THRUST2: Content for Development (C4D)

Content for Development consists of a combination of six mutually dependent activities that address the need to improve the management of and accessibility to the information resources that are produced or needed by the CGIAR to carry out its mission, as well as meeting the necessity for improved access to tools to support collaborative work. Within this thrust, four activities focus on system and process and two on the development and organization of training content in addition to nurturing the development of training-related communities of practice.

System and Process Activities

Four C4D activities (Virtual Resources Center Infrastructure; E-Publishing; Virtual Library Service; and Scientific Data Standards and Exchange: Capacity Development) are working in an integrated fashion to create a new "website" (the CGIAR Virtual Resources Center - VRC) that will provide a common home for accessing information resources, tools and workspaces relevant to the entire CGIAR community and its partners. This will function as a corporate intranet and extranet.

Virtual Resources Center Infrastructure
The VRC Infrastructure activity will provide the platform, maintenance and support for the CGIAR intranet, including extranet tools, a single sign-on and a common search engine. The Web Content and Usage Analysis sub-activity will determine which dissemination methods, information resources and services the users actually find most appropriate and useful through the VRC and other CGIAR web-based information services. It will also contribute directly to the monitoring and evaluation of the C4D Thrust as a whole.

E-Publishing
This activity will give Centers the technical infrastructure to vastly improve how the CGIAR publishes its research. It will create a common publishing workflow that makes document creation - layout or web pages - largely automatic. It will allow Centers to share resources for editing and graphics work and to centralize document creation.

Virtual Library Service
The Virtual Library Service will provide easy access, through the VRC, to the CGIAR libraries' collections and information resources and to other leading scientific databases, journals and reference materials.

Scientific Data Standards and Exchange: Capacity Development
In tandem with the development of the VCR, this activity will train key CGIAR staff in the latest technologies and standards in use by the international scientific communities for managing scientific information and will develop a strategy for implementing appropriate information architecture within the CGIAR for maximizing access to this information.

Training Content Activities (also available through the VRC)

Virtual Academy for the Semi-Arid Tropics (VASAT)
Drought and desertification threaten the livelihoods of more than 800 million people in the dry tropics of South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. VASAT will mobilize experts around the world, to create disk, Web, broadcast and print-based learning materials about weather, water, crop, and livestock management under varying levels of drought. These will be available on an open website that will be adapted by the VASAT coalition and shared with rural families and their intermediaries through community-based telecenters.

On-Line learning Resources
An up-to-date inventory of all relevant teaching and learning resources available from the CGIAR Centers will be produced and made available through a "CGIAR Online Learning Resources" portal site that can be used by national partners with different levels of technology and skills.

These training center activities are examples of communities of practice using the tools and processes made available through the VRC to support their work, while providing their specific information "view" from the larger body of information that the CGIAR generates and maintains.