Knowledge management workshop with PABRA

Workshop participants

For three days we worked with some 21 staff and partners of PABRA who joined us from Uganda, Malawi, Cameroon, among others. We also had two staff from CIAT’s TSBF joining. From a list of possible topics PABRA selected 3 prior to the event: One related to the improvement of meetings, a second related to online collaboration and a third around monitoring and evaluation and impact pathways.
> Read about the Positively surprising aspects of the PABRA workshop on knowledge management

On the first morning, after a round of introductions filled with good news of accomplishments from this group and the region, we have had interesting discussions on what KM is, its pillars and related disciplines. We used a highly appreciated Samoan Circle to discuss main challenges related to knowledge management and sharing. Some (very interesting!) main topics/ challenges emerged. Sophie took notes and published a blog post during the lunch break in order to show what social, and live reporting means.
> Read A Samoan Circle in our PABRA KM Workshop

One full afternoon was dedicated to a People- centered Outcomes exercise. (Not to be confused with, but closely linked toPeople Centered Evaluation (PCE) approach). The objective was to use the logical framework of PABRA and “un-pack” outputs into tangible products and develop stories of what they are doing and accomplishing in the field.
> Read Putting faces on PABRA Research Outcomes

The second global Knowledge Share Fair at IFAD

The Second Global Share Fair at IFAD provided a forum for some 300 participants to learn and share their knowledge, experience and innovations on emerging trends relating to agriculture, food security, price volatility, climate change, changing demographics, and other rural development related issues. Building on the success of the first global knowledge Share Fair, Bioversity International, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the World Food Programme (WFP) in partnership with CGIAR, CTA, and SDC jointly organized the Second Global Share Fair at IFAD Headquarters from 26 – 29 September 2011.

The first day started with a treat. Etienne Wenger gave a key note on Communities of practice (CoP). ”My name is associated with CoPs. CoP’s is only one aspect of Knowledge Sharing (KS) but I would claim that somehow the idea of a CoP is in the heart of KS.”
> Read Communities of practice: A concept to consider for CGIAR research programs

Sophie attended another session on Communities of Practice. It was a Clinic for CoPs with super- experts Etienne Wenger and Nancy White during the Sharefair in Rome.  The clinic was intended for discussion and to bring up issues we may all have in our CoPs, and was carried out with a peer review format.
> Read Communities of Practice Clinic at the Rome Share Fair

Day one of the Share Fair was called Day 0, a day to explore tools and methods for sharing knowledge, learn and get inspired to try out new ideas for group work in teams, events or any other agricultural research for development processes. I held a session on “River of life”, a method that we have used several times now at CIAT. River of life “is a visual narrative method that helps people tell stories of the last, present and future” (taken from the KS toolkit)
> Read River of Life: learning together from the past to improve the present and envision the future

The Share Fair unfolded in a series of parallel sessions (up to 17 running simultaneously). On day 2, I had the pleasure to facilitate a session for a FAO team who works on issues related to Climate Change, Fisheries and Aquaculture. The team had invited participants of the Share Fair to join them and give them some advice on how to formulate a compelling message that would bring fishery and aquaculture on the map of Cop17 to take place in Durban, Africa. We used the Peer Assist as a session format that ”brings together a group of peers to elicit feedback on a problem, project, or activity, and draw lessons from the participants’ knowledge and experience.”
> Read A compelling message for Durban: The Global Partnership Climate, Fisheries and Aquaculture (PaCFA) asks for advice

Day 3 had a great key note with Mark Davies who currently is leading the Esoko initiative, which is registering farmers and traders throughoutAfrica and connecting them with each other and international buyers through mobile alerts and services. Mark took us on a journey to the current ICT4D trends, opportunities and issues, looking specifically at public-private partnership in the ICT4D business.

