ILRI was awarded the 2019 International Knowledge Management Award (photo credit: ILRI/Job Mainye).

Last week, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) was awarded the 2019 International Knowledge Management Award at a ceremony held in Nairobi, Kenya.  The following day Peter Ballantyne and Michael Victor briefly presented elements of ILRI’s KM approach at the Knowledge for Development African Partnership Conference.

For the purposes of this presentation, five main challenges that ILRI’s knowledge management needs to address were identified:

1. Increase uptake of research;
2. Make research widely available and accessible (as international public goods);
3. Embed communications and knowledge sharing at all stages within the research process;
4. Enhance collaboration, reach and impact;
5. Move towards ‘open’.

The ‘open’ dimension was particularly highlighted as it is seen to:

• Allow partners, collaborators and others to directly use ILRI’s work;
• Increase the visibility of ILRI’s research— whether in journals, social media or through search engines;
• Increase the chances that ILRI’s work will lead to outcomes and impact by removing access barriers;
• Foster collaboration by sharing what ILRI does more widely; others are more likely to see and want to contribute to its work;
• Facilitate the re-use of ILRI’s digital resources across other platforms, through open standards, licences and inter-operability;
• Safeguard ILRI’s institutional memory and legacy for future use.

Two key ‘entry points’ for ILRI’s communications and KM work were explained. The first is to work through and support different projects with a set of rather consistent products and services – a web space, a wiki, a project repository, support to enagage (social) media, publishing services, internal knowledge sharing, and workshops. The approach was guided by lessons from an earlier project where we recognized that projects need different types of support over time, as well as a longer-term perspective where communications starts before a project begins, and ends after it is completed.

The second entry point is around events. Several years ago we realized that ILRI staff and partners perhaps spend more time in events, meetings, workshops and other face to face gatherings than they do undertaking research. Indeed, it seems that meetings have become a core part of the research process. One way to enhance knowledge sharing, learning and communication, we thought, was to improve the way meetings are designed, facilitated and reported.  Dozens of meetings later, we see a continuing interest from colleagues in meetings that facilitate exchanges and interaction, engage all participants and match process to objectives. Being part of the meeting – at the table so to speak – also paid off for the KM team who learned and appreciated much better what the scientists were trying to do and thus could better support them. A key part of most meetings is good documentation and we encouraged ‘working out loud’, sharing the insights widely and openly through blogs, websites, wikis and social media.

See the presentation:

Accelerating innovation through open research at ILRI

Under the terms of CGIAR and ILRI policies on open access and data management, “best efforts”
shall be used to make all information products and other intellectual assets produced by ILRI
open access, “subject always to the legal rights and legitimate interests of stakeholders and third
parties, including intellectual property rights, confidentiality, sensitivity, farmers’ rights and
privacy.”

The CGIAR policy defines open access as the immediate, irrevocable, unrestricted and free
online access by any user worldwide to information products, and unrestricted re use of
content subject to proper attribution.

The International Livestiock Research Institute – ILRI – started taking open access seriously in early 2010, adopting open licences for its products, setting up a dedicated repository as a publishing tool for all its products and establishing a portal for its data.

For ILRI, opening access offers significant opportunties, it:

• Allows partners, collaborators and others to directly use our work;
• Increases the visibility of our research— whether in journals, social media or through search engines;
• Increases the chances that our work will lead to outcomes and impact by removing access barriers;
• Fosters collaboration by sharing what we do more widely; others are more likely to see and want to contribute to our work;
• Facilitates the re-use of our digital resources across other platforms, through open standards, licences and inter-operability;
• Safeguards our institutional memory and legacy for future use.

What does this mean in practice?

Open access is mandated through CGIAR and ILRI policies on open access and data management; it is guided by the ‘FAIR Guiding Principles’ that provide guidelines and metrics to improve the findability, accessibility, inter-operability, and reuse of our digital assets; it requires that we give all our products open ‘creative commons’ or similar licences encouraging re-use; it requires that commercially published articles, books and book chapters have open licences and copyrights retained by ILRI; and it requires us to make our data, publications, code, software and other products accessible through robust repositories hosted by ILRI or other reputable platforms.

Guidelines

Taking advantage of an institute-wide annual meeting, we just developed a series of short handouts and a poster about open access practice at ILRI. View and download the handouts here:

• Making ILRI’s research open
• Making ILRI data open
• Making ILRI articles, books and chapters open
• Making ILRI information products open and accessible

In October 2019, as part of international open access week, we will organize further outreach around the ‘power of open’ – encouraging and motivating staff to really exploit being open to make their research and their products as accessible as possible.

