There will be sessions on common issues related to Knowledge Management and Knowledge Sharing among the Rome-based international organizations. Organizers and invited participants are practitioners, information managers, project managers, and facilitators as well as those involved in projects with knowledge management and knowledge sharing components.

Colleagues from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), International Development Law Organization (IDLO), International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), World Food Programme (WFP) and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) will be participating…

Antonella Pastore, Michael Marus and I will be representing the CGIAR’s ICT-KM program; so watch our for more news about this event later this week.

Related posts:

1. Knowledge Share Fair for Agricultural Development and Food Security starts next week at FAO Headquarters
2. Improving Agricultural Knowledge Sharing, Education and Learning
3. Roadshow–a knowledge sharing in research approach-takes place this week

This handy resource will be updated regularly with content from the ICT-KM Program and the Centers, as it becomes available. ICT Infopoint has also received input from several ICT support staff in small offices in Africa and India, enabling content to be developed that could potentially help them and local researchers improve the way they work and collaborate.

ICT Infopoint is a collaborative effort involving input from the ICT-KM Program’s Second Level Connectivity Project and the CGIAR Centers.  Formerly known as the ICT Briefcase, an output of the Second Level Connectivity Project led by Ian Moore (ILRI-ICRAF), this resource has been further refined in terms of design and content by Tania Jordan, ICT-KM Technical Coordinator, and Antonella Pastore, CGXchange Project Coordinator.  The change of name from ICT Briefcase to Infopoint was made to better reflect the present-day product.

Please come on by and check it out for yourself!

If you have any suggestions or comments about ICT Infopoint, please contact the CGXchange team at cgxchange@cgiar.org.

Related posts:

1. CGIAR tries out Google Apps….and…
2. 2nd Wiki Training session at FAO
3. Useful Tips for Collaborative Writing with Google Docs and Google Sites

Shwu Jiau Teoh

Way back in the early 1980s, there was no email in the CGIAR. When scientists wanted to collaborate with each other, they did so using the technology available at that time: phone, fax, telex and cable. Some of these communication methods were often slow and unreliable, and always expensive – factors that had a direct bearing on critical research efforts. Then in 1985, with the advent of email across the CGIAR System, things began looking up. Almost overnight, day-to-day communications became much faster and cheaper. However, long-distance collaborative efforts could still be slow and, at times, confusing.

The age of social media

Fast forward to the 21st century and we have a completely different scenario on our hands. Welcome to the Age of Social Media!

To find out how today’s scientists are collaborating in the CGIAR, we caught up with WorldFish GIS specialist Shwu Jiau Teoh at her office in Penang, Malaysia.

“I feel social media is changing the way some CGIAR researchers work with partners and present the results of their research,” she says. “For example, my team uses Google Sites to share documents and collaborate. It’s easy to create a website using the Google Sites template. You don’t even have to have a programming background – I picked it up in a few minutes. It’s ideal for accessing and sharing information and it’s free.”

Site features

Shwu Jiau is also impressed with the various features and functions of Google Sites.

“My team in Penang needs to be able to share information and collaborate with our Chinese partners while working on our project Valuing Living Aquatic Resources of Wetlands in China, led by Dr. Suan Pheng Kam,” she explains. “We started using the site last May, when the project first got underway, and we feel that the 10GB of storage (Google Apps standard edition) is more than enough for our needs. We have created content on a public Google site, so that visitors are informed of our work as the project advances. But we also set up a restricted site available to just our team members for sharing knowledge and documents in one place. The site settings allow us to easily assign different levels of permission to our members.

“Any changes to a document are tracked in a history archive, so we can follow the evolution of a document as it is accessed and changed by the various team members. There’s also a calendar, a section where members can see announcements in real time, and a page for project and research documentation. A dashboard page, which is by default a two-column webpage with four placeholder gadgets, automatically gives an overview of the project: an embedded calendar with the most recent posts from the announcements page, a list of updated files from the project document page and links to the different research components page.

File Cabinet

Of all the easy-to-use features available on Google Sites, this GIS specialist feels the File Cabinet, in which project documents and literature are stored, to be the one that team members value the most.

“Without Google Sites, we would have to communicate via email, which wouldn’t be convenient when we want to share large files, as some mail boxes have limitations,” she explains. “The File Cabinet is very useful for storing our reports and research literature. In addition, it immediately displays the latest version of all our documents. This makes it easy for team members to keep up to date and also helps with the compilation of donor reports – this is easily done by referring to the related documents available on the project page, without having to search through all the annexes.

