2nd Quarter 2008
CGMap is up (loaded) and running
The CGMap system is now up and running for the download of Medium Term Plan documents. The 13 participating CGIAR Centers submitted their MTPs via EasyMTP. All CGIAR MTPs were available by the agreed deadline of June 20 at the CGMap site.
However, from June 12-15, the CGMap Support Team was dealing with a marathon as it supported the Centers through the process of uploading the data from their medium-term plans through the EasyMTP system into the central hub – CGMap – where all MTP documents have now been assembled and made accessible for download and review by the Science Council. Searching and browsing of individual projects will be activated in early July.
The EasyMTP application was developed to assist with the compilation and uploading of the MTP information on behalf of Centers. However, during this first ever use of the application, CGMap Support team staff often had to go the extra mile. "The tension in the office was really high," said Tania Jordan of the ICT-KM Program. "We were working throughout the weekend to ensure that everything was going smoothly when we received notice that WARDA was having Internet connectivity issues. We had to go into overdrive to troubleshoot and assist the Center in submitting the MTP on schedule. This meant a series of quick-thinking and creative actions on the part of the team and the WARDA counterparts – which included providing step-by-step instructions over a cell phone in Benin to Marco Wopereis (Assistant Director General for Research, WARDA) to help submitting from a Internet café the information that was then compiled in-house by the CGMap support team.
"The immediate benefit," said Antonella Pastore, who coordinates the CGMap project which has been under development for more than a year, "is that both the MTP document and the database itself are available in one go. The Centers can focus on the content of the MTP because the formatting and assembly are handled by the CGMap. Science Council reviewers can download the documents as they have always done, and we receive the databases. This is the compliance step with the added value of structured data and reusable information. But, this is just the beginning."
The ICT-KM program and the CGMap development team at CIAT now start the process of combining the databases from the 13 submitted MTPs. At the same time, they will manually enter in the database the MTP data submitted in the traditional way by the other two Centers and two Challenge Programs.
"This is where it starts to get interesting for system-wide analysis," Antonella said. "ICT-KM and the CIAT team will spend the summer looking at this data from a number of perspectives. We now have the opportunity to get cross-cutting views of the research plans of the CGIAR. We will ask scientists, research assistants and monitoring and evaluation experts to help us define the interesting and relevant questions we can answer with this data. This analysis will also help us feed improvements back into EasyMTP, the system that Centers are using to enter and upload the data."
There are obvious questions such as: "What research projects are planned for country ‘x’, which would offer the Centers the opportunity to establish partnerships or collaborate with other Centers, helping to make the work more complementary and to share results. Or, "What projects are contributing to sustaining biodiversity?" which could help in formulating future funding proposals. But, there are also questions to ask that only the scientists or people working on the ground can formulate, questions that pertain to nuances of their work that CGMap will be able to help answer as the data is refined and analyzed.
Stay tuned for more news as we further develop CGMap….
Back
The CGMap system is now up and running for the download of Medium Term Plan documents. The 13 participating CGIAR Centers submitted their MTPs via EasyMTP. All CGIAR MTPs were available by the agreed deadline of June 20 at the CGMap site.
However, from June 12-15, the CGMap Support Team was dealing with a marathon as it supported the Centers through the process of uploading the data from their medium-term plans through the EasyMTP system into the central hub – CGMap – where all MTP documents have now been assembled and made accessible for download and review by the Science Council. Searching and browsing of individual projects will be activated in early July.
The EasyMTP application was developed to assist with the compilation and uploading of the MTP information on behalf of Centers. However, during this first ever use of the application, CGMap Support team staff often had to go the extra mile. "The tension in the office was really high," said Tania Jordan of the ICT-KM Program. "We were working throughout the weekend to ensure that everything was going smoothly when we received notice that WARDA was having Internet connectivity issues. We had to go into overdrive to troubleshoot and assist the Center in submitting the MTP on schedule. This meant a series of quick-thinking and creative actions on the part of the team and the WARDA counterparts – which included providing step-by-step instructions over a cell phone in Benin to Marco Wopereis (Assistant Director General for Research, WARDA) to help submitting from a Internet café the information that was then compiled in-house by the CGMap support team.
"The immediate benefit," said Antonella Pastore, who coordinates the CGMap project which has been under development for more than a year, "is that both the MTP document and the database itself are available in one go. The Centers can focus on the content of the MTP because the formatting and assembly are handled by the CGMap. Science Council reviewers can download the documents as they have always done, and we receive the databases. This is the compliance step with the added value of structured data and reusable information. But, this is just the beginning."
The ICT-KM program and the CGMap development team at CIAT now start the process of combining the databases from the 13 submitted MTPs. At the same time, they will manually enter in the database the MTP data submitted in the traditional way by the other two Centers and two Challenge Programs.
"This is where it starts to get interesting for system-wide analysis," Antonella said. "ICT-KM and the CIAT team will spend the summer looking at this data from a number of perspectives. We now have the opportunity to get cross-cutting views of the research plans of the CGIAR. We will ask scientists, research assistants and monitoring and evaluation experts to help us define the interesting and relevant questions we can answer with this data. This analysis will also help us feed improvements back into EasyMTP, the system that Centers are using to enter and upload the data."
There are obvious questions such as: "What research projects are planned for country ‘x’, which would offer the Centers the opportunity to establish partnerships or collaborate with other Centers, helping to make the work more complementary and to share results. Or, "What projects are contributing to sustaining biodiversity?" which could help in formulating future funding proposals. But, there are also questions to ask that only the scientists or people working on the ground can formulate, questions that pertain to nuances of their work that CGMap will be able to help answer as the data is refined and analyzed.
Stay tuned for more news as we further develop CGMap….
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