> Read Public-private partnerships in the ICT4D business: “The development community shouldn’t do it all by itself”

Sophie also facilitated two sessions, and microblogged on these and all the sessions she attended in the CGIAR Yammer Community. Microblogging is great for real-time updating, to link readers to related sites, blogposts and articles, and for cross institutional sharing.

> Read Microblogging on KS Toolkit

In the Ted Talk Water, Food and Poverty: Beyond the Limits presented by Alain Vidal of the CPWF, Sophie practiced her newly- acquired skills at Graphic reporting (starting small!). The conclusions of the exercise: anyone can do it, and it is a visually attractive, colorful way to share one or more issues of a discussion or presentations, even if it leaves out much- it works to stimulate conversations!

All in all, these were two magnificent weeks. We had the opportunity to interact with, work with and learn from our colleagues at PABRA and of the community of Agricultural Knowledge Sharers and more.  We come back with many little treats for our colleagues at headquarters- motivated as ever to help you find new ways of putting your research into use and making it go places!

From the Share Fair blog:

“Rob Burnet leads Well Told Story, a multi-award-winning Kenyan communications company which pulls together comic books, syndicated FM radio, SMS, social media, web, video animation, strategy and science to help change the way people live, think, act and govern in East Africa.”

To the delight of the Share Fair audience Burnet offered that inadequate budgets for communication could be the missing link in research! Using Hollywood as an example, where 30% of budgets are spent on publicity, he lamented that agricultural research doesn’t always succeed in delivering great ideas that final step into the hands of beneficiaries. In an interview after the presentation (see clip posted below) he said:

“The reason we do this work is to change the life of poor people, if we stop short of making those brilliant ideas… accessible to those they are intended to benefit – let’s go home…”

This is a message that the communications community will no doubt welcome! However, in the meantime there are lots of ways to make sure CGIAR research outputs are Available, Accessible and Applicable.  The Triple-A Framework developed by the ICT-KM Program seeks to help Centers, Programs and their scientists decide on the level of Availability, Accessibility and Applicability (AAA) they want for their research outputs, and also the pathways with which to turn these outputs into International Public Goods.

For a complete introduction to the Framework see “Availability, Accessibility and Applicability of the CGIAR Research Outputs”

We had a Clinic for Communities of Practice (CoP henceforth) with super- experts Etienne Wenger and Nancy White during the Sharefair in Rome.  The clinic was intended for discussion and to bring up issues we may all have in our CoPs, and was carried out with a peer review format, in which:

1. People present their case and give the audience enough information to understand the case and the context

2. A round of clarifying questions to make sure we understand the problem before we comment on the case

3. Some advice and suggestions can be given, and also questions (that should help the case proponent understand better where some possible actions may lie

4. A “what now”-type discussion about what we plan to do with what we have learned.

Some of the highlights of the session for me:

Many people don’t share their knowledge because they don’t know they have it, that is, they don’t “recognize” the knowledge that is embedded in their practice, and because they don’t know that something they know may be useful to others.

Clarity: in a CoP, knowledge is shared around specific practices (thus the name!). It happens a lot that, because practice is complex and difficult to talk about, we “flee” into theory. We have to beware of when ‘expertise’ or theoretical knowledge ‘devalues’ or makes seem less important the lessons learnt by practitioners through practice.  CoPs need to be a space where we are able to discuss the real issues and challenges we face in our work, not theorize in abstract.

Related to the above, a CoP has to enable members to be better practitioners- as whole humans, as whole people. As Nancy said, “Knowledge is not disembodied of how you live to do your practice”. CoPs should help to answer the integral question: How can I be a better person that can do my practice better? Some of the liveliest, “realest” conversations that can happen in a CoP happen around real- life issues of the participants having to do, for example, with issues in balancing work and home life.

Cops have periods of high activity and periods of low activity. There is no set standard regarding how much activity/ for how long a CoP being inactive is good or bad. Trying to make all people and times equally active in a CoP is a huge misuse of time and energy: there are always “emergencies”- which generate moments of more interaction, and periods when nothing is happening. CoPs have cycles- including a maturing process-  and don’t have to be active for the sake of being active, just be useful to the members, and move in this natural rhythm of use.

