We haven’t been lazy over the last months. Some of the ICT-KM originated KS action took place behind the scenes or on the platforms of partner organizations which basically means that we are currently still up- and out-scaling our KS work . I have been mainly collaborating with the CGIAR Secretariat and the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR), and in both cases most of the support laid in technological stewardship and the very exciting and rewarding coordination / facilitation of virtual consultation processes that had to do with the CGIAR change process. Here are some insights gained so far with the different activities.

CGIAR change e-consultations

With the CGIAR Secretariat we organized two e-consultations. One was related to some key issues around the Fund Framework. Together with the Governance and Finance team, we opted for a Skype chat as an asynchronous medium that allowed the 15 or so participants worldwide to contribute over 3 days with their comments and discussions in 5 chat windows, each related to a specific issue of the Fund Framework. A daily summary was emailed to the participants to assure that everybody could receive and digest the information in different formats. The short after action review with the Secretariat staff revealed that the process was quick and efficient, and worked well for the small group. Unfortunately we heard very late from some participants who had institutional restrictions for the use of Skype. Therefore I had to paste their emailed comments in the respective chat windows. This was quite easy to do but obviously not optimal.

In a second consultation effort in October, the objective was to enroll CGIAR Members, Science Council, Center Board Chairs and Center DGs in a three-day e-consultation on the critical elements of the CGIAR Reform. It was designed as an opportunity to discuss, clarify, and get resolution on substantive issues around the implementation of the CGIAR Reform, before the Executive Committee (ExCo) meeting. This time far more participants were expected and that is why we decided to create a Google groups. The again asynchronous media allowed us to sign up the participants easily, to create the 4 required discussion topics and to upload the background documentation. 83 members participated in the 4 day consultation and contributed a total of 118 messages. Again, daily summaries were prepared and shared by email and on the Google group homepage.

Observations: I have three basic observations related to the e-consultations:

• First of all it is a pleasure to see the openness of the CG Secretariat towards the principles of consultation processes as well as their interest in trying out low-cost and innovative solutions for virtual dialogues.
• It seems that the ease of use, and the zero cost of both tools have been big advantages compared to the minor difficulties that we encountered. The team is now perfectly able to undertake further exercises on their own and without external support, which means that we included a capacity strengthening component into the exercise, a very rewarding element.
• An interesting discussion arose when we were defining our mutual roles. We distinguished between content and process facilitators. While I was suggesting the medium and the respective timeline for each exercise and setting up the platforms, the Secretariat staff had to get the objectives clear and assure that the background documents were ready and available on time. They had to reply to the participant’s questions and clarify different aspects of the reform. So my role was quite easy to fulfill but I also realized that the mere fact of suggesting a platform or tool made me take the risk and responsibility for the technology which I was quite nervous about.

CGIAR change video

Another very exciting activity was the creation of a new change video. You may remember our short explanatory video from last year where we used the Common Craft approach to lay out the different elements of the change process. This time and with the communications team of the Secretariat we decided to opt for a small piece where we aimed at capturing the changes in mindsets that have been accompanying the process since its launch and as follows:

“We have success stories to share. However we need impact at scale. A revitalized CGIAR is part of the solution. And mindsets are changing; from skepticism to interest. Step by step we are embracing change. And now it’s your chance to get involved.”

The script is based on various CGIAR stakeholder quotes and the images and video excerpts are taken from center and challenge program Web sources. Both videos have been done with Caramba design, a Cali based multimedia company. Have a look and let us know what you think.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Observations: The video is just to be released and it will be interesting to see the reactions. To say the truth, before the latest ExCo meeting I was quite pessimistic about its value. The optimistic tone of the video seemed pretty much in contrast with the recent worries expressed around the different components of the change process. But after ExCo it seems that many problems have been faced and dealt with, i.e. the little consultation around the mega-programs. So I hope that our little video resonates with many CGIAR staff and induces a positive spirit.

