A Living Lab is a new way to deal with community-driven innovation in real-life contexts. The Living Lab concept is fuelled by knowledge sharing, collaboration and experimenting in open real environments. This research explores the sustainable development of community Living Labs within a South African context. The members of rural communities need sustainable development support in order to create jobs and alleviate poverty. In order to do so they need an open multidisciplinary research and systems thinking support environment which is facilitated in the Living Lab environment. The Living Lab approach provides its user group with an opportunity to develop a much deeper understanding of how the various components in their functional environment operate and interrelate. In the research community the Living Lab concept seems to be gaining increasing acceptance as a way to deal with innovation and to get insight into the innovation process. Several Living Labs are currently connected in a network of Living Labs, both in Europe and in South Africa aiming to share best practices and lessons learned. Creating an innovative software based management model for Living Labs for the greater South African region is also part of the research objectives. This paper presents two interrelated frameworks for the establishment of a Living Lab within a South African context. The paper also highlights the important role of holistic Systems thinking in a Living Lab environment.

<strong>Background:</strong> The background to this study showed that many communities, countries and continents are only now realising the importance of discovering innovative collaborative knowledge. Knowledge management (KM) enables organisations to retain tacit knowledge. It has many advantages, like competitiveness, retaining workers’ knowledge as corporate assets and assigning value to it. The value of knowledge can never depreciate. It can only grow and become more and more valuable because new knowledge is added continuously to existing knowledge.<p><strong>Objective:</strong> The objective of this study was to present a framework for KM processes and using social media tools in a Living Lab (LL) environment.</p><p><strong>Methods:</strong> In order to find a way to help organisations to retain tacit knowledge, the researchers conducted in-depth research. They used case studies and Grounded Theory (GT) to explore KM, social media tools and technologies as well as the LL environment. They emailed an online questionnaire and followed it up telephonically. The study targeted academic, support and administrative staff in higher education institutions nationwide to establish their level of KM knowledge, understanding of concepts and levels of application.</p><p><strong>Results:</strong> The researchers concluded that the participants did not know the term KM and therefore were not using KM. They only used information hubs, or general university systems, like Integrated Technology Software (ITS), to capture and store information. The researchers suggested including social media and managing them as tools to help CoPs to meet their knowledge requirements. Therefore, the researchers presented a framework that uses semantic technologies and the social media to address the problem.</p><p><strong>Conclusion:</strong> The success of the LL approach in developing new web-enabled LLs allows organisations to amalgamate various networks. The social media help organisations to gather, classify and verify knowledge.</p><p><strong>How to cite this article:</strong><br /> De Jager, L., Buitendag, A.A.K. &amp; Van der Walt, J.S., 2012, ‘Presenting a framework for knowledge management within a web-enabled Living Lab’, <em>SA Journal of Information Management</em> 14(1), Art. #506, 13 pages. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/sajim.v14i1.506</p>

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The power and importance of collaboration and knowledge sharing within knowledge-intensive innovation focused environments is a huge driving force in today's knowledge driven economy. Decisions taken are based on knowledge available, and knowledge is gained by asking questions. Within a Living Lab environment, information and knowledge dissemination can take on many forms and are cardinal to the Living Lab's successful operation, where the creation of innovative solutions is a key deliverable. This paper presents a framework that incorporates questions as additional metadata tags to catalyze knowledge discovery. The question metadata are used as part of a collection of knowledge support services developed utilizing a Living Lab approach. The objective of the knowledge support services is to provide mechanisms to enable and fulfill various knowledge oriented activities such as information acquisition, learning, and knowledge sharing. Each of the knowledge oriented activities is enabled by the implementation and use of Knowledge Objects. This paper reviews popular metadata formats, including the Dublin Core standard, the Learning Object Metadata standard, and the Sharable Content Reference Model (SCORM). Also presented is the concept of a Knowledge Object Wrapper, a collection of metadata as part of a class hierarchy, which includes questions. The concept of a Knowledge Object is also revisited.

The potential offered by technology extends to certain challenges that comprise general social inclusion, isolation of elderly people in everyday social life and support for ageing in the context of daily activities. This paper focuses on implementing a VoIP platform for elderly patients and it proposes an adoption of User-Cantered Design (UCD) methodology for the design and development of VoIP platform in order to support elderly patients. The research was conducted as a literature review with the aim to assess the related studies in order to discover theories behind VoIP interconnections. In short, this was conducted through the use of case studies, like white papers, conference papers, documented VoIP organization information websites, journals and peer-reviewed articles with the aim of investigating and accepting various Open-Source tools that are currently available. After successful completion of all tests, the possibility of providing a minimized set of VoIP platform became known.