Focus
In January 2009, Rome-based agencies working in agriculture, development and food security joined forces to co-organize the first Knowledge “Share Fair” in order to enable their staff to showcase, recreate and invent ways to share knowledge and improve access to it.  Building on the successful outcome of the Share Fair, a similar event will be organized by the ICT-KM Program of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) with other organizations who are working in the field of agriculture, development and food security. The event will take place at the campus of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Cali, Colombia and retain a regional focus on Latin America and the Caribbean.

Objectives
The main objectives will be to:

• Demonstrate how formal and informal knowledge sharing improves the effectiveness, efficiency and impact of working activities;
• Share and learn from each others good practices;
• Provide staff from different organizations with the opportunity to get to know and learn from each other to create linkages and networks for future collaboration;
• Develop ideas to support and enhance knowledge sharing within and across organizations;
• Experiment with tools and methodologies for knowledge sharing.

Themes
Specific themes will include:

• Good knowledge sharing practices with project teams, partners, communities, networks, and end users
• Good practices in making research processes and outputs accessible, available and applicable

Format
The presenters and activities will be selected upon a call for proposals. The Fair will be structured in booths, hands-on training and facilitated sessions with interactive modes of presenting the activities, focusing on the experiences and lessons learned. Participants will explore how different face-to-face knowledge sharing methods and e-tools can be applied to their work and present innovative solutions that encourage effective collaboration, networking and leadership.

Useful links
Share Fair Website: http://www.sharefair.net/
Contact Email: sharefair-ciat@cgiar.org

Download this announcement in English and in Spanish

Related posts:

1. Call for proposals for the Knowledge Share Fair in Cali, May 2010
2. ICT-KM and the KS project working with other Rome-based food and agriculture organisations to put on a Knowledge "Share Fair"
3. Deadline extended to 31st October for submitting proposals to the Knowledge 'Share Fair'

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

When Mrs. Williams, Assistant Director General for the Knowledge Department in FAO declared the ShareFair closed, I had shivers down my back, and more so when the crowd in the Green Room spontaneously clapped seeing the names of all the people who contributed to the Fair and its success displayed on the screen in the closing ceremony. It was done..a job well done by all of us. We should all feel very proud!

Only 3 days earlier I was sitting in the main podium of the Plenary Hall trying to explain in two minutes that knowledge sharing was just a way of doing things smarter.

Three days of ShareFair…what are my 3 take home messages:

- You cannot manage knowledge, let is flow, let it grow. Allow others to stand “on the shoulders of the giants”.

- Given the chance, people are eager to share and learn. Reward those who ‘dare to share’.

- People speak differently when they speak to their superiors. Create a safe space where they can talk, express their ideas, their creative juice. Let them grow, your organization will only benefit from it.

Usually at the end of such an intense period, you feel a certain anticlimax. This time it has not happened to me, I still feel the buzz of people walking along the corridors, meeting and talking to people they had not talked to before, even if they worked in the same organizations for years, finding out they had similar issues and together they could find solutions. People asking “when can we do this again”? What else can we, as organizers, ask for?

A heartfelt “thank you” goes to all who worked so hard to make this possible, from the steering committee, to the management who “dared” to support such an event and be ready to ‘face the consequences’, to my fellow CGIAR colleagues who traveled from afar to participate, to the volunteers, the translators, all the unsung heroes….

It is never fair to try and single out a person….but if I were pushed to do so, no hesitation. Gauri Salokhe, an information management officer in FAO, who worked so hard, so relentlessly, so creatively and always with a smile. She has been dubbed by a fellow Steering committee member as the “Saint of the Fair” a title well deserved!

Keep up the energy, we started a movement and we must keep it up!

Related posts:

1. ShareFair new website launched!
2. Knowledge ShareFair: count down has started!
3. Knowledge ShareFair: the program is available!

It was fabulous to see it up and running now and I really liked the site:

• It has a sober FAO design adapted to its user group
• It has blog lines that are daily updated
• It also allows non official representatives who work at FAO to access lots of information through the Intranet
• It has a Google calendar with all FAO events and it allows to follow webcasts and offers podcasts through a clever mash up with other parts of FAOs Intranet.
• In addition it is now the only way to access important information that was beforehand distributed via fax o paper copies, a good way to get users on board and increase consultations.

Bravo Maria!

Related posts:

1. Jo Cadilhon from FAO about the KS Workshop: KS is Collaborative, Flexible, and Fun.
2. Joint Forces with FAO to Offer a Second Edition of the Knowledge Sharing Workshop
3. Summary of Week 2: FAO-CGIAR KS Workshop

The Institutional KS project is happy to support some sessions as facilitator, and to present at a booth and together with FAO the KS Toolkit and the KS Workshop. It is also rewarding that one of our pilot projects on “Storymercials” will be presented as a way to effectively communicate project results through short videos.

