euforic blog

Open Data Nepal

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 17:57:00 +0000

Gilbert Sendugwa and Bibhusan Bista

We first met Bibhusan Bista from YoungInnovations, Nepal, at the training workshop for the World Bank Institute’s Social Reporting for Procurement programme. Bibhusan is also a central figure in the burgeoning Open Data scene in Nepal. I interviewed him about Open Nepal in Kathmandu last week, late at night in a hotel – which is why this is probably the worst quality video we’ve ever published! Open Nepal is the latest in a series of recent initiatives from a group of organisations including Freedom Forum, NGO Federation of Nepal, Young Innovations and the aidinfo programme at Development Initiatives. It is focused on ‘catalysing and supporting an ecosystem around transparency and access to Information’.

Nepal was the second country in South Asia to have a Right to Information Act, which was guaranteed in the new Constitution in 1990 and by an act of Parliament in 2007, although implementation has so far been limited. YoungInnovations and their collaborators aim at ‘translating the impact of international initiatives like International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), Open Government Partnership and other similar ones in Nepalese context'.

Bibhusan and YoungInnovations were involved in an early Nepal country study by Aid Info. An indicator of how the scene is developing since then comes from the success of their recent Hackathon, organised to coincide with a worldwide series of Hackathons, and described here in an AidInfo blog. Developers experimented with data exposed on Open Nepal, producing simple but effective applications such as this one comparing fuel prices in India and Nepal - addressing a hot issue locally.

The group, along with the World Bank and other partners are developing a programme of Open Data activities in June this year, which we will report on when details are available.

Third loop reflections or ‘go out and do some stuff’

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 09:23:00 +0000

This is the second post on the Climate Change Knowledge Exchange - From Action to Learning - held at IDS in early March 2013. As laid out in the first post, Ewen Le Borgne, Carl Jackson and I co-facilitated the workshop as part of our work for the Climate Change and Social Learning (CCSL) project, a stream of work in the Climate Change for Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) programme. We wanted to weave the social learning approach into the IDS Knowledge Exchange, partly because we believe that it provides an interesting methodology to address the issue of how to move from learning to action and partly as part of our own social learning about Social Learning. In this post I do my own reflecting on the process and it's outputs.

What would you do differently?

For the second day we set up a process that we hoped would put people into a different, more reflective, frame of mind as they approached the third thematic break-out session. The framing for the whole day was asking people to think about what they would do differently after the workshop at four levels: personally, in their organisations, in the context of their thematic groups - i.e. with those people gathered in the room - and, possibly, more widely.

Rob van der Berg, of the Global Environment Facility Evaluation Office, who had co-sponsored the workshop and led a key thematic group of evaluation of climate change, introduced the session with a five minute 'TED talk' style speech from the floor. He spoke without notes, passionately, about the extraordinarily gloomy outlook for the environment over the coming years. All, all the indicators - of bio-diversity, of sea temperature, of pollution, of climate-change related event - are spiralling downwards. The GEF has $20 billion for corrective action: the need is for trillions of dollars.

Participants were asked then to

"Reflect individually on a story of collective change in which you have been involved, part of your work, or separate, that illustrates how change works, and how have you been learning in that change. (5)
Meet with two other people and discuss what leads to change (20)
Then reflect individually on your own learning history: what can you learn from success or failure that will help you act differently how to act upon learning in an event without falling in the same trap
Share it with another person (10)

After coffee the participants returned to their thematic groups.

What does a third loop look and feel like?

On Day One the three of us did a nonsensical but fun introduction to the idea of triple loop learning, based on the iconic British class system sketch from the 1960s, in which each of us represented a loop. Ironically, I realise I approached the planning mainly in loop one and two mode, and hadn’t reflected enough myself, hadn't really gone into third loop mode. So I hadn’t grasped a key point about the relationship between the three loops which is that there is an exponential increase in the complexity of the process as we move from first to second to third loop. That means that the process slows, also exponentially.

Thinking Fast and Slow, a tremendous book by the Nobel Prize winning Daniel Kahnemann, talks about the mental and physical energy required to do complex tasks: we can’t drive effectively, walk slower, burn more calories if we focus on difficult tasks requiring what Kahnemann calls System Two thinking. Loop three thinking occupies different parts of our thinking processes, some foreground, some background. Writing this blog is a reflective act, but it is anchoring me to current processes that reflecting on a long walk wouldn’t. So it is the product of those slower, more reflective processes.

As we approached the final stages, considering what could come of the workshop, one of the participants reminded us that having no immediate outputs would be appropriate, indeed normal: that taking on board reflections that come out of a process designed to encourage deeper, non-operational, non-quotidian thinking will often take long time to surface. As an activist type I’d anticipated this kind of reaction from reflectors, but it’s hard not to feel disappointed when the actual outputs from the event seemed no different from any other event. Meanwhile, there was a lot of very positive feeling in the room, during our walking evaluation, and a many concrete proposals for future collaborations and other actions. People will be going out, 'to do stuff', as they were encouraged to do in the conference closing. And, with the IDS climate change team, we’re going to follow up in 3 months which will be an interesting exercise in itself: it’s rare that we follow up longer term, systematically – although it’s a common Next Step from workshops.

Development people default to project mode, framing responses and concepts in terms of a planning framework, action oriented, timebound, constrained by project definition processes. Part of that is a mindset, part of it is simply the product of the constant requirements created by project plans and operational realities, that people ‘see’ in lists and planning frameworks. That's reinforced by a typically insightful reflection from Liz Carlisle of IIED, that many busy people, especially at more senior levels, tend not to engage a lot with new ideas or people. Meetings, conferences, workshops, tend to be with people engaged in similar programmes, or networks: so being creative and innovative in workshop settings calls on relatively unfamiliar processes, and a sometime stale knowledge base. Therefore thinking about learning itself, about how change happens in a personal way requires a step sideways and out of daily life which is hard to achieve in a two day workshop. In our After Action Review Andy Newsham, the organiser, and I agreed that we needed at least a third day to match our ambitions.

As someone who promotes and takes part in social reporting from events, I was brought up short by the realisation that we make that pressure worse by tweeting, blogging, wiki-ing during the event: although our social reporting outputs are to some extent reflective, commentaries, holding up a mirror to processes and interacting in a different space to the physical, by running those streams we immediately anchor ourselves in the present and engage those parts of our brains which I associate with second loop learning. This blog, on the other hand, is the product of something different, which is interesting to me at least: we often stress the importance of blogging as a learning tool, for sharing, but it is only since I started blogging regularly here and for the Diplo Foundation that I have recognised the value of structuring reflections as a communication. That's critically important for those of us who work as consultants since we often don't have a team with whom we reflect or an organisation with various learning and KS processes. Pier Andrea Pirani, the other Euforic Associates and I work both together and separately, but even when we work together it's often online, so we relish the times when we meet and have time to share ideas.

'Slow Knowledge' and what would I do differently?

Not be so linear, since triple loop thinking isn’t linear, in the sense of having to pass sequentially between each stage.
Given, that and the issue of complexity, time and attention discussed above, I would start with a ‘loop three’ type exercise: get the reflection process started from the outset, and then constantly return to that process in short, intense bursts.
Following a request from a couple of participants, we added in a rapid Knowledge Cafe type process on Day Two morning (pictured here), when people moved around 'stations' within the large plenary room, visiting and hearing about the other thematic groups outputs from the Loop One and Loop Two processes. Another participant commented, when we were in the middle of our 'Loop Three style' conversation that she'd found that mixing of themes the most useful because in her experience, meeting people outside her specialism is what made her think differently, challenge her assumptions. So I would ensure we built in both thematic work - making sure people have an opportunity to dive deep, develop their story - and cross-thematic work.
Have moments without connectivity! I co-facilitated a Day O Learning exercise on 'Face2Face Knowledge Sharing' at the 2010 AgKnowledge Africa ShareFair in Addis. It's fascinating to re-read what I wrote in a reflective blog post, Slow Knowledge at the AgKnowledge Africa ShareFair an d McK-snacks,

"In much of my own work, within and outside IKM emergent, I engage with the Knowledge equivalent of Fast Food: new technology mediated communication and knowledge sharing, blood-pressure raising snacks of Tweets, Blogs or Blips, where the consumption only encourages more consumption."

