For the past 60 years, the remarkable economic growth of Korea has captured the attention of developing countries and many are eager to learn from Korea’s experience. However, resources on Korea''s development experience are scattered, making it difficult for audiences globally, especially those in developing countries, to share the development knowledge that Korea has to date established.

Based on Dean Sang-Woo Nam’s vision of creating a comprehensive platform for sharing Korea’s socioeconomic policy development experience, K-Developedia was established in March 2012 under the sponsorship of Ministry of Strategy & Finance of Korea. It can be accessed at http://www.kdevelopedia.org.

Subjects & Resources

The range of subjects covered in K-Developedia includes research and case studies related to the development and implementation of policies that contributed to Korea''s development. It particularly includes, and gives priority to, objective and comprehensive case studies and policy research from Korea''s development experience, which have been officially acknowledged and are addressed in "The Korean Economy - Six Decades of Growth and Development" and the KSP Modularization on Korea''s Development Experience

Main topics in Korea’s development experience are categorized into five areas: (1) economy, (2) industrial development, (3) international economic policy, (4) territorial development policy, and (5) social policy, which are portrayed in four different time periods: 1945-1959, 1960-1979, 1980-1997 and 1998-present

Architecture

The K-Developedia is divided into 5 broad sections:

• Resources is a collection of research work, conference proceedings, and other materials on various development issues regarding Korea''s development experience gathered from selected Korean and international institutes.
• Projects provides specialized information that has been collected through significant development cooperation projects that have been conducted in order to share Korea''s development experience with partner countries, including Knowledge Sharing Program(KSP), KSP Modularization, Infrastructure Feasibility Study and Capacity Building Workshop.
• Events provides information on development assistance programs implemented by Korea, including workshops, conferences and forums etc.
• Statistics section provides statistics on key development indicators for Korea
• Links Comprises of useful web links under three sub-menus: "Data & Statistics", "Country profile", and "Related Institutes". "Data & Statistics" introduces web-links to useful development statistics data. “Country profile” provides web-links to country profile information of approximately 200 countries. "Related institution" provides web-links to the respective websites of various development-related institutions.

Growth of K-Developedia

There has been a steady growth in the popularity of K-Developedia since the revamped version of the website was launched in Nov 2012. In the last 6 months the number of new visitors has increased by over 110%. Many new initiatives aimed at increasing the outreach such as the monthly K-Developedia newsletter have been launched.

The K-Developedia recently revamped its statistics page providing not only the full text contents of various resources but also specialized statistics to help researchers. The statistics section now consists of 877 socio-economic indicators gathered from top notch institutions such as Bank of Korea, Statistics Korea & Korea Development Bank and enables users to easily download data in excel format or create informative graphs. Moreover, statistics on micro development will also be made available soon via K-Developedia i.e. data drawn from the cases & research studies of external researchers.

The Future

Based on user feedback, the K-Developedia team is already working on a dedicated mobile site that will further enhance the experience of users who want to access the various resources offered by K-Developedia on their mobile devices. Mobile site is expected to be live as early as September 2013.

Usability & relevance of K-Developedia will receive a major thrust early next year when E-learning capability will be integrated in the K-Developedia platform. Courses & distance learning modules will be made available under the World Bank Institute – KDI School partnership which will help practitioners & students from around the world to learn about important policy themes.

By Manish Joshi (2012 MPP, India)