As the end of this projects comes nearer (end of April), I am very much looking forward to the event which will allow many colleagues and friends who have deeply contributed to the project, to meet, like Nancy White and Lucie Lamoureux who put their brain and energy into the workshop and toolkit, or Gauri Salokhe from FAO who’s enthusiasm made it possible join forces with FAO on the KS workshop and the toolkit. I am also looking forward to meet for the first time Michael Riggs from FAO who was a first class workshop participant, and then mentor. And there are all these other incredible people and colleagues who work so effectively on knowledge management and sharing in their organizations:  Sophie Treinen, Luca Servo, Andrew Nadeau (all FAO), Petr Kosina from CIMMYT, Andrea Pape-Christiansen from ICARDA, Vanessa Meadu from ICRAF…

I am also looking forward to meet new people, to facilitate sessions in which I hope to be able to help the groups to “do their best thinking”, to listen and learn from the experiences of others, and I hope to see us close to a tipping point where participatory communication processes become as essential as a project report, or any kind of publication.

Related posts:

1. Ever wanted to know about 'Keeping institutional memory'-Andrea shares her impressions from session at Share Fair 09
2. Tips on blogging and mico-blogging-at Share Fair 09
3. Exciting New Initiative of 8 KS Workshop Participants

This Forum will examine the challenges that rural communities face in enhancing the benefits of mobile telephony, and look at some examples of interesting initiatives and good outcomes from around the globe.

Subject Matter experts include:

• Pete Cranston, ICT and New Media in Development Consultant
• Jawahar Kanjilal, Global Head of Emerging Market Services, Services & Software, Nokia
• Christian Kreutz, Consultant, Knowledge Activist
• AHM Sultanur Reza, Additional General Manager and Head, Community Information Center, Grameenphone Ltd.
• Luca Servo, Knowledge Manager and Online Communities Expert, FAO
• Nigel Scott, Gamos Ltd
• Charlotte Masiello-Riome, Communications Expert and e-Agriculture.org Coordinator
• Michael Riggs, Information Management Specialist for the Asia-Pacific region, FAO

Register on the e-agriculture platform, if you haven’t already done so. Go to http://www.e-agriculture.org/regform.html

Related posts:

1. Forum on "Mobile Telephony in Rural Areas" 17-28 November 2008 on www.e-agriculture.org–in full swing
2. KSinR Synthesis workshop starts on Monday 17th November 2008
3. Virtual conversation around the Science Forum at AGM07

Related posts:

1. Joint Forces with FAO to Offer a Second Edition of the Knowledge Sharing Workshop
2. Summary of Week 2: FAO-CGIAR KS Workshop
3. The FAO Official Representatives Website: A KS Workshop Outcome and Achievement for One of Our Alumni

What are we trying to do?
We want to share and document a snapshot of our professional lives, at the moment when the KS workshop took place. Clearly, our backgrounds, current responsibilities, and applications of tools and methods learned in the KS workshop are diverse and we hope that we can provide readers with multiple perspectives on, and examples of, the contributions of “modern” KS approaches to our development work. Overall we will look at the value or significance of KS approaches (and the KS workshop itself) to us as international development professionals?

How are we getting this done?
In order to get such a joint article done, we benefit from the help of Gerry Toomey, a science writer who will coordinate our efforts and edit the different pieces as a whole. Gerry had short interviews with each of us and just sent us some guidelines so we can work on our individual contributions. For this enterprise we use a wiki set up as a private space. Each of us has a personal page where we can compose or paste in our texts. While we will not be editing anyone else’s text, we are all encouraged to leave comments, questions, suggestions, or words of encouragement on each other’s pages. Gerry will then work with each of us individually on our drafts.

We are all looking forward to it and hope to come back to you soon with a useful piece. Happy writing to all!

Related posts:

1. Reflections of 2nd KS Workshop participants about Open Space
2. Day 2 of the Share Fair starts with an exciting set of sessions
3. October 6: Beginning of the Face-to-Face Meeting of KS Workshop in Rome

We expect 35 participants and our facilitators will be Nancy White (consultant), Pete Shelton (IFPRI), and Gauri Salokhe (FAO). Open Space is one of the meeting dynamics that we will be using.

Watch out Gauri’s blog for frequent updates, the photo gallery for pictures, and the KS Toolkit wiki for real time summaries on the workshop and open space sessions.

Related posts:

1. Gauri Blogs about the KS Workshop
2. FAO-CGIAR KS Workshop: Our Amazing Mentors
3. KS Workshop: Face to Face Meeting Agenda Overview

KS is about people and people organize themselves in groups of all kinds. The network theory / approach allows us nicely to analyze those groups –call them teams, communities, units, organizations– in terms of: How do we share our knowledge currently and what could we do to improve interaction, enhance innovation, reach out to new users… We invited participants to listen to related podcats, look at a related IMark module, participate in a conference call, and most important to develop a network map that would look at the today of our project / group dynamics and at the opportunities for improvement. Our special guest this week was Eva Schiffer, former IFPRI, now consultant, who specialized in network mapping and helped us explore the potential of this method.

