KM & Social Change, No Such Thing As Neutral

Some of the most routine practices we associate with knowledge management, like how to name and store documents or how we take notes in meetings, can seem on the surface to be pretty neutral. But when applied in a social change or social justice setting knowledge management and mobilization practices demand deeper investigation and thoughtful design. Why? Because there’s just no such thing as neutral in knowledge management.

As I mentioned in my last post about why knowledge management matters to social change, how social change organizations collect, store, use, make sense of, and share knowledge is part of how we put our values into practice.

In many organizations knowledge management is simply left to the folks in IT, decoupled from a larger discussion about values-alignment. But like many seemingly neutral, procedure-intensive, and often technical activities, knowledge management systems are laden with bias. The good news is that they are also loaded with disruptive potential.

If we take a look at a pretty classic knowledge management lifecycle we begin to see how and where social and historical biases can get “baked in” to what organizations and movements “know”. The baked-in biases I’ve listed below for each life stage are just examples — there are many more ways in which inequities can be structured (or rectified) by KM — but these examples provide a glimpse into the bigger problem. They may even look familiar to some of you as things you’ve seen happening in how your own organization learns.

Of course, knowledge management is just one lens through which we can interrogate biases around what we “know”. For decades fellow travelers in related domains such as evaluation, organizational learning, social justice movement work, and data science have been dismantling these same biases through methods and approaches such as participatory research, equitable evaluation (see the Equitable Evaluation Initiative for clarity and practical guidance), calls for data and knowledge sovereignty (see the work of the Global Indigenous Data Alliance for more info on #befairandcare), and more recently feminist and anti-racist data analytics (see the work of Heather Krause and the work at We All Count for inspiration). (See also the work of orgs like WhoseKnowledge for initiatives focused on remedying some of these inequities.) Doing conscious KM is not separate or simply complementary to these efforts, it actually depends on the incorporation of these many methods and approaches at each stage of the life cycle.

So, what can you do to bring your KM practices into better alignment? Stay tuned for my next post on “now what?”.

Gabriela Fitz is founder of Think Twice, a consulting practice focused on helping nonprofits and foundations better mobilize their knowledge.