When looking at the development of this semester-project one can also identify several points where the same processes occurred which might have let to difficulties in the implementation of other TK based projects.
During the initial planning phase a very general idea was put forward and agreed upon to work with the concept of community and/or traditional knowledge. This was inspired by some seemingly successful projects we had heard about, like the Barefoot colleges in India. But at that point the overall level of information was low and it also seemed like these concepts were highly promising but underutilized in development cooperation. In retrospect one has to admit however that to a certain extent we still had an what El Berr (2007) calls an idealizing concept of TK.
During the second phase the idea was to conduct some research in the general literature concerning TK related concepts and their prior use. Relatively quickly it became clear, that those concepts were not quite as underutilized as we had originally thought. Not only had there been many previous projects spanning back several decades, but also a some dedicated research concerning the use of TK and the issues related to it (see introduction).
At this point however, we did not consider these concerns as really related to us or our idea of the semester-project and continued to narrow down what could become a successful project proposal. One of the main issues was that we now realized that the general idea how you could define TK or related concepts was not nearly as clear as initially thought. In the research literature one can find myriads of different definitions (see definition) and the topics one can find TK about span to about almost every research field imaginable .
As many western researchers before, we as a groups of engineers and natural scientists, therefore decided to focus on the technical aspects which seemed the most easily accessible and also transferable concepts. Thus without completely realizing it, we stayed in the tradition of western science, trying to get some “technical instructions” or “codified knowledge” out of TK. To a certain extent this was of course also due to the limitations we had having only secondary data sources about most of the TK we were interested in at that point.
But one can already tell that in many ways the development of our semester-project had similarities with the history of TK concepts in development cooperation. During the further course of the semester-project, maybe due to difficulties in implementing some of the experimental projects we had set out to conduct, or maybe because of further more in depth literature research, we slowly came to the realization that TK is a much more complicated concept than we originally envisioned.
Similarities: general TK implementation – our semester-project
Subsequently we searched for an alternative route to take, and believe that we found a practical solution with the creation of a decision support system (DSS). In this condensed form we could really integrate all the issues projects working with TK are often confronted with. Furthermore we could reflect on problems we, ourselves, encountered during the first project phase.
Finally it has to be said that even the final version of our DSS only presents a fraction of what could be said about this highly diverse topic, and should be if utilized for a project be integrated into a continuous improvement process.
Last but not least exploring some practical experiments as elaborated above greatly helped us to understand some issues of more technical nature and also enabled us to make a better decision support system (DSS). After the development of DSS, we have made a further improvement in knowing about TK and the development projects, but according to the limits of reality, we could not really apply the DSS in a real development project, and we are sure that after the practical application, the DSS could be improved more and more and the success of the TK development projects should not be so far away in the future.