Knowledge Rescues Combat the Dissolution of Dev Digital Program Collections

With a search overview of the Policy Commons, the new home for these assets

Things happened in February of 2025 that resulted in a loss of all kinds of knowledge networks in the humanitarian aid and assistance sector.

From a knowledge management standpoint, priceless human knowledge and asset systems were displaced and collections of digital assets were removed. Human expertise networks, communities of knowing and collaborating, learning, adapting and localized regional knowledge networks became sawdust.

So? That was then.

Incredible work has quickly been collectively achieved by the Knowledge Rescue Group where disparate pockets of international development experts and project teams have been finding and assembling a new home for these lost assets. Led by Stacey Young and Tony Pryor, these volunteers now search and capture evidence-based reporting, evaluations, and historic collections formerly available and collectively remembered or created by our expert #KM4Dev experts.

Now the excellent news. This is now.

As rescue of these assets continues, they are now homed on Coherent Digital’s Policy Commons here: Policycommons.net/ I have fielded numerous queries asking where to find or add to our captured history. Now, we have that place.

Infopro assists.

I began exploring what has been uploaded so far, and learned by accident that indigenous and local knowledge networks are an integral part of these collections. This a big win as far as information inclusion and local indigenous knowledges go.

For example, see this video on #decolonization of knowledge spaces now being collected Africa Commons digital spaces. Decolonization and local indigenous knowledges have been at the fore in our #KM4Dev communities and are critical to success with contextual relevance and culture.

Dr. Buhle Mbambo-Thata, University Librarian at the University of Lesotho speaks about decolonizing knowledge and her vision for Africa Commons.

Now, here’s a little Infopro guidance on searching, browsing, and getting around the site. Note that more content continues to be added.

Search on Policy Commons yields best results when using the Advanced Search options. Here is a screenshot of a search query to show how advanced search constructed my query, and result set facets which help you broaden, narrow, or browse.

Next I checked out searching on Policy Commons itself (the parent hub of the USAID commons). There is a lot to be desired if you are searching across all the collections. For example, since I spotted this video about Africa Commons (above) somewhere on the larger site and I wanted to be able to search for it. It did not appear in any of my search query iterations, and only when I went back to the video, did I find that this was an effort from the University of Lesotho. Searching on that term still did not surface that video. I suppose the video was promotional and policy related. Once I used the organization named entity using quotations, some results came back as follows:

If you search in the USAID Commons, the facets seem to be somewhat better positioned for better result sets. Well sort of. But there are not, for instance, references to SDGs as part of topics to search, so it would seem that no linked data of the SDGs is working behind the scenes. Or maybe those things have not yet been rescued? Overall content types could be more granular, not just generic “reports”.

It is a little strange that search commands are of the old school of query language tricks like Boolean or phrase searching. Here is what I had to search on to show WASH and evaluations. I tried to use the “proximity” search in advanced and rec’d an error message that saying that proximity searching was not available.

facets: to narrow, broaden, or browse from this search:

As a test, I removed “evaluation” from my query, and more languages did populate in the facet labels for the term “WASH” only.

Finally, I prompted ChatGPT to quickly analyze available Policy Commons content. I did this to save time and reduce the number of search iterations, to see if that surfaced anything especially helpful. Through these prompts, I learned that Policy Commons considers indigenous local knowledges as a topic labeled “Traditional Knowledge” and linked me to that topic page. The prompts saved me time and quickly acquainted me with other labels that have similar meanings. If you don’t know what the topics are named, you will need to do some digging to identify semantic or synonymous related terms. Here is how I got to that info from outside of Policy Commons:

https://chatgpt.com/share/683f53e5-81c0-8010-be50-6da6e0e31d69

I liked what I saw on the resulting topic page, however it was a lot of work to figure out what it is called for those better results. A taxonomy with synonyms would be quite useful here.

https://policycommons.net/topics/traditional-knowledge/

The original results displayed do not have facets to filter on for the landing page, but if you select ‘view more’ at the bottom of that landing page, you’ll return the faceted categories display on page 2 to aid you in refining or broadening or exploring the results.

So glad that we now know where and how to look! Hopefully this guidance may help you in your searches.

Recalling your favorite results or monitoring changes is easy using the Following feature which allows you to set alerts and choose frequency for them. Less poking around in the tool in the future.

To follow items of greatest interest to you, click on your account settings and select “following”.

As the collections grow, I expect you’ll find your own tips/tricks to quickly locate or recall your precise targets.