TECA - Technologies for Agriculture - at the AgKnowledge Africa Share Fair

At the AgKnowledge Share Fair, FAO showcased some good examples of knowledge sharing initiatives. One such is TECA – Technologies for Agriculture. TECA, managed by Ms. Karin Nichterlein and Ms. Estibalitz MorrasDimas from the Research and Extension Branch, Office of Knowledge Exchange Research and Extension (OEKR), is an information and communication system for proven technologies for smallholders. TECA consists of an online library for documenting and sharing of proven technologies and exchange groups for discussion, exchange and learning about challenges of agricultural producers, their information and knowledge needs and experiences addressing these challenges.

TECA is an FAO initiative that aims at improving access to information and knowledge sharing about proven technologies in order to enhance their adoption in agriculture, livestock, fisheries and forestry thus addressing food security, climate change, poverty alleviation and sustainable development.

A few years ago, TECA was evaluated by DFID, that engaged DFID’s project leaders to screen their project portfolio for technologies validated at farm level and document them in TECA. They noted that TECA consisted of useful information but lacked interactivity allowing users to raise questions and provide feedback on technologies. As a consequence of this evaluation, a new interactive TECA platform was launched in 2009, followed by field pilot in Uganda in 2010 to test the sharing of information and technologies on the new TECA platform with different rural users.

The Uganda exchange group, as its facilitator Mr. Bruce Kisitu explains, consists of a range of stakeholder (NGOs, researchers, private/public advisory services, private sector, etc.) and aims (1) to make available “shelved research results” so that they can benefit others and (2) to ensure knowledge from Uganda, on agricultural technologies, is shared with others around the world.

“So far this relatively new project has received very positive feedback”, said Bruce. However, one of the key challenges is to get engagement from researchers to share knowledge. If they do share, it is often in hard copy format which then needs to be digitised.

To know more about this project and what ideas the TECA team got from participating in the AgKnowledge Africa Share Fair, please watch the short interview of Estibalitz and Bruce, by me and my colleague Elena, below.

Knowledge Mela – how can we make most out of it?

At the UNKFair in Turin, one of the methods used was called Knowledge Mela (which in Hindi means a fair!). So it was a Knowledge Fair in a Knowledge Fair!

This method builds on the method of Day 1 where we had a marketplace with some UN money to invest. About 20,000 UN francs were invested and the projects with top 7 funding were selected for presentation at the Knowledge Mela.


The method is divided into three steps:

1) Collecting of questions to be asked for each of the 7 selected presentations (60 mins)

• The winning 7 presenters had to go back to their boards in the marketplace and explain their projects once again to who ever came.
• Those who were not presenting were encouraged to visit as many booths as they could and ask as many questions as they wanted about the project. However, there was a hitch - each presenter was assigned a facilitator who made sure that the presenters did not answer any of the questions. Instead, the questions were written down on a half-A4 sized card for discussion (part 2).

2) Group discussion of the questions (45 mins)

• Once the time was up, the presenters and their respective facilitators were asked to sit at one of the 7 tables.
• The rest of the people could choose to go to any table where they wanted to know more about the project.
• The idea here was that for the first 5 mins the presenters would go through the questions that were written down by the facilitators and pick the ones they wanted to answer.
• Once the session started, the presenter answered some of the questions in the given time (20 mins).
• At the end of the 20 mins, we were asked to move to another table with topic of our choice for similar discussion.

3) Presentation of insights (35 mins)

• After the two discussions, each presenter was given 5 minutes to speak on the insights (and “aha” moments) they learned from discussions at their table.

My thoughts on this method:

• Having been one of the presenters on the previous day, I had not been able to visit any of the booths. So, when I went to visit the booths (part 1), I (and others who were also in my shoes) were completely lost and could not really understand the project because some facilitators did not allow the presenters to answer even the clarification questions.
• Then, when we went to tables for more in-depth discussion, on both the tables I visited, the presenters/facilitators did not really make use of the questions that were collected in part 1. Instead, the discussion just started around the topics that those at table wanted to have covered. In my opinion, this made the writing down step redundant and useless.
  
• All in all, the whole method seemed rushed and there was not enough space for participants to give feedback to presenters and/or to learn about a project in a more organized way. All the learning was ad-hoc because the discussions were all based on ad-hoc questioning.

Have you participated in a similar event? What made it work? Maybe a solution could be to have the discussions of part 2 in plenary with each presenter getting about 15 mins to answer questions in a quick round?