“We also use the File Cabinet when we want to prepare material for a workshop and need input from our Chinese counterparts. At the conclusion of a workshop, we usually upload material from the event onto the site for the team members to access and also embed into the site a Picasa slideshow that displays the workshop photo album. There’s no way we could go back to using just email to accomplish this.”

It looks as if Shwu Jiau and her team have their feet firmly planted in the 21st century.

For those who are already using Google Sites, we’d love to hear your story, too.

Related posts:

1. Wikis, sites, docs and pads: the many flavours of collaborative writing (#7 – Social Media Tools Blog Series)
2. Useful Tips for Collaborative Writing with Google Docs and Google Sites
3. Updates from Social Media Workshop 2 (IV)

Tania Jordan, Gauri Salokhe, Romolo Tassone

Usually after the training sessions, Gauri Salokhe and Romolo Tassone from the FAO Web Knowledge Exchange and Capacity Building Division, perform an “After Action Review“ to the participants to see what they liked the most or least, and use this feedback to improve future sessions.

It seems that many participants liked the ’hands-on’ session last week where they had the opportunity to ‘play’ around with the tools, but participants requested  they should have more time …in other words: ‘less talk and more play‘…of course, nothing better than doing-it-yourself!

So considering last weeks feedback, yesterday’s 2-hour session was organized as to give more time to the participants for the ‘hands-on’ session.

Steve Katz

Steve Katz, Chief of the Knowledge Exchange Facilitation Branch at FAO, introduced the session by saying:

FAO is a multi-disciplinary environment and we organize events such as the Sharefair and training sessions like these to introduce new knowledge sharing methods, tools and approaches to help us work more horizontally in the organization…the challenge is to see how these can be applied in your work…

Romolo continued by giving the participants an introduction about what makes a Wiki a Wiki, and he explained:

• inline edit/save
• easy and open access to history, versioning/differences information and the ability to role back
• The most recent additions/modifications of articles can be monitored actively or passively (RSS, email, summary page) – to facilitate collaborative editing
• Discussion tab
• User management/permissions
• approach that focuses on trust, accountability and transparency, rather than security/authority/ownership
• Moderation/advocacy required. Sense of community and personal involvement of content

Gauri Salokhe

Gauri showed the example of the Knowledge Sharing toolkit (KS Toolkit), a long-term collaborative Wiki site using Wikispaces that assembles knowledge sharing tools and methods resources as a clear example of collaboration between CGIAR ICT-KM, FAO and most recenly from the KMforDev community.

Tania Jordan

This time, I showed them an example of a private collaborative team site under our CGXchange 2.0 implementation where more than 25 people from the different continents were actively collaborating to produce 7 Enterprise Security Good Practice documents on a Google Sites Wiki.

There were interesting questions like: ‘ How do you get people to start on a Wiki?’, What if I need to work only on one document? or How do I know if I need a Wiki’… Like any website, to get people started on a Wiki, you really need someone that is constantly ‘pushing’ people to provide their input, someone (or a group of people) that as Gauri put it: acts as a ‘Wiki gardener’, that encourages people to provide their ideas and content on the site. Once people start feeling confident on the tools and see the potential of what they’re working on, the Wiki starts taking a life of its’ own!

Remember that in some cases, people don’t really need a Wiki site, sometimes a simple online document can do what you need and I explain these differences further on this post: Useful tips for collaborative writing with Google Docs and Google Sites.

Of course towards the end of the session, the moment they’ve all been waiting for…the participants were paired up on the computers and had the opportunity to get their hands-on the Wiki…indeed this is the moment where they have lots of fun!

Once again, I congratulate and thank Gauri and Romolo for organizing this wonderful session…it’s very nice to see that there are always new things to learn from each other.

Gauri also wrote a blog post about this Wiki session.

Until the next time, I look forward to your comments…

Related posts:

1. Training session on Wikis at FAO – a great experience!
2. FAO-CGIAR KS Workshop: Our Amazing Mentors
3. Second FAO-CGIAR Knowledge Sharing Workshop team

First, Evelyn Katingi, from the Collective Action Regional Plan: we’ve been working together on the CGIAR Research Map. We talked about the status of Phase II developments and the feedback she is getting about the Research Map from the scientists she’s in touch with all the time. Very promising outlook for this project.