Social Learning in an IDS Knowledge Exchange

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 07:00:00 +0000

Carl Jackson, Ewen LeBorgne and I co-facilitated a knowledge exchange at IDS entitled, "Acting on what we know and how we learn for climate and development policy' Andy Newsham of the IDS Climate Change team, the lead organiser, blogged on the genesis of the workshop, as did the IDS Director, Lawrence Haddad, on the context.

The three of us were were co-facilitating as part of our work for the Climate Change and Social Learning (CCSL) project, a stream of work in the Climate Change for Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) programme. We wanted to weave the social learning approach into the IDS Knowledge Exchange, partly because we believe that it provides an interesting methodology to address the issue of how to move from learning to action and partly as part of our own social learning about Social Learning.

This first blog describes the approach and the programme, developed by the three of us together with Andy Newsham and Geoff Barnard of the Climate Development Knowledge Network (CDKN), one of the event sponsors.

This event brought together four different strands or ‘framing cases’ (1) which all related to an overarching learning theme in relation with the focus of the event: ‘acting on what we learn for climate and development policy’. We wanted to integrate ‘social learning’ activities into the event to reflect on the relationship between individual and collective learning, seeking to identify what circumstances encourage the collaborative learning and action at scale necessary to engage with Climate Change.

The social learning experience was based on the triple-loop learning approach:

Instrumental learning: acquiring new knowledge
Communicative: understanding/reinterpreting knowledge through communication with others
Transformative: examining underlying assumptions leading to change in attitudes and social norms and collective action, ideally

This table lays out some differences between these three learning loops

This event has to bring together four different strands or ‘framing cases’ which all relate to an overarching learning theme in relation with the focus of the event: ‘acting on what we learn for climate and development policy’. To make this conference an even stronger and memorable event that leads to effective change, we propose to integrate ‘social learning’ activities into the event to weave the reflections and actions together and tap into the transformative potential of social learning. We aim particularly to reflect on the relationship between individual and collective learning, seeking to identify what circumstances encourage the collaborative learning and action at scale necessary to engage with Climate Change.

The social learning experience will use the triple-loop learning approach:

Instrumental learning: acquiring new knowledge
Communicative: understanding/reinterpreting knowledge through communication with others
Transformative: examining underlying assumptions leading to change in attitudes and social norms and collective action, ideally

This table lays out some differences between these three learning loops:

	First loop	Double loop	Triple loop
Nature	Instrumental	Communicative	Transformative
Use of knowledge	Acquiring new knowledge	Understanding / reinterpreting knowledge	Examining assumptions behind (particularly dominant) knowledge
Focus (also temporal)	Efficiency (now)	Effectiveness (next)	Dynamic relevance (over time) / adaptive capacity
Key questions	What are we doing now and how can we improve this? WHAT IS	What could we do to improve the pursuit of our aims? WHAT COULD BE	What should we do to improve the way we think about improving our approach? WHAT SHOULD BE
Approach followed	Static, unilateral information flows e.g. dissemination of case studies etc.	Participatory communication, bilateral knowledge flows	Dynamic experience building, multilateral knowledge flows

As the event unfolded we planned activities gave participants opportunities to go through these three loops by examining successively:

existing experiences: what are we doing now?
opportunities to integrate and improve our collective approaches: what could we do together?
reflections about how we are learning about our effectiveness in climate change work: what should we do to learn more effectively and remain relevant over time, build our adaptive management and critical thinking capacity to influence collective social learning and action at scale?

In a second blog I'll add my own learning about learning from the event.

1. Four thematic strands:

Whose knowledge counts? Locally-held knowledge for climate change adaptation (IDS & CCAFS) PC/AN
Brokers, translators and intermediaries: new roles and challenges for putting knowledge into practice (IDRC, IDS, USAID) BH
How to learn from climate change evaluations in and between organizations (CDKN & GEF EO) ELB
4. Extreme events and disaster risk reduction: what are we not learning? (IDS) CJ

Social reporting at ERF2013 annual conference

noreply@blogger.com (Pier Andrea Pirani) — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 16:15:00 +0000

Image credits: GDNet on Flickr

I've just returned yesterday for Kuwait City where, together with colleagues from GDNet, I've supported the social reporting at the 2013 ERF Annual Conference.

This is the third year I have attended this conference which have always found to be extremely interesting events, in terms of topics discussed and quality of speakers invited. This year event focused on the rise of Islamist parties following the Arab uprising, and what this means for the economic development of the region.

The plenary sessions looked at the causes of the Arab uprising and the rise of Islamist parties to power in Tunisia and Egypt; a comparison between these countries in terms of economic development policy since Islamist governments came to power; and finally a look at some future scenarios for the region.

With a small team of just three people we had to be selective in terms of what social reporting we could realistically do. We chose the usual suspects but we also tried something new.

Even if the crowd was not particularly Twitter-savvy - and unfortunately participants were not provided with Internet access till the third and last day of the conference (no need to comment on this...) - we covered the plenary sessions with live tweets using the hashtag #erf2013 - several tweeps from outside the event re-tweeted and joined in the conversation.

We also recorded several short video-blips with most of the speakers at the event. The videos are available on YouTube on this playlist. Most - if not all of them are - are also published on the ERF blog, together with short write-ups of the plenary sessions.

Further, we collected all social media outputs into a daily curated summary using Storify - see here the social stories for day one, two and three.

Last but definitely not least, we had done a bit of R&D (as in "robbing and duplicating") and got inspired by the multimedia coverage of the recent TED Global 2013 and their TED Quotables. We created a series of images with the most relevant quotes from speakers and participants at the ERF conference. While a bit more time consuming than we'd expected, these images worked well as we were displaying them on the big screen in the plenary room before each sessions started, alternating with pictures form the event. This attracted the attention of the participants who could view them as they were entering to attend the sessions. It was a nice experiment, and I think one I'll repeat in future social reporting of events.

Besides blogging, tweeting, blipping, photo-sharing and slide-sharing, what do you use when you do social reporting?

Research to Impact Hackathon ....and the winner was...

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 14:51:00 +0000

Well, we were all winners, if truth be told, in the sense that we all learned a lot from the experience of the Hackathon at iHub Research in Nairobi last week. To begin with, the iHub itself is still under three years old yet has blossomed into an extraordinary innovation centre at the centre of a buzzing ecosystem of developers, projects, events, people, good coffee and, well, more people. There are over 10,000 registered members of the iHub community and it was through those networks that we were able to attract so many creative and plugged-in developers.

One of the newer projects is iHub Research, one of the co-organisers of the event. Leo Mukutu is Research Manager there and she was one of the judges of the competition. In this clip Leo describes the role of iHub Research and the criteria she used to judge the entries.

There were six entries in all, and in this video clip people from each team describe their proposals - and you can see who won!

(Update: a summary blog from iHub research)

'Let me Hackathon that thing'

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 08:40:00 +0000

'Every good piece of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch', says Eric Raymond, author of the fabulous book on Open Source software, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Hackathons evolved to harness that personal passion of software developers to create interesting code that solves problems - or sometimes, just create elegant, interesting code simply to see what happens. Organisers provide a context - for example software platforms such as Ushahidi that constantly need to to be improved or movements and campaigns such as development data or aid transparency which need lots of programmes to import and aggregate data or present the data in a form usable by others and the public - and a space, with coffee, cakes and chocolate. Developers who enjoy working individually or in teams and are moved by the spirit of the organisers come together and have fun.

The Research to Impact Hackathon is different in significant ways to a standard hackathon. Firstly, there is often criticism that these events produce a lot of interesting but unfinished code, which is either taken over by the sponsor and developed internally or simply abandoned, with the developers un-engaged in the follow up. The sponsors of this event, IDS/ELDIS and CABI/R4D see this event as Phase One in a longer term process. They are providing small prizes for the best products but committing larger sums to supporting the development of particularly promising ideas and prototypes that have the potential to increase the use of research data.

Secondly, we wanted to provide focus to the developers based on an informed understanding of specific challenges faced on the ground, in East Africa, by those working in agriculture and nutrition, challenges which constrain the use of development data and opportunities it offers to enrich the development process. However, we had to steer carefully between being too directive of the developers - which could reduce creative and risk appearing to be asking for some free labour to help large organisations solve their problems - and not providing a clear enough set of scenarios.

So we were a bit anxious about how Day Two of the Hackathon would develop, especially since we were joined by some new developers who hadn't had the introduction to the personas, challenges and triggers which emerged from Day One of the Hackathon nor been part of the Ideation session. We should have known better: we are in the iHub, in Nairobi, Kenya, at the centre of a vibrant developer community, supported by the ideas and contacts of iHub Research. Many of the participants had been trained in mobile application development at the mLab - yet another source of energy within the iHub ecosystem (and the iHub is not even three years old!). And all the developers were in some way or another connected or developing software solutions to the needs of those in the agriculture value chain.

We introduced the data available from ELDIS, R4D and other relevant open data sources, including the World Bank's data site and the rapidly growing Kenyan Government OpenData portal; the ways to access the data through the ELDIS open API and the tools which Tim Davies is developing to access the data, including in Linked Data formats. Finally we introduced the personas from Day One, together with the ideas which had been rated as having the highest potential impact and most viable as the basis for developing a Proof of Concept in only two days (and nights!).

Chaos of the most productive kind ensued. People discussed ideas; formed, and reformed, teams; ate sausages; asked for more information about the personas; drank coffee; got support in exploring the data and learning to use the access tools available; fed-back ideas for discussion; storyboarded and planned; ate cake; began to hack. By the end of the day four groupings of ideas and people had emerged, all interesting and within the frameworks we had established, and some with the beginnings of demonstration code - either created or imported. Then we went for beer.

Day Three is a hack-day: teams will continue working on their ideas, preparing for a presentation on the morning of the fourth day, in some kind of Dragon's Den format. While the progress has been remarkable for two days, the acid test is, of course, what the teams can present on Day Four. Given their commitment to the longer term, the organisers are looking as much for coherent plans and realistic assumptions as finished code - but watch this space.

Research to Impact Hackathon with iHub Research, Nairobi

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 13:41:00 +0000

Open data on the web makes it possible to take information on research from many sources, and to generate ‘mash-ups’ that make it available in different places, on different platforms, and in ways that support action and impact. Open data can be remixed to answer key questions in ways that were not possible before.

One of the most interesting developments in the R4D project, which we have been supporting with CommsConsult and CABI, has been converting the metadata in the R4D database of DfID funded research to Open and Linked Data formats. The Institute for Development Studies (IDS) ELDIS team have been travelling in the same direction - working to open up access to their research information including by creating open APIs allowing anyone to tap into their 15+ years of curated development research. The rationale for this is that every year institutions, researchers and practitioners generate thousands of datasets, reports and articles about development issues. To give some idea of scale, DfID funds £200 million worth of research every year. Yet, much of this knowledge remains underused, locked away in online repositories such as R4D and ELDIS.

Presenting personas at the Research to Impact Hackathon

We tested this, perhaps a little unfairly, by asking the participants during the first day of the Hackathon we're working on this week in Nairobi, most of whom were subject experts we'd invited to provide context and scenarios for the developers to get their teeth into, how much they used either R4D or ELDIS data. About half had accessed the sites, very few accessed them more than once or twice a year. Yet these were researchers, information scientists and knowledge workers with intermediary NGOs like ALIN, all prime targets from the materials.

"Hackathons" (also known as a hackfest or hack day) are events in which computer programmers join forces with a number of other experts, such as designers, investors, project managers, and spend a short intense period together to develop technical ideas and solutions. The Research to Impact hackathon is focusing on the research data from R4D, ELDIS and other relevant sources - including those from Kenya such as KAINET - relating to agriculture and nutrition. We brought together subject matter experts with technical developers to explore and create innovative prototypes to increase the use and impact of research in development. The hackathon is being at the Nairobi iHub by iHub Research, a new programme within this open innovation space.

The first day focused on generating scenarios - use cases - for the developers to work on. We started by asking participants to identify some of the reasons that research data isn't accessed or used. The group then selected seven typical 'user types' who represent key potential audiences for the data. These personas included extension workers, researchers and knowledge workers - key intermediary roles for re-purposing data and linking with primary players in the agricultural value chain such as farmers, input suppliers and market intermediaries. The group also prioritised fleshing out the role of policy actors, key to addressing the whole range of issues which impact those working directly in agriculture. Working in groups these types were profiled and linked to the challenges previously identified. After rapid peer review specific 'triggers' were identified for each of the personas, things which might motivate them to change their behaviour in relation to the data. The personas will be shared in the EuforicWeb wiki as the Hackathon develops.

Evaluating ideas at the Research to Impact Hackathon

A group of developers joined in the afternoon. They were presented with the personas and had time to interrogate the subject specialists. We finished with an ideation session, when all participants were given 10 minutes to come up with at least 10 suggestions for technical developments - mobile or pad apps, web widgets or small pieces of linking or bridging code. Those ideas were located on a matrix representing high/low impact, high/low viability - in terms of being able to develop a proof of concept in the succeeding two days. There were an extraordinary number and range of ideas, both creative and very applied. The ideas which were voted as high/high will be taken into the hackdays to help kick-start the process.

Evaluation of CTA web2.0 and social media trainings 2008-2010

noreply@blogger.com (Pier Andrea Pirani) — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 19:59:00 +0000

One of the most interesting piece of work we carried out in 2012 was an evaluation for CTA of its web2.0 related capacity building events (2008-2012). The goal of this study was to learn from three years of this web2.0 and social media training programme; to understand which demographic is the most enthusiastic adopters of web2.0 tools, and the impact that digital tools have in terms of personal development and institutional changes.

CTA Web2forDev Training Opportunity - Photo credits: Web2forDev website

Today, a blog post on Web2forDev summarises the main findings of the study:

Between 2008 and 2010, CTA delivered 20 web2.0 related capacity building events, reaching a total of 510 trainees from over 20 ACP countries, mainly in Africa
Not surprisingly, trainees under 36 are more likely to adopt web2.0 applications, except for online social networking, which interestingly was not affected by age;
Female trainees have higher adoption rates than males for almost every web2.0 application;
Trainees working for NGOs and national and international organisations are more likely to adopt web2.0 tools than those in educational and research institutions;
Nearly 90% of trainees have improved their capacity to search for, access and share information;
The use of the iMark module is the preferred way chosen by trainees to introduce colleagues and co-workers to social media;
Bringing about systematic adoption of social media in institutions is much more challenging.

The article has generated some interesting comments and discussions, both on the Web2fordev website as well as in Web2forDev community on Dgroups.

A follow up post will soon be published to presents some of the recommendations included in the final report.

Dgroups 2012 Annual Meeting and online peer exchange

noreply@blogger.com (Pier Andrea Pirani) — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 09:58:00 +0000

As part of the management support services we are proving to the Dgroups Foundation, we're working with the its Board to organize the 2012 Annual Meeting.

After having met in Rome last year during the ShareFair , this year Annual Meeting will be held online on 15 November from 14:00 GMT and it will consist of two parts:

The Dgroups Partners Business Meeting - open to Dgroups members
An open peer exchange session on “How to make most effective use of Dgroups” - this session is open to all interested participants. It will be the occasion to hear from two different Dgroups Partners, FARA and RWSN, which will share their experience and lessons learned in using Dgroups for their work.

If you are interested in joining the public peer exchange session, few seats are still available from the event registration page on Eventbrite.

Data cake

noreply@blogger.com (Pier Andrea Pirani) — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 09:39:00 +0000

As part of our R4D work we're thinking about the next stage in its open data strategy, building on the work done by Tim Davies with CABI on publishing the R4D data in linked-data formats. So this just feels right:

Image by EpicGraphic

Thanks to @Duncan_IDS for the link

WBI social reporting apprenticeship programme on innovative procurement reforms

noreply@blogger.com (Pier Andrea Pirani) — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 05:41:00 +0000

We're in South Africa this week for a new, exciting collaboration we have started with the World Bank Institute (WBI). It's about social media, ça va sans dire, but this time we'll be working with quite different types of development professionals and on a very specific topic.

Indeed, for the next four months we will be working with the WBI to facilitate an apprenticeship programme in Social Reporting on Innovative Procurement Reforms.

The rationale for this apprenticeship program is that innovative procurement reform initiatives are happening around the world, including in Fragile States. These efforts can offer powerful insights about what drives procurement reform. However, they are infrequently well documented and shared as practitioners don’t have tools or the support to document their work, leading to a missed opportunity to bring visibility to their work and share with peers.

The programme seeks to address this knowledge and capacity-building gap.

