Setting up online learning communities is just like learning to skate inline

This year 2011 the digital energy within the ICCO Alliance has been mostly dedicated to the setup and give life to the Learning Communities (LC’s). Several LC now have been formed around the themes the Alliance is working on together with its partners in a large number of programmes. And yes, it was confirmed again: people sometimes believe online facilitation simply happens, that it is something like breathing that everyone can do automatically. But fast skating inline down a frozen canal is a better metaphor. To skate inline you need first to learn to walk, then to skate and then skate well and finally to skate with other people. And like skating, online facilitation is best learnt with and from other people by doing it. However you always need the right weather and ice conditions to skate. Anyhow many colleagues within the Alliance have really put lots of energy and creativity in the setup and animation of their community. Need assessments have taken place, as well as discussions during face to face meetings about how to continue to deepen ideas and share experiences while working around the world. The LC’s Private Sector Cooperation, Basic Health and HIV and Food and Nutrition Security definitely have ‘taken off’.

Lately we have been talking with a quite a number of the facilitators, which was a really motivating and inspiring round of conversations. The feedback they gave us showed that most are struggling with ‘what’ and ‘how’ they need to do to energise the communities, help them become vivid and interesting for the members. The idea now is to develop, together with all facilitators, ways of working with their communities that really aim at usefulness for all members. As it is in our DNA, we’ll be practice what we preach and have started already to discuss these issues online in the ‘facilitators’ learning community’ and we’ll deepen this conversations in a couple of online sessions which will be held beginning of 2012.

Insights in Learning Communities - Share Fair

This week the Share Fair is taking place in Rome. Many interesting presentations and discussions are taking place about a great number of issues of interest for ICCO’s work: Public-Private partnerships, access to markets, use of social media in development and many others.

On the first day Etienne Wenger gave a very interesting key-note speech about Communities of Practice (CoP’s). This was a really interesting presentation/discussion and I suppose that all those within the ICCO Alliance who are somehow involved in the Communities of Learning (which in fact also are CoP’s) would like to know what Etienne said. His main messages were that it is just impossible to start CoP’s from top-down because partnership (partners in learning from practice) among the members of the community is essential and. Furthermore CoP’s need ‘social artists’ who are able to establish and nourish these partnerships and also ‘transversal people’ who manage to relate well with all (management) layers within an organisation. 

But as good summaries about Etienne Wengers’ talk are available on other blogs I will not repeat it all here, please have a look at the blogpost from Simone Staiger and the video interview of Pier Andrea Pirani. 

And by the way on the Share Fair blog there are many other interesting posts to read!

Networks here & there…. networks everywhere!

A few more years and NGO’s working on individual development projects might have become obsolete.

Just take a quick look in any NGO’s strategic plan and you will notice that ‘Networks’ and ‘Strategic Alliances’ and ‘Linking and Learning’ are presented as today’s development answers. Although it would be interesting to scrutinize this assumption, also I have come to accept that networks are an appropriate way to tackle societal issues in a rapidly changing world.

Currently I am supporting the NGO where I work in setting up a network on land rights and in our most recent round of discussion I asked my Junior Expert colleagues around the globe for some tips and tricks. Considering that most of us in the discussion deals in one way or another with networks, confirmed it is in fact a current development fashion. But as one of us rightly pointed out:

"In general I think the word 'network' in the context of development projects is a container concept that is easily used and often not understood…. there is a limitless amount of varieties in the range of formal - informal, size, type of members, goals’. 

Even in our small group the diversity in the forms and objectives of the networks we deal with was large, varying from group of 'community journalists' to a global network of actors dedicated to the Christian mission of ‘doing good’. But despite differences from our discussion it is possible to pinpoint several factors that any kind of network requires for effective and sustainable functioning.

Now please let me present, in the name of ‘sharing and learning’, my impressions of the virtual discussions I had with my colleague 'development advisors'.

Core elements and conditions to start a network
First remarkable thing in the discussion was that the main question itself created counter questions. As some of us suggested it is better ‘not to talk about setting up a network’ as networks should ideally evolve naturally when several people feel the urge to link up and cooperate around an issue. It is therefore preferable to take existing relations as a starting point and to expand slowly to other stakeholders and different levels.

