Making knowledge management systems open: A case study of the role of open source software

This chapter presents an action research-based case study of the development of pKADS (portable knowledge asset development system), an open source, desktop-based knowledge management (KM) tool, implemented in Java and targeted at government and nongovernment organizations. pKADS was a collaborative project involving Business Information Systems, University College Cork, Ireland and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and was funded by the government of Ireland. Development of the application took just three months, using an agile development approach and some reuse of existing open source code. The chapter discusses the background to the pKADS project and prior UNFPA KM efforts, the technical and conceptual architectures of the pKADS application, the roles played by open source components and open data standards, the rationale for releasing pKADS as open source software, and the subsequent results. Future research, in the form of developing open source, Intranet/Internet-based KM tools for the Government of Ireland-eGovernment Knowledge Platform (eGovKP) is also briefly discussed.