The Director-General of UNESCO Koïchiro Matsuura extols the virtues of shared knowledge as a means for the development of society Is knowledge sharing a utopian ideal, the international community's new buzz word? We think not. A few examples may be more telling than a dozen analyses. In 1965, Singapore was overrun with shantytowns, and its economy was underdeveloped. Since then, the authorities have pursued resolute policies aimed at investing in education, improving skills and productivity and attracting high-added-value industries. The per capita GDP of Singapore has today overtaken that of many countries of the West. Economies based on the sharing and spread of knowledge provide a unique opportunity for emerging countries and for the wellbeing of their populations. Thus, despite its poverty, the Indian state of Kerala now boasts a level of human development close to that of the countries of the West: life expectancy has risen to 73 years and literacy rates are in excess of 90 per cent. Kerala contributes significantly to making India the eighth nation in the world in terms of scientific publications. In 1971, a few thousand migrants settled in an empty plain 20 km from Lima and created Villa El Salvador. Practising self-reliance, its inhabitants set up education centres and formed associations. A courageous endeavour of participatory community development, relying on women, transformed this shanty area into an organised town. Recognised in 1983 as a municipality, Villa El Salvador established its university in 1987. Today, 98 per cent of its children attend school and the rate of adult illiteracy (4.5 per cent) is the lowest in the country. The town now has 400,000 inhabitants, including 15,000 students. The municipality provides computer access points for its citizens, who express their opinions on issues under discussion within the community. Shared knowledge is thus a powerful lever in the fight against poverty. It is also today the key to wealth production. Finland, which suffered a severe economic crisis following the break-up of the Soviet Union, is currently cited as a model: it invests almost four per cent of its GDP in research, its education system is highest rated among the industrialised countries by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the variation in performance between pupils and educational institutions is astonishingly low. This clearly demonstrates that success in knowledge societies can very well be combined with equity. These are far from being isolated examples. In all parts of the world, different countries are in the process of inventing new styles of development, based on knowledge and intelligence. For a society's development potential will depend less in future on its natural wealth than on its capacity to create, spread and utilise knowledge. Does this mean that the 21st century will see the rise of societies based on shared knowledge? Since this is a public good that ought to be accessible to all, none should find themselves excluded in a knowledge society. But the sharing of knowledge cannot be reduced to the dividing up of knowledge or the exchange of a scarce resource to which nations, societies and individuals lay competing claim. It is in network societies that the creativity and the possibilities of exchange or sharing are greatly increased. These societies create an environment particularly favourable to knowledge, innovation, training and research. The new forms of network sociability that are developing on the Internet are horizontal and not hierarchical, encouraging cooperation, as illustrated by Internet research collaboration or open source computer software. The emergence of network societies and the concomitant reduction of transaction costs encourage the rise of new forms of productive organisation, founded on exchange and collaboration within a sharing community. This is particularly vital set against the temptation of economic warfare: these new practices hold out the hope that we shall be able to arrive at a fair balance between the protection of intellectual property rights, necessary for innovation, and the promotion of knowledge belonging to the public domain. The sharing of knowledge cannot however be confined to the creation of new knowledge, the promotion of knowledge belonging to the public domain, or the narrowing of the cognitive divide. It implies not only universal access to knowledge, but also the active participation of everyone. It will therefore be the key to the democracies of the future, which should be based on a new type of public space in which genuine democratic encounters and deliberations involving civil society will make it possible to address social problems. Hybrid forums and citizens' conferences prefigure this development in some respects. The obstacles that stand in the way of knowledge sharing are admittedly numerous. Like the solutions we are putting forward, they are at the heart of the UNESCO World Report Towards Knowledge Societies directed by Jérôme Bindé and published a few months ago . The "21st Century Talk" that we have just organised at UNESCO on the topic of knowledge sharing has doubtless helped to identify them more clearly: polarisation, the digital divide and, even more serious, the knowledge fracture and gender inequality. To overcome these obstacles, societies will have to invest massively in lifelong education for all, research, information development and the growth of "learning societies," while also learning to cultivate greater respect for the diversity of cognitive cultures and for local, traditional and indigenous knowledge. Knowledge sharing will not forever be a future prospect: for it is not the problem but the solution. The sharing of knowledge does not divide knowledge, it causes it to grow and multiply.
