Announcement: Social Media for Development Workshop

“Social media is using the Internet to collaborate, share information, and have a conversation about ideas, and causes we care about, powered by web based tools.” – [We Media]

Background
From the learnings from the successful pilot (See blog posts about the event), and second  Social Media Online Workshop, the CGIAR through its ICT-KM Program, is pleased to offer a new online opportunity for social media explorations, this time with the specific objective to embed social media in participants’ contexts of international development work. This fully online workshop will run from September 7 to 25, 2009.

Social media offers development practitioners and organizations a move from “push” communications towards a place where we can interact with our constituents, listen and engage with them in ways we never could before. It enables us to network with colleagues and some stakeholders. If facilitates collaboration in the lab and in the field.

Social media also offers so many options that it can be overwhelming. This workshop focuses on exploration of social media from some specific development contexts. So instead of saying “there is a tool, how can we use it,” this workshop seeks to answer “we need to do this activity, how can social media support it and under what circumstances.”

If you ask yourself questions like these, you might consider joining the workshop:

• How can I support collaboration in wide-spread teams?
• How can I provide opportunities for open dialogue with my stakeholders?
• How do we support communities of practice and thematic networks, online and offline?
• How do we share our content and knowledge effectively online?
• How can we make use of social media under low-bandwidth constraints?

This online workshop is designed for researchers, research and development communications professionals and knowledge sharing practitioners.

Objectives of the workshop
This three week online workshop will provide a collaborative, peer based learning opportunity for you, as development practitioners, to address if and how social media can help address your needs, opportunities or challenges related to collaboration, participation, or communication. By the end of the workshop you should be able to understand and analyze the opportunities that social media can offer in the view of your specific research and development context, identify some potential tools and create a plan of action.

During this workshop you will:

• Identify possibles usages of social media through small group synchronous and full group asynchronous conversation, exploring opportunities and constraints related to your work.
• Obtain an understanding and appreciation of the role and value of social media.
• Explore 2-3 different social media tools which may be appropriate for your context.
• Start to plan the implementation of one or more social media tools that fit our work environment.
• Learn from participants of mixed professional and organizational backgrounds.

Outline of the 3-week event

• Week 1 to 2 – Context and Application of Social Media: Introductions, and telephone conversations in small groups to assess your research for/and development context and identify opportunities for social media practices.
• Week 2 to 3 – Testing Social Media Tools. Explore select social media tools in small groups.
• Finalizing week 3 – Reflection for Action. Reflect on individual and group learning of the past two weeks and  create an initial plan for social media implementation.

Maximum Number of participants: 18

Language: English

Participant Requirement/Dedicated time: This workshop offers an in-depth exploration of social media tools adapted to your specific context with personalized support and work in small groups. To do this, we ask the following of each participant:

• Organize your agenda to dedicate up to 1-1/2 hours per day during the three weeks. If you will be on travel and won’t have time in a particular week, save some time for “catch up.” If you will not be able to participate in more than one week, please consider taking a future workshop. It will become hard to catch up after missing significant time.
• Participate in weekly telecons of  60-90 minutes. These are scheduled for the afternoons for those in Europe and Africa, mornings for North and South American, and evenings for Asia. We will try to accomodate all time zones as best we can.
• Read and respond to blog posts
• Explore at least 2 tools
• Reflect and share your learnings on the workshop blog and wiki
• Complete a pre- and post-workshop survey.

Open to: CGIAR staff, not for profit partners, agricultural and development organizations. Individuals, consultants and members of for profit organizations may join on a space available basis as the unsubsidized rate. (See costs below)

Platform: Blog, Skype and/or telephone, email and wiki. Our teleconference platform allows you to call for free using Skype. If you choose to use a landline for the conference calls, you will be responsible for long-distance costs. You should have regular access to the Internet. Some tools may not be accessible for those with low bandwidths. You may need to check with your IT department, as some web-based services you wish to explore may be currently blocked in your organization and you may need to seek support to access them.

Facilitators: Nancy White (Full Circle Associates), Simone Staiger-Rivas (CGIAR-CIAT), Pete Shelton (IFPRI)

Cost: USD$ 850. Individuals who work for for-profits or consultants: USD$ 1050.

Contact: Please write to Simone Staiger-Rivas (s.staiger[at]cgiar.org) for questions and subscription by August, 10 at the latest.

 

Social Media Workshop Blog Outline

Here is the flow of blog posts that document our recent social media workshop:

1. Workshop Announcement
2. Introductions Summary: A Mind Map
3. Conference Call 1A Summary
4. Conference Call 1B Summary
5. The Challenge of introducing new tools: About attitudes and preferences
6. The web site is not the community: it’s the people
7. You Mean Unfinished is Good? Yes!
8. Workshop Evaluation

For information about social media tools, please go to the KS Toolkit at www.kstoolkit.org.