More information on open access and open data at ILRI:

• Information products: cgspace.cgiar.org
• Data: data.ilri.org
• Code: github.com/ilri
• Licences: ilri.org/copyright
• Policies and guidelines: ilri.org/open

People to contact:

• Information products: Abenet Yabowork (a.yabowork@cgiar.org)
• Data: Harrison Njamba (h.njamba@cgiar.org)
• Code: Alan Orth (a.orth@cgiar.org)
• Licences and copyright: Sheila Wainaina (s.wainaina@cgiar.org)

Post by Peter Ballantyne based on resources compiled by colleagues Abenet Yabowork, Harrison Njamba, Jane Poole and Erick Rutto.

The new site now features

• Global challenges and what we do about them
• A library of integrated publications
• An outcomes section highlighting our impact
• A projects page

Goals of the redesign

With the re-design we aim to improve the user experience and to have more curated content on the front page, while leveraging the rich underlying architecture of the website.

It now features a fresh, modern interface with a more coherent structure that surfaces related content better, including integrated publications. The design is mobile friendly, clearly highlights featured content and invites users to explore ILRI’s research through themes.

The website was optimized for search engines and is generally more lightweight now.

Visit ilri.org

The wikis can now be found on http://ilriwikis.org/

We made sure to keep all the original names. If you are looking for a wiki just swap out the domain, instead of myproject.wikispaces.com use myproject.ilriwikis.org. There were about 80 wikis with a little under 300 users.

The migration was implemented in collaboration with tech company CiviHosting, see the work breakdown for details of the engagement. Moving wikis from one platform to the other meant that they had to be ‘translated’. In the process some formatting or attachment may have been lost and needs to be corrected manually.

Kindly review your wiki to ensure everything is as it should be. Let us know in case you find a missing document or broken page. We have a backup on file and will assist you to restore it.

A couple of things did not work out as planned:

Unfortunately, we were not able to implement redirects from the old to the new wikis. Wikispaces no longer provides that service. And while we were able to migrate all users, Wikispaces have refused to release emails and passwords for reasons of data privacy. That means we are effectively re-enrolling our users.

Wiki admins can help us: Consult the list of users by wiki and encourage them to create an account. If you need editing permissions or admin access to a certain wiki, please get in touch so we can assign you the appropriate role.

MediaWiki is a powerful platform that offers many possibilities for customization. As we learn to work with it we will implement additional features and functionalities over time. 

You can read the project brief to learn more or write to ServiceDesk [at] cgiar.org if you have questions, want to make a suggestion or face problems.

CiviHosting is a web development and hosting company with experience migrating Wikispaces wikis. They have already begun the process of migrating all our wikis to the new platform, known as MediaWiki, which is what Wikipedia runs on. It is the de facto industry standard and offers a very similar user experience to Wikispaces.

Half of our wikis including the free ones will be moved in July, the other half in August. Before being moved they will be backed up. All content and media files, including images, will be transferred as well as user accounts. Once the migration of your wiki is complete, we will redirect it to the new domain: Instead of myproject.wikispaces.com it will be myproject.ilriwiki.org. You will get an email with a link to the new address.

We aim to do this with little or no disruption to your work. At the most, you may find your wiki locked for editing for a while. Also, moving wikis between providers means they need to be ‘translated’. This may cause some issues with text formatting or layout that we may have to correct manually. Once your wiki is migrated, you should review it to ensure everything is as it should be.

Read the project brief to learn more or write to ServiceDesk [at] cgiar.org if you have questions or face problems.

These efforts span a wide variety of activities including adoption of policies, awareness raising, using open licenses and establishing open access repositories for products as well as data.

An article by  Abenet Yabowork, Alan Orth and Peter Ballantyne in the KM4Dev Journal explains the origins, operation and uses of the CGSpace repository set up in 2009 by the International Livestock Research Institute with several partners.

Starting from an ‘institutional’ effort, it has evolved into a collaboration among dozens of programs and entities, pooling technical efforts and generating collective public goods for the wider agricultural world.

The article covers the CGSpace and open access value proposition, technical developments and choices, content management and standards, use and update, metrics and reach, as well as lessons and promising practices for wider use.

Download the article

This article is part of a special issue of the Knowledge Management for Development journal on ‘Open research, open data, and your development organization: best practices in information and data management for development.’

According to the umbrella document which explains the ambitions of the second phase of the program:

‘Communities of practice (CoP) are widely-used in development as mechanisms to bring scattered people—who share an interest—together. Keys to success are that a community has a clear focus that strongly attracts and interests people to contribute; that it has some deliverables; that it has some incentives or rewards; and that it is facilitated in some way.’

Five CoPs have been set up and two others have emerged spontaneously in the program in the following shared areas of interest:

1. Socio-economic assessment of technological innovations
2. Nutrition
3. Private sector engagement for better linkages of farmers to input and output markers
4. Livestock intensification and integration
5. Translating research outputs into scaled innovations
6. Virtual farming
7. Integrated watershed management

Each of these CoPs is steered by a ‘champion’ from either of the participating research centres in order to both stimulate productive conversations that encourage more joined-up thinking across all countries and organizations, and to develop some products that will help the entire program.

