Brain-WASH

Published on: 31/10/2012

The WASH sector is in consensus labelled as a complex system. Interventions need to cope with wicked problems and solutions strive for adaptive management as exit strategy. The bulk of the WASH projects deliver on the short-term. In three year Hygiene projects populations / schools / communities are supposed to learn where Westerns take 15 years while being brought up.

It is said locals are well aware of needs and solutions but possibly in need of capacities. Most countries have a WASH-in-crowd that buzzes around policies, in networks, some donor-led research, the next trilennium goal and donors / global venues.  The HR gap is huge.

Improvements of value-chains come from shorter chains - getting out the middle man - decreasing the complexity dramatically or improvement / intensifying of the flow of information across the chain. What really helps is a shared, up-to-date overview of actors and initiatives in the sector; a common good. WASH mapping is frequently done based on geo-spatial-data.

The who=who, where=where and what=what is too complicated to precipitate in two dimensions. A brain does wonders here. For a full screen version of the Ghana WASH sector network use the link below.

Now the question is how to organise a WASH-Brain! To me the Brain is a excellent tool to make explicit what people know. Much more easy then blogging. The concept is intriguing: build your 'world view', your 'network of concepts' and make it intuitive navigable; publish it, share it, polish it, update-it and share it! It is a great source / proxy to peoples' knowledge! And that is the problem I am facing when some 'WASH-Brain' tells me she's got 30 staggering good documents about XYZ on her PC. Apart from copyrights; put them in a Brain! I notice myself working in various brains. I slice up reality in domains very naturally. I choose to 'Brain-WASH' (coined here!). below another example; my KM-brain.