Muthoni and Susan, Public Awareness, ILRI

Then, Susan McMillan, Head, Public Awareness, and her staff of young, committed people in the PA team. We had no agenda for this meeting, we just wanted to share our experience with social media. And what a job ILRI is doing! Videos, blogs, and online accessible documents! The meeting ended up in a fascinating brainstorming session on how to bring a conversational quality to the documentation process of intense meetings, and eventually in some sort of speed geeking with quick tours of what we are doing on the Web.

Finally I met with Ian Moore, the ILRI-ICRAF IT Manager. I had met Ian before but only very quickly at the IT Managers’ meeting in Bioversity back in 2007 when I had just arrived in the CG and was still pretty frightened at the new turn in my career. Forty-five minutes with Ian were enough to agree on some key points of the single sign on project for CGXchange 2.0 that has been discussed with other colleagues online for a few weeks now.

Last but not least, I met Leah Ndungu, Research Management Officer, who is the EasyMTP Focal Point at ILRI. It had only been skype chats and phone calls with Leah so far, mostly in the rush of the MTP submission deadline. So it was good to finally see her smiling face.

Off to ICRAF in the afternoon where I met Michael Hailu, Director of Communications, and Solomon Mwangi, Web Developer. And this is only a taste of the great bunch of people who will make the reporting team at the Second World Congress on Agroforestry. We’re getting ready to bring in the social Web to the Congress starting from Monday 24.

Self portrait of the author on ILRI campus

As Tania suggested in her post on the wiki session at FAO, we’re getting really good at online collaboration, but eventually nothing beats the power of the face and the personal touch.

Thank you, all, it was good to see you…

Related posts:

1. Social media at the 2nd World Congress on Agroforestry, Nairobi
2. The Social Web at WCA2009: monitoring the buzz
3. Social Media: Impact of our Capacity Building Efforts

CGIAR staff frequently use online tools to communicate with colleagues and partners around the globe. Many of these tools have made a significant, positive impact on the way staff work by facilitating communication and information sharing.

Until recently, some CGIAR Centers used Microsoft’s Live Communications Server (LCS) version 2005, an internal instant messaging (IM) system that integrates other IM applications (MSN, AOL and Yahoo) using a single client. LCS wasn’t deployed widely in the CGIAR mainly because the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) conversations between Centers didn’t work properly. This was due to the different security levels and network environments across Centers, as well as some limitations with LCS itself.  In addition, the implementation of LCS incurred monthly costs for server maintenance and per-user licensing charges.

Consequently, the decision has been made to remove LCS from the CGIAR’s portfolio of services come September 2009 and explore alternatives.

As the Technical Coordinator of the ICT-KM program, I’ve been working with a group of CGIAR IT managers over the past few months to research possible cost-effective alternatives to replace LCS.  The objective is to find a tool (or set of tools) that:

• doesn’t incur high licensing and server maintenance costs
• has a user management that can be integrated with CGIAR Active Directory, which presently has over 8500 users
• allows users to make calls to landlines and mobile phones at low rates given the high cost of communications between Centers and with CGIAR partners and to a much lesser extent within Centers

With these requirements in mind, we started exploring GTalk and Skype, both of which are applications in the cloud.

While a system-wide decision is yet to be made, I would like to share the information I’ve collected so far about these tools and present a comparison table.

Google Talk (GTalk)

In mid 2008, the CGIAR tried out Google Apps as a suite of collaboration tools. The ICT-KM Program gathered the feedback from users and published it in the CGIAR Google Apps Case Study Report. Then, in January 2009, it was decided to implement Google Apps Education edition to replace the CGXchange BEA Aqualogics infrastructure and take advantage of the collaboration tools in the Google Apps package:  Docs, Sites, Calendar, Google Talk, etc.

GTalk Downloadble Client

Google Talk is a free web-based application for instant messaging and voice over internet protocol (VOIP), offered by Google Inc.

Instant messaging between the Google Talk servers and its clients uses an open protocol, XMPP, allowing users of other XMPP clients to communicate with Google Talk users.

GoogleTalk allows users to sync their “screenname,” so to speak, with their e-mail account so they are alerted when they receive new mail, thereby eliminating the need to frequently check their accounts.   

One of the advantages of Google Talk is that you can access it either through your personal Gmail account or your Google Apps account (if you are in the CGIAR), making it easier to keep in touch with contacts.

Skype

, another popular VoIP software with IM functionality, is already more widely used than Google Talk in the CGIAR. Skype, which has been owned by eBay since 2005, is free to download and has more than 443 million users around the world as of March 2009  (according to EBay).

One of the main differences between Google Talk and Skype is that the latter allows users to make free PC-to-PC calls as well as low-cost long-distance or international phone calls to landlines and mobile phones over the Internet.

Skype uses a peer-to-peer protocol and offers voicemail, chat, videoconferencing and an expanding array of additional services. Skype is not a replacement for ordinary telephones and cannot be used for emergency calling.

Source: Skype

While Skype was originally intended for personal communications, the service also offers significant appeal as a low-cost, long-distance service for businesses, particularly for companies that need to communicate internationally.

There are some 3rd-party Skype solutions for business such as  Skip2PBX and VoSky Exchange to name a few that offer the possibility of integrating Skype with their PBX systems. However, Skype has begun testing a connection to corporate VoIP systems (Skype For SIP for Business Users), something that enterprises have been asking for years and which is currently undergoing beta testing.

Although Skype is a great tool for making competitively priced calls to landlines and mobile phones, I feel it needs to improve its online presence indicator – sometimes, online users are shown as being offline when their status if set to online. I’ve also received some instant messages several days after they were sent. In short, the IM feature is not always so ‘instant’ after all.

For more information about Skype, click here

Comparison between Google Talk and Skype

See the Google Talk and Skype comparison table

Conclusions

In my opinion, Google Talk is more enterprise-oriented than Skype, has a good level of security, requires less bandwidth, collaborative features that work well with the implementation of Google Applications Education Edition (CGX 2.0), and integrates with our Active Directory through third-party tools, to name just a few advantages.

Skype, on the other hand, is an application with many interesting features that Google Talk doesn’t have at the moment, such as the ability to establish a conference call with up to five people at a time and the ability to make phone calls to mobiles and landlines worldwide at low rates. However, this software requires more bandwidth than Google Talk and it is blocked in some CGIAR Centers as a result.

In summary, there is no single tool that does it all. At the moment I use Google Talk mostly for work-related purposes since it’s directly linked with the Google Apps CGX 2.0 collaboration workspace and with external partners or friends that have Gmail accounts.

I mostly use Skype for personal communications or when I need to make international phone calls or send a text message.  I hope Google introduces a feature that will allow users to make phone calls to landlines and mobile phones at low-rates with Google Talk. Google is working on  Google Voice, the next version of Grand Central (presently in private beta), which will allow users to make international calls, conference calls and send text messages. However, it’s not known if Google Voice will be integrated with Google Talk. If that were to happen, we would have a real killer application at our disposal.

Keep a look out for the full report on the ‘Selection of a communication tool in the CGIAR’ – to be published soon!

Until the next time, the question still begs: GTalk, Skype or both?

Related posts:

1. CGIAR tries out Google Apps….and…
2. CGXchange 2.0: "The Times They are A-changin'"
3. Useful Tips for Collaborative Writing with Google Docs and Google Sites

Source: myozspot.com.au

There’s a whole new world of ICTs out there. So much to choose from: technologies and services that could have a significant impact on the way we do research, aid….. well, our business, whatever that is.

There’s cloud computing, virtualization, chargeback and social software, to name just a few. And just where does Green IT fit into the scheme of things, if at all?

With budgets being squeezed ever tighter, many of us now have to justify more than ever our investment in new ICTs. We all know that certain ICTs can improve efficiency, are cost effective, and easy to implement and use, but with limited funds and a large array of technologies and services available to choose from, it can be a daunting task deciding what’s best for your organization.

In June I presented a paper at the CGIAR Science Forum discussing cloud computing and ubiquitous networks. Look at this paper to explore some of the advantages.
Each year, analyst firm Gartner releases its Top 10 Strategic Technologies list, a predictive inventory of the technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in the three years following its release.

Last year, we started from this list and with help from the CGIAR IT Managers we used a ranking system based on five criteria: effectiveness, cost reduction, practicality, user satisfaction and low cost to select our top 10. Cloud computing was looked at there too…

Towards the first half of October, we will have a new list of technologies for 2010 and as part of a new upcoming ‘Tech’ series in our blog, there we will give you more details on each of the new technologies/processes we expect to gain ground in the CGIAR in 2010.

Stay tuned as you can find there some ideas for your organization!

Related posts:

1. Changing the Emperor: ICTs transforming agricultural science, research and technology generation
2. The question begs: GTalk, Skype or both?
3. More ‘impactful’ agricultural science and innovation by investing in ‘ICTs’

The CGMap team is gearing up for the release of research plans to the world via KML, the Open Geospatial Consortium international standard for the geographic annotation and visualization in earth browsers, mobile maps, and Web-based maps. CGMap is the epitome of ICT-KM’s ‘Triple A’ approach, and once CGMap lands on the Web’s engines through KML, the project plans in CGMap will have an even greater Accessibility and Applicability potential.

Search engines will now have geographic coordinates of the who, what, and where of CGIAR research. This means that searching for ‘maize and wheat genetic research’ will give results on CIMMYT projects, along side other relevant sources, like FAO.

Scientists, researchers and beyond … investors, partners … who use tools like Google Earth to study and plan activities will be able to build scenarios which provide a more intelligent context to their research. For example, a researcher using an earth browser to plan maize and wheat genetic research activities will be able to focus on any geographical region/location, search for maize and wheat genetic research, see results, add layers of required data (e.g: the Köppen climate classification), and save the scenario built on the fly.

Who is doing What and Where in the CGIAR?

From my first day with the ICT-KM Program, this has been an underlying question and driving force in most of my work with the Program. CGMap, launched in late 2008, is the CGIAR’s prime source of MTPs, the Medium Term Plans in which CG Centers and Challenge Programs express both their strategy and coherence to the CGIAR objectives and priorities.

Recent posts on the Social Media Tools Series have shed light on how social media tools provide researchers a more effective landscape for the collaboration and dissemination of research information. Exploiting research projects geographically will give rise to sharing and collaborating by using CGMap’s existing resources, the CGIAR project plans (who is doing what and where).

Stay tuned for future landings on maps and earth browsers of the CGIAR’s Ongoing Research: Focus on Africa (a.k.a. Eastern and Southern Africa – ESA).

Related posts:

1. CGIAR receives Google Earth Pro licenses!
2. Giving Research New Bearings: Take a Peek in the Google Engine Behind CGMap
3. Search, Browse and Download CGIAR research plans from CGMap

Yes, change can be a pain, because it can shake up your organized, structured existence. However, we can’t close our eyes and hope the Internet will go away. While I feel we should not jump onto the social media bandwagon just because everyone else is doing so, social media’s potential cannot be denied. Whatever the reason people give for avoiding social media, don’t let ignorance and fear hold you back from what will probably be the next revolution in the way people communicate.

Social media is breaking down communication barriers: allowing people to reach out to others around the world – letting them connect, engage and share among themselves. Now more than ever, agricultural research and development organizations such as ours can leverage the popularity of social media to get more mileage out of their research outputs.

Social media tools can help you in your role as researcher, manager or communicator.

If all you’re interested in doing is organizing your online world, there are several social media tools that can simplify your life. These include social bookmarking sites that can help you organize your website resources and scientific literature. And if you’re struggling to keep abreast of updates from your favorite websites and blogs, newsfeeds may be your ticket out of mayhem. However, if you are yearning for more, hoping to connect with like-minded individuals or wanting to share your organization’s research with a larger audience so that it can be used, applied and improved upon, then read on!

The true value of social media lies in its ability to form communities organically. Often these communities, or social networks as they are called, come together because of common interests or a shared purpose. It is a nurturing environment filled with trust and camaraderie – the perfect milieu for effective collaboration and the sharing of ideas, information and knowledge. Add to that an outreach across vast geographical distances and the cross-linking between the different social media tools, and voila! You have a global, inter-linked audience at your fingertips.

Social media can give your communication strategy a boost in the following ways:

• It can help you tap into a large, global audience base and go where the people are these days – the Internet!
• The way people source for information has evolved. They are more discerning, preferring to seek out recommendations and suggestions from their colleagues, peers and experts. Information overload is a major concern, so people will not waste their time visiting a website, blog, database or any other resource unless someone they trust points them in that direction.
• The usual way we do business is slowly coming to an end. Pushing information out to your target audience does not guarantee that it will be read and used. Information is useful only when it is received by the right person, who is looking, at the right time. Use social media tools as vehicles to get your message out.