GCARD e-consultation process

The consultation process of the Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (GCARD) has been in full swing for the last 3 months. I am involved in the process as a coordinator of the 6 regional e-consultations. In addition I have been facilitating the Asia Pacific e-consultation.

The GCARD process consists in a step-by-step stakeholder involvement approach in 6 regions coordinated each by one of the 6 regional fora through which the stakeholders are represented within the  Global Forum of Agricultural Research GFAR. The overall objective is to meet the knowledge and technological needs of resource poor, small holder farmers so as to have development impact through a refinement of regional and global agricultural research priorities, as identified by different stakeholder groups and representatives in each region and in an inclusive way. The GCARD process is an integral part of the new CGIAR and serves as its stakeholder platform. It is very interesting and valuable in its attempt to be broad and inclusive, while also recognizing some obstacles like the still soemwhat week connections of the regional fora a with civil society organizations. All in all some 3000 research and development workers are currently directly involved in the GCARD consultation process.

My coordination task consisted in supporting the regional teams –composed in general by a facilitator, the consultant who provided the regional reviews and a person providing technical support– with timelines, tips, and tools related to the facilitation of the virtual events. I used a wiki to share with all the regional teams emails drafts for facilitators which were adapted, and translated by most regional fora. The wiki site is available to all so please feel free to use the resources that are certainly useful for anyone who has to facilitate virtual consultations. In addition I spend time in feeding the GCARD blog with summaries, stories and updates from the different e-consultations. An interesting exercise was to pick up so many significant quotes from participants and use Twitter as an extra channel to convey the voices we could hear in the listserv-based dicsussions. More on the GCARD process in a podcast interview that Nancy White did with me.

Good news come from the e-consultation evaluation survey with 231 replies showing that 86% of the respondents feel that they have increased their understanding of AR4D issues in their regions. 86% also rate the e-consultation as excellent (29%) or good (57%). Lively discussions on the regional reviews have indeed helped to confirm and enrich the identified key issues while coming up loud and clear with preferences on how research should be done. “The enthusiasm created around the e-consultation is evident. 500 members from 65 countries signed up for the event” says FARA’s Myra Wopereis-Pura “Up to the moment, the GCARD-Africa group is still very active. We don’t know how to stop people!”, she says.

The regional face-to-face meetings have now been finalized and as the GFAR Steering Committee meeting has been held last week we can expect interesting first statements on the process, the content of this prioritization exercise as well as the next steps that lead to GCARD 2010 conference in Montpellier in March 2010.

Observations: I had the opportunity to summarize some perceptions around the issues of broad participation, trust and transparency related to the GCARD e-consultations in the recent issue of Collective Action News. The point I am trying to make in this article is that obtaining broad representation and trust ultimately depends on the capacity of the research community to listen actively to those it is ambitious to engage. Active listening is a key skill and challenge. It means that we are really willing to take the participant’s wisdom into account, beyond our usual too narrow economic evidence-based science approach .

Finally: Some remaining ‘delicious” bits and pieces from the KS project

While the project “Institutional KS” is formally closed for a while now, we are still working on some documentation bits and pieces.

KS workshop article in international peer-reviewed journal: More than a year ago 8 participants and facilitators of the first Knowledge Sharing workshop embarked in an effort  to write an article about our workshop experience including examples of the principles and tools that we have been implementing in our centers and organizations as a consequence of the workshop. We did some collaborative writing on a private wiki supported by a professional writer and found a publisher: The International Journal of Web-based communities. While the whole process was finalized a month ago we are now waiting for the issue to be released. I guess we all agreed that this was an interesting experience but that in times of urgency this peer-reviewed process has the inconvenient of delaying the release of information and knowledge which might be outdated once published.

ILAC brief: Similar to the point above, we are waiting for the release of an ILAC brief (Institutional Learning and Change) where Nancy White (Full Circle Associates), Petr Kosina (CIMMYT), Peter Shelton (IFPRI) and I try to summarize the benefits of three social media tools (wikis, blogs and social bookmarking) for the research community.