 

Updates from Social Media Workshop 2 (VI)

You Mean Unfinished is Good? Yes!

In the very recently released final Institutional KS Project report, one of the lessons I am sharing is the one about Facilitation:

Facilitate: We are not experts, but facilitators for research for development. Hence, the effort to cultivate networks and relationships in accordance with relevant thematic inputs has paid off. The decision to share unfinished content was good: it encouraged dialogue; opportunely delivered useful material; and left time and space for adaptation, improvements, and adoption.

It was not surprising that we had a discussion in the recent social media workshop around the issues of publishing unfinished content. A couple of workshop participants wanted to be convinced about the usefulness of frequent publishing of unfinished content. Some of the worries they raised were:

• Unfinished can mean factually wrong, and can include spelling and grammatical mistakes. There is a risk of going off subject.
• Unfinished can also reflect badly on the image of the organization, and can bring legal problems.
• Social media like blogs contain often too much information with diluted quality which might confuse the public about the messages we’re trying to convey.  We need to make sure that content is focused and has an editorial quality.

Now, those points about control and rigorous editing are all very relevant.  So, why did the workshop facilitators argue in favor of sharing unfinished work? ¨It depends on the context¨, says Nancy White.  ¨Are we representing ourselves to the world, or collaborating with peers? When we seek to work with partners and diverse staff, social media allows us to start a new way of working, of learning in public, of not always knowing, or ‘being right´. If we want to increase participation, we need to get comfortable with typos – especially with people working in languages other than their first language, and with stuff that is “in process” and not polished and complete. Messy? Yes¨, says Nancy.

This is so true for us who work in the development sector.  Participatory approaches have shown how the chances of adoption of technologies increase if the process of their creation is shared and if there is room for improvement and adaptation. Social media allows us to think, improve and adapt online. Together.

Below I summarize some opposite keywords that I found in our workshop discussion:

Unfinished vs. Finished
Conversation vs. Lecture
Community vs. Expert
Learning vs. Teaching or Selling
Collaboration vs. Representation
Diversity vs. Quality
Process vs. Product

Related post: Unfinished is good news (Learning Alliances)

 

Updates from Social Media Workshop 2 (V)

Social media workshop evaluation

We, the workshop facilitators invited participants to review the activities through comments on the workshop platform, as well as through an online survey. We have set up surveys for all the workshops in the past. We did our own facilitator debrief as well. Here are some conclusions and ideas that emerge from the synthesis of the three types of reviews:

• If we compare the results below with those from the evaluation of the first social media workshop, we can say that they are very similar and overall very positive. Respondents rated the workshop as excellent or good. However the group in the first workshop was smaller and more homogeneous, and the feeling of the participants was of better interaction. It seems that we should consider to limit the number of participants, perhaps to a maximum of 20.
• Among the useful learnings, participants mention the importance of a needs and use analysis before setting up an application; The well shared resources, typology and context of tools; The useful discussion around social media practices for low-bandwidth issues; The reflections about social media strategies and the integration of tools. Some were happy to get into the use of specific tools like slide share, social reporting, delicious, twitter, wikis, the clock method for teleconference calls; The idea behind: sharing knowledge
• In a next opportunity the workshop facilitators would like to make it more conversational, less focused on questions and replies. We would like to design a third social media workshop with a shift of focus from tools to contextual challenges i.e. :  Low bandwidth, networking / community development / stakeholder involvement, communication of research results, collaborative research / teamwork, online meetings, etc. This could make the workshop more conversational, bring in different audiences and weave in tools as they arise.

Results from the Survey:

17 participants replied  and 6 rated it as excellent (38%), and 9 (56%) as good, 1 as average.

15 respondents (88%) consider having increased their understanding of Social Media principles and tools.

In a range of 44 to 59%, participants found the different activities (introductions, tools explorations, teleconferences etc) very useful, the tools exploration getting the highest rates.

The tools that participants are already using are Photo-, Video-, and Slide sharing sites (56%), as well as Social networking sites (50%) and blogs (36%). Among the tools that respondents are most interested in exploring are: E-newsletters that incorporate social media (73%), RSS feeds (69%), social bookmarking (67%) and wikis (62%). Half of the respondents say that they don’t have plans to explore social media listening.

The moodle platform was considered as good with some 3 participants rating it as average or poor.

88% rated the effectiveness of the facilitators in supporting the learning experience as excellent

The size of the group was considered as just right for 69%.