How social media can boost your communication strategy:

Increase Visibility

• Create awareness by raising the profile of your organization on social networking sites. Cultivate long term support for your organization by creating your own network of scientists, research partners and interested individuals.
• Use social media tools to promote your projects, events and activities. Announce time-sensitive, newsworthy items and get a head-start on others by microblogging. Microblogging involves posting short sentences (max 140 characters) that can be used to promote your journal article or a useful website, act as a reminder for an activity, or even ask questions. Tip: Ensure that your microblogging network consists of like-minded individuals who share your interests and concerns so that the information exchange is meaningful. Be prudent in selecting whom you follow.
• Promote your name: use social media to establish your reputation in the research and development arena. Blogging is a great way for researchers to share their research ideas with others and gain feedback from a wider, online audience. A recent Blog Tips post  provides practical reasons why blog sites may surpass websites in generating traffic to increase Internet presence.Well-thought-out blogs attract people with similar thoughts and queries, people who can validate your ideas and also challenge you by sharing varying opinions.

Engage people

• Promote issues that resonate with people to encourage involvement and gather support for your cause. A great example of this is the Obama campaign which relied heavily on social media to garner visibility and support, resulting in victory for the Obama camp.
• Form strategic alliances with influential people and institutions that help boost your organization’s profile.
• Source expertise or talent, whether potential research partners, service providers or other experts.
• In the ICT-KM Program’s Social Media Tool series, I shared some thoughts on how social networking sites can help you engage with others. Reinforcing the sentiment that it is easy to find and connect with people of similar interests and even easier to set up online groups, Christian Kreutz and Giacomo Rambaldi provide interesting examples of local and global engagement. They also describe the various levels at which people engage while participating in social networks.

Share Knowledge

• Social media transcends geographic boundaries. Test your research ideas by sharing them with your colleagues globally. Collaborate, enrich and validate your work at a fraction of the time and cost associated with face-to-face meetings. As wide-reaching as it can be, collaborative sharing sites also come with security options that allow secure knowledge sharing.
• Create an environment where people recognize your expertise, and establish your organization as the expert in your field of research. Whether you are a researcher who is new to a field and eager to learn more, or the resident expert, share your knowledge and experiences by contributing to insightful blogs. I may be new to blogging, but already I’m learning so much from just opening up to a new community. My boss, Enrica Porcari, CGIAR Chief Information Officer, is a regular blogger and attests to its value. As she believes, and as I have been experiencing, blogs go beyond just sharing your words. The true value of blogging is in the exchange of information and knowledge, and the nurturing environment that allows differing ideas and opinions to emerge without defensiveness.  See how these successful bloggers use their expertise to share and learn:
  • Agricultural Biodiversity blogs  (by Luigi Guarino and Jeremy Cherfas, who are living their passion for all things related to biodiversity in agriculture)
  • ICT-KM Blogs (Blogs on knowledge sharing and social media in the CGIAR by 6 active bloggers and many guest bloggers)
  • Blog Tips (On blogging and social media for non-profits)
  • NEW: Rural Climate Exchange (new CGIAR blog connecting agricultural and environmental science to the climate change agenda) 
• Share your photographs and videos online. Place useful slides online so others can learn from them. Tip: Think about the keywords/tags that you use to describe your product, such as blog, photograph, slides, videos, etc. How would you search for information online? Use that as a guide for your tags.
• Get more mileage out of your research outputs by filtering content to fit different social media tools. Think of social media as strategic communication lines that branch outward to several different networks, which in turn branch into other networks.
• Reach out to interested people outside your regular circle and gain valuable ideas/feedback from your pool of social networks. Practice what some call social listening.

As my colleague Simone Staiger-Rivas often quotes, “Social media is not about technology. It is about conversations enabled by technology.”

• Going beyond self-promotion, we should be paying attention to conversations that are already ongoing on social media sites; conversations that we are also passionate about. Sharing is a two-way process, and we should take the time to interact with others in a similar fashion.
• Share resources within interested communities and broaden horizons at a fraction of the time it would take to search for data or information or knowledge on your own. Social Bookmarks and Newsfeeds are great for keeping track of what’s being published on your favorite websites and blogs. Share this with others, and see the favor being returned manifold.