But what if these relations do not yet exists while you see the added value of exchange and cooperation? In such situation people could be brought together through events and joint actions to examine the potential to evolve as a network. When doing so the facilitator plays a key role to link and ’to create opportunities for a joint discovery path’ before getting people on board. This implies that she or he must study the people, their institutions, their interests and power relations, to plan and prepare the joint events carefully and to give follow up to the outcomes of these events.

Once people are on board it is time to define focused objectives, to discuss different contributions and to align expectations. At this initial stage it is crucial that the facilitator ensures there is time and space to answer questions such as: what kind of network do we want to become; formal or informal? To what extent do we want to cooperate? Do we consider for instance exchange of knowledge as sufficient or should we take a step further by joining forces in research, lobby and advocacy? If so, which topics and through which activities? What institutional rules and regulations are needed for proper functioning? How do we fund network activities and what financial mechanisms?

While coordinating the dialogue on these questions, the facilitator should ensure progress and prevent that members end up in endless discussions. Especially the importance of starting to undertake actions, both at the initial phase as afterwards, can not be overstated because ‘for every network’s sustainability it is crucial to combine learning with action to have continuous results and the added value….People are only willing to invest time and resources if they see visible results.

It has been concluded many times before, hence it is not surprising that also in our experience proper coordination and leadership proves to be indispensable. Everyone will be interested, but nothing happens if no one takes the lead. Leadership could be either in the form of an institutionalized secretary, a project unit, steering committee, working group or simply an assigned person….. to take initiative, coordinate and to connect to existing larger initiatives and potential funds.

Above all, we all clearly agreed that at the core of any successful network lie passion, chemistry and openness . In general what I notice here is that a network (and any kind of cooperation) really functions around personal relationships, instead of institutional common interest. Beyond the curtain of organizations and institutional interests lie the people, who can make it or break it. In a way you could say that the passion people share to fight for a common cause is the heart, and cordial relations the heartbeat of a network.

Without a heart and heartbeat your network will not sustain life.

Leyla Ozay - l.ozay@hotmail.com

Networked Learning for Private Sector Cooperation

Cooperation with the private sector is an explicit strategy of the ICCO Alliance. In the past years considerable experience is gained. For the ICCO Alliance intensifying cooperation with the private sector (in economic programmes, but also in other thematic areas) is the challenge for the coming years. This requires capacity building of staff, as NGO staff is not naturally used to work with the business sector. For this reason ICCO has initiated a Learning Community (LC) on Private Sector Cooperation (PSC) for ICCO, SharePeople and Yente.

The Learning community will address issues as e.g. strategy (how to get started), tools to use (e.g. the ICCO company scan), linkages with resource mobilisation.

Angelica Senders of FSAS was requested by Nelleke van der Vleuten, ICCO specialist on this theme, to assist the start-up of this LC based on the following guiding principle:

• Learning has to lead to an improved practice and a better understanding of this practice in its context. For this it is important that learning takes practice as a starting point; learning should have an action perspective and should preferably start with asking the right questions, not with knowledge. 
• A Learning Community fosters horizontal interaction between practitioners; not all questions are to be answered by ‘experts’; in an effective learning network practitioners assist each other. Networked learning can take place within one organisation, but learning is most effective if synergy is created with learning in other organisations and in other networks. 

Steps taken:

• Start a Dgroup as communication channel, invite potential members and ask them to present themselves and their experiences; 27 people registered. 
• Based on the outcome of an e-survey and 3 Skype conversations (with selected members) agreement was reached on first steps to take in the Learning Community. 
• Subsequently 4 subgroups were formed around cases selected from the experiences of the members. Each group analyzed a case; communication took place by means of Skype and e-mail. Establishment of a wiki (an internet-based platform) named ‘Private Sector Cooperation and Corporate Social Responsibility’ for the ICCO Alliance. 
• The 4 case descriptions are uploaded on the wiki. In September a ‘plenary discussion’ will take place on the cases with the objective to identify shared lessons and common issues. 

This will be the basis for further work in the PSC Learning Community. This Learning Community will be closely linked to the LC on Fair Economic Development (FED) and external networks, e.g resulting from the PSO CSO-Biz event.

Communication, pleasure and connection

Lessons I've learned in ICCO Enablers Workshop
by Michelle Prazeres

I'm Michelle Prazeres. I'm a journalist and I work for Acao Educativa, a brasilian organisation that fight for education, youth and culture rights.

