Abstract:

The overall performance and viability of societies and organizations result from innumerable small actions by individuals. In a society with broad personal competences, decision-making everywhere will maximize personal goals, provide effective public agencies and governance, make commerce and industry competitive, and ensure that personal and family decisions and actions will improve societal functions and Quality of Life. Hence, it has become important to understand how people reason and how to ascertain that they have the best available knowledge and support for whatever function they need to perform. Wiig’s assertions equally apply to developing countries. But, as Johri and Pal point out, assistance provided is primarily framed in the theory and practice of development and empowerment, signifying a disproportionate emphasis on fulfilling basic needs of users in low-resource environments without adequate attention to user-motivated concerns which would enrich their lives rather than merely provide access and satisfy basic needs.

So, how can the emerging knowledge societies and the individual knowledge worker be better served mastering the changing spheres of work and needs for self-development? How can we address the growing digital and innovation divide? And, what provisions have to be made to overcome potential current barriers in order to serve three perspectives:
(1) personal focus on personal fulfilment and quality of life;
(2) society's economic/business focus on workforce competence; and
(3) society's operational/functional focus on citizenship capabilities/societal behaviour.

As a way out of this dilemma, a novel approach to promote Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) focuses on supporting life-long-learning, resourcefulness, creativity and teamwork of individuals throughout their academic and professional life and their role as contributors and beneficiaries of organizational and societal performance. Based on the assumption of decentralized autonomous capacities and nourished by creative conversations of many individuals' personal knowledge management, PKM systems are envisaged to constitute ‘the elementary process that makes possible the emergence of the distributed processes of collective intelligence, which in turn feed it.’ Accordingly, Levy alerts us to the fact that one of the most important functions of teaching, from elementary school to the different levels of university, will therefore be to encourage in students the sustainable growth of autonomous capacities in PKM.

The concept proposed in this paper and system-in-work give preference to grass roots, bottom-up, lightweight, affordable, personal devices which offer effective low-cost applications (accessibility easiness), enable the authorship and contribution of own ideas based on one’s background (expressive creativity), alone or in collaborative environments with other users/owners (relational interactivity), and with the opportunity to add productively to the world’s extelligence (ecological reciprocity) and, hence, are compliant with Johri’s and Pal’s suggested primary ICT for Development design characteristics. Currently, the respective prototype is about to be converted into a viable commercial PKM system profiting individuals, institutions, and society. The paper complements a series of recent papers concentrating on the PKM challenges to be addressed as well as the conceptual aspects and focusses on the capacity development issues in the educational and career context.

Keywords:

Personal Knowledge Management,Knowledge Society, Knowledge Worker, Creative Class, Capacity Building, LifeLong Learning, Digital Divide, Innovation Divide.