Consider your communication goals when you decide to incorporate social media into your strategy:

• Decide on whether you want to increase visibility for your organization, share knowledge or engage people.
• Choose the right social media tool(s) for your organization based on the target audience, research content and technology available.
• Start small. Many social media tools are relatively low-cost to implement in your organization:
  • Experiment with a low-risk pilot project.
  • Use short timeframes, anywhere from a few weeks to a few months.
  • Evaluate your progress with pre-determined goals and measure its success. Read Antonella Pastore’s post on how to check if social media is working for you.
  • In the event a social media tool does not work for your organization, it is wise to let go and start over with a different, more suitable tool. Don’t take it too personally.

 Until you try social media out for yourself, you will never know what you’re missing. This reminds me of the days before the mobile telephone came along. Can’t imagine your life without it now, right? Similarly, the potential of social media is limitless. When you use several social media tools in tandem to inform, disseminate, share, collaborate and interact, you work within an environment of networks that grow exponentially. That’s power you can’t afford to ignore. Resistance is futile!

Till next time.

Resources: 

• ICT-KM Social Media Blog series (articles on using social media tools in research and development organizations like ours)
• Knowledge Sharing Toolkit (social media tools in the research and development context)
• Blog Tips (Blogging in the non-profit context)
• Web2forDev (Web 2.0 for Development Gateway)
• ShareFair (A knowledge sharing fair involving FAO, IFAD, CGIAR and many other research and development partners)

Related posts:

1. Social Networks: friend or foe? (#4 – Social Media Tools Blog Series)
2. Social Media: how do you know it's working? (#3 – Social Media Tools Blog Series)
3. Social Media: Are You Listening? (#5 – Social Media Tools Blog Series)

This is not the first time we write about this topic: Meena published a general overview of collaborative writing approaches, and Silvia Renn shared tips on writing proposals with Google Docs.

Having been involved in the Google Apps Case Study and currently in CGXchange 2.0, I’d like to share my experience with Google Docs and Google Sites since I’ve found these tools are helping me and the ICT-KM team improve the way we work.  In particular, I’m sharing tips for organizing comments and edits so that every collaborator feels comfortable with the tools and the collaborative writing process.

Enjoy and share your experience and feedback!

Google Docs

Google Docs is a hosted (online) service where you can create, store and share documents, spreadsheets, presentations and online forms. You can also import documents from MS Office and Open Office: Google Docs will convert them to HTML and make them available for you to work on them on your own or share for viewing or editing by selected people or  the world.

With Google Docs you can:

• Share your project documents and other useful resource materials with collaborators in different parts of the world;
• Allow your collaborators to view and edit  online documents; this eliminates the problem of having several edited draft versions that arise out of email-based collaboration;
• Organize your project information in one online location with the added benefits of search and chat;
• Collaborators can access it from any computer with Internet access. They won’t lose work because it saves automatically. Users can also access the Google documents offline if they install Google Gears and synchronize them (this is a great option for low-bandwidth users that cannot be connected all the time).

Tips for smooth collaboration with Google Docs

Google Docs is a great tool to write documents collaboratively because it’s online so anyone with an Internet connection (even low-bandwidth users) can easily reach the document. Plus, it’s got version history: you can have up to 10 people editing at the same time and you can see their names at the bottom of the page.

Working with so many people at a time can be confusing and someone may easily remove what others have written. In this case, a good practice is to agree with the collaborators that they should not delete content, but instead add comments to something that in their opinion should be removed. Anyway, the version history function will help you keep track of the changes in the document.

Remember that with your Google account you also have GTalk, Google instant messenger, enabled: this allows you to chat with your colleagues as you are editing in real-time so you can easily avoid overlaps.

If your goal is to publish the final document, you should consider that writing styles can vary, and all the ideas your collaborators provide may not be relevant for the final document. It could then be a good idea to identify a moderator who is in charge of capturing the edits/comments and finalizing the document.

Note that while Google Docs is excellent for basic editing and collaborative writing, you still need support from other tools for final formatting and presentation, once the collaborative input has come to an end (E.g: MS Word, Adobe InDesign).

If you have already started a document in Word, you can upload it to Google Docs (with .doc extension – maximum 500k). It will be converted to the Google Doc format and be available for you to start sharing it with collaborators.