Social media workshop: We have been holding a third social media online workshop with a small group of participants and it was Nancy White who was the facilitator of this event. You will shortly hear more from it as we will do an extra interview with her on social media, the CGIAR and issues related to online collaboration. Stay tuned…

Related posts:

1. ICT-KM Supports the Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (GCARD)
2. Active Participation of FARA in Knowledge Sharing Workshop
3. Institutional Knowledge Sharing Releases Final Project Report

My mission- first, find out how research outputs from six CGIAR Centers measured up in terms of being available online. This meant spending countless hours surfing the great worldwide web for Center publications, research journal articles, book chapters, conference and workshop papers armed with only an author name, title or year.

Having searched through the various center websites, CG Virtual library, Google, AGRIS, Scirus and CABI, if the document was found, the next piece of detective work involved seeing how accessible the document was? Could anyone access the document in full text or was access limited to the abstract alone?

The challenges were plenty!

And here’s what I observed:

• Excellent internet connectivity is a theory. I was sorely tested with disruptions every time there was a natural disaster (typhoon, earthquake, and many assorted thunderstorms) in Southeast Asia since our ISP (in Malaysia)  is linked via Hong Kong and China to the United States.
• Once in long while, a research output is wrongly indexed and hence your search does not always give you results.
• While a center may have a comprehensive database of their research outputs (library catalog, publications catalog), this does not automatically translate to it being listed and found on the Center website.
• Same goes for the CG Virtual library (CGVlibrary). Before anyone gets upset, let me state that different search engines have different strengths. Sites like Google and Yahoo index websites and are able to find a document when you query author, title and year in a single search box. On the other hand, as Peter Shelton from IFPRI explains, “the CGVlibrary relies heavily on metadata that carefully describes records via a series of standardized fields.” Learning point: you want to keep your searches simple.

Then why not just Google everything? Tempting but Peter clarifies further, “Google doesn’t find everything since it only indexes publicly available web pages while CGVlibrary specializes in searching and retrieving records from closed (and open access) databases. Therein lies the fundamental difference, which is also why you have to be more careful searching CGVlibrary since you’re actually searching the record metadata rather than the entire document content.”

CGVlibrary provides a link to agricultural information databases so you can stay current on CGIAR research- think of it as having a straw in 180 milkshakes i.e. searching from 180 different databases (open and closed access) based on metadata using standardized fields.

So while Google – the default go-to search engine we all adore, is great, it only searches based on what’s public which means you’re fishing in a smaller pool. Which brings us to the point – your research outputs fare better as public goods when they are made available via many search engines and databases. Google Scholar and Google Books can do much to make your research outputs more accessible. People stand a greater chance of finding your work this way.

However, if you have to register and pay a subscription fee to view a document in full text, it is accessible to a select few only. It may be argued that requests for hard copies of journal articles can be made from the Center libraries. But the time it takes just does not seem reasonable these days when information can soon become obsolete.

The six Centers that graciously allowed us to benchmark their research outputs are Bioversity, CIAT, CIMMYT, CIP, ICRAF and WorldFish. The percentage of their peer reviewed journal articles from year 2006 that are available in full text and accessible online range between 22 – 62 percent. This pans out to an average of 36%  per center, meaning we still have a long way to go in making our PIGs fly.

ICT-KM in partnership with CIARD recently developed pathways to aid policymakers, research directors, researchers and information specialists with making their research outputs more available, accessible and finally…applicable. Knowledge is power only when applied. It is quite timely for us to scrutinize our policies when it comes to disseminating our research outputs and ensuring we do not put that power in the hands of a few.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be exploring these pathways and how they can help your research outputs fly! 

Till next time.

Related posts:

1. Making the most of our research outputs…or making our pigs fly!
2. NEW! A tangible help to improve access to our research: or how to make our pigs fly!
3. Now the question is…how do we make agricultural research outputs useful?