I came here with at least three wishes/expectations: communication, connection and pleasure.
Each day, I've learned one (or more) lesson (lessons).

A lesson (that I already knew, but it was very important to find people who think just like me!)
Communication is a process and not a set of products.
Technology is not a set of tools, but use what you do to them and the role we assign to them politically and socially.

Lesson 2: I learned to use Delicious.
I created an account for me and I will definitely continue to use in my daily work.

Lesson 3: The countries whose representatives are presented at the workshop have very similar realities in relation to access the Internet and technologies.
In fact, Brazil is one of the most advanced countries in relation to this, although it is a reality beyond desirable and ideal for the work of organisations.

Lesson 4: Using the tools of Compart it comes to curiosity, pleasure and fun and willing to learn without fear of making mistakes. Check on ten fears and miths about technologies.

Lesson 5: Two major issues in relation to such tools are: how to maintain the enthusiasm that is created in a workshop like this at work everyday, and how to reconcile the traditional work with this new way of working, and that Compart?

Lesson 6: I've learned how to use feeds, and created an account in iGoogle to receive feeds sites that interest me.

I guess my expectations were accomplished and - more than that - they were exceeded!
I discovered that Compart is all about communicating, having fun and connecting!

It's been such a fantastic moment.
I've shared my view of it in a video that I made with all the participants of the workshop.
Take a look at it!


PORTUGUESE VERSION

Eu cheguei aqui com tres desejos: comunicacao, prazer e conexao.
A cada dia, eu aprendi uma (ou mais) licao (licoes).

Licao 1 (esta eu ja sabia, mas foi muito importante encontrar pessoas que pensam como eu!):
Comunicacao e um processo e nao um conjunto de produtos.
Tecnologia nao e um conjunto de ferramentas, mas o uso que voce faz delas e o papel que conferimos a elas politicamente e socialmente.

Licao 2: aprendi a usar o Delicious.
Criei uma conta para mim, e com certeza vou continuar usando no meu trabalho cotidiano.

Licao 3: Os paises cujos representantes estao presentes no workshop tem realidades muito similares em relacao ao acesso as tecenologias e a internet.
Na verdade, o Brasil e um dos paises mais avancados em relacao a isso, ainda que seja uma realidade aquem da desejavel e da ideal para o trabalho das orgaziacoes.

Licao 4: O uso das ferramentas do Compart se trata de curiosidade, prazer e diversao e vontade de aprender sem medo de errar.

Licao 5: Duas grandes questoes em relacao a estas ferramentas sao: como manter o entusiasmo que se cria em um workshop como este no trabalho cotidiano; e como conciliar o trabalho tradicional com esta nova forma de trabalhar, que e o Compart?

Licao 6: aprendi a usar feeds, e criei uma conta no Igoogle para receber feeeds de sites que me interessam.

Become the change you want to see

We are “Appreciating the Programmatic Approach”. For two days now we have been sharing stories and experiences of what ICCO has been doing in the name of the Programmatic Approach from many parts of the world. A number of us in the group are consultants who come from those parts of the world often referred to as the “developing” world or even as “under-developed”, we come from Central Asia, South Asia, Africa, and Latin America. We have been asked to study progress in the use of the programmatic approach in these parts of the world often defined by their need to develop and change.

But here we are in the ICCO compound in the heart of what is often thought of as the “developed” world. Our focus is meant to be on the ability of groups in far off countries to come together to collaborate and coordinate their efforts towards becoming more effective in their common purpose. But as we tell the stories the two parts of the world keep coming together. It becomes clear that the bigger story is not of one fixed and stable (developed) system intervening into systems that need change. The interventions are coming from a place where change is rampant, where the pain of real development is being acutely felt. It becomes clear from what is happening inside ICCO how deeply difficult it really is to let go of the old in order for the new to emerge.

In our conversations we explore themes of dependency, of power and powerlessness, of ownership and of new organisational forms. We recognise the critical role of leadership. As we draw learning from experience we are reminded of the Gandhian challenge to “become the change you want to see”.

James Taylor, CDRA - South Africa

The "luxury" of selfreflection

Today I met James. James is working within an organization, that has the courage to take regularly a week of to learn. You may say: ”Yes that is good, we should all do this occasionally, take a week of to reflect and learn. Look for feed-back, get new insights and inspiration.” In the mean time I think: Yes I try also my best to reflect every month about what will be of importance with regard to my personal and my business goals. And again, whenever I have a ‘to do’ list I often take some time to think about my intentions, related to every item. This provides me with some of the energy of the end result, instead of with the energy of ‘having to do stuff’. And yes, I need a certain discipline, but it helps me to get results and attack even the more heavier jobs. So what was so special about James?