It is good if the CoP facilitator is a member of that CoP (vs facilitator as an external non-member, a “process” person with less knowledge of the field of the CoP). It is a case of “leadership with” rather than “leadership for”.

Sometimes people hesitate to send their questions out “into the void”- why is this? Well, it can be the simple fear of not knowing where the question goes, and who can see it and respond to it. But in many cases, especially in hierarchical- arrangement CoPs, there may be a fear that your question indicates that you don’t know something, or that something is wrong with your practice. This is why it is important that we do not mix the CoPs with indications of performance, or “supervisory” comments.

We got from the ‘clinicians’ and other participants (go figure: the practitioners of CoP daily business, with great experiences and lessons to share) some ideas to revitalize and facilitate our own communities:

• Sometimes it is important to break things into  bite sized chunks that enable people to commit to participate in or lead specific tasks, and make time limits clear:  something that enables people to feel like ‘putting on a hat’ for a while. Carry out some safe-fail experiments: small tasks that will slowly create confidence in participation and asking questions, and that help people realize there is an audience for what they know.
• Sometimes you should rearrange structures, namely disrupt “formal expertise” and top- down interactions. Suggest that the community organize themselves into a peer – to -peer vs a hub-and-spoke arrangement. The members have to be in front of the CoP: top-down CoPs don’t survive long! The word ‘Community’ in CoP is useful as far as it shifts focus on the learning that is in the hands of the practitioners.
• “Nothing more powerful than a fabulous question”, said Nancy. Compelling ‘domain’ and questions, the real need of people for the help from others, and critical mass can make or break a CoP. You should strive to look for that question, that burning issue, that pressing need that will get the participants “into” the CoP.
• Use the “back channels” available to you as a way to develop trust. There is always a strategic decision to be made between using public or private channels. Always use public if it will benefit the whole CoP, and private when the intimacy is needed, and when you feel an out-of-range nudge will help re-vitalize the CoP. In vibrant cops there are always lots of back channel conversations going on (as long as they are not complaining chats!)
• Very stressed by Etienne: give RECOGNITION! Find ways to give non- gift incentives to the people who participate and facilitate, such as telling other people what the collaborator is doing (especially his or her supervisors), help people realize that time and resources need to be assigned to the CoP, and that time valued properly, help the leaders of an organization understand the value of the CoP for the participants themselves and for the organization.

This session (or something like it) is highly recommendable for people doing CoPs start-up or facilitation, and Nancy’s and Etienne’s unflagging humor and understanding made it all the best! Thank you!

For more information on various related things: Keith McCandless and liberating structures, EttieneWenger.com, CPSquare, Full circle and Nancy’s work and the ks toolkit for more on CoPs.

See also Simone Staiger’s blog on Etienne Wenger’s key note at the Share Fair

Here are the notes from this session which I think was highly relevant for CIAT and the CGIAR when it comes to think about how to use ICT4D in our work.

History

Tweets during Mark Davies' key note. See full chat session history: http:/storify.com/jschunter/sharefair-2011

During the “.com” period we had crazy expectations: “if you build it, they will come… They didn’t come”. Then came a cooling off period and it accelerated again in 2002 with Web 2.0 and social media. Now we have the explosion of tablets”

In the ICT4D sector, we find the same type of curves. E-learning, telecenters… We also thought if we build them, they would come. We were victims of our own imagination. It’s kicking off now with SMS even if SMS are around for a while. Now we see an explosion of creativity and new ideas.

Examples for us to explore and analyze:

• Frontline to push an SMS out to people.
• Community Knowledge Workers in Uganda
• iCow phone service (presented at the Fair yesterday)
• Ushahidi crowdsourcing of info from mobile phones
• iHub

Why is this all happening now? Why are things moving?