AGCommons a CGIAR-delivered project using maps and other local information to help farmers in rural Africa

In Africa, for Africa, with Africa.

Related posts:

1. AGCommons at Africa GIS Conference 2009 in Kampala
2. Day 3 in Nairobi is AGCommons Day!
3. Make use of African Skills: the AGCommons model

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

To  give an extra push to our efforts, we joined forced in the CIARD partnership. To ensure that public domain research outputs – in the form of information, data and knowledge – form part of a global ‘knowledge commons’ for agriculture, these outputs should be created, assembled, handled and disseminated in ways that ensure that they will be as Available, Accessible and Applicable as possible.

With our partners we have developed the CIARD Pathways to provide an introduction to the many ways in which research outputs can be made more available, accessible and applicable.

Who can use these pathways? policymakers, research directors, researchers and information specialists. There are pathways for everyone..

Amongst the CIARD Pathways, there are several which focus particularly on areas of change in both policy frameworks and individual researcher behavior which will help to prepare an institution to stimulate the dissemination of research outputs.  These pathways have been placed in Group 1, called “Developing Institutional Readiness”.

For those people involved with the development of a repository or structured website, some Pathways focus on best practice technical and policy approaches to ensure that websites/repositories fulfil their purpose of making research outputs more accessible and available.  These pathways have been placed in Group 2, called: “Increasing the Availability and Accessibility of Research Outputs – Collection and Preservation”.

Reaching beyond producing digital content and placing it in a repository or on a website, there are some pathways addressing making research outputs easily accessible and transformation of those outputs to communicate them to different stakeholders.  These Pathways have been placed in Group 3 called: “Increasing the Availability and Accessibility of Research Outputs – Making Content Widely Accessible on the Web”

We plan to revise these pathways periodically, add new ones, remove the ones that no longer make sense… This process of enhancement will be continuous, given that Pathways will change as new innovations arise.  You will notice now the Pathways are in English, but we have plans to translate them in French, Spanish, and possibly in other languages, so that they can be more widely accessible.

Our efforts go beyond… in a previous post, we introduced Mendley. We received very good feedback and now are planning a series of webinars to introduce this tool and train in its use…

Stay tuned for more…as our efforts to support researchers use effective techniques to better conduct their work are just about to step up again!

One step at a time we will make those pigs fly!

Related posts:

1. Making the most of our research outputs…or making our pigs fly!
2. Making agricultural research accessible: CIARD steps up
3. If a tree grows in a lab, will the poor eat its fruits? Opening Access to Agricultural Research: A Triple-A Approach to Make Research Available and Useful

One of the five AGCommons’ Quick Win Projects, Community Level Crop Disease Surveillance, has achieved an important result. As a component of the larger Community Knowledge Workers (CKW) Project implemented by the Grameen Foundation, it has contributed to demonstrate the potential of the CKW model. The CKW Project is scaling up its activities after receiving a huge boost in the form of a $4.7 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. AGCommons is proud to have contributed to its success.

The grant will enable the CKW Project to expand its activities in Uganda, where it is building a self-sustaining, scalable network of rural information providers who use cell phones to get vital information to smallholder farmers.

As one of the components of the CKW Project, the AGCommons Quick Win Project trained 40 CKWs in two Ugandan districts to interact with more than 14,000 smallholder farmers and conduct 6,000 surveys, all of which helped organizations such as the World Food Program and IITA better understand the needs of the farmers. IITA also created Geographic Information System (GIS) maps that provided farmers with vital information about crop disease outbreaks and the impact of disease control methods, to name a few.

During the Quick Win Project’s nine-month duration, farmers regularly turned to the CKWs for information on the treatment of pests, accurate weather forecasts, and how to maximize their crop incomes. For example, a groundnut farmer who lost his crop when the rains came late contacted his local CKW, who gave him access to regular weather forecasts and enabled him to plan the rest of his planting season and preserve his livelihood.