The interaction with other participants was scored as average (47%) or poor (13%)

Among the suggestions of improvements are: more teleconference calls; hands-on sessions, make the workshop longer, work on smaller groups

Workshop facilitator’s debrief

• This time we had some very active participants and a large lurker group. It is good to know that participants took time to read and browse through the site even if they didn’t actively contribute with comments or questions.
• Next time we should try to give more focus in the introductory session and we need to create opportunities for more active interaction among participants. The purpose and needs of each participants could be crystallized more in this session.
• The Tools explorations were animated and served to exchange lots of additional resources.  Most of those have been included in the KS Toolkit by the facilitators.
• Time commitment is a real issue in on-line workshops
• We felt that as facilitators we have been always was responsive and present; Nancy was present continuously, Jo gave valuable technical input and links to tool alternatives, Simone did lost of behind the scenes and administrative work in addition to some contributions on the site; Meena was less visible online but very active in observing and learning which was great; Antonella contributed with some great specific posts. Meena, Nancy, and Simone were continuously skype chat connected and coordinated interventions and tasks.

 

Updates from Social Media Workshop 2 (IV)

The web site is not the community: it’s the people

The second and last call of the social media workshop was about strategies. How do we use social media tools effectively? How do we choose the tools according to our user groups, bandwidth constraints, and organisational culture? How do we plan their introduction? How do we get them used and how do we market them?

Some principles that we mentioned when it comes to consider social media and desired change:

• It’s about people not about tools: It is very good to know about the tools but the purpose and needs have to be clear. Early adopters and champions can do miracles.
• Learn as you go: An important point was raised when we encouraged each other to try out different tools in different settings, adjust as we go and learn from what is going wrong.
• Take risks: The introduction of social media doesn’t often generate immediate change. It can take a while and also, it can create change in unexpected places of the organization and among unexpected groups of people. It is worthwhile to take the risk to open up and allow broader use of social media, and simultaneously talk with staff about how we use this liberty in the organization.

Two resources were on the table for our conversations: A mind map of our communication needs and goals that we had expressed during our workshop introductions and the Developement 2.0 Manifesto sugggested by some World Bank staff.

The group of 12 conference call participants shared their ideas on how each of us might pursue social media explorations:

Tools

• Improving existing tools set ups: Improving tagging, work on M&E of the current social media approach, practice social media listening.
• Look at possible tools to facilitate virtual decision making.
• Overcome the tech-jargon of social media.
• Try out Facebook and Twitter / Convince rigid organisations to embrace such ideas
• Include social media i.e. delicious in existing Drupal site
• Improve staff involvement through good video streaming services / improve intranet
• Experiment with Mobiles in Africa

Process

• Social Media to create a global network and consider the issue of scale
• Set up a social media approach for a new organizational research unit where lots of leadership support is guaranteed
• Start over again and ask target groups about their needs and preferences
• Identify champions in the target region, likeminded people for joint activities
• Tackle low bandwidth issue in Africa through the use of mobile phone. Have a look at the gender implications
• Involve project partners in the social media strategy and planning process
• Survey all of our network members to define and prioritize their ICT needs.
• Distinguish between internal communications needs for a distributed team (Google Wave promises to offer good features http://wave.google.com/), and external needs: e-newsletter to keep people in touch and engaged
• Facilitate a core contributor group
• Position ourselves on issues like social media abuse, bandwidth control, required standards

KS workshop mind map: Social media needs and goals (by Meena)

 

Updates from Social Media Workshop 2 (III)

The Challenge of introducing new tools: About attitudes and preferences

Today we received some fundamental questions about social media practices. Getting social media into use is indeed a crucial issue and we got one question about possible ways to achieve staff adoption and involvement. I wrote this contribution with inout from Nancy White for the workshop and I am sharing it here:

In order to engage staff into social media it is important to take into account different learning styles and preferences in the way people make choices:

Learning a new tool is often not that simple:

• Some enjoy tips and trick conversations within a group.
• Some learn alone, and click themselves through the pages jungle.
• Some might need some coaching, sitting down and go through the step-by-step approach.

The workshop for example combines the first two aspects. The virtual environment isn’t necessarily the best one for the hands-on part. But it is definitively a tip for you whenever you have a chance to do it to try to sit down with someone who knows and ask this person to guide you through a tool with the computer in front of you.

Also, being exposed to new tools generates feelings of:

• Resistance to spend time exploring it.
• Fear of not being able to understand how it works.
• Worry of liking it so much that we need to re-organize our way of working, get team members convinced and start a new adoption cycle.
• Doubts of loosing focus and putting the tools first instead of the people.