• The technology gets really widespread
• The level of penetration is high
• Connectivity gets much better
• Targeted money comes in
• Groups of innovators start to share knowledge
• High level of experience in software development

But it’s still tuff times because:

• We don’t know what is out there. No inventory is available
• We have no standard measures for designing products and apps
• Who builds it? Software development is complex
• The environment is moving quickly. We need to change, and evolve every day
• The deployment of the ICT4D is longer and more difficult than expected
• Does it work? We need to experiment and make mistakes

 Common themes are emerging

• The delivery channels, like SMS, radio are converging
• Issues of illiteracy: Not confirmed, i.e. users actually want to have market information to be written down to see trends over time.
• Content is converging, like prize information, advisory services
• We don’t know how to get actionable, relevant content. We have to get farmers to do the content and rate it
• Growing interest from operators, also because cities become saturated and they are looking for new markets
• Anthropology skills are needed to understand the behaviors
• Advisories, data collection, supply chain, marketplace: tools that will drive the market.
• Business: Leveraging business solves 2 key problems: sustainability and deployment. Business to Consumer model, now b to b model
• Are we supposed to develop content or tools?  Google has the most content in the world without having produced any. So we provide a space, but it works only in partnerships.

 Key messages: we need…

• Time to develop markets
• Money to incubate projects
• Advocacy to attract innovators
• Experience to measure and share knowledge

The private sector is key. The development community shouldn’t do it all by itself. However it has to understand private sector and really include them for purposes of:

• Execution
• Accountability
• Sales & Marketing
• Business models
• Cost management

To work together we need a clear articulated strategy and legal and operational frameworks to engage.

Today I had the pleasure to facilitate a session for a FAO team who works on issues related to Climate Change, Fisheries and Aquaculture. The team had invited participants of the Share Fair to join them and give them some advice on how to formulate a compelling message that would bring fishery and aquaculture on the map of Cop17 to take place in Durban, Africa.

We used the Peer Assist as a session format that ”brings together a group of peers to elicit feedback on a problem, project, or activity, and draw lessons from the participants’ knowledge and experience.”

Team member Tina Farmer introduced the topic: A group of organizations which work on fishery and aquaculture topics worldwide started to form an informal network called the Global Partnership Climate, Fisheries and Aquaculture (PaCFA). This was a first important step to share what each of these organizations is doing. The group formulated 10 key issues that the partners are currently trying to address. Now they want to formulate one key message that they could use to promote and advocate for their cause, “which tends to not make it into the short list of climate change hot topics, like forestry for example”, Tina said.

We started the session with a short brainstorming exercise: What makes a message compelling? “It needs to be useful”, “be adapted to the audience”, “generate credibility”, “it needs to be repeated everywhere”, were some of the responses.

We then asked: What makes a policy message compelling? Participants mentioned the need to “talk about impact and consequences”, “to deliver the message at the right place and at the right time”, and “to make the benefits clear”.

We then went into the feedback and input part of the peer assist process. What could our colleagues do to design a compelling message for Durban? The group came at with a whole set of ideas:

• Develop a one-line message by doing a contest, or as part of a campaign (which requires funds)
• Develop the message together with the members of the partnership. Involve communications people from your partners; Write up a one-pager with the issue and then organize a teleconference to virtually co-creation the message. Use Google+, skype, blog, facebook.
• Think about the “one” thing, the “hook”. What distinguishes you and your issue from the others? There is a lot of competition for messages in an event such as COP17. So, what will generate the “pull” reaction from the policymakers present at COP17 instead of you pushing them?
• Use keywords (buzzwords?) like “blue carbon” or “blue economy” that immediately retain     people’s attention. This raised issue of whether those keywords can cover the complexity and technicality of the partner’s area of work.
• Visualize what’s at stake: “In 5 years from now only one fish is left” or “Policy makers sitting in a boat with no fish in a net: Who’s fault was it?”Use cartoons. Use maps to visualize the consequences. The shift in distribution of species. Make personalized maps by country. Put maps on the web to share widely.