The CKW model is simple, efficient and effective. Once a request is received from a farmer, the CKW will use a cell phone to access the relevant information. At the same time, CKWs collect agricultural information from farmers, providing a vital link between farmers, government programs, and non-governmental organizations. The second phase of this initiative will enable more farmers to access a cell phone to contact trained professionals tasked with sharing knowledge and information with them. Indeed, the Grameen Foundation plans to build on its experience gained from the Quick Win Project to develop a self-sustaining national network capable of reaching more than 200,000 farmers.

The grant is part of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Agricultural Development initiative and was announced as part of a larger package of agricultural development projects in conjunction with Bill Gates’ keynote address at last week’s World Food Prize Symposium in Des Moines, Iowa.

The five Quick Win project funded by AGCommons cover a range of technologies and African geographies. They span a variety of different links with end-users – from direct work with farmers (“Seeing is Believing” project) to collaboration at the research level to create access to valuable data sets that can be used on the farmers’ behalf (“Africa Trial Site Catalogue”). Scheduled for completion by the end of 2009, they are already meeting one of their goals: to provide a learning opportunity that offers the potential for scaling up benefits to farmers in the future.

Photo courtesy Guido Ric via stock.xchng

Related posts:

1. Mobile phones fight disease and poverty – An interview with Whitney Gantt
2. Village Phone, Grameen, farmers opportunities and gender challenges…
3. "Sharing knowledge-tell us a story"–article on KSinR project in latest New Agriculturalist

To prepare for the meetings, I looked at the proposed “Strategy and Results Framework” to how we could support the new CGIAR.

The proposed ‘Strategy and Results Framework’ introduces seven interlinked Mega Programs and two platforms — gender and capacity strengthening – that will serve as the building blocks for the work of the ‘new’ CGIAR.

How do information, knowledge, ICTs and related areas fare in these proposals?

Let’s see…. Mega-Program 3 is titled ‘Institutional Innovations, ICTs, and Markets.’ Its focus will be on: “Knowledge to inform institutional changes needed for a well-functioning local, national, and global food system that connects small farmers to agricultural value chains through information and communications technologies and facilitates policy and institutional reforms.”

This mega program “aims to unleash an ― institutional and information revolution – with and for farmers and the rural poor that improves and secures their livelihoods, and also promotes innovation along value chains.” It speculates that the “next big breakthrough in institutional innovation to be unleashed in support of poverty reduction, food and nutrition security, and environmental sustainability” might include: “linking of information and communications technologies (ICTs) to value chains and services for the poor in rural areas, through, for example, the cell phone and its increasing range of sophisticated derivatives.”

Within Mega Program 1 on ‘Crop Germplasm Conservation, Enhancement, and Use’, a program will “integrate bioinformatics and crop information systems.”

These proposals seem to recognize the importance of knowledge and information as well as ICT applications and tools within both CGIAR research processes and the agricultural innovation systems where organizations doing research and development interact. Hopefully, it will boost scattered efforts to increase research uptake, interaction and collaboration using ICTs and other innovative approaches to knowledge sharing in research.

Two cross-cutting platforms have been identified. The one on ‘capacity-building platform’ will “strengthen the capacity of the CGIAR and its partners through improved research networks, information technology, knowledge management systems, and training. The expected result is a dynamic knowledge creating and -sharing system comprising CGIAR centers, strong independent national agricultural research systems, and other research partners sharing knowledge.”

According to the plan, the capacity strengthening role of the CGIAR should “have two purposes: strengthening capacity for all Mega Program partners by fostering research collaboration and networking, and strengthening capacity for weak national agricultural research systems.”

The report goes on to say “An important element of both activities will be the development and use of advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs) and knowledge management and innovation systems, including access of Mega Program partners to applications and resources such as databases.”

These proposals seem to include work by CGIAR centers to make their data, information and knowledge accessible (see recent work on AAA and CIARD), so often limited-access knowledge is freed to be exchanged and re-used. Hopefully, they will not forget the importance of open licenses such as creative commons, and open access in general. The ‘public goods’ need to be made public! as Peter Ballantyne pointed out.

