Blog: World Bank

Baseline Magazine Looks at How the Bank Does Knowledge Management

I received a nice email this morning with a link to an article on knowledge management and was pleasantly surprised to see that it named the World Bank as one of the top five companies that gets knowledge management. What great credit for the organization.

We’ve worked on several different knowledge management projects with the World Bank, from an intranet for its communications team to a community portal for its Global Development Learning Network to a news tracking system to help them follow development news, and have always been impressed with their ideas and commitment to using technology to better handle information.

From the article:

"Amidst the World Bank's recent management brouhaha, a more significant event has gone overlooked - the bank's dramatic transformation from a hierarchical source of low-interest loans to a decentralized organization that uses knowledge-sharing technologies to fight poverty and disease in developing nations. The enabler of this transformation: the bank's overhaul of its antiquated I.T. infrastructure and construction of a truly global network."

The World Bank certainly has developed some great new technology and systems to improve knowledge sharing and connect their worldwide team, so it’s great to see them get a shout out like this. I wonder how much of their forward thinking here was credited to their use of open source software and Drupal in some of these systems. Well, that didn’t make the article, but I’m still curious : )

You can read the whole article here.

Our Team Aggregator Catches Some Buzz

Salon.com has an awesome story today about Pierre Wielezynski's work helping the World Bank become better listeners. The article explores why he came up with some of the functionality that we built for him in the BuzzMonitor, or what is now being called the "Super Aggregator."

From the article:

The World Bank contracted with the software firm Development Seed to build the new program, with additional input from the World Resources Institute. Development Seed relied on the popular open-source content management system Drupal for its core code. Last week the bank announced that version 1.0 of BuzzMonitor was available for free download to all comers, and suggested that it was particularly applicable to nonprofit organizations interested in monitoring what the Web was saying about them. (The decision to open-source BuzzMonitor need not be taken as some kind of altruistic move by the bank. By using base code that is protected by the free software GNU General Public License, my understanding is that the bank was required to make any modifications or add-ons freely available.)

The World Bank just made its open source aggregator BuzzMonitor available to the public to take for a test drive. This is great news. We worked with the World Bank to build the system, based on Pierre Wielezynski's ideas for source profiling, Yahoo term extraction, Technorati integration, Alexa rankings, tagging, voting and graphing. World Resources Institute also played a hand in the development and is currently using a customized version to track news internally. There is now an online demo up that shows how the World Bank monitors news about AIDS and Africa.

Handle Your Content More Intelligently

There are smarter ways to handle your events than with a classic calendar on groupwise. We recently installed the MIT Timeline module for CommNET, a staff intranet at The World Bank that helps its geographically disperse teams communicate better. Here is a screencast by Ric Castro, the site's lead architect, that shows how he uses Timeline to nicely handle multi-day events and run quick filters. Here at Development Seed Jeff has been working on this module a lot and is maintaining it for Drupal 5.