Kenneth Hansen

Cand. mag., PhD External lecturer Department of Communication, Business and Information Technologies Roskilde University Website: www.akira.ruc.dk/~keha E-mail: keha@ruc.dk

I’m a communication professional working as university teacher, part time researcher, project developer, consultant, and freelance journalist. I have worked with Information and communication tehcnology (ICT), knowledge managment, project management, innovation, organizational theory, complexity theory, Corporate Social Responsibility, critical theory and political economy.

My latest writings are about “meaningfull experiences” and my lectures often deal with a combination of value management and experience design (“værdibaseret oplevelsesdesign”, “oplevelsesbaseret værdiledelse”). A constant focus is on ethics, which I see as a reflective process between norms and feelings that constantly creates and recreates values.

A selection of my publications can be found at my website.

My interest in Orecomm is focused on the combination of experience economy and design, communication for development, ICT and complexity theory. This combination reflects an interest in facilitating communication for development by enlarging the traditional view to include new media, experiences and 2.order cybernetics.

I would like to discuss how such a combination can be utilised in entrepreneurial processes of social change. The focus is thus from the start, it could be argued, functionalistically on the creation of durable, cross boundary structures.

I have, illustrating my approach, for example participated in the project “Digidi Ghana” funded by The Danish International Development Assistance, Danida, and supported by the World Bank in Ghana. Digidi (Digital Distribution, http://www.digidi.org), is a global co-operative society, established in Copenhagen in 2003. It is a non-profit, non-governmental organization that has successfully established a global digital distribution net, through which shareholders can sell digital cultural products in more than 60 online shops all over the world. It is currently owned by approximately 1100 participants coming from a wide array of fields in the global experience economy. Each participant holds an equal share.

Digidi Ghana is an attempt to develop this idea into a global fair trade concept within a development agenda. In Ghana, as in other developing countries, mass production and global distribution of digital cultural products is an often overwhelmingly complex and expensive affair which requires substantial investment beforehand. By instead distributing these products through the Internet, a Ghanaian artist for example, can receive up to 85 % of the income from the sale, since there are no unnecessary intermediate stages between producer and consumer. The establishment of such a new fair trade concept, with its use of advanced digital media in an unusual context is, however, a highly complex and challenging task. Among many things it involves unusual partnerships, intensive and very special experience based PR-work, powerful negotiation skills, and, above all, the skill to navigate immediately and powerfully in an environment in total flux.

A hypothesis guiding the study of the project is that new communicational forms in the field could be approached both analytically and constructively as generic and complex design forms where concepts as non-reified social rules and reified values are central elements. This implies that issues of norms, ethics, legitimization, and International Human Rights become central from the outset. It is, however, also to be discussed how such generic structures correspond to balances of relations, feelings and solidarity in the designs (White 2006, Honneth 2006). The goal, thus, could be to develop new ideas and suggestions for improved approaches for social change. The processes behind such changes are, following the hypothesis, to be modelled with tools from the research on dynamic and complex systems (Stacey 2007, Hansen 2007), and perspectives drawn to the future organisation of communication for development and the organisation and evaluation of humanitarian efforts in the international relief system (As discussed in e.g.. W. K. Kellogg Foundation 2007 and Ramaligan & Jones et al. 2008).

This also could be said to follow in the line of a recent trend of collaboration between the private sector, NGOs and the United Nations, where private companies are partners in the development of new campaigns or relief projects. In this work mutual and generic communicational and collaborative structures are apparently sought for (e.g. Dalberg 2007/2008). This is often expressed in the quest for “accountabillity”. My view on this trend is, however, a critical one, where issues of intentions, motive, values, feelings and power are central (cf. e.g. Eyben 2008). I have just finished writing an article on this and presented it at a conference at Roskilde University. The article can be viewed here.

Parallel with this I’m participating in a new, upstarting project – managed by the Danish communication company “Zoomstory” (http://www.zoomstory.dk) – for Public Services International (PSI) in Geneva (http://www.world-psi.org). PSI is a global union federation made up of more than 650 trade unions representing approx. 20 million workers who deliver public services in 160 countries around the world. PSI promotes gender equality, worker rights, trade union capacity building, equity and diversity, and have health communication as a target area. PSI is an NGO for the public sector within the International Labour Organisation and has accreditation with UNESCO, ECOSOC and UNCTAD. PSI also works in association with the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). The aim of this projects is to use new global media to facilitate social change processes across the affiliated trade unions in developing countries, and my role is, as a consultant, to facilitate the development and to connect the project to current research on ICT, knowledge distribution, complexity theory and international development.

I like to work with project development and often write about experiments, examples and cases. I’m involved in the ongoing development of a handful of other projects. I try to update as much as possible on my website.