When it is about making choices we are often overwhelmed by the so many possibilities. It’s just like buying a pair of shoes:

• Some are impulsive, go and focus on one pair of shoes and just buy it.
• Some are hesitating and try out everything available in their size.
• Some are systematic and look mainly at the prize and make a pre-selection.
• Some know exactly what they need and buy the one pair that fits their need.

Making a choice about a tool and introducing it in an organization can certainly be far more complex then buying a pair of shoes. 😉 What I want to highlight is that we need to be aware of those preferences and be prepared for an adoption pathway in zigzag. (Nancy White once told me after I shared my frustration to get a blog adopted that it takes 7 times, 7 attempts to get it right.)

Finally it is about making a tool trendy, because when people follow a trend they overcome fears, doubts, and worries more easily to follow the crowd (for the girls in this workshop: I am sure all of us have at some point bought the most uncomfortable pair of shoes to be trendy…).

Here are some tips to make your tool trendy:

• Try to find a champion in your organization or team.
• Create a core group around you and the champion to then enlarge the user group progressively.
• Keep using the tool for a while even if it is not adopted immediately or used.
• Experiment with the many features of the tool.
• Try to find a community of likeminded to share your doubts, and experiences (the KM4dev one is a good starting point).
• Invite external “experts”. For some reason organizations tend to trust them more than their own staff  😉
• Find entry points for launching the tool (like an event, a workshop).
• Believe in what you do and don’t be afraid of insisting in your views (and that is the tuffest part for many of us).

Photo Credit: Hubspot

 

Updates from Social Media Workshop 2 (II)

The 2nd Online Social Media workshop is well on its way, with the first week having gone by. Participants had their first tele-con session, organized on Skype and held on the 27th of May in two sessions. Telecon session B saw 14 enthusiastic participants raring to go: Helen Gillman, Margaret McEwan, Helene Ni Choncheanainn, Eugenia Isnardi, Maya Rajasekharan, Alice Thomann, Olive Thiong’o Wahura, Miriam Cherogony, Pamela Kilborn-Miller, Yassir Islam , Idris Jones, Brenda Bucheli and Bonnie McClafferty.

Facilitated by Nancy White, I was lucky enough to co-facilitate. Jonathan Thompson of the World Food Program, was also on hand as mentor. A noted blogger, he has just launched an internal microblog (laconi.ca), probably the first inside a humanitarian aid organization. Here’s the post: http://tinyurl.com/oec2zu

The introductory tele-con was a great way to gauge the comfort levels of participants and also to encourage them to see online social media tools as nothing more that just ways to get better results at work. While the participants’ experiences with social media tools were varied, this in no way hindered conversation flow. Many participants discussed their frustrations in using/ advocating tools like Delicious, Skype, Go-To-Meeting, Webex. Also noted was the need for low-bandwidth options in areas with poor Internet access.

What I found personally interesting was the perception many of us have when advocating a tool/ technology. It may be easy to use, it may make your life easier but if people are not engaged, it might as well be ineffective. To counter this, Nancy suggests the first point of action should be to decide on what it is that you want to do.

Once there is purpose, you can start thinking of tools and practice. Think of what can engage them. Is it going to make a difference in their work?

On how blogging could help us track our success in engaging people, Jon Thompson, our blogging expert gave a few pointers:

• Statistics provide legitimacy to your blogs, pay attention to them
• Your title is the life or death of a blog post, a well-titled blog is everything 
• Write what you believe in
• Raise visibility of the blog by sending links by microblogging. Using tools together helps improve visibility of tools all around.

The tele-con lasted one hour, but no one noticed. Discussions could have continued. With minor hiccups of dropped calls, which were compensated by chat room texting for those missing out, participants left the virtual ‘room’ feeling energised.

 

Updates from Social Media Workshop 2 (I)

This morning we had our first conference call with 14 social media workshop participants.

Nancy's clock notes from the call

We went around the clock (see the method described in our KS Toolkit http://www.kstoolkit.org/Teleconference+Clock) to have a chance to introduce us quickly and share the type of social media tools we are already using for personnel or professional purposes. Almost all the tools we will be discussing over the next three weeks have been mentioned: Twitter, Yammer, Blogs, Facebook, Slidesharing etc. Nancy compared this group’s feedback with the initial comments we got when we launched the first knowledge sharing workshop early last year. “It is incredible how much more tools you are using and it is only one year later”, she said.

Nancy also made the point that it is quite easy to get overwhelmed with the number of tools that are out there. “Over the next 3 weeks we will try to get to know those tools, and think about the strategic path each of you might take. The tip is to focus on what matters to you. You don’t need to look at all the tools” Nancy suggests.

