Day 1 at the AgKnowledge Africa Share Fair - Making knowledge travel

After a fruitful day of learning, sharing and training, we moved into the actual Share Fair on Tuesday (19 October 2010). The opening ceremony in the tent started with Bruce Scott from ILRI welcoming the 300+ participants. This was followed by short statements from Lamourdia Thiombian, FAO representative, Koda Traore, CTA and Roxanna Samii, IFAD.

Bruce Scott on the Share Fair

The guest speaker at the Opening was Owen Barder, is a visiting fellow at the Center for Global Development. He made an excellent presentation and more about his presentation and the opening ceremony is captured in impressions of Roxanna Samii.

On each of our badges, along with our name and orgaization, there is a picture of an animal. After the Opening ceremony, Peter Ballantyne from ILRI asked us to find our own species over coffee and mingle and get to know them. Our first time blogger - Camille De Stoop – shares an interesting experience with her “brother duck”.

Once the coffee was over, we separated into four learning pathways – water, climate change, land and livestock. The pathways integrate key knowledge processes and major knowledge spaces in a participatory process of mapping, sharing and connecting the people attending. Each pathway contains three phases: mapping, sharing and brokering. The idea is that at each phase the conversation should explicitly address grassroot spaces, intermediary spaces and research and policy spaces. More about how the learning pathways can be organized and used is available from the AgKnowledge Africa Wiki.

Each of the session’s first meeting is summarized below:

Water

• Sliding along the water stream (pathway)
  

Climate Change

• Blogpost by Camille: Changements climatiques et agriculture : session 1
• Videos by Seyoum: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaW9v8xKUPA and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzP9eF9Sc_w

Land

• Blogpost by Willem: Sharing practices to make land tenure securer #sfaddis

Livestock

• Blogpost by Beatrice: Livestock Pathways: Mapping actors and knowledge sharing processes
• Videos by Pier: Mapping knowledge sharing at grassroots and organisational level; Using participatory video with pastoralists in Ethiopia

During lunch participants continued networking, learning and sharing. Here is a beautiful story by Grace on how colleagues helped each other and shared their knowledge.

The beauty of this event has been the seamless integration of local culture and traditions in the Fair. The Bunna ladies are constantly serving excellent, and I mean EXCELLENT, coffee! The African horn is used continuously to sound breaks and starts of sessions.

The highlight was the market place which was spread over the ILRI campus. There were “travelling knowledge” donkeys – usually used to transport construction materials – carrying knowledge products, people selling local products, hawkers, shoe polishers and more. This and the spirit of the “market place” is captured by Roxanna in her blogpost. We finished off the day with "tasting session" where we tasted different types of honey and were served local Ethiopian drink and of course, some good African music and dancing!

Stay in touch and tuned!

During the day, there was an extensive coverage on Twitter, and a mass of pictures are being posted on the Flickr group. Have also a look at the mobile reporting via Shot from the Hip. For more information, take a look at the list of social media tools used by the Social Reporting Team.

And, the communications team, true to its words, has released the latest version of the Daily Tail. Here's a link to the Monday edition.

The “Oh I know how to ...” Day – Summary of a day of learning, training and sharing at the AgKnowledge Africa

The Training and Learning day was first started in the Share Fair held at Rome in January 2009. The overwhelming response and interest has led to a “Day0” at many of the follow-up Share Fairs.

The aims of the Day 0 at AgKnowledge Africa were:

1. To provide an opportunity for participants of the Share Fair to learn skills, tools and methods that were used in planning and running the Share Fair, and additional tools
2. To discuss overall concepts and learn how to identify, choose and implement tools and methods to match particular needs, activities and goals
3. To provide opportunities for participants to learn and be trained in specific ICT tools and face-to-face methods
4. To expose participants to ways to make their content travel by connecting various tools
5. To explore social, traditional, cultural and creative forms of communication

The Day started with a opening ceremony which introduced the concepts of knowledge sharing, knowledge management, ICTs, facilitation, social media, online collaboration and networking and more. During this session, Nadia Manning-Thomas from CGIAR’s ICT-KM Program gave examples on how to identify, choose and implement right knowledge sharing tools/methods for their particular stage of work and to help achieve a particular purpose or goal they may have. She stressed that although there is a “overwhelmingly long and constantly increasing list of tools and methods” many of these tools and methods can and should be used for different kinds of activities and for achieving certain aims. For more information take a look at the knowledge sharing framework in research.

After the opening ceremony, over 180 participants split into various sessions. Here is a summary of reports from many of the sessions that took place.