The results of our external review and the expectations laid out on the new Mega Programs will be the basis for a renewed ICT-KM strategy.

Related posts:

1. Changing the Emperor: ICTs transforming agricultural science, research and technology generation
2. Institutional Knowledge Sharing in the CGIAR – One Year Later
3. Second FAO-CGIAR Knowledge Sharing Workshop team

It’s always good to have the fresh, impartial eyes of an external team look at your work and give you feedback in an open, constructive manner. “Nemo profeta in patria!” as my ancestors would say (”No one is a prophet in his own country”).

In today’s world, it’s absolutely vital to get some sense of perspective before one can successfully navigate all the challenges presented by any profession or career. One’s worldview is by default limited — geographically, culturally, historically, linguistically — chances for success in meeting those challenges will be equally limited. So, it was important to have diverse perspectives contribute to the way we charter our course, as we recently explored at our leadership course in IMD.

In coming to their conclusions, members of the review team were more than thorough. They diligently and systematically combed through six years of paperwork and web content, spoke to people familiar with the Program, and asked for opinions from people who knew of our work but who didn’t know the people behind the scenes. In short, no stone was left unturned.

Overall, the review is extremely positive. Here are just a few comments:

“The Program has important accomplishments that have:

• Opened access to research results through the CGVirtual Library, the AAA (Availability, Accessibility, Applicability) Framework, and CGMap/EasyMTP ….
• Expanded knowledge sharing in the CGIAR through tools, including the Knowledge Sharing Toolkit , workshops and events, such as the first Knowledge Share Fair for Agricultural Development and Food Security (January 2009 at FAO). The Program has supported researchers at the project level, fostered sharing of lessons learned (such as WorldFish Center’s “StoryMercial”), and been recognized for its role (as at the International Farmer’s Conference-ICARDA).”

But that doesn’t mean that the panel agreed with everything we’ve being doing. Nonetheless, we appreciate the excellent suggestions on how we can improve, just as much as the recognition we have received for the things that went well.

One of the recommendations suggested “that the ICT-KM Program sharpen its communications strategy to build awareness of the value of ICT-KM initiatives to CGIAR operations and research results.” This is one area that we are definitely focusing on, starting with this message.

Many of our projects and activities have chartered new waters in the CGIAR. We have taken on new ideas, adopted and adapted new technologies, and attempted to change mindsets – all without being 100% sure that we would succeed. In that regard, I see the similarities between our work and that of a venture capitalist: we are willing to take a calculated risk or two in the hope that some activities will turn out well. And some of the activities that turned out well, turned out really well, as highlighted in the panel’s comments above. Some of our outputs and outcomes are also changing the way things are done in the CGIAR, and that’s both gratifying and motivational, because there is still so much more that we can do.

I want to take this opportunity to say a huge thank you to my team members: dedicated professionals who demonstrate on a daily basis their commitment to and belief in what we do. I applaud their resiliency and look forward to having them on board for the next stage of our journey. An expression of heartfelt appreciation to our reviewers too, for their objectivity, willingness to understand and explore and their constructive comments.

From a personal perspective, leading the Program has been interesting and rewarding. I’ve had an opportunity to support innovative approaches that have changed the way I work, been exposed to ideas that have opened my mind, and met people who have changed me as a person. It’s not always been easy, but it’s been a memorable and rewarding ride.

“What next for the ICT-KM Program?” you might ask.

Well, I have to say I feel heartened by the panels closing remarks:

The ICT-KM Program has made great strides and has the potential to contribute much more to the CGIAR System and its research objectives. The Program should be an integral part of the new CGIAR. It should no longer be a fee-for-service operation. In the Panel’s view, the CGIAR should maintain its commitment to ICT-KM during this time of transition so that the Program will not lose momentum or valuable staff, and can build on past experience to better serve the future CGIAR.