The WBI has identified innovative procurement champions committed to advancing public procurement reform, transparency and efficiency and we'll be kicking off the programme with a 3 days face-to-face workshop in South Africa. In the workshop, we'll train participants in the use of web 2.0 and social media tools to capture and share their experiences.

One of the excellent features of this programme is that it goes well beyond the more usual social reporting training events. At the workshop, participants will agree the activity(ies) that they will explore and the colleague(s) with whom they will collaborate for the remaining months of the apprenticeship following the workshop. It will be up to participants to identify and agree upon activities. These could include examples such as:

documenting their own experiences of what works,
identifying and documenting common good practices across countries or regions,
developing training materials which describe the stages of a process or
reporting on a deeper follow-through on the implementation of a specific activity.

We'll support the apprentices with coaching throughout the duration of the programme, through online webinars, email discussions and virtual conferences.

All knowledge generated will be shared with a global community of practitioners for further learning and uptake - mainly through the Pro-Act platform.

In the video below, Marcela Rozo (WBI) introduces the Apprenticeship Program, its objectives and process.

Using Feedly as your personal home page

noreply@blogger.com (Pier Andrea Pirani) — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 05:00:00 +0000

In his post about Top tips for more effective advocacy Duncan Green recently wrote about the importance of setting up a personal home page as a way to keep on top of recent news and resources - before diving into your mailbox. He also pointed to the excellent guide by Owen Barder on how to set up your personal home page with Google Reader or similar services.

Most of the reasons and the advantages to use personal readers have been well described in these posts and there's no point for me to repeat them here.

What I'd like to share with you here is how personalised home pages are helping me to do my work, and what's the tool I'm using to manage my streams of incoming contents.

Not as common as it should be
But before going down into the details, one small reflection based on direct experience and observation from the social media trainings we conduct at Euforic Services: it really strikes me to see how many people still do not know or do not use personal home pages as preferred channel to 'read' the web.

This is true across the board and regardless of the background of people we train. In a workshop on social media for researchers we facilitated last June, only 1 out of more than 20 participants had set up his Google Reader, without actually using it. Similarly, in the social media workshops we're conducting these days at FAO, we are finding that well over 90% of participants do not know or do not use personalised home pages. That's a lot, isn't it?

What's in it for me
For me, my personal home page is the only way I could possibly keep track of about 215 (and counting...) sites and blogs - without spending all my day browsing around the net! The personal home page is the first thing I check in the morning, and then several other time during the day, to look for updates about relevant topics for my work (social and digital media, knowledge sharing and learning, ICTs in developing countries, etc), news from my country and the beyond, comments and analysis and...well..field hockey..

From my personal home page, I can manage different streams of incoming content, browsing my different sources and save items to read later, bookmark them in my Diigo and Delicious lists, share them through Twitter, Facebook and other social media channels. All in the same interface and with just few clicks.

Trying different tools..and sticking now with Feedly
After having tried different feed readers, for more than one year now my personal home page is set up using Feedly - and am really lovin'it!

The way I use Feedly is actually in combination with Google Reader. Indeed, Feedly provides two way synch with Google Reader so no matter if I add new subscriptions to one of the two, these get replicated onto the other. Same goes for items I read or save for later. Basically Feedly adds a much nicer interface of top of your Google Reader and allows you to browse your feeds more in a magazine style than in the dry, flat layout of Google Reader.

Besides RSS feeds, Feedly allows you also to import Twitter and Facebook content, and to tweet and share content to other social media media channels. Further, it promotes content according to 'social engagement', pushing on your front page the most popular items from your sources.

Oh, did I say that the Feedly mobile and tablet apps also look great? Maybe they are even better that the web interface for some aspects.

If you haven't tried it yet, I suggest you give Feedly a chance. Maybe using feed readers to read the social web will be a different, much nicer experience as it has been for me.

Content Objects - Nectar for busy social media bees

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 11:07:00 +0000

Online content on its own, however interesting, informative or attractive, is as static as a poster on a wall. It will attract attention from people who pass, who might tell other people, but the impact of the work you have put into developing and posting your content - often quite a lot of work - will be a fraction of its potential unless you put as much effort into promoting and spreading the word. After our first social media training workshops at FAO in July 2012 we developed a new metaphor to try and communicate both how this can happen and the value of the random connections which fuel social media communications and very, very rarely, make content go viral.

An iris in Oxford's Botanical Gardens

During the second workshop at FAO last week we introduced the new idea, using a natural metaphor since, as ever, nature got there first. With some trepidation, to an audience composed mainly of scientists, we talked about the role of bees in pollination. It was an excuse to show nice pictures of flowers - always good after lunch - which can represent an individual content object - a photo, video, blog or tweet. Flowers have evolved a variety of mechanisms to attract the insects they need to reproduce - colour, shape, smell, location and their structure, making it easy for bees and other insects to visit, collect nectar and pass on. In the same way, content needs to use all the tricks of the trade to stand out from the crowd. As well as the normal techniques for making the content communicate, these days that means ensuring that 'share this' buttons, or the equivalent, are prominently displayed - like the landing stage of the flower (see the bottom of this blog post).

A bee visiting an iris, already carrying pollen

The second element in the metaphor is the pollen that collects on the bees as they go from flower to flower. Randomly, unaware of their central role in passing on genes, the bees transmit the pollen from one flower to another. The parallel with social media is, we hope, obvious: the famous - and very shaky - claims that a tweet reached n1000 people operates on the same principle. If someone re-tweets one of my tweets then all of that person's followers will see it and, in the random way that tweet-viewing works, a tiny fraction of them might spot something in the second that it scrolls by and pass it on, and so on.

To enrich the metaphor, bees go back to their hives and communicate the location of the flower. I was startled that this amazing piece of scientific decoding wasn't universally understood. At the risk of stating the obvious, as these pictures below show, patient scientists observed and decoded the movements of bees returning to hives and recognised that they were communicating direction and distance through a precise set of dance moves (well, sort of dance moves, of a bottom waggling kind). Other bees set off to the same spot, and so the cycle continues. Again, we hope the link to social media is clear: adding a link to a tweet, or mentioning people in a blog, or tagging a photograph is doing the same thing as the bee dance: telling our hive - followers, friends, readers - precisely where this good smelling, tasty, bright content object can be found.

Bees dance, communicating direction & distance in relation to the sun

And in the wonderful way of the world, bees also turn the nectar into honey, which is harvested across the world by animals and humans. Without being too fanciful about it, this can be seen as analogous to the way that learning and knowledge spreads and is shared, where other people's ideas and learning help us manufacture something that is both new and made up of millions of ideas from other people, places and times.

It's always good when you arrive at a point and see the marks that show someone else has passed this way. I learnt that Peter Casier has developed a similar metaphor in his work for CGIAR on social media strategy. Peter uses the metaphor of candy and shops, where the research item is the candy, the site the shop, and the social media task is to go out and spread the word - through tweets, blogs etc. We must both have a sweet tooth.

Two sides of the Evaluation Coin

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 17:46:00 +0000

Evaluating projects is probably the most demanding of development roles. Good Development depends on learning, on knowledge sharing and on adapting projects to emerging issues and changes in the external environment. It sounds so easy put like that, but changing direction - especially if it involves reducing or closing down activities - is difficult and fraught. Evaluators walk into a minefield of expectations, anxieties, conflicting interests and plain old financial pressures when they take on the task of reviewing progress within a project and reporting back to all those who are involved - the people in whose name the project is being run, the project staff, the managers and the donors.

As we reported back in December 2010, together with CommsConsult and John Rowley, we carried out an evaluation of the AfricaAdapt project for the Institute of Development Studies (IDS). The evaluation, as many do, took up far more time than we had estimated - and budgeted - and was a difficult exercise involving a lot of negotiation, both with the client and the project staff. However, we learnt a lot in the process and the engagement with our colleagues was intense and, generally, enjoyable.

Determined to walk our talk we signed up for the virtual writeshop process led by Irene Gujit for the Better Evaluation project. The aim was to work with the contractor - Penelope Beynon, then of IDS - to write a joint account of the project, exploring what worked and what didn't work, and suggest recommendations so others could possibly avoid the problems we faced.

Looking at the Better Evaluation new website, full of fascinating and insightful resources, including the report we developed on the evaluation - Two sides of the Evaluation Coin. It's quite possibly unique amongst the resources in being written by both the contractor and the consultants, and where we couldn't agree on a joint account, we spelt out our differences.

