Message-ID: <364B1135.EC4F8362@bellanet.org> Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 11:47:49 -0500 From: Sam Lanfranco <mailto:SLanfranco@BELLANET.ORG> Subject: Consultant's Reports, Validation and "Lessons Learned" To: mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU
This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --------------1898C6C4D65307B58F2648C5 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bitThis is a short response to Chris Byrne's further comments on the DML:XLM initiative but it is not about the DML initiative. It is about a problem that accompanies the use of consultants and consultant's reports, and the notion of knowledge itself.
I will use an example from Chris's posting - which comes from a consultant's report on XML as posted on the Bellanet website http://www.bellanet.org/ in its DML section. The consultant writes: " the field is wide open for Bellanet to take the initiative and to spearhead a standards development activity". The following comments are intended to stir a pot of problems. Here is the problem - and it includes how consultant's reports are used for policy making. I will just sketch it out here to keep this short.
I and Bellanet (I am not there 100% of the time) are deeply committed to collaborative approaches to development and to very high degrees of transparancy in what we do. I have written consultants reports and I have to read consultants reports. They produce a particular problem for me - and for stakeholders. Most of the time consultants' reports are inside documents - used by those who commission them and seldom made public - or only made public after substantial editorial advice from those who fund the consultants' reports. In contrast to published articles in refereed sources, they have not undergone any peer review or adjudication. They are - quite literally - the consultant's opinions, possibly informed by evidence and possibly not. They have not undergone the admittedly limited and occasionally faulty peer review process. In other words, they may be wrong and they are seldom public. They frequently serve as a basis for policy, or for the justification of policy.
Bellanet's decision, as a committment to transparency, is to make its consultant's reports public. This causes me further problems. What happens when I disagree with something in the consultant's report. Should I push for "editorial intervention" which can border on turning the report into a public relations document? If I (or Bellanet) disagree parts the consultant's report should we write a commentary? Who decides what is truth and what is opinion? This is a general problem.
For example, there are those who are reading the current World Bank Development Report as less an assessment of the topic (Knowledge for Development) and more as a marketing document for a re-positioned Bank. If I disagree with parts of the World Bank Report and say something, am I engaged in an intellectual dialogue - with whom? - or am I seen as objecting to a World Bank strategy. What does that mean for me as a consultant? What does it mean for my organiztion? What does it mean if I am an ultimate stakeholder, looking to the same organization for resources?
These are difficult issues. What is clear is that this electronic venue offers a 'space' for greater transparency and a 'place' for discussing around these issues. It is my assessment that these are serious issues and are likely to be short changed in the short run as institutions treat "lessons learned" as so many knowledge bricks and struggle to be "the" knowledge bank" for this, that, or all development activity.
Lastly, of course, all of this begs the major questions which animate philosophy today, those having to do with the notion of a single validated knowledge to start with. In short, when is a lesson learned a lesson learned and when it is a strategy definition of reality on the part of a (possibly powerful) stakeholder or (possibly ill-informed) consultant? I view as a healthy step forward the fact that this venue will force us to take several steps backward before we leap blindly into some ill-defined age of knowledge for development.
Sam Lanfranco, Distributed Knowledge Project York University/Toronto
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