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.

Looking Towards e-Agriculture at eIndia 2008!

The next main ICT4D event in this region will be eIndia 2008, 29-31 July, in New Delhi.

In the eAgriculture track at eIndia, FAO, GKP and OneWorld South Asia have teamed up to bring some of the brightest minds in KM4D and ICT4D together at this event, people dedicated to improving rural development. The group will discuss some new topics, shine the light on some challenges, and see what innovative ideas the collective group can identify for acting on in the near future.

There will be a headline presenation on the global e-Agriculture initiative and the growing importance of the e-agriculture.org platform in Asia-Pacific.

On Wednesday, 30 July there will be a panel discussion on "Making e-Agriculture work through public-private partnership in Asia."Public private partnerships (PPPs) in e-Agriculture are generally found at the community level where the strengths of the public and private sectors complement each other in providing information and advisory services that address the needs of farmers and rural communities. Examples of PPP in e-Agriculture abound in Asia-Pacific, and range from establishing access points (e.g. cybercafés, telecenters) to generation and delivery of content through mobile phones (SMS) and the internet. Understanding why a PPP is required, the respective mandates and incentives of the partners, and their roles in the partnership, are fundamental to its success. This face-to-face event builds on the March 2008 online forum hosted by www.e-agriculture.org with an audience led discussion on how to further this understanding, and to identify opportunities for collaboration.
Panelists:

- Mr. Amit Dasgupta, IBM Global Services India
- Mr. Manish Pandey, Deputy General Manager , Katalyst-Swisscontact
- Mr. Naimur Rahman, Director, OneWorld South Asia

- Dr. (Mr) N.T. Yaduraju, NAIP/ICAR
- Dr. (Ms) Amrita Patel, Chairman, National Dairy Development Board (TBC)

Moderated by Michael Riggs, FAO

On Thursday, 31 July there will be a panel discussion on "The role of communities of practice (COP) and networks in e-Agriculture." COP strengthen links between networks of practitioners, allow individuals to gather and gain access to policy and technical information, facilitate sharing and exchange of complementary knowledge and resources, and can organize and create knowledge in ways that are flexible. Following up the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) plan of action, the e-Agriculture Working Group conducted a global survey on "e-agriculture". The need for networks of experts and a community of practice was high on the resulting list of actions. This panel representing some of the leading COP in Asia that are active through virtual collaboration spaces, face-to-face events, and in-country interventions. The panel will interact with the audience to analyze what role COP play and what value they bring to the application of e-Agriculture and through that successful, sustainable rural development in the region.
Panelists:

- Dr. Gopi Ghosh, Assistant FAO Representative, and Solution Exchange India network coordinator
- Dr. Alexander Flor, Dean & Professor, Faculty of Information and Communication Studies, University of the Philippines Open Univ.
- Mr. Michael Riggs, e-Agriculture.org
- Mr. Rikin Gandhi, Assistant Researcher, Microsoft Research India; Founding Member, Digital Green
- Dr. (Ms) Prema Ramchandran, Director, Nutrition Foundation of India
Moderated by Ms. Shalini Kala, IDRC, ENRAP coordinator

And so much more!! It's a chance to listen, learn, speak, meet and network ... all key to personal knowledge sharing! I hope to see you there. Do come up and say "hi" when you see me! ;-)

Human Capacity Building Efforts of FAO and Others Brought to a New Focus Online

The role of capacity building is essential to knowledge management and sharing, and of crucial importance in the development field. Without an understanding of both the information that is available to us as well as the tools and methodologies to organize and make use of this information, it cannot have a positive impact and we get nowhere.

FAO says capacity building is at the heart of its mandate, a fact reinforced by the recent IEE report (PDF file). To further this role, FAO has just published the Capacity Building Portal, contributing to the organization’s “vision to strengthen the national capacities of its member states to achieve their goals in food security and agricultural development.”

The portal highlights:

• Learning Resources, both corporate and specialized collections
• Learning Services, searchable by keyword and topic and providing access to FAO's Fellowships/Funding Sources database
• Featured Sites highlighting specific initiatives in capacity building

There are links to FAO's own featured capacity building sites, to other initiatives in the UN, and to the broader international development community’s efforts. I encourage the ICT4D community to try this site in order to identify new capacity building resources and tools.

The GK3 Phenomenon

Last week I was in KL with my colleague Charlotte, Dr Mangstl Director of FAO’s Knowledge Exchange and Capacity Building Division, and about 1700 other great people dedicated to KM/IM/IT for development.

The meeting brought together all levels and focuses in development, or as the program said, GK3 sought to explore issues of emerging people, emerging markets, emerging technologies, and emerging solutions.

My congratulations to GKP and all those involved in organizing what came together as one of my “top 10” events for this year. The conference was well organized, dynamic and diverse, full of people with enthusiasm and a will to get things done.

Some conference highlights for me were:

• the e-Agriculture forum (of course!)


• catching up with the "new generation" who make up Thai RuralNet and similar organizations - they give me hope for the future (yes, I am getting older myself…)


• meeting so many great people from industry, governments, NGOs, CSOs and other organizations that share a vision


• playing with a OLPC laptop and learning more about the potential this offers
  
• the infectious enthusiasm of the GKP staff that really made this event so great


• the GKP 10 year anniversary party!


• many more things, but this list has to pause somewhere…

There were many new friendships made and networks established and expanded. So many good ideas came up I think 2008 is going to be a very busy year! Stay tuned for more about what develops here :-)

KM to Me (aka "Looking Back...")

I've been working in the field of information/knowledge mangment for development since I first joined the UN (FAO) about seven years ago now.

In this time the terms have evolved, "information", "knowledge", "ICT", "ICT4D", "KM", "KM4Dev", Web 2.0, etc., but in most cases I believe the intent remains the same - to help others by improving rural developoment (both the processes and the results).

My work involves capacity building (e.g. IMARK), networking people (e.g. PhilAgriNet), information management standards (AIMS), studying successful examples of rural ICT, and some other things. I'm devoted to the Asia-Pacific region in my current capacity. It's a great job, one that has opened my eyes to the world we live in and one that has hopefully allowed me to give something back.