At the end of our session we did a short review of the peer assist as a collaborative process. Participants thought that “it was good to get input from people with a different background”; “It could work as well in the field at a local level, with fishers”; “Needs good moderation”; “It provides a safe environment to talk about issues we face.”

Tina said: “We are coming out with a lot of ideas. The willingness to share ideas was great.” One participant had an idea for a next possible step: “We could do a workshop using role play: You play the policymakers and have to convince each other.” What about that?

What was really cool about the session? An FAO colleague named Anton who sits “just a floor upstairs” participated in the session and had some great ideas and information for the team. They decided that they will get in touch soon. Let’s hope so.

Participants: "We are all fishers"

River of Life exercise

Today was day 0 of the Share Fair at IFAD, a day to explore tools and methods for sharing knowledge, learn and get inspired to try out new ideas for group work in teams, events or any other agricultural research for development processes.

I invited to a session on “River of life”, a method that we have used several times now at CIAT. The KS toolkit tells us that River of life “is a visual narrative method that helps people tell stories of the last, present and future. Individuals can use this method to introduce themselves in a fun and descriptive way; a group can use it to understand and reflect on the past and imagine the future of a project; and it can be used to build a shared view compiled of different and perhaps differing perspectives. River of Life focuses on drawing rather than text, making it useful in groups that do not share a language. When used in a group, it is an active method, good for engaging people.”

In the today’s workshop I introduced the method asking participants to draw their personal river of life and share their story with the group. Some used only drawings, some used images and words, some immediately interpreted the river with a timeline, others draw a “as-I-see-myself-now-image”. Then, I asked them to set the scene for a bigger exercise. Participants scotched 6 flipchart papers on the wall to create the drawing area and together created a landscape that represented the river, from 2001 to 2011. I asked them to paint birds and fishes as a metaphor for respectively professional highlights and difficult moments. Also, we used the sunshine to write down one keyword that could stand for a motivation for the future.

A discussion started on whether to use River of life for future planning. Some do, I haven’t done it (beyond the sunshine part). I feel it being such a great method to help a group finding common ground, remind the past, and evocate shared moments, that I prefer seeing it as a way to learn from the past, improve the present and get ready for planning the future based on the lessons learnt.

Some pictures will follow tomorrow.

The 2nd Global Share Fair has started!

I will be blogging here about the sessions I’ve been involved in and if I get a chance, on other sessions too.

An incredible amount of tweeting is happening already under the tag #sfrome – and for KM4Dev quite simply under the tag #KM4Dev.

Some sessions are webcasted – see the webcasting programme on: http://t.co/knk1CBxM

The first blogposts and blips (post here and blip here) are started and will be soon linked up with the official event blog.

Aggregated feeds: http://www.netvibes.com/agriknowledgesharefair

And finally, there is a daily Corriere to cover what has been presented or discussed every day: http://t.co/IsTeZJkP

So stay tuned and keep watching the incredible amount of social learning happening, this is most certainly one of the highlights of this year in terms of social learning and knowledge sharing for development work.

Related posts:

• Live and direct from Almada: from KM4DEV to learning4change?
• KM4DEV 2009, a few weeks later

After the previous Share Fairs in Addis Ababa (2010) and Rome (2009), also the programme and design for this year event looks impressive:  more than 150 sharing and learning sessions on issues related to rural development and agriculture; talks by renowned practitioners in different fields; a vibrant market place; and a series of trainings on knowledge sharing methods and tools on Day0 of the Fair.

Dgroups will also be participating in the Share Fair. Here’s what we have on the menu for next week:

• On Monday 26 September Hapee de Groot (Hivos) and Damir Simunic (WA Research) are hosting training session on Dgroups (14:00-15:30, room B500)
  
• On Tuesday 27 September, Damir Simunic will lead a session on Dgroups going mobile (11:30-13:00, room B200)
  
• Also on Tuesday 27 September, the Dgroups Partners Meeting will bring Dgroups members together to discuss present and future developments of Dgroups.