Social reporting at KM Singapore 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Pier Andrea Pirani) — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 08:23:00 +0000

I've arrived today in Singapore where I'll be doing social reporting at the KM Singapore Annual Conference. This is the second year that I have attended this event and I very much look forward to the conference starting tomorrow.

Organized by the Information & Knowledge Management Society of Singapore (iKMS) - a non-profit organisation aimed at serving information and knowledge management (KM) professionals - the 2012 KM Singapore Conference is the 9th Conference organised by the Society. For this year, the theme of the event is "Exploring the Frontiers of KM". To quote from the conference brief:

We want to look at emerging trends and reflect on implications for information and knowledge managers. Such trends may be in the realms of business management, IT, science, economy or society. The conference aims to bring together the IKM Community in Singapore, both IKM practitioners and partners from the public and private sectors to share and learn about the latest development in KM in Singapore and beyond.

Though the target audience is mainly from Singapore, several international speakers who'll take the floor over the next two days. And the programme looks *really* good! Check the conference website and judge for yourself.

So you are not in Singapore and you are interested in following the event remotely? No problem, we've got that covered!

The crowd here is very Twitter savvy so you can follow the hastag #kmsg for live tweets, quotes and twitpics from the event. Event better, you can check the awsome Twitter wall provided by JamiQ (@kelvinq) and see the different Tweets visualized in a great way.

In addition, the KMSG website will feature daily updates, including blogs and video interviews with speakers and participants, as well as pictures and presentations.

Join in and participate from wherever you are!

Learning social media online - UNITAR ICfD course

noreply@blogger.com (Pier Andrea Pirani) — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 09:30:00 +0000

When Euforic Services approached me last year to facilitate an online course on social media, I didn’t imagine I would have so much fun. Last year I had participants from many different countries and regions as well as professional backgrounds and levels of knowledge. This definitely made for a good mix of people and certainly their contributions were inspiring. This year, I’m having the privilege to facilitate the course again along with a colleague based in Nigeria, Johnson Opigo. I’m still enjoying it very much!

The online course Innovative Collaboration for Development (ICfD), jointly developed by UNITAR and FAO has a unique approach to teaching and learning that is hands on and focuses on knowledge sharing. Six different modules (one or two weeks in length each) build up on concepts and skills gained throughout the course. Besides having interactive lessons, there are many online resources that help reinforce the concepts and tools reviewed. Activities and exercises help participants familiarize themselves with a wide range of tools and approaches to social media. For busy professionals, this course is ideal as all is needed is a computer and internet connection. People are able to fit the exercises, assessments and evaluations within their own schedules. We all are based in different parts of the world, and we don’t need to be connected at the same time!

“This course has been an eye opener for me. I've always seen social media as a tool that business and for profit organization could leverage but I've never considered how it could be used for non-profits, particularly those at the community and grassroots level. I'm really glad I had the opportunity to participate in this training as it has caused me to think differently.” – Summer 2011 participant

The emphasis is not on the tools available, but rather on how an organization can choose and use the tools effectively to achieve specific goals according to their needs. Therefore, at the end of the 6 modules, each participant designs a social media strategy for his or her organization with clear objectives and measurable outcomes, giving them the opportunity to take something concrete back to work.

"The knowledge gain will definitely be an asset to me and my organization. I plan to put these skills gained into practice as soon as possible.” – Summer 2011 participant

Furthermore, this course concentrates specifically in the not for profit sector, with examples, case studies and stories that are relevant, so participants can relate to similar challenges and opportunities and they can adapt strategies that suit their requirements.

What makes a difference in this course is the participation of all the people involved. It’s definitely not a linear contribution facilitator-participant, but rather a collective collaboration where participants are encouraged to share their own experience and provide insights and recommendations to fellow colleagues. We all learn from each other.

“It was really great meeting all these great minds for you all where great inspiration to me. Thank you all for your contributions and dedication to the course.” – Summer 2011 participant

Following the success of the previous online courses, UNITAR and FAO are launching the Innovative Collaboration for Development (ICfD) course again this fall from 15 October to 14 December, 2012. Registrations are now open and applications must be submitted online until 28 September.

More information can be found on the course introduction and application page. There is still time to be part of this exciting experience!

by Rosamelia Andrade - Euforic Services Associate

R4D Peer Exchange on Theories of Change - Videos and resources

noreply@blogger.com (Pier Andrea Pirani) — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 08:38:00 +0000

On July 31 2012 we organised a Peer Exchange session on Theories of Change (ToC). The event took place at DFID in London, was organised in the context of the R4D project with our colleagues from CABI and CommsConsult. The aim was to better understand how ToC can be used in research uptake and communication programmes.

Around 15 people took part in this two-hour session. For the occasion, as well as DFID staff, we were joined by Duncan Green from Oxfam GB and Simon Batchelor from IDS, who have both done a lot of thinking and and writing on the subject of ToC and research.

Two excellent summaries and reflections on the meeting can be found on Duncan Green's blog and on Research to Action website:

After the session, we recorded a short conversation with Simon Batchelor and Duncan Green. In the video below, Simon and Duncan explain how they got interested in Theories of Change. They discuss how ToC can be used in research programmes and how DFID and other donors could created incentives for researchers to use ToC in their work.

The video is about 12 minutes long but worth watching there is rich content and insights that reflect the discussion and debate of the day.

In case you don't have time to watch the full recording, we have also produced these five short clips:

More resources and discussions on Theories of Change in research can be found on the Research to Action website.

Blog posts from previous R4D Peer Exchange sessions are available at this link.

Social media peer exchange session with FAO senior managers

noreply@blogger.com (Pier Andrea Pirani) — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 09:25:00 +0000

Social media and other collaborative web 2.0 tools are now firmly embedded in the mainstream of information, communication and knowledge sharing processes, both strategic and everyday. However, in our experience running social media training workshops in organizations over the years we have often seen how difficult it is to translate the enthusiasm of participants learning to use new tools into changed work functions and processes.

Sometimes, this has to do with the lack of management buy-in, resulting in little or no space for staff to try and experiment with social media on a daily basis - let alone the integration of new tools to support existing processes.

After the social media workshop we recently held at FAO, we had organized a two-hour session for Senior and Middle managers. This session, structured as a Peer Exchange, was meant to addresses three questions:

How can social media enrich communications and knowledge sharing activities, bring communities of practice closer and facilitate the flow of information and knowledge?
From an operational perspective, what is the most effective way to mobilise and manage resources to support these processes in teams, programmes and across projects?
Over a three to five year time-frame, what are the most effective strategies for maximising the impact of knowledge sharing and communications through building up and integrating the use of social media and other digital tools?

After a quick run around the table to introduce participants and collect the questions they had brought to the session, we kicked off with a presentation on the relationship between social media and information, knowledge sharing and communication. In particular, we looked at two case studies from other agricultural development organisations illustrating how social media can enhance information, knowledge sharing and communication activities.

The first case study, prepared by our colleague Vanessa Meadu, highlighted the experience of the CCAFS programme and how they used social media for communications and outreach during the Rio+20 event. The second case study instead presented the work of the ILRI KMIS Team and how they have been integrating social media in everyday business processes.

Using Social Media to communicate online and share knowledge from Euforic Services

The discussion that followed covered a range of interesting issues, some specific to FAO and some more generically applicable:

FAO, like other organisation, already has 20 years of experience in web communications: it is important that with social media typical mistakes from the past are avoided (which in a way was the aim of the session, to share learning and experience!).
There is a trade off for FAO programmes and projects between doing more social media and diverting resources from other activities, especially as resources are limited. Having social media strategy templates would help managers decide where and how it is worth investing resources.
Strategies are not enough, clear work plans are also necessary - and having example templates here also would help managers in their decision-making.
With social media, the goal is engagement, it's about dialogue and conversations.
The Communication and Partnership team of FAO is developing a new version of FAO Social Media Policy to ensure that social media is used consistently across the organization and FAO projects itself as one single organization across the social media landscape. Therefore, Facebook is being used centrally and there is only one official FAO Facebook account. The 'one account policy' is a sensible approach followed also by other UN agencies.
The different teams and departments need to provide the Communication team with content and they will take care of disseminating it through Facebook - however, these content objects need to come with the right metadata and descriptions. A description of this work flow is being developed and will soon be shared within the organization so that staff is made aware of this.
It is important to realize and understand that the shelf life of individual content objects is longer than one of individual websites set up for specific programmes and projects.
In some FAO divisions, there are already several early adopters and innovators. Their talent and enthusiasm could be leveraged by asking them to produce content objects that work well across social media channels such as Facebook; example of these include quizzes and 'did you know' type of questions.

