Sharing Knowledge for Better Aid - A Knowledge Fair takes place at EuropeAid

A day long event dedicated to knowledge management, in the format of a Knowledge Fair, took place on the 3rd of February 2011 at the at EuropeAid headquarters in Brussels. The aim of the event, as Anna Bertele, coordinator of the K-DAY (as the knowledge fair was called), explained to me, was to raise awareness on knowledge management and encouraging the culture of sharing.

She further elaborated..

We didn't know very much about the Knowledge Fair format so the Share Fair in Rome was really inspiring. Then some contacts with the KM4Dev network followed and finally on 3 February of this year the first Development and Cooperation Directorate General of the EU (DEVCO) K-DAY was organized.

The organization of an event like this was a real challenge for many reasons, the biggest of them being that we were just running into a big reorganization, including the merge of two different Directorate–Generals, the arrival of a new Director and the departure of some colleagues. Getting people on board, both as contributors and participants, wasn't easy and we had limited resources, so some sessions were more successful than others, and the lessons learned are many.

One of the best results was having our hierarchy discussing informally about opening up silos and building the new DEVCO.

Other sessions were less successful because expectations were not always met as objectives were not made clear enough. There was a high percentage of external participants from partner organizations or consultancy that drove the discussion on quite general issues while some sessions should have been focusing on internal needs of the fresh new organization. - Anna Bertele.

You can find more information about the event, on their blog: http://blogs.ec.europa.eu/k-day-2011/.

Well done to Anna and the Team!