He said: “We do this every month. It is not just an occasional reflection week.” “Wow!” I said: “Every month, one week?” and he: “Yes we call it our home week”. Later on during lunch he explained more about how they organize it, what the permanent elements are and how they bring in creativity and specific themes. I just thought that it might be worth to consider, when he said: “I cannot anymore imagine who we would be without it.” Yes indeed it is about ‘being’ not ‘doing’. We talk a lot about learning organizations, but we need to ‘become’ the change we want to create.

On my way back home, I met a friend of mine in the train, she is heading a team of teachers and she referred directly to a recent reflection activity she had with her team and what it provided. Yes it is true, we can be our own best teachers. How would our world look like, I continued to think, when we reflected on a regular basis on our behaviour, our thinking and even our paradigms behind it? We would learn more from our self than from say consultants or the WRR.

Today was the first day of the “home week” of ICCO, a week of reflection about the programmatic approach. Congratulations ICCO for spending a whole week on learning about your own experiences in programmes. You are your own best source of wisdom. Take the opportunity to participate in appreciating the programmatic approach.

Domien Bruinsma (appreciation facilitator WA Cotton Programme)

'A box in a box': learning to learn

With a "box in a box" Arja Aarnoudse of PSO, visualised the idea behind the meeting on learning and knowledge management that took place at Oxfam Novib, on 7 November 2008. The aim of the meeting was to reflect on our learning processes and learn from each other to improve our learning interventions.

The fourteen participants of various Dutch development organisations expressed a commitment to achieve results as a learning group. 'Learning by doing' will be the approach of the organisations; all participants agreed to apply the learning in their organisation and to provide feedback on the learning in the next meeting. The group agreed to meet approximately three times per year.

Participants brought along succesful experiences on learning within their organisation and some burning questions. Among others, these questions included "how to involve partners" and "how to connect learning islands". A shared concern was also identified in the need for "ownership" in the learning processes. A matching exercise, where burning questions were linked with possible answers was used to select a topic for a more in depth analysis. Four participants presented a case; Pieter de Baan (SNV), Irma van Leeuwen (ICCO), Rheinard Skinner (Bernard van Leer foundation) and José Utrera (Cordaid).

Irma van Leeuwen presented the ICCO experience on 'action reflection groups'. These are subgroups in which ICCO staff reflects on various topics relevant to their day-to-day work. Objective of this initiative is to improve effectiveness and program quality. Groups worked on a well defined question, towards a concrete product, within a limited time frame.

Two people volunteered to be active listeners to the case presentation. René Schoenmaker, one of these active listeners asked whether ICCO was satisfied with the results achieved by these learning groups. According to Irma, some changes were indeed visible. Next week an evaluation will take place and the decision will be made whether or not to continue with the active promotion of action reflection groups within ICCO.



Click To Play

By Stephanie Zwier

Debating the future of development cooperation

On Monday 3 November three representatives of the Scientific Council for Government Policy and approximately twenty five representatives of the ICCO Alliance debated on two questions. The first related to our vision of poverty reduction and development and the second to the role of our type of organisations in this area.

Jack van Ham introduces the debate

Click To Play

The debate was chaired by Mrs. Gemma Crijns. It followed a fish bowl method, whereby six people sit in an inner circle and the others in an outer circle. Those in the inner circle are privileged by having the right to speak. Those in the outer circle, needed to touch the shoulder of a speaker to be allowed in.

The fishbowl method

The majority said that the terms poverty and development are intertwined. Using these terms demands clarification. Poverty is subjective and its sphere needs to be broadened. It has too often been seen as merely improving the economic position of people e.g. with the '1 $ a day' criteria. It should however also address socio-political issues, such as empowerment, and moral issues, such as solidarity in a specific context.

In terms of development, several speakers emphasised that we should step away from linear thinking; that we have set our aims too high. We need to narrow down our ambitions and provide opportunities to marginalised people. We should also think more in terms of cooperation, rather than poverty reduction. Reinier van Hoffen states that: "The word cooperation is hardly emphasised. It should be a central element. We should learn from each other, share knowledge, be concerned and interconnected with each other".