Opening session

• Audio by Jan: http://share-fair.podomatic.com/player/web/2010-10-18T01_46_56-07_00

Gladson Makowa, Media and Communications Manager, Story Workshop (trainer for Commonwealth of Learning (COL) - Radio for knowledge sharing

• Audio by Jan: http://share-fair.podomatic.com/player/web/2010-10-18T06_44_39-07_00 (how to make good audio and radio interviews)

Tania Jordan (CGIAR ICT-KM) - Collaborative writing

Google team: France, Evans, Jackie - Google tools

• Blogpost by Andew: Google Geo Tools: What can they do for knowledge sharing?

Antonella Pastore - Collaborative writing

KM4Dev team: Pete Cranstan , Charles Dhewa, Gauri Salokhe, Willem Bettink, Roxanna Samii – Face to Face Knowledge Sharing Methods

• Blogpost by Roxy: Day zero: "I know HOW day" starts at Agknowledge share fair #sfaddis
• Blogpost by Ewen: Share Fair Addis: Fishbowl and fishbowl battle

Pier Andrea Pirani - Videos for Knowledge Sharing

• Blogpost by Pier Andrea: http://euforic.blogspot.com/2010/10/agknowledge-africa-share-fair-training.html
• Videos by Pier Andrea: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWIFBn7vRpU

Susanna Thorp, WRENmedia and Pius Sawa - Making the most of the media

• Blogpost by Davide: How to deal with journalists
  

Katarlah Taylor, IFPRI - Mendeley

• Blog post by Grace: New Discoveries at #sfaddis: MENDELEY!!!

Maureen Agena- Blogging

• Blog post by Davide: The big deal about blogs
  

The day ended with Peter Casier ran a session called “Making Content Travel”- introducing practical and low-effort tips, tools and tricks to make your content known to the wider public, to “make your content travel through the social media channels”, magnifying the reach of your content.

The rest of the week, the social media team, which now includes some newly trained participants, will be covering the event and documenting everything through Twitter, Flickr, Audio and Video tools, blogs and much more. For more information, take a look at the list of social media tools used by the Share Fair Team.

The communications team on the other hand was busy publishing the daily newspaper called the "Daily Trail". Here's a link to Sunday's edition.

In a very African way, the day ended with drumming and dancing! Lots of knowledge sharing on music from different countries. Great way to end the day!

Social Reporting at AgKnowledge Africa Share Fair

The Day 0 of the AgKnowledge Africa Share Fair started today with introductions to various knowledge sharing and communication tools and a also face-to-face techniques. Every sessions was covered by member of the Social Media Team.

You can follow all the happenings of today's and rest of the weeks sessions via the Social Media Team's coverage on the Share Fair website as well as the individual websites of the various tools used:

• Blog: http://tinyurl.com/sfaddisblog
• Wiki: http://tinyurl.com/sfaddiswiki
• Tweets: http://tinyurl.com/sfaddistweets
• Photos: http://tinyurl.com/sfaddisphotos
• Videos: http://tinyurl.com/sfaddisblips
• Social web: http://tinyurl.com/sfaddismention
• Share fair FM: http://tinyurl.com/sfaddisfm

Tomorrow we start with the actual event - check out the agenda and stay tuned for lots of tweeting and blogging from ILRI!

Picture Credits: Roxanna Samii

Knoweldge Sharing - under l’arbre à palabres

After I saw this photo of “l’arbre à palabres” from Geneviève Renard of ILRI, I was curious and asked her to explain what it was. Here is what she said:

The ‘arbre à palabres’ is dear to me because I lived in West Africa for a long time and miss those baobabs!

The ‘arbre à palabres’, metaphorically the ‘talking tree’ or literally the ‘discussion tree’ is usually found in every village in West Africa where political and social meetings are held under the large canopy trees providing shade. Decisions are taken and issues are sorted out by elders usually. It is said that “What an elder sees sitting on the ground, a younger person cannot see even if he/she is up in a tree."

Interestingly enough, such a tree is popular in many cultures and traditions in Africa (and elsewhere!) and that is how we came up at the Share Fair with the oromo tree, Odda (in Ethiopia) which is a sacred tree for social and religious meetings and the Bazara which is a forum, a meeting place in Swahili.

They are just three traditional meeting places we named after those trees in the AgKnowledge Africa Share Fair, where people can sit and have informal meetings, just discuss and have nice talks.

And jokingly she adds, “We just hope that it does not rain!”

Thank you Geneviève for the explanation! Indeed, as you mentioned, a tree is popular in many cultures. In India, where I come from, the village elders are formed into an elected Gram Panchayat and who share latest news/knowledge and make decisions about local affairs, often meeting under the a tree (although it is changing now).

In the previous Share Fairs, we did not have a "physical" knowledge tree so this is going to be exciting new format for the Share Fair to facilitate knowledge sharing and connecting. Will keep you all posted!