2nd Wiki Training session at FAO

Last week I blogged about the 1st Training Session at FAO and it was such a success that they repeated the training session on Wikis again yesterday for those people that didn’t get the chance to register last week.

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…

 

Training session on Wikis at FAO – a great experience!

Yesterday I had the opportunity to participate as guest speaker to the first training session about Wikis at FAO and it was an enriching experience!

The 2-hour session was moderated by Gauri Salokhe and Romolo Tassone, both from the Web Knowledge Exchange and Capacity Building Division at FAO.

These sessions at FAO are part of an ongoing series of workshops on the methods, tools and services that can facilitate knowledge sharing.  These trainings are offered weekly by the Knowledge Exchange and Capacity Building Division (KCE), in collaboration with Staff Development Branch (AFHT).

The session was fully booked and it was interesting to see how more and more people that couldn’t register were arriving to see if, just by chance, they could get a seat to participate in the session. This shows there are a lot people interested in learning more about collaborative tools and how these can be applied to their work at FAO.

Initially the moderators introduced Wikis by showing one of the world’s most popular Wiki: Wikipedia. Actually at FAO, they have implemented MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia as their internal Wiki, but they also offer other Wiki tools depending on the users’ requirements.

Together with Gauri, we showed the example of the Knowledge Sharing toolkit (KS Toolkit), a collaborative wiki site using Wikispaces that assembles knowledge sharing tools and methods resources. The KS Tookit is an initiative of the ICT-KM’s Institutional Knowledge Sharing project and in collaboration with FAO and the KM4Dev community, it currently has approximately 120 people that contribute to keep this global public good growing.

I had the opportunity to show the Wikis we have implemented recently in the CGIAR. As part of the CGXchange project, we are currently offering Google Sites which is a Wiki that users can easily setup themselves and start collaborating quickly. Some of these Wikis are public or private. The private Wikis in the CGIAR are mostly being used for project/team collaboration and meeting sites. The public Wikis are shared with the world for viewing and only a few people with editing rights can maintain the content:

http://www.cgxchange.org (site that gathers tutorials and trainings of the collaboration tools available for the CGIAR staff)

http://alliance.cgxchange.org (the strategic framework of the new CGIAR is being shared through this public Wiki)

We also discussed about the Wikis that ‘die‘ because of the fact that people do not contribute. Of course…Wikis are just like any website, they need a moderator or at least a group people that are committed in keeping the content updated and encouraging others to contribute so they can be useful.

Towards the end of the session the participants had the opportunity to edit a Wiki that had been setup for the training using a free Wikispaces guest account. The participants had a lot of fun adding content, links, inserting videos and deleting what others had written!…thank goodness that Wikis have version history and you can easily go back and retrieve older versions! 🙂

You can find a summary of all the links to the Web pages that were viewed during the training session on this Delicious page: http://delicious.com/sharefair09/training_wiki

I would like to thank Gauri and Romolo for the invitation to participate as guest speaker for this session. I believe we learned a lot from each other and hope we continue partnering in these knowledge sharing sessions in the near future. 

I believe that we, in the ICT-KM program, are doing a lot of research about social media tools and have vast experience on these topics. Given the CGIAR’s dispersed locations, currently our main method to communicate our knowledge is using our blog, which is great, but many people still prefer hands-on training sessions than reading. In this respect, my take home message is that we should learn from our FAO colleagues and start organizing on-site or online training sessions as well, every now and then, to share our knowledge on social media tools for our colleagues in the CGIAR…

 

ShareFair 09 is over….first impressions.

The ShareFair 09 has just come to a close. Months of preparations, negotiations, discussions, worrying whether this was a good decision, will people come, will they understand?….

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!

 

The FAO Official Representatives Website: A KS Workshop Outcome and Achievement for One of Our Alumni

I was very happy to attend the Share Fair session where the FAO Official Representatives Web site was presented. Not that I have much to do with its content. But the person who designed and developed the site, Maria Grazia Bovo, was one of our alumni in the first KS workshop. When we started the workshop this web site didn’t exist and Maria Grazia designed the site as the workshop unfolded.

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!

 

Next Week: Institutional KS Project at the Share Fair

Next week I will join the Share Fair in Rome.

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.

 

Mark your calendar and participate in the Virtual Forum “Mobile Telephony in Rural Areas” 17-28 November 2008 at www.e-agriculture.org

Mobile phones are the success story of bridging the rural digital divide, bringing tangible economic benefits and acting as agents of social mobilization through improved communication. But what are the real challenges that face reaching rural areas, and what are some of today’s most beneficial applications that can help these rural communities, specifically regarding agriculture development?

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

 

Jo Cadilhon from FAO about the KS Workshop: KS is Collaborative, Flexible, and Fun.

As part of my work as Marketing Officer (Quality Improvement) at FAO’s Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, I am involved in sharing knowledge and information about new marketing best practices with my colleagues in the regional office’s informal and multidisciplinary Commercialization and Agri-Business Interest Group (CABIG).
 
As a coordinator of CABIG – pronounced “cabbage” – I decided to attend the Second FAO/ICT-KM Knowledge Sharing Workshop to learn about innovative knowledge sharing methods that will enable me to make the most of group discussions in my workplace. I also hoped to discover new web-based tools that can help a community of practice, the members of which do not necessarily have the time nor financial means to meet face-to-face, to collaborate remotely.
 
The workshop helped me to explore knowledge-sharing challenges and opportunities, and how to make the most of face-to-face collaboration. We also discussed alternatives to email and tools for virtual collaboration. This was extremely useful as most of my work in a decentralized office of FAO also makes me interact frequently with my Headquarters colleagues and supervisors in Rome by email. The workshop also allowed me to learn tips in order to become a better facilitator of meetings and group discussions, which will also help me in my work.
 
To sum it up in just three words, I have realized that knowledge sharing is collaborative, flexible, and, very importantly, fun.

 

Exciting New Initiative of 8 KS Workshop Participants

Eight participants, and two facilitators of the first KS Workshop are joining efforts to write a joint article about their multiple perspectives around knowledge sharing in the context of our workshop experience. I am talking about Alessandra Galié (ICARDA), Ben Hack (consultant), Alexandra Jorge (ILRI / Bioversity), Florencia Tateossian (CGIAR Secretariat), Andrea Pape-Christiansen (ICARDA), Vanessa Meadu (World Agroforestry Centre), Michael Riggs (FAO), Gauri Salokhe (FAO), Nancy White (consultant) and myself.

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!

 

October 6: Beginning of the Face-to-Face Meeting of KS Workshop in Rome

Everything seems to be ready for the three-day meeting of the FAO-CGIAR Knowledge Sharing Workshop that starts tomorrow. It will take place at Bioversity HQ in Rome just after the first 4-week on-line phase.

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.

 

Summary of Week 2: FAO-CGIAR KS Workshop

Week two was very active at the FAO-CGIAR KS Workshop. Participants were invited to think about the people we do / need to share knowledge with. After having explored the issue of the “Why share knowledge?” during week 1, which aimed basically at getting to know each other’s contexts better, during week 2 we dived into the area of our networks.

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!

 

FAO Joins KS Toolkit

FAO and ICT-KM are not only joining forces on the next edition of the KS Workshop. We are also working together to improve, and expand the KS Toolkit. That is why the Toolkit is now accessible through a new URL: www.kstoolkit.org (the former one is redirected) and why you can see the FAO and ICT-KM logo since the homepage.

Also, between September and December 08, we plan to continue our work with the support of Nancy White to improve and expand it further. Some ideas are:

• Include a KS literature section
• Improve the situational entry points, tags and links to corresponding tools
• Think about presenting more general entry points as KM strategies, KM assessments, tools for learning
• Look further into collaboration with the authors of other toolkits. 
• Boost some tools like Mobile Phones…
• Translate into other languages
• Work on the master list of tools and methods classify them better

We are currently in the brainstorm mode and any comments, priorities, additions to the above list would be welcome.

 

Joint Forces with FAO to Offer a Second Edition of the Knowledge Sharing Workshop

Discover, understand and apply innovative knowledge sharing approaches to deliver outcomes that have impact!

FAO logo

We are very pleased to announce that FAO and the ICT-KM Program are joining forces for the second edition of this workshop, which will offer FAO and CGIAR staff as well as their research partners an opportunity to explore and experiment with knowledge sharing (KS) principles and methods. Through an innovative three phase approach participants will get an understanding and appreciation of the value of KS in research and institutional settings.

Dates: Phase 1 (online) starts on September, 8. The face-to-face meeting takes place in Rome, Italy from October 7-9. Phase 3 is online and goes on up to March 2009.

Costs: 500 USD. You can choose to participate in phases 1, 1+2, or 1+2+3 of the course. You mustparticipate in phase 1 to participate in phase 2, and both 1 and 2 to participate in phase 3.

Download the workshop flyer at: http://www.ks-cgiar.org/images/stories/pdf/fao_cg_workshop.pdf

Have a look at the Toolkit to get an overview of KS approaches: http://www.kstoolkit.org

This blog has a workshop category with extensive information: https://ictkm.wordpress.com/category/ks-course/

 

Why 2 Web 2.0..

The theme of today’s blogging is “Why 2 Web 2.0” and we invite you to post any comments, responses, ideas or thoughts on this particular topic whether you are attending the Web 2.0 for Dev conference or not.

– Do want to or need to share information and knowledge with others?

-Do you work in or with a team that is geographically dispersed? Do you need something to help with communication, working together and sharing with this dispersed team?

-Do you want to improve and increase collaboration with others?

Web 2.0 is a new era of electronic, virtual, online tools and applications which move beyond static posting, managing and sharing of knowledge. Web 2.0 introduces new opportunities for interaction, collaboration, networking, and multi-dimensional sharing.

Have you ever used a blog to have a discussion?

What about a wiki for collaboration on projects with dispersed teams and partners?

There have been a lot of successes in the use of these tools to open up the globe and its people to the vast amount of valuable knowledge in written, visual, audio, video, and interaction with people formats.

So why 2 web 2.0? Because it offers potential for greater, wider, more effective, more efficient, and more participatory working and living.

Why not to web 2.0? Does everybody have the infrastructure, the connectivity, the capacity or even the desire to use these tools?

What do YOU think?

Stay tuned…

 

Sharing on the Web2.0 for Dev Conference

Today, Tuesday 25th September is Day 1 of the Web2.0forDev conference taking place at FAO HQ in Rome. The focus of this conference, being held in the midst of the E-Agriculture week is learning about, experiencing and exploring participatory web for development.

Along with other organisations, the CGIAR is helping to organise this interesting and innovative conference. The CGIAR is widely represented at this conference, with 5 presentations being given by CGIAR people, attendance by many IT and IM managers from various centres, as well as other projects from the CGIAR ICT-KM program.

There are people and organisations from around the globe and from various sectors, coming together to share knowledge and experiences of the use of web 2.0 tools in and for development.

To share with others out there the CGIAR representatives here plan to use this blog to present some of the ideas, discussions and approaches featuring in this conference.

Join us each day on this blog, where we will explore a different angle of Web2.0 for Dev:

Tuesday 25th Sept (Day 1)—Why 2 Web 2.0

Wednesday 26th Sept (Day2)—How to Web2.0

Thursday 27th Sept (Day 3)—Where 2 Web 2.0

Stay tuned…