Now that we’ve learned and made adjustments, we’re more than ready to move forward … to support the new CGIAR!

I hope to see you all there.

Enrica

Photo courtesy M. Meynsbrughen via stock.xchng

Related posts:

1. ICT-KM Newsletter: Results of external review, new ways to access our research and much more
2. After Action Review of KS Workshop Team
3. Growing discussion on Farmers' Conference

Much energy and care went into the blog, which the team used for reporting on keynote sessions, announcing presentations and updates as they became available, highlighting the main articles published in the media and in other blogs about the Congress, and publishing the occasional opinion piece on what was being discussed in the sessions.

It was a challenge having to set up a reporting process in a few days, especially since there was so much more going on during the Congress, but the energy and motivation of the people involved helped with this unprecedented task.

However, the real challenge was getting started on Twitter. First, we had to get the team organized into ’shifts’. We were lucky to have two volunteers joining us, enabling us to cover the keynote sessions. Second, we tried to keep an eye on how word was spreading about the Congress themes and speakers. And that’s when we found another ‘twitterer’ who was sharing info bits containing the Congress’ WCA2009 hashtag.

Curious and excited, Vanessa Meadu (ICRAF) and I tracked down our fellow twitterer and discovered it was Tom Vandenbosch, Programme Coordinator in the Training Unit at ICRAF. A scientist on Twitter? Yes. And much more, as you’ll find out from the following conversation we had with him.

Tom Vandenbosch (ICRAF)

[Antonella - AP]. Tom, who did you have in mind when you were tweeting from the WCA?
[Tom - TV]. Nobody in particular, because I have a few followers. It was more about taking notes and bookmarking interesting things for myself.

[AP]. How long have you been on Twitter?
[TV]. I haven’t had my personal account for a long time. I’m doing a PhD in e-learning, and as part of my studies, I have been testing many social media tools under different names.

[AP]. Did you follow the @icraf tweets?
[TV]. Yes, I followed them from the sessions. But honestly, I think it was overwhelming to have a sort of play-by-play report of what was being presented. Just the key facts emerging from the sessions would have been okay. People are following so many Twitter accounts, so it’s a bit of overloading. On another front, it helped me discover that it’s possible to have RSS feeds for hashtag searches on Twitter, so you can follow the conversations on a given topic with a RSS reader as well. Moreover, I think it’s good that we have the Twitter account labelled ICRAF, it’s short and handy to quote in re-tweets and replies.

[AP]. Do you think that tweets from the various sessions added any value to your Congress experience?
[TV]. It added a lot of value, especially because there were many things going on at the same time. They made it possible me to follow the sessions that I couldn’t attend. The next time Twitter is used for ICRAF events, there will hopefully be more followers and less irrelevant tweets. For example, a tweet like “#WCA2009 Noordwijk leaves the podium to a round of applause following a lovely sing-song!” is not very relevant to a person who is not at the event. Tweets should be used sparingly to avoid flooding followers’ Twitter streams. Potential followers will automatically be attracted to Twitter accounts that tweet high quality information, since this information can be re-tweeted by others. On the other hand, ICRAF might considerr promoting its Twitter account more widely in order to get more followers.

[AP]. Have you been to other conferences where people were on Twitter?
[TV]. I attended one in FAO last June, where some participants were posting to Twitter but not in a systematic way. But FAO now tweets from a number of interesting accounts, including faonews for news releases and related coverage, and FAOWFD for World Food Day.

[AP]. Do you have colleagues at ICRAF or other institutions who are bloggers and twitterers?
[TV]. Besides Vanessa, who blogs at ASB (Partnership for the Tropical Forest Margins) and PRESA (Pro-poor Rewards for Environmental Services in Africa), there are some others, but I don’t know if they’re real staff, students or interns. These blogs usually contain personal stories.

