K-Developedia is an online database that brings together all kinds of information on Korean development. Perhaps intuitively, the ‘K’ in K-Developedia stands for Korea, while ‘Developedia’ is combines development and encyclopedia.

It contains more than 35,000 resources in the form of theses, papers, multimedia resources, statistics, videos, conferences and journal articles. K-Developedia was launched by KDI School in 2012 funded by the Korean Government and the Ministry of Strategy and Finance. It contains comparative data from more than 40 countries and through this channel we expand our resources by comparing data between Korea and other countries. There are 1,545 indicators on Korea’s economy including employment, population etc. Thanks to its outstanding services and resources, K-Developedia was selected as a major governmental web-portal in economics by Cheongwadae (the Korean Presidential office).

On May 11 the K-Developedia Team organized a “brown bag event” for the students at KDI School. The Globe met with Communications Officer Ms. Sung Jee-eun to talk about the event and K-Developedia.

* A brown bag event usually refers to a casual meeting that occurs during lunch. It is named brown bag because participants bring their own lunches to the meeting.

1. Can you introduce our users to the K-Developedian program?
   We have a student ambassador program called “K-Developedian” that started in 2014. Now, we have four K-Developedian programs where each program involves 10 to 15 students from in and out of KDI School. Their main job as K-Developedians is, of course, to promote K-Developedia to our target audience using various methods both on and offline. Currently we are in the process of selecting the 5^th K-Developedian ambassadors from a wider spectrum of countries to gain some more diversity. 
2. Why do you decide to have such an event?
   We started this event several years ago, maybe once or twice a year, to introduce K-Developedia to students. We thought students should be our primary target since they could use it as an important tool for their studies and research activities. Every year, we welcome new students so it’s crucial that we continue this event and introduce this extremely useful resource to our students or other users that may access K-Developedia. 
3. Which people do you target?
   We target the global community, specifically those who are interested in development issues. These might include students but also government officials in developing countries. We want to help our users learn about the Korean experience in development to achieve growth of their own. We have researchers from all over the world contribute to K-Developedia which helps us achieve our goal. This is why we use English as our main operating language. 
4. What were you hoping to achieve in this meeting?
   The ultimate goal, as always, was to raise the awareness of K-Developedia among students to help them use it even more extensively in their research. This is why we are trying to teach them how to use the system more thoroughly. The secondary goal was to invite students to interact and become familiar with our staff. As you know students generally meet with the staff from the Academic Affairs and Student Support Divisions only. K-Developedia staff doesn’t have same opportunity to meet students. So the brown bag event was one way to establish a good relationship. 
5. What are some of the main challenges you face while preparing for the brown bag event?
   I always enjoy arranging these events. It’s an exciting chance for us to meet students and promote what we do at the K-Developedia Team. I’d say the trickiest part is always the timing.  As you know KDI students are usually busy with coursework since we run on a trimester system. Sometimes unexpected events happen that may derail our schedule much like how the MERS epidemic did last year. It broke out after we arranged for everything so the event had to be postponed because students were concerned about meeting and eating together in a group. 
6. What is next for K-Developedia?
   At the moment, we’re working on a new project called Asia Development Open Access (ADOA). As you can probably infer from the name, we’re planning to create a repository of knowledge on development in Asia and open it up to the public. It’s still on the drawing board but we hope to have something tangible by the next year. We’re cooperating with the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex in the UK. We signed an MOU with IDS back in 2015 to collaborate for a “Global Open Knowledge (GOK) hubs project”. We hope our new ADOA initiative can play a significant role in pushing along GOK as well. We’re fairly happy with the progress we’ve made so far. Also, in terms promoting K-Developedia, we held information sessions to government officials from more than 15 countries and we hope to continue our promotional efforts moving forward.

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   By Marian GRASS (2015 MPP, Egypt)