We cannot "save the world" or "provide monetary wealth to all people". But we can make small and valuable contributions. Annemiek van de Kerk stressed that we should focus especially on marginalised people that governments and bilateral organisations fail to reach. She quoted Ghandi: "the world has enough for everyone’s need, but not for everyone’s greed".

The various participants agreed that we, as the ICCO Alliance, need to clarify our role in cooperation with different partners on our position in development and in poverty reduction. We need to clarify the expectations that others, such as the Dutch government, can have of the ICCO Alliance. The large budget given to the Alliance increases our accountability requirements, but it shouldn't change our identity and core activities. We need to listen to those needs we want to meet. Dieneke de Groot states that: 'Development is interrelated with power. The fundamental is empowerment of people'.

Harry Derksen emphasised that our role needs to be aligned with, but separate from that of the Dutch government. We should implement those programs that people in need ask us to implement. He stated: "We need to listen to peoples' wishes, instead of implementing what we wish to implement. Our mindset needs to be broadened, beyond north south thinking, towards thinking in global terms". Jack van Ham furthermore stressed that: "We should dare to finance countervailing powers, it is our strength. We should expand and politicise this".

Sticking to our role in a world of rapidly growing interconnectedness is crucial. Our watchdog position is our added value. Willemijn Lammers supplemented this by stating "We have a speciality: processes of society building. When our role is pure, we have no other interest, but poverty reduction".

Gemma Crijns facilitated the debate and reflects on the discussion

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By Stephanie Zwier (Euforic) and Jonathan Huseman (ICCO)

A future for new media in education programs in developing countries?

Stephanie Zwier recently joined the Euforic team to work on ComPart knowledge sharing and learning activities. We asked her to reflect on her previous work with Plan Netherlands and to introduce herself:

----

As part of the Euforic team, I will support learning in the ICCO Alliance. My name is Stephanie Zwier, I am a young consultant working on policy and research in development organisations. I write this posting because a number of people at ICCO asked me to reflect on my learning experience at Plan Netherlands. Last year I worked at Plan where I helped to stimulate learning. I will reflect on learning within Plan's livelihood learning group and on some research I conducted on learning from their pilot School improvement program.

Plan is an international Development organisation that aims for a world in which children can develop their full potential. One theme Plan works on is livelihoods. The livelihoods learning group was facing some start up difficulties, it had no leader for a while and was lagging behind. As soon as a leader was appointed we, as a group, cooperated to develop a learning action plan. With outside support the group developed first a vision, then a mission and, after a while, an entire learning plan that was put into action. Central in this plan was the thought of generating best practices and stimulating learning. The plan involved a decentralisation process, whereby our group set up four learning sites in 'the south'. At these learning sites a different culture was stimulated to share knowledge and generating best practices. This required some behavioural change, but was soon appreciated and ownership grew.

To stimulate learning on the education program I furthermore conducted a research and wrote the report 'learning for innovation in quality education: A meta-evaluation of Plan's school improvement program'. This program was a holistic pilot program on quality education, implemented in from 2003 until 2006 in Africa, Asia and Latin-America. The pilot SIP was thoroughly evaluated in 2006 and 2007. The evaluation reports were not yet compared or analysed. The learning potential offered by these reports was the reason why I decided to analyse them in a meta-evaluation. This research emphasises the importance of involving children in the learning process. 

My first day at ICCO, I discovered how new media, such as wiki's, blogs and video's is used to stimulate learning. Its use follows a 'bottom- up' approach. It seems to challenge more common hierarchical structures, by involving ICCO staff in all layers of its organisation. New media enables knowledge sharing through social networks. Especially in the area of education I could imagine the vast possibilities for such new media to distribute knowledge in the south and increase children's participation. I therefore would like to trigger some debate by stating that ´the use of new media in education programs is a way forward to increase possibilities for children in developing countries´. What do you think of this statement?

By Stephanie Zwier

ComPart South Workshop 16 and 17 June 2008, Lisbon (1)

As announced in the previous post, these days a workshop is organised in Lisbon to talk about how to set up support on ComPart for Southern partners. Twelve people from all over the world are participating. The main idea is to generate ideas on how to introduce the ComPart tools and especially the "ComPart thinking" among Southern Partners involved in the programmes supported by the ICCO Alliance.

