The Challenge within International AID and Human Development organisations:

Measuring development aid effectiveness, managing donor funding process flows and bringing together the knowledge of a diverse network of volunteers, donor officials, implementation NGOs, and development aid professionals are some of the key challenges faced by development aid organisations today.

Emerging from the fact that participatory processes that happen at the grass roots level, are often implemented by independent self-organising smaller informal teams or individuals,  it is not possible most of the times to collect and maintain the valuable information and insights created, for others to collaborate with and improve the development aid effectiveness.

Communications Platform for International AID and Human Development Organisations

fusionKM platform provides international AID organisations a means to achieve:

• Operational efficiency,
• Management of scattered knowledge and information using social networking within a secure environment.
• Management of the knowledge that is exchanged between different entities in this ecosystem to be harnessed and made available to the wider audience to bring transparency and implement development aid projects effectively.

fusionKM establishes a solid communications platform for International AID and Human Development organisations which are looking towards adopting the Web 2.0 technologies  for creating collaborative, credible and easy to use platforms, which help them in making information available across Geographies while being inline with their budgetary constraints.

Some of the features from the fusionKM platform along with additional features developed by us for this domain are:

XML based Workflows designed for Development aid business

Using fusionKM as the base platform, the solutions was developed for development sector using open source frameworks to implement Configurable XML based workflows . Packaged workflows already exist can be quickly customised to track donor funds and management of these funds as these are spent on development.

Profiles for Knowledge Spaces

The platform has an underlying capability to create user, group and organization profiles. Once a user has signed up to the platform, he/she has a Person profile. The user can personalize his/her profile
by adding a profile picture and/or some contact details.

Similarly, group, community and organisational profiles can be made. Even applications and projects profiles can be managed. In real world this represents a working area where the visitors can join an application and work on different form based workflows mapped to development aid business workflows.

Knowledge Management using Social Networking context

Development AID agencies and NGOs can implement knowledge management within their enterprise using social networking patterns inbuilt into fusionKM. For example, when a development aid agency implements a platform solution each participating user, official, volunteer or consultant gets a “Knowledge work space” enabled with Social Network applications. These spaces are linked with the profiles for users, organisations and aid groups.

Knowledge Management is implemented in the form of:

1. Interactive profiles for individuals and groups
2. Highly accurate and customizable search for almost anything added to the knowledge management platform in the form of activities, status updates, documents, content management, audio and video content and also content from other social networks as collections.
3. Assimiliation of content from external networks in the form of “Public Collections” such as videos from YouTube, Flicker and number of other social networking sites that are used by individuals working in the development sector.
4. Customizable discussion groups (that can include pictures and polls)
5. Micro-sites (mini web-sites) for community-based organizations without a web presence
6. Applications (such as job listings, videos, directories) that you can include on your own website
7. Jobs, events and funding opportunities

fusionKM harnesses web 2.0  features and implements this social side of change. Using fusionKM International development organisations involved in development AID have been able to harness personal knowledge networks and develop trusting relationships.