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This paper sets out to offer a holistic perception of the information ecology in which disadvantaged communities of the so‐called third world operate with a view to contribute to overcoming its limitations in a more effective way.

The authors briefly review the major social, economic and cultural characteristics of disadvantaged communities that balance the common place trust in the power of modern information products and infrastructures. Based upon a number of field studies the notion of information needs is reconsidered and combined with concerns for information literacy, social autonomy and the role of indigenous knowledge. The authors then present a number of examples of innovative approaches to the delivery of information services that may support the role of information centers and libraries as change catalyst from within the communities rather than mere providers of ready made information.

To this end, information professionals have to be educated in order to become change agents and consider this role as essential for their practice to be rewarding for themselves and more importantly for the people they serve. There are numerous examples of information services and information professionals who make a difference in the life of their communities against the most severe circumstances. This however requires a radical shift in their value system and operation.

The authors hope that the paper will encourage information professionals and in first place those who educate them to give social responsibility toward disadvantaged communities the same emphasis and priority as alignment with the latest technological artifact or excellence in observance of standards.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the Namibian liberation struggle, 1966‐1990, as an information war rather than a military conflict, so as to explore the dimensions of information activity under conditions of conflict. This builds on the idea, expressed by participants in earlier struggles of this kind, that the contest for “hearts and minds” is more significant than the armed confrontation that accompanies it.

A model that incorporates information and communication activity by both contestants, at their command centres, in the field and in the media, was elaborated in a previous paper using data from a number of conflicts, mainly in Southern and Central Africa. The present paper focuses on the Namibian struggle so as to examine the capacity of the model to assist in explaining the outcomes of the conflict. Using published sources, printed archive material and oral testimony, the range of information inputs, the incidence of suppression of information and information outputs are set out in the pattern provided by the model. This shows how both sides used covert intelligence gathering, secret communication, propaganda and disinformation accompanied by censorship and the suppression of critical comment by force to further their political/military aims.

Whilst South Africa and its Namibian military structures were generally successful in armed confrontation with the forces of the chief liberation organisation (SWAPO), they were not able to bring the conflict to a successful military conclusion. This was because SWAPO's attention to the diplomatic war, based on strong and consistent information flows, convinced the United Nations and other allies to press for a negotiated solution. Once this was agreed, the success of the liberation movement's news and education campaigns in attaching the people to the cause of liberation was revealed by SWAPO's overwhelming success in free elections in 1989.

It is important to establish that the war in Namibia was much more a clash of information‐related activities directed at hearts and minds than it was of guns and bombs. When this is demonstrated, we can perhaps learn from the fact that the contestant most effectively committed to waging war by peaceful means was victorious.

Departing from an online interactive Gender Café on the topic of Knowledge Management (KM), jointly hosted by a UN agency and the Society of Gender Professionals, this chapter seeks to provide gender practitioners and others with practical examples of how to “gender” KM in international development. Through analyzing the travel of feminist ideas into the field of KM with inspiration from Barbara Czarniawska’s and Bernard Joerge’s (1996) theory of the travel of ideas, the chapter explores the spaces, limits, and future possibilities for the inclusion of feminist perspectives. The ideas and practical examples of how to do so provided in this chapter originated during the café, by the participants and panellists. The online Gender Café temporarily created a space for feminist perspectives. The data demonstrate how feminist perspectives were translated into issues of inclusion, the body, listening methodologies, practicing reflection, and the importance to one’s work of scrutinizing underlying values. However, for the feminist perspective to be given continuous space and material sustainability developing into an acknowledged part of KM, further actions are needed. The chapter also reflects on future assemblies of gender practitioners, gender scholars and activists, recognizing the struggles often faced by them. The chapter discusses strategies of how a collective organizing of “outside–inside” gender practitioners might push the internal work of implementing feminist perspectives forward.

The necessity for social intelligence, broadly defined, to inform decision making in developing countries is apparent as globalization places increasing demands on governments, non‐governmental organizations (NGOs), parastatals, and business corporations. Yet the existing information systems of developing countries suffer from a range of problems which afflict all three main elements: documentary services (libraries and information centres), statistical services, and management information systems (including records management and computerized systems). Grey literature is vital to each of these three systems, either as the partially‐processed product of the internal information‐generating capacity of the country itself, or in the external scanning process. Information professionals have tended to concentrate on the technical problems of acquiring, listing, indexing, retrieving and alerting potential users to documents. This largely ignores questions about the capacity and propensity of the targeted users to absorb information, however well it might be organized by information systems. An examination of the decision‐making process in a selected country (Malawi) and a case study of planning for technology transfer (from Kenya) are used to illustrate these problems and the role of intelligence. A range of structural and non‐structural constraints on the absorption of information is identified. The conclusion is that the problems of existing information systems can only be relieved by information professionals further processing and refining the information content of grey literature so as to present it to the decision makers in the form of intelligence reports.

While working in a rural district library system, the question of planning library/information services to meet the needs of the population was always of foremost importance. Community profiles of the region had been conducted continuously for ten years, and during the eleventh year it was decided to survey the entire area in a methodical way to search for the information needs of the population. The purpose of the study was to identify information needs in a specific rural area in Israel in order to design a plan for library/information provision to meet those needs. The study consisted of a literature search of relevant material on information needs in rural areas and less developed countries and a multi‐level field survey in one specific rural area of Israel.