Overall, it was a fascinating session - even though only five managers were able to come on the day (it was mid-July in Rome!).

We'll continue these conversations at the second and third FAO social media workshop planned for October and November.

FAO Social Media Workshop

noreply@blogger.com (Pier Andrea Pirani) — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 06:41:00 +0000

Last week both Pete and I were in lovely Rome for the first of three social media workshops with FAO staff. It was great to facilitate again a workshop together - as we work together almost on daily basis, but virtually. It was also great to be back at FAO and work with our good friend and colleague Gauri Salokhe.

However, I must confess I was a bit nervous as we were getting closer to the kick off of the workshop...

Well, it certainly was not our first social media workshop, quite the contrary...And we were well prepared: we had spent quite some times over the weeks prior to the event to design the workshop and produce slides and training materials, counting also on the excellent collaboration of Vanessa Meadu (CCAFS and Euforic Services Associate, who will co-facilitate in the next two session) and the useful feedback from Gauri.

However, this time around we had opted for a complete new methodology and we were very curious and excited to see how it would be received by the participants.

[Workshop participant Uwe Barg reflects in what he learnt in the Social Media workshop]

Over the years, we had learnt the lessons that social media tools are fun to use and you can get training participants very enthusiastic when they put their hands onto things like Google reader and Netvibes, or when they practice to edit and upload a video online. The question remains, however, on how they will adopt the different tools in their daily work practices, and if they will be able to incorporate social media in the tasks they are required to perform at the workplace. Even more so, as you consider that these people are probably the middle and late adopters of social media.

So how did we go about it?

Start from the business functions, not from the social media tools!

Quite simply, instead of starting from a standard set of tools - the typical social media toolkit of a knowledge worker in development - we started from the business functions this worker has to perform. The KS Toolkit provided to be an excellent starting point, with a quite comprehensive list of example contexts and specific tasks one may need to achieve. From this long list of functions, we boiled them down into three main areas:

Project management

Collaboration

Communication and promotion.

For each of these, we identified a set of specific sub-functions. Through a pre-training survey, participants indicated the work processes and functions that were most relevant for them and on the basis of the results, we matched functions and tools; better yet, we bundled a set of core tools around each of the specific functions that were chosen in the survey, excluding the tools that were already known to participants. At the end of the first day of the workshop, we 'negotiated' with participants and together selected the tools that we would practice with (hands on) or simply demo and introduce (in speed geeking session) on the second day of the workshop.

Overall the agenda setting was very flexible and 'democratic', and we tried to accommodate participants requests as they emerged. Still, three sessions were 'non-negotiable':

A stakeholder assessment - This in fact was the starting point of the workshop: you need to have clear who you want to reach and engage with, before you look into the how social media can help you doing it.

A session on 'personalized listening dashboards' (i.e. Google reader and Netvibes - and yes, we do need a better title for it...) - We strongly believe that being able to read the web through RSS feeds and mastering the tools to do so is fundamental in today's personal information management and to avoid information overload (or filter failure, according to how you see it)

A closing session on strategy - From our experience, getting participants to start thinking strategically how they would put social media at work in their context is a key component of an effective workshop, something that participants can go back to their desk with and start implementing immediately.

So how did this work out?

Positive feedback...but there's always room for improvement!

Personally, I had the feeling the overall methodology worked well: starting from the business functions put the whole workshop in a complete different perspective. Moreover, the fact that the ultimate choice of tools to explore came from participants themselves put the ownership of the event in their hands. The personal feedback we received from the participants also confirmed these impressions, as well as the overall score of the online evaluation we asked them to fill in after the workshop.

However, as always, there is room to improve the workshop, and we're already working to incorporate the lessons learnt in the next sessions:

The group (15 participants) was a mix of communication officers, programme officers and technical officers. This meant that the entry level and the knowledge and practical experience with social media was very different amongst the different participants. We'll try to have more homogeneous groups in the next two sessions.

Across the workshop, we repeatedly stressed on the concept of 'content object': we wanted participants to understand that being online today is not just about uploading a report online on your corporate website. Increasingly, it is about creating different content objects around it, or different products for different audiences. These objects ought to have 'legs' to be able to travel across the web - and to be share-able so that your audience can pass them on to their own friends and followers and help you disseminate what you do. This concept worked out well but we need to have more graphics and diagrams to make it even clearer, especially to a beginner audience.

We had a conversation around FAO social media policy on the last day of the workshop - right before participants had to develop their own social media plans, for their programme, project or team; for some participants, this conversation should have happened up front at the beginning of the whole workshop, so that they would have a clear idea what they are allowed and encouraged to do. We're still discussing where this session would fit best.

The next two sessions will be in October and November, there are already quite some FAO staff that have expressed their interest in participating - and hopefully there's some positive buzz in the building after last week training and both sessions will be fully booked.

By the way, did I mention we also had a very interesting peer exchange session with some FAO senior managers? Well, stay tuned, we will be blogging about it soon!

Seven principles for middle and late adopters of social media

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 12:08:00 +0000

We are meeting different people these days when we talk about and work with social media, more of the massive numbers in the middle and latter portions of the classic adoption curve.

Presenting and facilitating at three very different events - the eDiplomacy day at the Instituto Publico in Rome, an ICARDA/ICRISAT programme inception workshop in Dubai and an informal chat with a group of international development consultants in Oxford - I heard similar things from people who are only now feeling their way into how they can engage with the online mainstream:

there are many from the ‘early majority’: people who have became enthusiastic and skilled users of several social media or collaborative platforms and who want to integrate them into their everyday work, as well as evaluate some of the less-well known tools
there are probably more from the ‘late majority’ who are involved in one or two platforms, sometimes uneasily or by default:

'I am on Facebook to follow the kids' is something I've heard around the world;
the logistics information, agenda and reports for the Dubai workshop were on a wiki, which for many of the participants was their first real exposure to anything other than Wikipedia: they had no choice;
'I kept being invited to LinkedIn so I eventually joined'

and there are some classic late adopters checking out the space: 'everyone tells me I need to be on Twitter, do I?' to which the answer is, 'it depends'. I don't like the term 'laggards’. It is loaded and inaccurate: it implies everyone will - should - adopt, eventually. But there is, of course, no reason to join any of these platforms unless it serves a purpose.

And what is the mainstream? As an illustration I listed for one of the groups the tools that I use regularly, not because I am a model but because they are also typically used by many other early adopters I know. The list is at the bottom of this post.

Seven principles for those late into the social web

It’s hard to come up with general principles for the majority, since it includes all human variation and possible sets of interests. And in 2012 there are many, many mature products on the market which can be adapted to suit an individual’s needs. For a long time in our training we have used business functions within organisations as the basis for assessing need and interest. It's an approach that can be extended to individuals. For example, promotion and collaboration were the two functions which generated most interest amongst the group of consultants. Here are some notes from our discussion, elaborated later of course, which is the right of the blogger.

As ever, start with your aims: why would you want to use one of these tools? For example:

Promotion: what is the audience you want to reach, where do they hangout online? Research, join and start to engage.
Collaboration: are your colleagues already using a tool? How good is their Internet access and how confident are they using social media? Select an appropriate platform (see below) and invest the time in learning how to use it well, so you can support them. Note that if you choose a wiki they will probably find it surprisingly difficult.

Engage with people: the essence of social media is that it is, well, social. That means personal conversations, linking people to people, sharing information, ideas etc, joining important lists and conversations on other people’s sites. These are not platforms for broadcast messages. Crucially, it also means keeping on top of the exchanges, for example, commenting on comments, thanking people for linking to your work or RT your tweets.
Feed the web and it will feed you back. For example, linking to other people’s content, RT in Twitter, liking in Facebook or slideshare and commenting in blogs will get you noticed, connected and - if your content has meaning - shared in turn
Use groups of tools, linking and integrating: many social media tools are designed to one thing well but they are all designed to interact and exchange data (to be mashed up, as they say). For example, I echo tweets into LinkedIn (via the Hootsuite client) and selectively into Facebook (you simply have to link the two accounts and use #fb). I tweet about content I generate - Blogs, videos, photos, slides;
Always share and record your work online somewhere public, for example slides on slideshare, project progress on Blogs or Twitter
Be yourself: authenticity scores over slickness, although manufacturing 'authenticity' earns PR firms and political spin merchants a good living.
Have fun: Good social media practice has a lot in common with being a good party host: introduce people to people, provide interesting titbits, circulate regularly, help people have fun.

