ICT-KM Newsletter - 2nd Quarter 2008

3rd Quarter 2008

In This Issue

News Archives

ICT-KM supports events and conferences

"Making Our Research Outputs Available - the AAA Approach"
Co-organized with FARA, this event will look into methods and systems to ensure research outputs are available, accessible and applicable. Tentatively scheduled to be held December 1st 2008 during the CGIAR 2008 Annual General Meeting in Maputo.

"Knowledge management- Why and Who for?"
The session will look into the "why" of knowledge management and sharing and discuss the challenges and opportunities afforded by implementing knowledge management techniques. The sessions is tentatively scheduled December 2nd, 2008 during the CGIAR 2008 Annual General Meeting in Maputo.

"Knowledge Management and Sharing: How?"
This all day event will specifically look into different strategies and methods and the benefits and or shortcomings. Scheduled for December 4th 2008 in Maputo

Extra Extra….

Read more about the Knowledge Sharing in Research project in the September issue of CGIAR e-News.

For more information on ICT-KM activities and events, visit our website and blog at http://ictkm.cgiar.org/

Snippets

Are you setting comfortably? Farmers share knowledge through storytelling
"My story with farming began when I was a child," says Mahmoud Shlash, whose village lies near the ancient city of Aleppo in northern Syria. "At that time, the rainfall was high unlike the rainfall this season. I watched my father when he collected spikes (barley seedheads) from here and there and brought them home. I asked him, 'Why are you collecting the spikes and nothing else?' Now I realise that he was doing the same as ICARDA is currently doing with the farmers."
For more information, please visit: http://www.new-ag.info/08/05/develop/dev2.php

Strengthening Partnership through increased collaboration: ICT-KM and FARA
Working with partners to increase effectiveness continues to be an important aspect of the ICT-KM Program. With this in mind, the ICT-KM Program, represented by Enrica Porcari recently participated in the CGIAR-FARA (Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa) consultation held in Accra 2-4 September 2008. The consultation aimed at increasing this strategic partnership and harmonizing research in Africa.
Taking into consideration past successful collaborations, representatives of FARA (Myra Woopereis-Pura and Francois Stepman) discussed with Enrica ways forward to increase ICT-KM/FARA partnership and joint activities.
More information about the consultation can be found at http://farastaff.blogspot.com
/2008/09/cgiar-fara-consultation.html

Pilot projects paving innovative paths to sharing information
The Institutional Knowledge Sharing project is supporting three pilot activities in three CGIAR centers in order to contribute to institutional innovation, and learn about the effectiveness of KS approaches. Two of the pilots have now made available their products.
“Recovering from natural disasters” A ‘Storymercial’ by WorldFish
“The storymercial is e a combination of video, audio and images. At the heart of the storymercial is the story; the oldest most proven way humans learn and remember information.” says Helen Leitch, Pilot Project Leader. “Despite a huge investment in communications, awareness of the CGIAR Centers’ work and contribution to development is often low. Since knowledge products with more mass appeal are needed, this project examined the role storymercials can play to attract our donors and partners to knowledge, thus increasing the uptake of research outputs”. Have a look at: http://www.worldfishcenter.org
/v2/rehabilitate%20livelihoods.html
Best Practices in Research data Management (IRRI)
“There is still little experience in using wiki technology within CGIAR. The openness and visibility of a wiki is often seen as a risk, rather than an opportunity for increased participation and collaboration in communities of practice.” states Thomas Metz, Project Leader. This project developed, collected, recorded, and applied good practices in research data management, and initiated a communities of practice for research data managers. It is enabling scientists to produce better quality research and release their primary data as global public goods that will be available and usable for future secondary use. See the wiki at: http://cropwiki.irri.org/everest/

ICT-KM Homepage

Google to Moodle...

…what do they have in common? Well, as you read through this edition, you will see how they both fit in the spectrum of activities of the ICT-KM program this quarter. Many CGIAR staff, those who actively participated in the Google applications case study or any capacity building officer in the CGIAR who worked hard to review the progress of their project can tell you about these initiatives.

“Are you sitting comfortably?” Reads the title our article on the Farmers' conference at ICARDA, one of the six pilot projects of the Knowledge Sharing in Research, a "storymercial" developed by WorldFish for our Institutional Knowledge Sharing project will show us how we can explain in a few minutes the work we do, a successful collaboration with FAO has helped us deliver a new Knowledge Sharing workshop….