We then spent some time on participant’s examples. Florence Sipalla who is a Communications Officer with the CGIAR Gender & Diversity Program tells us about the AWARD fellow ship blog which tries to “reach out to more people more frequently then the newsletter”.
Salomon, World Agroforestry’s Web coordinator seemed excited about the Slide Share site where the center shares its presentations.

Talking about slide-sharing: Social Media is indeed a lot about sharing: It is based on the assumption that you don’t have all the content yourself and that using and re-using of materials can improve the content but it can also help adapt the content to specific user groups.  Another important characteristic of social media is that the emphasis is less and less less technology, to become each day easier to set up, learn and use.

The obvious downside of social media is the bandwidth problem. “Users with low bandwidth are having a hard time in accessing some of the tools,” Nancy states: “But people are also getting creative in the way they address low bandwidth issues”. There are a series of tips and tricks that can help and that we have to learn. One example is to share on a blog a link to a power point presentation rather then to embed the presentation into the blog which makes the page faster to load.

Another participant raised the sometimes difficult choice of reaching users through email versus social media: Too much in peoples email box leads to overload and there is a need to balance. Participants seemed to agree that “email is still essential”

Maria Iskandarani from the CGIAR Secretariat asks if blogs are good discussion tools. Nancy thinks that in general discussions are difficult because of the ‘dominant role” of the blog author. A blog doesn’t put the reader and the blogger on the same level. A comment on a blog is more like an input to an author than a conversation. Also Nancy emphasizes that the adoption of a blog can really take time, as the ICT-KM Program blog https://ictkm.wordpress.com/ shows which needed almost a year to thrive including trying out different techniques, fine tuning ownership issues, getting the whole team on the blogging board, as well as adding a marketing component like Twitter.

The final issue raised was about security related to our digital identity. Nancy suggests being careful when you share information related to your location, your personal telephone numbers etc. “If you just start now with social media, choose a secondary email when you sign up.” Antonella Pastore from ICT-KM shares a great link with us:    http://security.ngoinabox.org/ Tools and tactics for your digital security!

Stay tuned….

 

Full House for the Social Media Workshop

The second social media workshop of CGIAR’s ICT-KM Program kicks off next Monday with 35 participants from 10 different organizations, among those IFAD, CTA, IRG, and CARDI.

The facilitators team Nancy White, Meena Arivananthan, and Simone Staiger-Rivas also welcome participants from 2 Challenge Programs, 6 CGIAR centers, as well as eco-regional and systems-wide programs, and the CGIAR Secretariat.

In this edition we are also happy to have a workshop mentor: Jonathan Thompson from the World Food Programme.

We are looking forward to three weeks of social media explorations and discussions. Pre-workshop preparations include a short survey that invites the group to share existing IDs or set up accounts for the social media tools that we will be learning about (Skype, Fickr, Twitter, blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) The three weeks have each a different focus:

1. Thinking About Your Social Media Needs
2. Exploring and Picking Tools
3. Social Media Strategy and Implementation

The workshop menu includes also 2 optional teleconference calls and discussions on the internet platform Moodle. The facilitators provide the group with discussion starters, tools introductions and related links, and will refer to the KS Toolkit as central resource. Watch out this space for summaries of the event!

Photo Credit:  Matt Hamm

 

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

My colleagues Meena and Antonella started a great blog series on Social media tools that complement the KS Toolkit and will serve as input for the upcoming social media workshop. Antonella wondered at the beginning of this week how we know if social media is working, and mentioned social media listening as an important practice.  Here is a little bit more about it:

Good conversations require us to listen actively

Les Causeuses de Camille Claudel

“Social Media is not about technology. It is about conversations enabled by technology.” I used this quote, which can be found in many presentations, in a recent social media presentation I gave at CIAT.

So if Social Media is about conversations, we need to have at least two actors alternatively talking and listening. This is a critical point that is often questioned by social media sceptics. Just the other day, I was copied in on an email from an IT manager of a CGIAR Center who was wondering about the real level of interactivity of many blogs. Indeed, Nancy White states that only 10% of the social media content is truly interactive. The other 90% is dedicated to dissemination without any visible reaction through online comments.

Listening as a way to market our research

We can do better. Social Media Listening is a great opportunity for us to engage with stakeholders and possible users of research products, people we probably wouldn’t meet anywhere other than online. While we think about possible ways and alternatives to get our messages out more effectively, through different channels, and in different formats, we also need to keep an eye on what other organizations and people are writing about those issues that are related to our research. Reading, following and commenting on other people’s work and thoughts is essential if we are to engage with stakeholders of all kinds, and should be part of our Social Media strategies. If we want to make our media interactive, we also need to take the time to interact with others online. And all social media tools allow us to interact with authors through comments (i.e. blogs, photo and video sharing sites, wiki discussion pages etc).