So what social media tools do you use?

For the record, and because we believe in transparency, here is the list of tools I regularly use, ranked loosely by how often and how important they are to my work:

Twitter (via client software - hootsuite [web client] or tweetdeck [dowloadable client])
Delicious (it's always surprising how few people who work collaboratively with others around the world use Delicious or one of the competitors like Diigo)
Dropbox (probably the most straightforward collaborative application since it requires no social media experience and, carefully managed, can serve as a common repository for collaborative projects. Importantly, it doesn't require users to change their favourite tools, like MS Office or the Mac equivalents
Wiki (e.g. euforicweb; platforms I use include mediawiki [free, open source: clunky, the original, and still the Wikipedia platform]; wikispaces; pbworks) Note that a lot of people find learning to use a wiki quite difficult: for example the 'edit' function, also a basic essential for blogging, flummoxes people who haven't had a lot of experience)
Google docs (tends to be easier to understand for new users, since the applications 'feel' similar to MS Office packages that people use already. It does require good Internet access, although there is offline access to documents. Candidly, I have had more problems that I expected with offline Google docs)
Facebook
News and other feeds, through Google Reader; we suggest using an iGoogle Home Page as an introduction to the value of filtering news through feeds, or netvibes, which allows users to share and publish a common home page, as in this great example from Stephanie Psaila of Diplo Foundation
Blogs (writing on our own blog; for communication support, for example the Diplo Foundation blog, from where I cross-post here or from events, such as those we support for GDNet. I always quote John Naughton as my favourite blogger, partly for interest and partly because he does it so well; Tim Davies is another superb digital-artist)
Slideshare
LinkedIn
Scheduling tools (for example Doodle for diaries; eventbrite for, er, events)
YouTube (we use Blip.tv, as it syndicates content to other sites; Vimeo is used by many people for video quality reasons)
Flickr for pictures and images (see again euforicweb for how we easily the content can be shared and displayed; many people also Google’s platform called Picassa)
Mindmeister, for collaborative mindmaps
Yammer, which works as an internal Twitter

There are several platforms I want to explore a bit more

Tumblr, and easy to use and flexible blogging and aggregation tool
Google+, Google's 'social network', which is apparently used by more people than Twitter, but still has to convince me
Pinterest which enables people to collect and link to images from across the web and I communicate best through images

The states of eDiplomacy

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 08:39:00 +0000

After a long, competitive selection process we are then told we know nothing and can't use the knowledge and skills we bring with us', said an exasperated new foreign diplomat based in Rome from a diplomatic service which lags a long way behind the mainstream in its adoption of social media and the other tools of eDiplomacy. It was especially surprising to hear of such myopia in Italy where 73% of the online population are on Facebook (approx 37% of the population), making it Facebook's 11th most active market. The majority of the approximately 80 participants at the eDiplomacy day held at the Instituto Diplomatico in Rome this week told more positive stories about how their own Ministries are engaging with the digital landscape. For example, Ambassador Bernardino Regazzoni, introducing the evening expert panel session, described how the Embassy of Switzerland in Italy employs the experience of younger diplomats in their drive to engage online.

In a time of constrained and reducing budgets, resource issues were understandably high on the agenda. Few countries could match the three staff working on communication at the US Embassy in Rome. Yet, like the Italian Instituto itself, most are creatively redeploying and retraining staff to be able to engage with what the majority recognised as essential tools for public diplomacy. Stefano Baldi, the Director of the Instituto illustrated how they are using all kinds of technology from video streaming to blogging, as can be seen in this impressively rapidly turned around video from the Italian Ministry (up a long time before I could complete this blog!).

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr (or a similar photo-sharing application) and Blogging have emerged as the standard set of tools used to implement the kind of multi-channel communication strategy shown to be effective by those leading the band of eMFAs into the next phase of the digital age. Put on the spot, a narrow majority of the participants at the evening session agreed that Embassies should engage with at least three such channels. To sceptical looks from those struggling with budgets, participants from several Embassies told stories illustrating how, beyond an initial learning period, integrating different social media channels is an economical use of time, relative to the returns in term of closer engagement with the different audiences with which MFAs aim to connect.

In reviewing the eDiplomacy Hype Cycle, which we in Diplo have been discussing recently, participant's accounts of progress and good practice within their own institutions suggests that there are micro-cycles within an overall cycle which are applicable to national contexts. MFAs like the US, the Canadian and the UK FCO have been using social media tools for over three to four years and they have learned how to maximise returns from investing limited resources. Other later adopters are engaging with enormous enthusiasm but are likely to experience something of a backlash - a descent into the Trough of Disillusionment - as longer-term resource commitments become clearer, along with the typically slow build of a new online profile in a digital space which is becoming more and more crowded. As for what next, during his opening remarks to the panel discussion, Ambassador Carmel Inguanez from the Embassy of Malta in Italy invited participants to an Innovation in Diplomacy conference which is to take place in Malta on the 20^th and 21^st of November. The digital space changes so rapidly it will be fascinating to see what will already be history in six months time. Jovan Kurbalija reminded us that Diplomacy has always struggled with the acute tension between continuity and change, a tension screwed ever tighter by the imperative to adapt policy and practice to the new digital seas in which we all swim. (cross posted from Diplo Foundation site)

An eDiplomacy Hype Cycle

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 08:36:00 +0000

The recent surge of interest in Digital Diplomacy - perhaps eDiplomacy's younger-looking cousin - is the latest wave in the adoption and integration of computing and Internet enabled applications. While more and more MFAs and Governments are engaging actively online for good reasons, and with increasing confidence and success, there is the unmistakeable whiff of hype about some of the activity. There are also voices questioning the Return on Investment from deeper e-engagement. For example, in a fascinating piece about eDiplomacy in Indonesia Dr Shannon Smith questions just how many people Facebook and Twitter pages connect to in a given population and whether they represent a significant influencing group:

"US e-diplomacy needs to be put into perspective. There are 55 million internet users in Indonesia, which means that less than 1% of those are currently reached by the US Embassy. With a total population of 245 million, the US Embassy reaches only 0.21% of all Indonesians via social media..... [and]... Spiderman is five times more popular [on Facebook]"

Then the recent furore over the fight back on Twitter by the Chinese and Russian governments to US eDiplomacy targetting their populations suggests that, at best, any first-mover advantage enjoyed by those MFAs who have been quick off the mark has now been lost. At worst it may mean that in terms of Public Diplomacy, using Twitter is revealed as the equivalent of standing in London's Hyde Park corner shouting at your friends and passing tourists.

The Gartner Technology Hype Cycle reports are popular and influential. The format lends itself to reflecting about what might be real and what overblown in the current eDiplomacy/digital Diplomacy wave. Here are some first suggestions culled from a few of the Diplo team. We comment on both digital tools that lend themselves to eDiplomacy and Diplomatic functions that can exploit those tools.

What do you think? Have we left out some key tools or functions? Are we unkind or too timid? Please comment below, or send us your own versions.

(cross posted from Diplo Foundation website)

Re-imagining the future

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 08:33:00 +0000

The excellent new future-gazing piece from Mary Meeker, embedded below, set the Internet abuzz last week. Her annual Internet Report has “acquired legendary status in the industry because it distilled from the froth some elements of reality”, says John Naughton, himself well regarded as a well-informed and prescient commentator. Naughton often characterises how most of us future-gaze technology trends with the joke of the policeman finding a man on his hands and knees under a lamp post:

“What are you doing?
"Looking for my keys”
“Is that where you dropped them”
“No, but at least I can see here”

However, one of Meeker’s strengths is that she bases her report on deep analysis of data trends. For example, Meeker estimates that there are now 2.3 billion internet users worldwide, which is nearly a third of the world's population and that number is growing at 8% per year. Read Write Web (@RWW) has a useful summary of some highlights. @RWW is interesting both for its often great content and for what it shows us about the state of mind in the US digerati. RWW’s "standout statistic was that 29% of USA adults now own a tablet or eReader, up from 2% less than three years ago. That's been fuelled by the rapid growth of devices like the iPad and Kindle.” For those of us less absorbed by US trends, recent research into the information ecosystem of six ‘Southern’ countries by IDS found this pattern replicated amongst ‘policy-actors’ in those countries.

