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1st Quarter 2008


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Advancing Agriculture in Developing Countries through Knowledge and Innovation
The International Food Policy Research Institute's ISNAR Division held an international consultative conference in Addis Ababa at the Hilton Hotel April 7 – 9, 2008 on "Advancing agriculture in developing countries through knowledge and innovation." Scholars, policymakers, and practitioners from a wide range of sectors came together to exchange ideas and experiences (positive or negative) on how knowledge and innovation (technological, organizational, and institutional) are affecting agricultural advancement. The conference showcased innovative research in the field and provide a forum to identify further areas for research and cooperation.

The ICT-KM program is a sponsor of this event and delivered a paper to the conference and will be contributing a chapter in the resulting book on knowledge and innovation experiences for improving developing-country agriculture. The book will show knowledge and innovation frameworks, applications, methods, and empirical research results.

ESA training meeting and workshop and wrap up meeting
At the end of 2007, the ICT-KM program entered into agreement with CIP to take leadership of a project for the Americas Centers (CIAT, CIMMYT, CIP and IFPRI) that focuses on enterprise security activities for these Centers. These activities have included improving the security of Centers network infrastructure; fortifying the CGIAR global network security by including analysis of the CGNET NOC; securing intellectual property, and training information systems security personnel.

One of the key components of this project is the ESA training meeting and workshop and wrap up meeting being held in Lima from 31 March through 11 April. Participating are two participants from each of CIAT, CIMMYT, IFPRI, plus guests from Bioversity, ICARDA, WorldAgroforestry and ILRI (total 10). This packed ten days will include a CISSP (Certified Information Security Systems Professional) certification preparatory course; a CEH  (Certified Ethical Hacker) certification preparatory course; a ESA project review which also benefits from the guest participants in pulling together the threads of the ESA project with a similar global project (Enterprise Security and Business Continuity Project) that wrapped up in 2007.

Latest word from Anthony Collins, the ESA project manager is that the consensus view emerging from the meeting is that the ESA group will be forging ahead in stimulating the establishment of a base-line of agreed best practices on information systems security and standards for the CGIAR.

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Now we're cooking! Good practices for managing research data

Most research conducted by CGIAR Centers depends on the collection of primary research data. Effective and efficient research data management requires special skills and experience, but there is seldom a systematic approach to teaching and training new staff to manage research data, or to update existing staff on new methodologies and technologies. Skills and experiences are often scattered among Center staff with different specializations. Good practices are often not recorded in the form of institutional guidelines and training materials of practical relevance for day-to-day research management work or the induction of new staff members.

One of the Institutional Knowledge Sharing pilot projects is taking on this issue. Thomas Metz, IKS pilot project leader from IRRI is working to develop, collect, record and apply good practices in research data management at IRRI and CIMMYT (http://www.ks-cgiar.org/images/stories/pdf/iks2_metz_irri.pdf).

The pilot project is now well underway and the ICT-KM program would like to share with readers Thomas' story "Of Cooking and Research Data Management"

"Many of us can cook a decent meal without having had professional training. How did we achieve that? The answer to that question will lead us to a didactic approach for research data management capacity building. But let's go back to the cooking question.

Most of us have probably learned some basic cooking skills from our mother. These skills usually start with food preparation, hygiene, and using kitchen equipment. Basically we were taught not to cut ourselves with knives, avoid food poisoning, or burn down the kitchen. Then we probably learned to prepare some simple dishes, such as fried eggs or warming up tinned food, mainly to take care of ourselves on the rare occasions when nobody was around to cook for us. After that we probably learned how to prepare some of our most favorite dishes and that is where for many of us the teaching stopped.

The next stepping stone was probably a cookbook. The recipes in a cookbook are the condensed knowledge of expert cooks. We can make use of their knowledge and re-create dishes that many people have appreciated, sometimes over generations. Think of traditional Italian pasta dishes, English roasts, French fish soups, or American apple pies. Equipped with the survival cooking skills learned from our mother and a good cookbook, we can actually achieve remarkable feasts.

And if things go wrong, we can still call mother and ask for help.

In analogy to the above cooking story, we have created a framework for capacity building in research data management at IRRI. We have developed a basic course in research data management where we teach the survival skills and how to avoid the most common mistakes. To complement the course, we have developed a Wiki site that contains short recipes on how to solve specific research data management problems. These recipes provide the data and procedure in such detail that users can understand the solution and apply it to their specific problem. And for problems beyond that, users can call the helpdesk and ask for assistance.

Such a combination of basic training, cookbook and helpdesk is also possible in other areas where specialist services are required, but it is not possible to have fully trained specialists available to perform them."


We thank Thomas for this culinary analogy and look forward to sharing the results of this project at the end of the year.

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