We hope you enjoy learning more about the activities the ICT-KM program carry out with our partners.

Best,

Enrica
Leader, ICT-KM Program and
Chief Information Officer, CGIAR

Main News

“Knowledge Sharing in Research” Project: A year in the life of six pilot projects
by Nadia Manning-Thomas, KSinR project Leader

The pilot projects supported through the Knowledge Sharing in Research project (KSinR) are capturing by example real lessons for future application. Initiated with the goal to improve the effectiveness and impact of CGIAR research by providing options and lessons around good practices of knowledge sharing in research, KSinR’s main learning vehicle has been six on-going CGIAR research projects which are piloting various knowledge sharing approaches integrated into different stages of the research process. The pilot projects began with an Inception Workshop held in August 2007 at IRRI in Los Banos, the Philippines where the projects all refined their planning using the Impact Pathways approach. Now with a little more than one year later, the projects have undertaken a number of activities, produced useful outputs and generated valuable lessons and knowledge.

Such examples include:

Challenges and benefits of operating a collaborative, multi-stakeholder framework for conducting more coordinated research to action processes as being tested by IWMI through its use of the Learning Alliance approach in the ‘Wastewater, Agriculture and Sanitation for Poverty Alleviation’ (WASPA) project.
The ICARDA-lead Pilot has held its main activity- an International Farmers’ Conference- in which 53 farmers from 7 different countries attended and presented stories on their experiences, needs and knowledge in barley breeding. This successful event resulted in audio, video and text versions of stories from farmers indicating their priorities, needs and innovations which are useful to other farmers and researchers to use and learn from. Small video clips were loaded onto mobile phones of farmers and by showing them how to send them to other farmers it set up a farmer to farmer type extension system. All stories and other information about the conference will be available on a soon to be launched website.
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Online Learning Resources: the way forward

A workshop to review progress over the past four years of the CGIAR’s Online Learning Resources Project and plan for the future has made considerable progress towards defining the goals of a third phase for the project.

The OLR project is intended to provide an educational technology platform that gives access to information that can strengthen research skills, to facilitate cooperation between educators and researchers and to improve access to learning materials generated by the international, publicly funded research of the CGIAR. It helps to ensure quality training and education in the CGIAR and for partners.

The workshop brought together several stakeholders, among them universities in developed and developing countries, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the ARIADNE Foundation for the European Knowledge Pool.

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KS Workshop runs, runs, runs with FAO

When the ICT-KM Program started the adventure to develop a workshop on knowledge sharing under the leadership of the institutional KS Project we were all far from imagining the positive impact and feedback we would receive and the positive spin offs of our workshop concept.

After a first edition of this workshop that involved mainly CGIAR staff we are now in the middle of a second edition led by FAO in strong collaboration with our Program.

Here are some of the results and observations so far that make us "feel good" about our initiative:

Both workshops reached staff of 13 of the 15 CGIAR centers, for a total of 70 participants from all continents.

The participation of FAO staff in the first edition of the workshop led them to take the leadership of a second edition, including administrative and financial resources.

7 participants from the first workshop joined efforts and will co-author an article about challenges and experiences in their areas of work at the moment of the workshop. This initiative is supported by the IKS project and a professional writer will serve as a guide and coordinator of the process.

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Google Apps case study ended and the users are satisfied with this new experience!
As the CIO office and the ICT-KM program continues to look at innovations, we launched The Google Apps Case study, a joint initiative of the CGIAR IT Managers and the CGIAR's ICT-KM Program, to evaluate the overall performance of using outsourcing services to improve the user experience of remote offices users and traveling staff, enhance business continuity, reduce costs of using these services across the CGIAR centers or part thereof.

Google Apps was selected as an online hosted service which includes: Google Mail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Start Page and Google Site applications in an effort to explore new tools that could enable our organization to better communicate, share, and collaborate.

This was an excellent experience," stated Tania Jordan, Coordinator of the Google Apps case study, "this initial study is a very good start, and shows there is a real need out there. To go further we need a real pilot study to take into consideration the particular technical challenges and needs of the CGIAR, highlighted by the case study, to identify an optimal solution."

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We welcome feedback on the ICT-KM News, so please feel free to contact us at ictkm@cgiar.org