Summary of group discussion around learning before, during and after

This afternoon, we had a group discussion/peer assist on how we can improve learning before, during and after within our organizations.

We often have problems with externalizing our knowledge and have limited social interaction across units – in form of both face-to-face and virtual form. The other problem is also that KM is seen as an add-on instead of being seen as an integral part of what we should do.

Some methods/techniques that came out for the following stages of learning were:

Learning before

• access the existing lessons learned, strategy papers, guidance notes, publications (journal articles to theoretical)
• search for content on relevant networks
• stakeholder analysis
• peer assists
• assessment

Learning during

• do regular/continuous evaluation at all stages of project
• after action reviews/ appreciative inquiry
• peer assists and regular during action reviews
• regular team meetings
• study visits

Learning after

• capturing of lessons learned
• briefing and debriefing
• most significant change
• exit interviews and hand-over strategy

Study/learning circles, knowledge fairs, etc. are other examples of how knowledge sharing can be encouraged at all stages. Make the environment within the organization conducive to knowledge sharing and asking. Management should also support by giving time for learning before, during and after.

One thing the group agreed on was that a lot of learning is personal effort and those individuals who walk the talk should be encouraged and supported.

The group observed the common principles as:

• Make learning explicit
• Buy-in from the team
• Provide a safe environment in which staff can fail
• Delineation between learning and performance assessment
• Donors also need to give opportunity for us to learn
• Learning happens by interacting between people as well as through codified resources
  

Some of the action items that came out from the group to encourage learning before, during and after were:

• Recognise and acknowledge what people do – knowledge promoter award, thank you email, etc.
• Embed learning before, during and after in the project implementation/processes of the organizations work
• Provide templates for capturing of knowledge such as through good practices and other knowledge sharing formats
  
• Increase social interaction at workplace and engage constructively
• Create a KM taskforce to ensure that KM is embedded into work of the organization
• Codify knowledge and make it available for those who are afraid to ask
• Make our stakeholders that learning is part of the way we work in our organization
• Support and create environment for people to interact
• Push/train management to understand that we do better if we give time for reflection/analysis of situation and learning
• Make staff members aware and responsible for knowledge sharing/management in the organization
• Balance codification of knowledge and social interaction/networking

Summary of World Café discussions on good/best practices identification, codification

One of the KM/S methods we struggle with is the capture, sharing and use of good practices. At the UNKFair, Steve Katz facilitated a World Café session to discuss issues around the topic. We were divided into two groups. The first group discussed the following questions and this is a brief summary of their outputs.

A practice is a replicable action that you can use in your own work environment. Good practices are results that are replicable, from which we can learn and has benefits (operated in a value system and without harm to a community). A good practice can be identified by the community itself and/or an expert panel (could involve different stakeholders). The expert panel could also be involved in designing guidelines for identification/capture, etc.

The target audiences (users/beneficiaries) for good practices can be identified on a case by case basis. In the first discussion, they were identified as basically everyone ranging from decision makers to programme designers and from operational staff to academia/researchers. What we need to look at is our sharing demand or supply driven – what do which users want? If sharing is demand-driven, we need to make sure that the beneficiaries know about the knowledge we can provide to them. In relation to this, one participant asked if we need to advocate and create demand ourselves. Our own organizations were also identified as users of good practices – taking examples of what worked in a country/project and applying it to a similar problem.

As the participants were from UN organizations, they identified the following roles for the organization as:

• facilitate the identification, analysis, capture, coding, storage, sharing/diffusion and ensuring good practices are converted into policy implementation of good practices
• assess demand and raise awareness about the availability of the knowledge and ensure local experiences are shared globally
• know where to replicate what at the right time, supporting south-south collaboration
• provide normative support – in terms of definition and guidelines – around good practices
• provide technical assistance and, where appropriate, support capacity building in all or most of the above activities so that stakeholders and partners also learn about the importance of and methods for capture, sharing and reuse of good practices

A very regularly asked question around good practices is also its quality. There was no clear checklist for that but most agreed that it is easier for technical organizations such as FAO to identify them through its projects and activities.

Given that we have identified a good practice, the participants identified the following mechanisms and formats for sharing them.

