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.

Sharing the events of last week's IAALD-AFITA-WCCA World Congress with the tag "aginfo8"

So many interesting things transpired at the World Congress in Japan last week that I have been struggling with what to write about next! With time slipping away as it does, I've suddenly realized the efficient issue is to make sure everyone interested is aware of the tag "aginfo8".

Just search the tag in your favorite search engine, or use it in any of the web2 applications that were used by the organizers and several participants at the event (Flickr, Feedburner, Slideshare, Delicious, etc.) and you'll find loads of great information from presenters' slides to commentary from the audiences.

For those who prefer a more direct approach, here is a list of resources kindly provided by Peter Ballantyne and the Euforic web 2 team:

• general news feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/aginfo8
• some stories: http://iaald.blogspot.com/search/label/aginfo8
• some photos: http://www.flickr.com/groups/749287@N20/
• some presentations: http://www.slideshare.net/tag/aginfo8
• some video interviews: http://iaald.blip.tv/
• everything bookmarked together at http://delicious.com/tag/aginfo8

My congratulations to the three organizations as well as the hosts in Japan for an excellent job in organizing this event and providing an opportunity for sharing and learning. As a final note, the next IAALD meeting will be in Montepellier, France in 2010.

Meeting of Minds, Sharing of Knowledge: e-Agriculture next week in Japan

e-Agriculture at the IAALD-AFITA-WCCA World Conference

I'm looking forward to joining the World Conference next week. It is a great opportunity that all three organizations have joined together for this conference, as I am sure it will not only bring together a large group of people from around the world dedicated to the application of ICT in development, but will also bring together a wide cross-section of experiences, knowledge and perspectives, from organizational capacity building to IT infrastructure, from metadata standards to community KS forums. It is this opportunity to interact and form new relationships, share knowledge and extend our personal networks that will be the great value at the end of the four days.

The conference takes place 24-27 August 2008 in Atsugi, Japan at the Tokyo University of Agriculture. The e-Agriculture plenary session will be on Wednesday, 27 August, from 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM. I really believe in the e-Agriculture initiative and am pleased that I was asked to participate in this event.

Information from the e-Agriculture news flash sent out yesterday notes:

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) will facilitate an e-Agriculture panel to deliberate issues of ICT as enablers in various critical areas of development, as well as the role of Public Private Partnerships (PPP) in support of e-Agriculture.

The session will be an interactive discussion with the audience, with the panel anchored by:
- Alexander Flor, Dean, Faculty of Information and Communication Studies, UPOU;
- Manish Pandey, Deputy General Manager, Katalyst-Swisscontact;
- Michael Riggs, Information Management Specialist, FAO RAP;
- Roxanna Samii, International Fund for Agricultural Development;
and Stephen Rudgard, FAO, as the moderator.

The panelists will share knowledge and experiences, and the audience encouraged to contribute on topics such as the use of mobile telephony use in rural areas, with particular reference to ameliorate global soaring food prices, and knowledge brokering services in support of agricultural development, including Communities of Practice and approaches to building capacity.

There will also be a reprise of the issues arising in this year’s PPP online forum and eIndia conference discussion session entitled "Making e-Agriculture Work through Public Private Partnership in Asia". Experience and lessons in Bangladesh (Katalyst) and West Africa (Tradenet) will be contributed.

Full details of the PPP online forum, and reviews of the two sessions organized by FAO, the Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP), OneWorld South Asia and Katalyst in the e-Agriculture track of India's largest ICT Event, eIndia 2008 in July 2008, can be found on www.e-agriculture.org.

For more information on IAALD-AFITA-WCCA World Conference please see http://iaald-afita-wcca2008.org/

Launch of CIARD

There will also be a plenary session on the 27th to launch CIARD, the Coherence in Information for Agricultural Research for Development. Earlier this year, a group of organizations from around the world got together to establish this initiative, which aims to make agricultural research information publicly available and accessible to all. Several of the founding partners will be present to help launch CIARD with all the World Congress' participants this day.

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.

Learning never stops!

Some spontaneous thoughts on PLN ... Nancy White's bookmarks on del.icio.us just showed up with something about "PLN"and somehow it occurred to me that I needed to know what this meant. Timely really, as I read this article on David Warlick's blog, because I am just wrapping up a four week online course on knowledge sharing, which I now realize is a clear example of my PLN, my "Personal Learning Network."

Learning is next to godliness ... somehow my PLN of my early years managed to sink that value deep into me. Although caught up in the day-to-day demands of large organizations and professional "carrots and sticks," I think it becomes possible to lose track of this. PLN play a vital role not only for one self, but also for others as:

• part of our own "continuing education" for professional and personal development
• something to be instilled in others; key role in mentoring and managing

Each of these points is an essay in itself. Does anyone know of good information supporting these ideas?

My mind has already got me thinking of how the Web2.0 technologies will impact our PLN. The article talks about Twitter.

Personally I'm fascinated thinking of the cultural and organizational impact of technology such as Twitter ... an enclosed classroom or meeting room, or a delimited group of individuals, is suddenly opened up to the Global Village. Of course opening up can be good or bad, depending on one's perspective. Not all would be comfortable with, welcome, or find value in this level of exposure. I doubt there will be Twittering in my office's meetings anytime soon!

It would seem there is the potential for too much of a good thing here, although Twitter's website does say it is the "modern antidote to information overload." There certainly is a need for limiting or filtering, and this is why the role of an established, defined networks is so very important.

But the potential for valuable input is phenomenal.

Sharing Knowledge with me and others (a course!)

I am currently a participant in a workshop on knowledge sharing (KS) techniques supported by CGIAR and facilitated by four great individuals. A professional development opportunity!! Wonderful.

For this workshop I personally have two goals: to develop my understanding of good KS and my ability to apply KS tools; and, to expand my network of professionals working in the KS/KM field. I want to improve myself and be able to do a better job at my work, but I also know that I can never do it all nor do I work in a vacuum. (But it does get lonely out here some times!) The network of professional friends is what really brings it all together in the end.

The success of this could be judged through my application of the things we learn in my work and hopefully through the identification of some common interests (maybe even specific projects?) with others who are taking the course with me.

The course is run in a space on the net created with Moodle. This in itself is a learning experience for me, as I know about this application from our IMARK team, but have not actually experienced it first hand! The learning space is choc (hey, that’s a Nancy White term isn’t it?!) FULL of stuff and we’re just though our first week. It’s fascinating and a bit overwhelming at the same time. All the things I don’t know laid out in front of me … and then there’s trying to balance this opportunity to learn new things with the day-to-day demands of my regular work. I will mange :-D

LEARNING! Never stop learning.

(This is the first of several posts that I will be making during the online KS workshop.)