ABSTRACT
This chapter chalks out the credibility and necessity for proposing a social knowledge management framework in the context of holistic rural empowerment. It starts by differentiating social knowledge from organizational knowledge and subsequently distinguishes how knowledge management differs from context to context; the strategy as practised in organizational context is different than the way society manages its knowledge resources to achieve social functioning. However, the loopholes of efforts undertaken to manage social knowledge for social benefit, as detailed in the preceding chapter, paves the path for our social knowledge management framework. The chapter bears reference to our framework of social knowledge management, which iterates how social technology can be appropriately put to use to facilitate collaborative knowledge exchange among diverse rural as well as urban agents. By using the collaborative premise of social technology as an implementing tool, our social knowledge management framework is designed to facilitate unrestricted knowledge exchange among rural–urban entities through purposive virtual community formation. Purposive community formation, leading to unhindered inter- and intra-group knowledge collaboration, has the power to enhance knowledge capability of social actors, thereby positively contributing to mitigation of knowledge asymmetry.