• Roster of experts
• Events - knowledge fairs, trainings, workshops, study tours, farmer-fields schools, etc.
• communities and networks
• publications – reports, briefs, posters, magazines, etc.
• Multimedia – photos, videos, audios
• mapping/sharing within UN/our own organizations what we know
• creating knowledge sharing culture in the organization and highlighting success stories
• Media – TV, Radio, etc.
• Share/embed them through educational curricula – schools, universities, etc.
• there are many challenges in the actual identification and capture of good practices, some of which were noted as:
• how we match the demand to supply
• identification and codification
• loss of context
• knowledge loss when short-term staff complete projects
• trickling up of good ideas and examples

The challenges continue even after the identification such as:

• language coverage and translation
• technical language of the content
• identification of potential beneficiaries and challenges to reach them (ex. putting info on the net for decisions makers who don’t use internet is not a correct approach)
• not correct format/package – we need to ensure that we have right format for right person
• political will and support
• document lessons learned from application of good practices so that they can be improved and become live
• NIH – not invented here syndrome
• first hand knowledge of those who share is missing for those who apply
• bandwidth and access of online information issue
• feedback mechanism to see who is using a good practice, how and if they have new lessons learned
• institutional arrangements to share knowledge and adapt good practices
• lack of follow-up/feedback strategy from pockets of innovation to the users of good practices

We briefly touched upon the issue of up-scaling of good practices and some ideas came out as:

• use multiple channels for innovation and adoption (which costs resources)
• provide incentives to adopt
• focus resources on early adopters
• form peer group – networking/communication

The success and impact can be measured through planning and allocation of resources for monitoring and evaluation.

One UN Intranet – example of intranet for One UN Pilot Team - Sharing lessons learned

Eddy McCall from UN Vietnam presented a Joomla-based One UN intranet tool for 650 staff from various UN organizations. I don’t want to go into the tool itself but just share the lessons learned that were presented by the moderator at the end of the discussion of his site:

• the social initiative such as intranet or shared space has to be bottom up for it to get buy-in and uptake
  
• the staff should be involved in design of the product from the beginning
• lot of people want something like this at the country level but they find it difficult in terms of support from management and thus resources.
• often decisions are made at the HQ/IT level – lot of push from top instead of first looking for working grassroots examples which can be scaled up.
• leadership is critical - in both encouraging and ensuring participation from staff members
• allocate resources to promote (through presentation and training) the tool

I found the site interesting but overall, I am not sure how many new systems we can give to our colleagues before they get overwhelmed...

Marketplace where you have some (fake) money to invest?

One of the formats in the past share fairs we have struggled with is the “Marketplace”. The method is not unique in terms of format as almost all conferences have booths or posters but what is common is the struggle to get people to engage with the booth or poster.

At the UNKFair, the idea of marketplace was taken a step further. Here is how the marketplace worked:

• Selected projects get a space in the marketplace to put up their booth (1 hour).
• Each person at the event gets some fake money to invest (we got 300 UN Francs).
• Project owners get to showcase/sell their project.
• Visitors to the booth get to listen to projects and invest money.
  
• At the end of the marketplace session (1 hour), money collected is counted and top projects are selected for in-depth presentation.

Those who have the money got one piece of advice from Steve Glovinsky: invest your money properly. What do you want to learn more about? Invest money where you want to go in-depth and try and replicate in your own organizations/projects.

The presentations were very animated with participants sharing their experiences. Most participants loved the way it was organized but thought more time should have been given to each project presentation. The money idea was great as it encouraged people to visit booths! ;-)

UN Knowledge Fair opens with "Speed Networking"

This morning @tomwambeke used the "speed networking" technique to encourage the 65+ participants to get to know each other (to the extent possible) and to dish out their expectations for the next 3 days.

The method

• Line participants up in two rows, facing each other
• Ask them a question and get them to record key points on a large post-it
• After 2 mins, stop the discussion, get one row to move two persons to the left
  
• Ask another question and give 2 mins to record the discussion (repeat this as many times as you like - he did it 3 times)
• Go back to table and at each table group the "expectations" into clusters
• Once the groups were done, we posted our groups expectations (5) onto a large board. When we were posting to the board, we looked for ideas similar to ours that may have come from other groups.
• Create a mind-map of the expectations.

The three questions we were asked were:

1. What's our KM background and what are our expectations for the next three days?
2. What do we think are good examples of inter-agency KM activities?
3. What are our learning needs and motivation for participating for the three days?
   