Google Docs also allows you to upload these other file types:

• Microsoft Word 2007 (with .docx extension), Rich Text (.rtf), OpenDocument Text (.odt) and StarOffice (.sxw).
• Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt, .pps).
• Spreadsheets: Comma Separated Vale (.csv), Microsoft Excel (.xls, .xlsx) files and OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods)
• PDF (that you would be able to view only)

How to insert comments on Google Docs

Place your cursor next to the area on which you would like to comment. Then, select Insert> Comment, and a highlighted line will appear.

Add a comment

You can have as many comments as you like. You can also discard comments, add to them, and change their color by right-clicking on them.

Using a different color for each participant

Version History

Go to Tools > Revision History and you will see the different versions available: click on any one version to display it. You can revert to the one you’re viewing by clicking on Revert to this version .

Google Docs Revision History

Google Sites

While Google Docs is a great tool to collaboratively write documents, I found that Google Sites is a great alternative when you have more than one document to edit and when you want to share additional information at the same time.

Google Sites is a wiki-based solution that allows you to quickly gather a variety of information in one place – including videos, calendars, presentations, attachments, and text- and easily share it for viewing or editing bya small group, the entire organization, or the world.

In the CGIAR we experimented the collaborative writing of 6 documents using a collaborative Google Site with more than 25 people distributed worldwide and I must admit this was quite a successful experience…

We started from a base document in Word.  We created a page for each document and sub-pages for each section of the document, so that the invited collaborators could write their comments or edit online. Then, we appointed a moderator to keep track of the changes and provide the final document based on the comments posted on the site. When the document was final, it was uploaded again to the site for another round of comments, wherever necessary.

Tips for managing comments and edits on Google Sites

If you already have a Word version of the document, upload the document on the page and ask people to download and print the document.

Create a page for each section of the document to facilitate the edits and comments per section, and copy and paste the content to the page. (Note: if the document is very long and you don’t want to create a page per section, you may want to consider Google Docs instead). In our case, the initial document was uploaded as an attachment, then the content was copied and pasted to each page and collaborators made general comments.

How to organize commenting on a Google Site page (click to enlarge)

If collaborators have comments on the section in general, they can use the Comments area at the bottom of the page to post their comments.

Comment box

Another way to comment on the site is to click on Edit Page and add the comment directly in the page itself using a different color and writing name or initials to easily distinguish the collaborators.

In-line comments in a Google Site page (click to enlarge)

Want to get started with Docs and Sites?

For CGIAR Users: CGIAR users can request an account at cgxchange.org Google Apps Education Edition. Browse the Get Started guides to Collaboration Tools, in particular Documents, but also Spreadsheets and Presentations.

For users outside of the CGIAR: To set up an account, go to http://docs.google.com or http://sites.google.com and find there the instructions. You can either set up a Gmail account or create a Google Account with your existing email address. For a Google account, you can just enter your current email address and select a password. This would allow you to take advantage of all the free Google services.

How to get started with Google Sites

1. Create the Google Site. For CGIAR users: follow these instructions and watch How to create a Google Sites video. You can also watch an introduction to Google Sites and browse examples

2. Create pages. Start creating your wiki pages: each page allows users to upload documents and comments. Watch How to edit a Google Site video or read this tutorial on CGXchange 2.0

3. Share the site. When your site is ready, make sure that the people you need to invite to edit and comment have a Gmail or Google account.

Conclusions

Usually when I need to write a document, I start with a Google Doc, and then invite the people that I need to collaborate with. If I have additional content to share in relation to the same topic or project, usually I consider a Google Site which allows me to add and share web pages, documents, videos, calendars, Google gadgets and more. Actually, you can even embed the Google document you started on a Google Site as well (just remember to share the Doc with all the people that have permissions on the Site).

Note that while Google Docs and Google Sites are great tools for collaborative text processing, they are not so efficient for final document layout (at least for now);  in order to provide a final document layout, you still have to use other specific word processing or desktop publishing tools (E.g. Word, Adobe tools). Remember that you can decide which tool to use depending on your situation; but if you ask me, I would suggest you try them both so you can understand which tool is best depending on your particular situation.

If you have any other collaborative writing experiences, we would be pleased to hear about them, so until the next time…happy writing!

Related posts:

1. Wikis, sites, docs and pads: the many flavours of collaborative writing (#7 – Social Media Tools Blog Series)
2. Using Google Docs for Proposal Writing
3. CGIAR Google Apps Case Study