The Communication and Knowledge Management (CKM) team of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) has been asked to support the work of the champions in their facilitating role.

This support involves:

• Explaining what the job of champion entails.
• Helping members get set up on Yammer (the program coordination team agreed to make communities of practice happen online. In addition there will be periodic live face-to-face events for CoP members to think and work together on their theme).
• Helping the champions synthesize conversations and prepare to present what has been done in the CoP at the annual learning or science event.
• Ensuring the champions are sharing among themselves their tips and lessons from their own practice.
• Answering questions related to how Africa RISING CoPs are working and how they can reap benefits from their experiences.

In order to kick-start the work of these champions, ILRI CKM developed a ‘CoP support pack‘ that explains what communities of practice are, how they are set up in Africa RISING and what is expected of CoP champions and their members for CoPs to flourish.

Communities of practice (image credit: K4Health).

In the case of Africa RISING, some concerns remain whose outcome will affect the success of these budding CoPs:

• Is it possible to reconcile bottom-up CoP development and voluntary engagement (the good practice from experience in CoPs) with a focus on delivering outputs in the Africa RISING CoPs?
• Since different levels of engagement across CoPs are expected, will it be sustainable to keep these seven communities and how will they work? How will any ‘dormant’ ones be dealt with?
• Is it realistic to expect that everyone will be able to use Yammer as an acceptable platform for their online conversations whereas experience from phase 1 showed that Yammer was mostly used by Ethiopia-based people?
• In case Yammer does not work, what alternatives should be explored to make these CoPs more functional?

The next few months will show whether this investment in supporting CoPs by Africa RISING is worthwhile and what lessons have emerged. Watch this space for more.

She is a graduate in political sciences and international relations and print journalism respectively from Addis Ababa University. In addition, Tesfaye has an MSc degree in sustainable development from Uppsala University, Sweden.

Previously, she worked as knowledge management and communication expert for the ILRI-led Livestock and Irrigation Value-chains for Ethiopian Smallholders (LIVES) project and before that as development outreach and communications specialist for the United States Agency for International Development Agribusiness and Trade Expansion Program (USAID ATEP). She has also been involved with the Agricultural Development and Value Chain Enhancement (ADVANCE) project of ACDI/VOCA in northern Ghana and an environmental NGO, Afrika Kontact based in Copenhagen.

Tesfaye is based in Addis Ababa and will be providing knowledge management and communications support to ILRI’s director general’s representative office in Ethiopia and ILRI projects including the Sustainable Rangelands Management initiative in Tanzania, International Rangelands initiative, SmaRT Ethiopia project and the Sustainable Intensification of Maize and Legume Systems for Food Security in Eastern and Southern Africa (SIMLESA) program.

Conflict management tools (photo credit: Danie Becknell / Bruce Burris).

Many development (research) organizations are seeking to understand and harness the potential of collaboration. But collaboration is not easy. Not least because it requires trust. And an alignment of interests. And a good understanding of how power relations work and how they might set people against each other.

Sometimes these elements are just not there despite the initial goodwill. Whether from the start or as a progressive process, conflict shows up.

When it does, most people have difficulty letting go of their desire for harmony and tend to ignore the elephant in the room.

When bravely we face the truth, we realize that conflict is not all easy to understand, to recognize or to apprehend – let alone to prevent when it has degenerative qualities.

In a recent GIZ Ethiopia team building retreat, the Communication and Knowledge Management team of the International Livestock Research Institute was invited to reflect about conflict management as one of the themes of the retreat.

The following presentation is the result of this inquiry. It was put together on the basis of many great presentations and documents that exist on the topic.

The idea is that conflict can be leveraged to generate new solutions to problems and to get to true collaboration.

This understanding of social learning is the fruit of several years’ work on ‘climate change and social learning’ (CCSL) sponsored by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS).  Most the body of work is available publicly at http://ccsl.wikispaces.com.

The start of the second phase of the CGIAR’s research programs (CRP) provides an opportunity to re-look at the potential of social learning for the next phase. Recent discussions around the LIVESTOCK Agri-Food Systems CRP provide some early insights into what this may look like.

The initial entry points identified are around partnerships, learning, monitoring and innovation systems – all areas where social learning offers interesting insights and practices, and also raises questions.

Read a brief that reflects on this work in relation to the new CRPs: Le Borgne E. 2016. Applying social learning where ‘business-as-usual’ solutions no longer work for complex problems and programs. CCSL Learning Brief 17. Copenhagen, Denmark: CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS).