Social media's potential for improved impact

Simone Staiger-Rivas, part of the CGIAR's ICT-KM program and ground breaker in knowledge sharing for development, made a presentation on social media at CIAT yesterday. She was kind enough to share the presentation at http://www.slideshare.net/ictkm/

Take a look at the ideas here about how the impact of her organization's activities and research projects, as well as the efforts of individuals can be enhanced through the use of social media. It has already stirred up a discussion on Simone's FaceBook page, which I think is fantastic. I hope the presentation went well at CIAT and that it has many minds now thinking about the possibilities of social media within large, structured organizations!

We need to reprise this presentation for use in my own organization...

@km4dev shared a link earlier today which compliments Simone's presentation: Notes for Non-Profits: Ten Things a Nonprofit Should Do Before Setting Up Social Media. Don't just read the ten points, read the discussion posts below - particularly the discussion on ROI is useful in my opinion. (Hmm ... maybe we in the sprawling international organizations need to have a chat about the concept of ROI. What do you think gang?!) A bit of strategy is always a good thing when embarking on a new venture, and it would help management to understand why some tools are chosen over others and the corresponding resource commitments.

Sharing Knowedge about Knowledge Sharing for Development

The Knowledge Share Fair for Agricultural Development and Food Security (otherwise known as "Share Fair"), being jointly organized by Bioversity International, the CGIAR ICT-KM program, FAO, IFAD and WFP, will take place next week over three days at FAO Headquarters from 20 to 22 January 2009.

This promises to be a unique, exciting event for the organizers and those in attendance, including me! It is the first time (to my knowledge) that all these international organizations - organizations in which the greatest asset is information and knowledge - will come together to discuss specifically about sharing knowledge, about making knowledge more powerful, more effective, and through this making rural development more successful and sustainable. I'm also very much looking forward to reconnecting with friends and colleagues, meeting some of my virtual collaborators in person for the first time, and expanding my KM4D network!

The Shair Fair will focus on methods, tools, lessons learned, challenges, partnerships, etc. of knowledge sharing, so as to provide practices and learning opportunities that will be of practical benefit to the multi-disciplinary audience. The achievements of projects, programmes and divisions will be presented in light of demonstrating successful knowledge sharing. There will also be special sessions applying new Web2 tools.

There is a great, short video clip on Blip.TV in which Roxana Samii, IFAD, talks about looking forward to this event. Check it out!

Click To Play

I will be taking direct part in four sessions:

• K for Institutions and Partnerships: "Public-Private Partnerships: Cross-fertilisation of Knowledge"
• K for Networks and Communities of Practice: "Leveraging Connections among Networks"
• K for Rural Communication: "Mobile Telephony in Rural Areas"
• K for Institutions: "Making Networks Work Within Institutions"

and sitting in on many more!

Registration for the Share Fair is already open online. For those who can't be there, keep a look out for posts, blogs, tweets, blips, etc. on the event all next week using the "sharefair09" tag.