ShareFair Rome

The chock-full programme features many interesting sessions which promise to be very relevant for this blog too!You can hear more about this event through the ShareFair blog interview with one of its co-organisers, Willem Bettink from IFAD.

Back to back with the global Share Fair, the annual KM4Dev event is also taking place and that promises to be a highlight of a very full ‘learning for change’ year.

KM4Dev

A team of IRC (Carmen, Jaap, Peter and myself) is attending both events and will be sure to report some of the buzz that will be taking place in the Roman area. We will be tweeting about it with the following tags: #sfrome for the Share Fair and #KM4DEV2011 for the annual event.

We come with a multi-hat, multi-mandate mission: The KM4Dev event is of course a big thing since all four of us are on the amazing community of practice which celebrates 11 years of existence (and over 2000 members) this year. But we will also be going there for IRC’s learning for change thematic work, for the IKM-Emergent research programme and, personally, for my future employer ILRI.

But what all these mandates have in common is the interest in learning and in (social) change, all in their ways. So Carmen drafted a list of questions around learning for change which will be our red thread throughout our participation to the events. The list of questions is below and we will be sure to blog about the interesting sessions and happenings we come across in the course of next week.

• What are examples of approaches/ programmes that support learning in networks/ at scale?
• What are promising approaches to stimulating learning and reflection in networks?
• What tools could be used to engage networks in learning?
• How are these learning processes structured and facilitated?
• How are others showing links between learning and change (personal/organisational/ sector/ policy levels)?
• How can we monitor and document outcomes of Resource Centre Networks (as vehicles for sector learning initiatives) in achieving sector learning? Are there useful tools or inspiring examples we can learn from ?
• What opportunities are there to test our learning cycle concept and approaches?

So keep watching this space – L4C (Learning for Change) becomes an (inter-)*active* space this Monday!

(By Ewen)

The Share Fair will be an exciting and “out-of-the-box” event, offering participants creative and innovative learning and sharing opportunities, and equipping them with tools to better influence future rural development activities. We are glad that the Dgroups partners meeting can be held during this international gathering as this will provide Dgroups members with excellent opportunities for networking and learning.

A draft agenda for the Dgroups partners meeting is available on the Dgroups wiki.  The participation and active engagement of current Dgroups members – as well as potential partners and interested organisations – is key to the success of the partners meeting and the discussion on the future development of Dgroups.

Besides the partners meeting, Dgroups will also organise a technical session during Day 0 of the Share Fair on 26 September 2011, which is dedicated to collaboration technologies and knowledge sharing tools and methods. This will be a perfect occasion for Dgroups members and users to participate in a hands on, practical session on the new platform about to be released and already available in beta version at http://next.dgroups.org.

Dgroups members and users that plan to attend the training session and the 2011 Partners meeting should register using the Share Fair registration form.

More updates on the programme of the  2011 Dgroups Partners meeting will be available in the coming days and the final agenda for the meeting will be circulated by the end of August 2011.

Building on the success of the First Global Knowledge Share Fair, this three-day event provides a forum for participants to learn and share their knowledge, experience and innovations on emerging trends relating to agriculture, food security, price volatility, climate change, changing demographics and other rural development related issues.

The organisers are now inviting proposals for sessions on the following specific themes:

• new trends and thinking on coping with market access challenges and developing markets for small farmers
• innovative use of mobile technology and/or social media in the agriculture sector to enhance food security and nutrition
• the impact of migration and population growth to feed future population
• new technologies and innovative agricultural and farming practices to increase productivity
• opportunities for innovative partnerships including with private sector, farmer organizations, environment-friendly and green innovations

Download the submission form and send in your abstracts and proposals by latest 1 July 2011 by an email to: share-fair@fao.org. (Please write in the subject line “Abstract/Proposal”).