[AP]. Would you recommend your colleagues at ICRAF to get engaged with social media?
[TV]. Definitely. There’s a lot of value in Web 2.0 tools, but I think we’re over-creating new blogs and Twitter accounts, instead of consolidating what we have already, including our presence on other high-impact blogs.  It would be better to liaise and engage with those who are already out there, the same way you want to be on high-impact research journals. To give you an extreme example, if Britney Spears were tweeting about trees on farms, that would be excellent. She has more than 3 million followers on Twitter now, while ICRAF has about 100.

Vanessa Meadu (ICRAF)

[Vanessa - VM]. ASB has contributed to a new blog, the Rural Climate Exchange, where the CGIAR is bringing together the Climate Change and Agriculture initiatives from across the System. Most of the content is developed by professional writers working closely with communications staff in the Centers. This type of collaboration, especially on such a high-profile issue, is bringing a lot of added value with minimal additional cost.

[TV]. When blogs get linked by popular traditional media, they often get a big boost. For example, a blog called Africa Expat Wives Club became one of the most popular blogs in Kenya after being featured in The Times.

[AP]. Do you think that social media have a role in mainstreaming agroforestry research?
[TV]. Yes, but it is different if we talk about the general public or the scientific community. With the general public, we need to target people on social networks who are interested in receiving information about agroforestry. That’s what my PhD research is all about: me-learning, a new form of e-learning, based on individual requirements, on recommendations based on the user experience history, instead of a one-size-fits-all approach. Through cookies or other existing technologies, e-learners can receive learning propositions that suit their interests, experience levels and learning styles.

The role of social media would be different within the scientific community. Scientists tend to have a more traditional approach to publishing, through papers, assessments, journals, etc. And this has an influence on how they perceive the worth of a communications channel. It could possibly take another generation of scientists to start realizing the value of social media for science.

Perhaps it would be easier for them to perceive this value if more projects used these tools to gather data, such as via SMS-based systems. I’m thinking, for example, of an adaptation of Ushahidi for the collection of scientific data from a range of specific locations. Ushahidi is a platform that crowdsources crisis information: people can report incidents via the Web, email and SMS. The reports are then aggregated, geo-referenced, browsable and searchable on the Web.

[VM]. Many projects I’m working on at the moment have a knowledge sharing and communications component built in the design, so this is changing… like with the PRESA, it was a direct request from the donor, IFAD. Impetus is coming from different places, and this could shift research priorities. Many of the scientists I work with understand the value of integrating knowledge into a proposal, with proper funding for it. Hopefully the trend is over, of asking the communications unit to churn out a policy brief at no cost, after the project is already finished.

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: Are You Listening? (#5 – Social Media Tools Blog Series)

The “Social Media in International Development” Workshop kicked off on September 7th with four CGIAR members, two World Bank staffers, a representative from a Dutch NGO and from an Australian university.

With this diversity, the group was off to a great start in their work to understand the application of social media in international development. We covered four continents and 5 time zones!

The first week focused on understanding social media and the context for the its use in development. There are many potential applications from supporting scientific research, collaboration, engaging with stakeholders and disseminating information. The accompanying mind map offers a glimpse of the conversation, which included  defining social media, exploring the participant’s potential applications and then beginning to open up the implications of the use of social media.

Click here to enlarge

These week one conversations held  asynchronously online and with a weekly telephone/skype call set the stage for week two which began an exploration of three types of social media identified by the group: blogs, wikis and collaborative platforms. This activity will culminate in the production of a summary page on a blog, wiki or added to the existing base resource of the Knowledge Sharing Toolkit http://www.kstoolkit.org

In addition to the conversations,

• the group used and gave positive reviews of the recently released FAO IMARK module on social media,
• listened to podcasts from workshop guest, William Anderson on open science and scientists uses of Twitter
• and had as an option the chance to do a personal exercise on online identity

Related posts:

1. Announcement: Social Media for Development Workshop
2. Social Media On-line Workshop: Evaluation Results
3. Sign up now for the next Social Media Workshop!