Naughton, on the other hand, finds it even more startling that there are now 1.1 billion 3G mobile subscribers and that they are increasing at 37% per year. In the context of the important debates about net neutrality, Naugton’s take is interesting. He extrapolates from this trend to illustrate one of his current themes, the way that our freedom to roam on the net is being weakened since we all of us get mobile connectivity courtesy of telcos while those of us with iDevices accept that our apps and content are tightly managed by Apple.

Naughton, like me, was also interested in what Meeker shows us about advertising trends which will probably determine the trajectory of Facebook and its competitors.

“If you're Facebook, then it's less good news because mobile advertising is much less profitable than standard online advertising. Slide 19 of Meeker's deck estimates that the eCPM (short for "effective cost per mille" – cost per thousand impressions) for mobile ads is five times less than the desktop equivalent. This explains some of the reservations buried in Facebook's pre-IPO filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission”.

More apocalyptically, Michael Wolff argues in his MIT Technical review blog, The Facebook fallacy, that this weakness in the Facebook revenue model means it is a question of when it will crash, not if, and suggests that Facebook’s increasing dominance means a crash may bring down the Internet! Note that the blog illustrates well a core principle of the Internet Futures business: why be tentative, nobody else knows either. But a lot of smart money follows Mary Meeker, indeed she has moved from Morgan Stanley and is now a partner at Kleiner, Perkins Caulfield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley's leading venture capital firms. She has done a lot of thinking about the implications of the data she studies so carefully, and presents them in a compelling set of slides envisaging possible futures. In a second blog we will consider how these trends might play out in eDiplomacy. Meanwhile, settle down for some serious thinking:

KPCB Internet Trends 2012

View more presentations from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

(cross posted from Diplo Foundation website)

We’re all Digital Migrants now

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — Fri, 18 May 2012 08:29:00 +0000

‘Social media for sceptics’ could have been a subtitle for the coaching programme we have been running with Diplo staff and teaching faculty. Distinguished and deeply experienced diplomats and educators were presented over the four weeks with an introduction to personal dashboards like iGoogle or Netvibes, tools to help select from and manage the racing ‘web of flows’; they engaged with enthusiastic bloggers; and we shared experiences of using LinkedIn and Twitter.

If there was an icon for many of the exchanges it would be a pair of folded arms, below a head leaning back, with a raised eyebrow, perhaps saying, “Really?” Entirely understandably and properly, those experienced in the subtlety, complexity and richness of diplomatic communication wanted evidence not hype, to interrogate the real and potential contribution of social media. These tools are increasingly part of the mainstream in Public Diplomacy, illustrated in the slowly growing activity on #eDiplomacy and #DigitalDiplomacy on Twitter and the professional social media operations of many larger MFAs, like the social-media rich US State Department site or the open promotion of UK FCO Digital Diplomacy. In their public engagement on the platforms diplomatic communicators have to adapt their language and engage with the predominant culture, much as people do on postings outside their own country. Will this in turn impact the language and practice of Diplomacy? There is plenty of case-lore about the overflow from social media into more private spaces of negotiation, as Governments and individuals use public social media to promote their causes, test opinion, leak to embarrass or wrong-foot. Will open media, digitally literate populations and universal access to the Internet transform Diplomacy? We might also need an icon for a sceptical snort.

None of the participants on our coaching programme had grown up with social media, or any of the web2.0 toolsets, indeed some of us were around before electronic computers. But our current usage of the tools bore no relationship to our age. The experience cemented for me my changed position on the concept of Digital migrants. This is based on the notion that Digital natives, people like my 27 year old son, who grew up with computers and digital tools as an integral part of their environment, have an affinity with the technology and its use which is denied those of us who have migrated into the culture. David Hockney, the modern British artist, provides a compelling illustration of how adoption of technology and its functions is far more to do with experience and engagement than upbringing. For those who don’t know his work, he is extraordinarily prolific, and popular –'worth a staggering £80 million'. Hockney integrated video into his work as soon as it became a consumer commodity and has used the iPad as a sketch pad since it appeared. He has always sketched quickly, and often produces several paintings in a day. But the iPad has extended his range. As a consummate artist he does more than sketch: he draws on the iPad to scale, with the size of the final blown-up product in his mind, as it might appear on a gallery wall, as illustrated opposite. In the jargon, he has appropriated the technology – not only learnt how to use it but innovated with it and developed a new form. Hockney is 74.

There are still digital divides: recent Pew research showed 20% of US adults don’t use the Internet at all. But their findings confirm those of the earliest Oxford Internet Institute UK Internet survey which demonstrated that the strongest indicators of Internet activity were the same forces that have always influenced social exclusion, namely education level and wealth. And soon to be published research from the UK Institute of Development studies, into the ‘information ecosystem’ of ‘policy actors’ in six Southern countries confirmed what many of us have been arguing for years, from our own experience: that the ‘elites’ in economically poorer countries, once they have access to affordable technologies like the Ideos smartphone, retailing for $80 in Kenya, access information and engage with friends and colleagues using digital tools - and their profile of tablet use is ahead of many wealthier countries.

Pew illustrates that not being aware of the benefits available on the Internet is also a factor in not being connected. But people who engage with digital culture later in their lives do have to overcome barriers to do with confidence in a particular way. People who grow up using technology are obviously more comfortable using it and, importantly, often find migrating to newer technologies – software, devices – relatively easy. They have expectations about how these things will work: they assume, for example, that there will be menus and a logic to functions; above all they know it will work, you only have to learn how. They are unafraid.

Then again, the impact of openness and the giving away of data to the new behemoths of the Internet age, Facebook and Google, is something that had to be learned by eager 20 somethings, while many older people were instinctively suspicious and more cautious. (even though the former might have taught the latter where to find the security settings). But on the day that eight year old Facebook has been valued at an unimaginable $104 billion why not sit back and listen to the master talking about his instant iPad art.

(cross posted from Diplo Foundation site)

Connecting and engaging with research audiences: Oxfam social media mix and strategy

noreply@blogger.com (Pier Andrea Pirani) — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 10:44:00 +0000

Earlier in April 2012 the third and last R4D peer exchange meeting took place in DFID. After having discussed issues related to measuring the success in research uptake and understanding audiences behaviours in accessing digital content, this third session looked into how to connect and engage with research audiences. Joel Bassouk, Digital Communications Manager at Oxfam International, presented the great work that his organisation is doing, how they are using social media and the results they are achieving.

Connecting with audiences with social media

View more PowerPoint from Euforic Services

Oxfam social media mix and strategy may be fairly similar to what others are doing but clearly the scale of the results achieved by the organisation is impressive. Some key points and practises are definitely worth mentioning and highlighting.

According to Joel, connecting and engaging with users online means first and foremost to know the audiences you are targeting your communication to. Google Analytics, user surveys and regular content audits are key elements of this process.

Once you have clear who you want to reach, the next step is to create good and engaging content: research reports, articles, policy papers, blogs, press releases, photos, videos, infographics, presentations, case studies, op-eds, interviews - these are all content items that need to be taken in consideration. But equally important, it's to define clear guidelines, workflows and sign-off process that each staff member can easily access through the corporate intranet.

However, it is not enough to have great content if this just sits on a website. Therefore, Joel reminded us how important it is for this content to be findable, searchable and shareable. In Oxfam's experience, as for may other organisation, visits from search engines represent the first source of inbound traffic. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and writing for the web need to be taken seriously if you want make sure Google search works in your favour and not against you.

Additionally, one key element that emerged from Oxfam experience is the need to repackage and cross post content on the different social media channels in use. Oxfam produces a lot of research reports and the digital communication team accompanies these with additional outputs such as infographics and images but also sound bites and 'three things about the report'. These additional outputs are tweeted and posted on the appropriate channels.

But with all the social and digital media available, how do you choose the right mix? According to Joel, there's a clear A-list that forms Oxfam social media portfolio: Facebook, Twitter YouTube and Flickr are clearly the must-have channels. Additionally, Oxfam makes also use of Google+, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Scribd.

Last but not least, RSS feed should not be forgotten - and I cannot agree more with this: as an old colleague of ours used to say, "RSS are really the blood of the social web."