We offered two podcasts:

• In her interview on social networks Patti Anklam who has a strong KM background and has been working for large computer companies before becoming a consultant, highlights how social network analysis (SNA) helped her to make sense of her intuitions: “SNA helps us to improve our understanding of organizations and ask relevant questions. We are used to see organizations through their charts (who reports to whom?), but to get things done we use much more our personnel connections. SNA illustrates the existing knowledge pathways and a map can illustrate questions like: Are we focusing too much on some individuals? Who are the connectors? And SNA can reveal the hidden value of people. Where do we need to create more pathways?” Patti recommends a reading for those who want a introduction to this area: Robert Cross: The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations
• Eva Schiffer complements nicely Patti’s interview by linking SNA to our R4D context. She tells two stories that illustrate the use of SNA in research projects, done in low-tech environments with basic materials like paper, markers and post-its. “SNA opens the black box about impact, because it helps us to understand how things work and why we have or don’t have impact. It can give us additional information on how to reach better out to end users.” Eva uses SNA in meetings and asks project stakeholders questions like: – Who are the actors in your project? – How are they linked? What is their role (donor, advisor, partner…) – How influential are they? (using influence towers) – Have you influential friends / enemies “The complete map is for many an eye opener and generates excitement. It confirms intuitions for some, for others it highlights the different understanding that the actors can have about the relationships and dynamics in their network”, she says

Our weekly resource, the IMark module is definitively an extremely rich and useful resource for those who want to go more systematically through the issues of on-line communities and how to establish and make most out of them. The module offers us a first exploration with concrete situational examples within our R4D domain. Then it helps us go through a needs assessment, and have a look at the available options and tools. It guides us through all the design issues of on-line communities—from roles and responsibilities to online security issues—and has also a crucial chapter about online facilitation. On that one, and just as example, I really like the slides about cross-cultural differences i.e. about how we start a conversation, use humor, our attitudes towards time, conflict and moments of silent… very insightful.

Our weekly conference call (divided as always in three alternative schedules to cover the different time zones of our participants) allowed us to have Eva Schiffer with us and to explore network issues around some examples given from the participants. On the call we explored questions like: incentives and the existence of a “tipping point” for active participation and how to reach it; the role of a core group as most active members who engage the others; the potential of focal points to reach out within the network; the notion of “boundary spanners” between the more connected and the less connected in a network; the trap of seeing us too often in the center of the network as an indispensable node; the power of informal meeting opportunities for networking; the power of on-line tools for active networking and the need to offer different tools or channels to meet member’s varying preferences.

The network mapping exercise generated some good on-line discussions on our Moodle space. So far participants contributed 10 maps or so. The discussion came up about the need to map the network with regard to the people we have relationships with, not so much the units or groups. It’s the nodes between actors of the network that we can influence / work on. Another important step in the mapping exercise is to look at the map as it is now but also to add the links and relationships we dream of developing. Here are examples of issues that emerged while analyzing three of the maps:

• “ By looking at my map, I found that we should involve more on our Focal units, because they are working at the national level and they have a close collaboration with their national institutes and researchers. A Regional Information System doesn’t mean nothing if it doesn’t has the support of National Agricultural information system.” The feedback suggested for example to aim at a face-to-face meeting to strengthen and motivate the focal units.
• “ I envision that I have currently centralized to such a point where I am the only connector and now I would like to ensure that the relevant areas take on ownership of their own pieces of the Portal.” Eva reported an example of a colleague who tries to be very involved in the strategic development of his projects in the beginning, but who right from the start will look for a “leadership apprentice” to take over and who can assure continuity.
• “Our partners are of different nature, positions, cultures, but they are all committed to information exchange. The actors involved are basically those who produce information (data providers) and the big audience that uses this knowledge.” Workshop participants reply: the challenges is to moving individuals in the network from a mindset of “data exchange” to thinking about KS, i.e. What would the map look like if those same end users were able to shape the type of content that goes into the platform in the first place?

It is also worthwhile mentioning that this week we experienced some problems with our Moodle space. Many participants had problems to post their messages, specifically when they were pasted from another document. While this is been currently addressed we all had some frustrations and certainly lost some good comments. We hope that next week will be a no technology problem one! We are looking forward to now explore tools and methods for knowledge sharing during week 3 of our workshop!

Related posts:

1. FAO-CGIAR KS Workshop: Our Amazing Mentors
2. KS Workshop 2: Week Zero launched
3. Institutional KS Project Offers a Two Week Online Event on Social Media for CGIAR Communication Professionals