In addition, social media listening is an excellent way of talking about our research processes, products and achievements.

What we can expect from practicing Social Media Listening

Social Media Listening is a new way of raising the profile of our organizations, projects and even ourselves as we gain visibility by adding value to online conversations related to topics that we care about. It should also help us find new partners, networks, research ideas and, perhaps, even new donors. By participating in online conversations, we leave footprints in the Internet sphere that raise the probability of us being found and contacted. Finally, we can hope that this practice leverages our impact paths by accelerating the effective dissemination of our work.

How to practice Social Media Listening

Comment field on a blog

Start by following information on the Internet that is related to your work. As Chris Brogan states “Google is your front page whatever happens”, but there are other ways to find opportunities for valued added conversations:

• Technorati is a good site to start searching for related blogs.
• Go to Twitter and search for tweets that might be of interest. You will be surprised how many interesting links you will discover.
• Subscribe to the RSS feeds of the sites you find interesting.
• Join listservs and communities that tackle your or related issues.
• Ask your colleagues and peers about their favourite professional social networking sites for you to consider.
• Start contributing with comments, questions, answers and links to your own sites.
• Work hard on composing and refining keywords for your own sites and searches. Keywords allow you to find the hidden treasures.

Who should practice Social Media Listening?

While all of us, researchers and research supporters alike, can gain from keeping up to speed with the latest innovations and developments in our respective areas of expertise and interest, social media listening should be practiced by all communications professionals, especially those working in the field of public relations.

Resources:
Beth Kanter and Chris Brogan are two geeks covering this area. Have a look at these:

• Social Media Listening Literacy for Nonprofits, Beth Kanter
• A blog post by Chris Brogan

Practice Social Media Listening and start a conversation now:

• What are your first reactions to the practice of social media listening?
• What would it take to make this a permanent and strategic activity?

 

Sign up now for the next Social Media Workshop!

After a successful pilot online event (See blog posts about the event), the CGIAR, through its ICT-KM Program, is pleased to offer an online Social Media Workshop from May 25 to June 12 2009.

“Social media is using the Internet to instantly collaborate, share information, and have a conversation about ideas, and causes we care about, powered by web based tools.” – [We Media] Social media offers a move from “push” communications towards a place where we can interact with our constituents and engage with them in ways we never could before. It enables us to network with colleagues and some stakeholders.

Objective of the workshop: Introduce researchers, communications professionals and knowledge sharing practitioners to social media tools and support their social media strategy development. As a participant, you will:

• Obtain an understanding and appreciation of the role and value of social media.
• Learn how to apply social media concepts and tools to both gather information and increase the dissemination of your information.
• Learn how to apply social media concepts and tools for collaboration and interaction with your organization’s staff and partners.
• Learn from participants of mixed professional and organizational backgrounds.

Outline of the 3-week event

• Week 1 – Introductions, conversations and assessment of your communications needs and goals.
• Week 2 – Social Media Tools (wikis, blogs, twitter, file and photo sharing, and many more). You can join the exploration of a range of tools or start a new discussion on tools of your own choice.
• Week 3 – Social Media Tools and strategies. How these tools can help you to achieve your knowledge sharing goals. Develop your strategy.

Number of participants: minimum 22,maximum 30

Language: English

Dedicated time: A minimum of one hour per day, asynchronous (you decide when you go online), as well as two telephone conversations, one during Week 1 and the other during Week 3. Optional synchronous calls or chats may be offered if there is an interest.

Open to: CGIAR staff, partners, agricultural and development organizations

Platform: Moodle, Skype and/or telephone. If you choose to use a landline, you will be responsible for long-distance costs. You should have regular access to the Internet. Some tools may not be accessible for those with low bandwidths. You may need to check with your IT department, as some web-based services you wish to explore may be currently blocked in your organization and you may need to seek support to access them.

Facilitators: Nancy White (Full Circle Associates), Simone Staiger-Rivas (CGIAR-CIAT), Meena Arivananthan (CGIAR-WorldFish)

Cost: USD 500

Please write to Simone Staiger-Rivas (s.staiger@cgiar.org) for questions and subscription by May, 15 latest.