Some of the expectations that came out of our group were:

• What is the methodology for Knowledge Fairs?
• How to systematize KM within our organizations.
• How can the UN KM Community stay in touch.
• What are the good practices in KM implementation?
• Who’s doing what?
• Learn about different methods and tools for KM implementation.
• Be exposed to innovative KM/KS methodologies.
• How to implant KM at and between different levels – global, regional, local.

There were many others which I will share once the mind map becomes available.

AgKnowledge Africa - After Action Review of the organizing team

An After Action Review (AAR) was carried out by the organizing agencies at IFAD in Rome ten days after the AgKnowledge Share Fair. Those who could not be physically present at the venue joined the discussion via Skype or via audio conference.

Participants: @rsamii @@peterballantyne @petecranston @eporcari_CGIAR @bajan_nads @Willem @elenadip Silvia Sperandini @gaurisalokhe

Here are some key issues (put together with @elenadip) that came out during the AAR.

Day 0 – Learning and Training:

• The majority of participants expressed themselves positively about the Training Day, underlining they had learnt new tools. Beginners, though, said they did not have enough time to learn. Longer sessions should have been organized for them to learn new skills and get used to new tools.
  

AgKnowledge Share Fair:

• Majority of the participants appreciated the concept of embedding Ethiopian culture in the different sessions like the marketplace, horn and Bunna!!
• In case of the marketplace, the participants thought it should have been made in a smaller space instead of dispersing around the ILRI campus.
• Organizers realized that those sessions carefully planned over a longer period of time were superior, in terms of quality, than those sessions which were organized in a shorter span of time
• Organizers also decided they should improve the ways to collect content and make it usable for the participants once the event is over.
  
• Social reporters had a key role in covering the event, although some sessions were poorly covered with respect to others. In a brainstorming with the social reporting team, some put forward the idea of having a more structured social reporting plan for all sessions to be equally covered. Others argued this would subtract from the real nature of social reporting which is a spontaneous activity.
• One issue all the reporters agreed on is that a stricter quality control should be applied to the social media coverage.
• The issue of social reporting vs documenting was also raised. The social reporting at the event was remarkable whereas there was no documentation of the sessions. For the sake of documentation, a rapporteur should have been assigned to each session. Rapporteurs could be recruited among university students knowledgeable about the topics and able to produce first draft documentation to be distributed to the participants before the end of the event.
• All the sessions in the Fair were self-organized. Most sessions thus were good, with buy-in and ownership from the participants, but there were a few which could have done better.
• Organizers observed there was request for more open spaces - more space for spontaneous discussions.
• Each sessions should have a content facilitator and a process facilitator.

Meaningful outcomes of the Fair were:

• The funding of 65 participants from various organizations in Africa.
• The participation of heterogeneous groups (farmers, researchers, NGOs, etc.) which allowed different parties belonging to the same value chains to interact and talk about common problems.
• The presence of farmers was particularly significant and made it clear that they should be adequately represented and that more interaction and space should be dedicated to them in order to understand their needs. The idea was put forward to organize a Farmers’ Share Fair.
• The remarkable number of social reporting outputs: blog posts (60+), pictures (470+), podcasts (15+), tweets (2400+) and 50 videos (50+).

The organizers decided to work on indicators to measure the impact of a Share Fair. A “One Year After the Fair” Survey will be distributed to collect feedback and reason upon the metrics of success of a Fair.

Summary of outputs from AgKnowledge Africa - better late than never!

During the AgKnowledge Africa Share Fair few weeks ago, we had a big social reporting team who tweeted, photographed, blogged and interviewed participants. I was tasked with producing a summary report every day which I managed on the first 2 days but eventually ran out of time and didn't get the reports out for day 3 and 4!!

This week, my colleague Elena and I have been tagging everything (well, for the moment blogposts, videos and audio recordings) produced during the event on the Share Fair delicious account. As a result, we are now able to create summaries of all the outputs that came out each of the sessions! You can browse them all on the Share Fair Website.

• Summaries of outputs from Day 0 - Learning and Training
• Summaries of outputs from Opening and Marketplace
• Summaries of outputs from Pathways
• Summaries of outputs from Focus Groups
• List of the Daily Newspaper - Daily Tails
  

A list of all known "products/outputs" by format type is now available here.

• Event Tweets
• Event Photos
• Event Blog posts
• Event Audio/Podcasts
• Event Videos

A clear lesson learned for next time is to tag everything since the beginning! Did you cover any of the above sessions? Is anything missing or amiss in the above pages? Please send me an email or leave a message below!