|
News |
|
|
| |
|
|
10-10-2006 (UNESCO) - In October 2006, UNESCO sponsored a three day meeting gathering social and computer scientists, members of international organizations and government officials to examine the evidence that Diaspora Knowledge Networks open up new perspectives for thinking through the issue of migration and development.
More...
|
|
|
|
| |
|
Contacts |
|
|
|
Consultant |
|
|
|
Chief of Section
International Migration and Multicultural Policies Section
Division of Social Sciences, Research and Policy |
|
|
|
Project Coordinator
Computer Sciences Laboratory for Mechanics and Engineering Sciences / Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (National Center for Scientific Research) (LIMSI/CNRS) |
|
|
|
|
 Email this page  Printable version
Quick Link to this page: www.unesco.org/shs/migration/diaspora
|
|
|
|