 

Social Media: Impact of our Capacity Building Efforts

Susan MacMillan

I was happy to meet Susan MacMillan, Head of Public Awareness at ILRI, in Penang at the CGIAR strategic communications meeting. We had met for the last time at AGM08 where she attended the first day of the Knowledge Management, Education and Learning Workshop. That event had kicked off with a presentation by Steve Song from the Shuttleworth Foundation. Steve introduced participants to the fundamental changes around Web 2.0 tools. While I was fascinated by his talk, I was wondering what Susan was doing in the back of the room, very actively typing in her lap top. I am ashamed to admit that I thought she was doing email and not paying attention to what I considered as a crucial opportunity for the participants and the research and development community as a whole.  Later on, Susan shared with me the amazing article which she had written for ILRI’s Intranet during Steve’s presentation about the potential of web 2.0. Very kindly Susan authorized us to publish the text as a blog post. Now, meeting again in Penang I was even more delighted about her telling me how much this presentation had impressed her and opened the doors for ILRI’s path towards social media. While she became an ambassador for social media in her center, the Webteam already plans an ILRI Web site renewal based on the principles and tools of social media tools.

Paul Stapleton

The second example could be called CIP 2.0. While Paul Stapleton, CIP’s Head of Communications and Public Awareness,  was one of the first to sign up for the recent social media online workshop, we discovered that he uses social media a lot for personal purposes, but hasn’t started to consider it for CIP’s communication processes. That changed quickly during and after the workshop: Paul was immediately part of the CGIAR Yammer group that was created during the Penang meeting, and has become a daily user of it. Once back in Lima, he included social media ideas into a presentation to his management, who got very excited about the prospects and so Paul is going to start a wiki for them.

Those are very encouraging examples for all of us who are working towards the use of innovative communications and knowledge sharing tools and methods.

Thank you Susan and Paul for your open minds and enthusiasm!

 

Social Media On-line Workshop: Evaluation Results

“The workshop was only the beginning hopefully to more communication and exchange among the CG colleagues – thank you for bringing us closer together” quote from a workshop participant

In-between all this important and exciting traffic on our blog, I am coming back to our social media online workshop to share the results of the participants evaluation.
15 of the 30 participants replied to the survey, which seems like the maximum you can get in those days of evaluation overload. 😉

The workshop was rated excellent by 57% and good by 36%.

Here is a summary of the workshop evaluation:

• 73% of participants say that after participating in this workshop they have increased their understanding of social media principles and tools?
• Usefulness of each activity and discussion focus: The lively welcome and introduction session was very useful for 64%. All participants found the tools exploration or very useful (50%) or useful (50%).  The suggested discussion on the opportunities of social media for the new CGIAR didn’t fully kick off, maybe because the 2-week workshop was really short. Only 36% found it useful. The teleconferences and the discussion summaries were useful for those who participated or looked into it.
• Wikis, Blogs, RSS feeds, Photo-,Video-, and Slide Sharing as well as social networking sites (i.e. facebook) are the social media tools that most participants already use. After the workshop the following tools triggered interest:  Micro Blogging, the use of social media for organisational web sites, social reporting, social media listening and social media for new e-newsletters, as well as social media strategy M&E.
• Participants found the Moodle platform good in terms of ease of use, connectivity, look and feel, and structure.
• 65% scored facilitation excellent, 29% good.
• For the majority (85%) the size of the group was just right. The interaction with other participants could be better: 50% found it good, 36% average.
• Half of the participants state that they did make useful contacts during the workshop.

ICT-KM is currently thinking about offering two more social media workshops for the larger community, including researchers, partners, and development practitioners. This time the workshop would be 3-week long to respond to the mayor suggestion for improvement: Give more time for the tools exploration.

Stay tuned….

 

Updates from the Social Media Workshop (III)

Today we had our second and last conference call with 11 participants. Before the call started Nancy White shared some statistics with me about the workshop participation. It was interesting to see that participants were more active in the first week (this week there was apparently an annual report deadline in many centers), and that there were more or less three times more reading then posting going on. This was confirmed in our call today where participants highlighted that they enjoyed the reading even if they didn’t participate that much.

In total and until today 165 posts have been shared and approximately 800 views registered. Not bad!!!

We did a first round of comments and asked participants what ideas the tools generated. Here are some examples:

• Innovative e-newsletters using more communication channels like YouTube for example
• Possibilities of social media as a discussion topic in the upcoming Penang workshop of Communications Directors
• Social reporting
• Twitter / Yammer as a short messaging system
• Start to think about M&E of social media
• More strategic use of social bookmarking
• More strategic use of Wikipedia, Bioversity experience
• Google apps for increased collaboration needs in the CG
• Use social media promote a campaign (Facebook, YouTube)
• Support school to school exchanges in Africa (Mobile phones)

The other topic we started to surface in the call relates to the question on how we might use social media in the “new” CGIAR: Should we have a strategic approach or should we experiment and learn first?

