Well, while the summer heat was blessing the northern emisphere, and many were enjoying some well deserved rest, the ICT-KM program team continued to work…. and I wanted to share some of the things we did in the month of August that make us very proud!

Reshaping Agricultural Research and Innovation

Our Simone Staiger-Rivas is supporting the Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (GCARD) process that is being organized by GFAR. Aimed at creating new ways of working together to enhance the development value of research, GCARD 2010 will see ICT-KM coordinating and facilitating several key e-consultation processes.

World Congress of Agroforestry, Nairobi, August 24 – 28

Our Antonella Pastore has been actively involved in the reporting of Congress activities with social media. A designated social reporting team embraced blogging and microblogging in providing informal, interesting reports from sessions and hallway conversations that took place. Many in the reporting team are first time users to blogs, Twitter and photo sharing, yet the impact was staggering – participation and sharing was extensive and it is reaching many beyond the participants of the congress. Read more on monitoring the buzz!

ICT-KM – a resource hub

Our Knowledge Sharing Toolkit is an excellent example of collaboration between ICT-KM, the Knowledge Management for Development (KM4Dev) community and also the FAO. This has resulted in us being tapped into as resource persons for training sessions on social media at the FAO.

On another note, the toolkit now boasts a new context page that offers scientists ideas, experiences and recommendations on tools and methods for knowledge sharing within the project cycle. Fruit of the hard work of our Nadia Manning-Thomas read about improving impact through knowledge sharing in research.

Monitoring our blogging impact

Those who know me best, know I do not easily get impressed with statistics. My favourite question is “So what?”. But numbers are a good place to start. We took stock of our foray into social media recently, namely blogging, to see how successful ICT-KM was in the last 6 months in the blogosphere. We looked at blog traffic statistics as key indicators to monitor and assess the value of putting our program-related activities and CGIAR initiatives on the Web, in our effort to improve our visibility, and – to later be able to answer the famous “so what?” question – our impact. An obvious finding was that more content meant more web traffic, but the trend showed that original work was more popular than our other blogs. Our Meena Arivananthan was queen of the month, with her very successful social media series. Read on to find out what the other 4 lessons learnt are. We are working to be able to answer the “So what?” question with full details….

Good Practice Guides: IT related issues

ICT-KM has just published a new series of Good Practice Guides based on the collective work of the IT community of practice. These useful guides address issues that CGIAR centers face worldwide, including challenging connectivity or minimal IT support. We believe these guides, which were developed in collaboration with the Internal Audit Office, will benefit IT departments seeking to implement improved approaches.

Sharing what we learn…

Our Tania Jordan has given presentations at FAO about the use of Wikis in the CGIAR with quite some success… they keep on asking her back!

And…. Michael Marus is hard at work on our research maps, our new site is being finalised, we are actively engaged in the CGIAR reform process….so much more going on…and more to look forward to making us proud next month.

What made me most proud this month? See the tenacious commitment of the ICT-KM team members despite the heat! Quite remarkable really!

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