• We should go the exploratory path. We could put some funds into pilot projects, learn and make recommendations.
• We need to start to think about quantitative and qualitative analysis of the experiments we undertake.
• We could start to more intensively aggregate feeds from different centers
• Social media could kick off the Marketing group again who lost its energy and impact. The Marketing group was networking solution of its day. We should combine it with social media, the technological aspects and open it up to new members.
• Social media is subversive as it goes around the formal channels element. And this is the perfect time to present the opportunities and do some positive disruptions within the CG
• Social media represent the tools of the future. We need mechanisms to get to talk about them widely, and go beyond the experts to reach a second level of adoption.-    Social media can empower the younger CG staff. We should let them show us the way through social media instead of telling them what to do.
• We need to show the impact of social media in research to convince.

Some closing impressions from participants

• Now I know some people I can go to if I have questions
• We shouldn’t be that careful and try things out.
• The potential of social media becomes clearer
• We have to look at the M&E of social media
• Look at http://search.twitter.com/search?q=agriculture just to get a sense how powerful Twitter might be!

 

Updates from the Social Media Workshop (II)

The workshop started with the basic question: What are our communication goals? Incredibly basic, but it triggered a more then 80 post thread! I played around with participant’s answers and offer the following list with some examples of what has been said.

What do you think about those goals?

1. Create a two-way communication

• Moving towards the model of ‘conversations’ with our networks of contacts.
• Connect people to ideas and information across my network.
• Tapping into my online network as a way to think together, do tasks together and solve problems – communications for collaboration.
• Connect people and show that YES, there IS a way to break silos among disciplines, between projects and Centers.
• Strengthening of lateral connections in a network
• Make communications more innovative and engaging by mastering new tools
• How we can engage in a more continuous and participatory communication process with our target groups?
• Take actually the time to LISTEN. What are our next and end users saying about us, about their needs, issues and achievements?

2. Overcome the internal and external limiting factors

• Target audience not online; Target audience not familiar with and comfortable with (trust) social media; Organization not supportive of our use of new tools
• Limited bandwidth, so Skype, video streaming, etc. are out of bounds unless we make special arrangements
• The intersection of technology and communications.
• Exploring how to help these people overcome that fear of loosing control and make use of social media tools to enhance both our institutional and personal communications.
• How to introduce/persuade others to try social media!
• Finding ways to communicate via web2.0 and use social media in challenging conditions such as Ethiopia.

3. Disseminate outputs

• Significantly build up the number of people the CGIAR is reaching.
• Active, rapid and widespread dissemination of our research outputs.
• Make the community of donors, policymakers and investors fully aware of the high impact our scientific accomplishments through a program of public awareness activities.

4. Understand audiences and needs

• Clear understanding of the information needs of our primary audiences
• Audiences: Research scientist, Research partners, Policymakers , CIP’s external community and associates, Donors and investors, The CGIAR Consortium, The media and the general public, students.
• Learn more about what the communication needs are across the system to get a better idea of how we can support each other and work together to meet our goals.

3. Raise profile and resource mobilization

• Rebuild image after financial and governance crisis
• Public – Increase the perception of our center as a global center of excellence
• Ensure efficient communication in the context of major organizational change
• Corporate communications: How do we build the profile globally for better partnerships and fundraising?
• To enhance the awareness, understanding and appreciation our work by partners, stakeholders and staff members

4. Strengthen the role of communications within the research cycle

• How to integrate communication tool, web2.0, and social media methods into the research process
• Assist Centre scientists to proactively think about effectively communicating their research outputs to achieve better outcomes and impacts
• Help integrate communications into the planning, budgeting and implementation of research projects
• How to use such tools to enhance our work with partners and stakeholders.

7. Learn and innovate

• Explore what has worked best, and how can we make it happen more often.
• Identify the common elements and propose a comprehensive set of objectives to the Transition Management Team for the new CGIAR
• Bring my own communications practices in line with such approaches through networking and the acquisition of new tools and skills.
• Take the opportunity to explore the power of social media as a personal networking tool.

8. Improve internal processes

• Management – Increase recognition of the essential contributions form communication and information professionals
• How to engage with the technical programs/the scientists on communications issues
• Create a culture of sharing and transparency within the CGIAR so information flows freely and there’s a “meritocracy” for information/knowledge.
• Understand CGIAR’s institutional culture, which provide important background for this workshop on social media.
• Promoting these new approaches in the CGIAR
• Organize internal resources / data better
• Internal Communications Strategy: What Culture are we going to build and how is information being shared and communicated?

Photo Credit: Faria