As you can see in the programme we used this first day to explain the backgrounds about ComPart (what it is and why the ICCO-Alliance is introducing using it) and sharing the related experiences of the participants. It became clear the gathered experience is a really good and fruitful basis for the discussions of tomorrow. To give you an idea about who they are, hereby a couple of presentations of the participants.

Olivier Sagna - Codesria, Senegal



Margarita Salas - Sulá Batsú, Costa Rica



The last part of this afternoon we started with a kind of a brainstorm asking all the participants to give some feed back on ComPart and the question whether this way of working for sharing information and experience has potential for Southern Partners. Some very interesting ideas on the role of “enabling organisations” have been mentioned. Tomorrow we will further concretize them and hopefully also come to define some possible strategies on how to work further on the introduction. I will come back to that in a next post.

Maarten Boers

How are we doing? Reviewing the ComPart Flowers

On 29 May, some 15 participants – learning facilitators and ComPart enthusiasts – gathered in Utrecht to review progress and formulate priorities for the Euforic-supported project to enhance knowledge sharing and learning in the Alliance.

Participant reflections

We began the workshop with a series of ‘coffeeblips’ by participants to collect views and experiences with the past year or so of the project. Viewing these, we could identify some perceived project successes:

1. A smart package of technologies has been put together
2. The Wiki’s are useful to organise documents, research reports, partners meetings
3. Awareness of the new possibilities of the web has been raised
4. Some new and useful ways of sharing information have been introduced
5. It gives new perspective on everyday work
6. It creates opportunities for partners in the South to contribute

We also heard some challenges:

1. How to better embed ComPart into knowledge creation and learning cycles of the organizations
2. Promoting greater use of the tools and approaches
3. How to take content out of people into an ‘open’ web space
4. Convincing and engaging others to work along
5. Embedding into workflow and mindset of the organization
6. Making the tools less complicated


Looking back …

Peter Ballantyne of Euforic presented the project so far (see ppt presentation). Formally entitled ‘Supporting ICCO Alliance Knowledge and Learning Networks,’ the project works with Alliance members supporting efforts of staff to document, communicate, and share knowledge and information.

The aim of the initial ‘north’ component is that Alliance staff members will become more aware of ways they can use knowledge sharing approaches, tools, and applications to support and achieve their objectives and programmatic purposes. Many will also try out and test some knowledge sharing tools, learn new skills, and have begun to employ them in their daily work with colleagues and partners. The (larger) ‘south’ component aims to enhance the strategic information, knowledge and communication capacities of alliance partners in the South – so they can operate more effectively in a networked environment, contribute on an equal basis to alliance supported programs and projects, and learn from and share their experiences more effectively.

He outlined the major elements of the approach being followed: to mobilize information and knowledge assets across the alliance; to encourage sharing and open exchange of information and knowledge; and to enable easy ‘user generation’ and sharing of information. This implies behavioural changes of staff and managers, also development of a new knowledge sharing ‘toolkit.’

The major emphasis of the initial phase of the project, roughly from March – August 2007 – was mapping the different knowledge and information demands and flows in the Alliance, with a particular focus on the roles of ‘learning facilitators’ associated with the new Capacity Building Programme. By the late summer of 2007, a toolkit based around various open information sharing and communication applications was emerging, with a wiki at the centre. A training and awareness programme was started and, in November 2007, ComPart was officially launched.

By the end of May 2008, more than 30 wiki spaces, 6 blogs, and 15 dgroups had been set up. More than 150 people from most Alliance members had undergone an awareness session – including Learning Facilitators; Programme Coordinators; Programme Officers; Programme Managers; Directors; Financial Officers; Programme Specialists; Consultants; Regional Process Coordinators; and Secretaries.

The different parts of the toolkit are being used by individuals, to track and to share information. Some tools are being used by groups to share and communicate with each other, across the alliance, and to some extent, with partners.

Peter concluded by asking ‘where are we now?’ He concluded that the main focus has been on the Alliance members in the Netherlands, especially ICCO. The toolkit has received much attention, so people too often assume that the tools ‘are’ the project. There has been much training and awareness for alliance staff, leading to the emergence of a group of enthusiastic users and champions.

… looking forward

A main purpose of the meeting was to identify changes needed for the coming period. For this, we carried out a simple SWOT analysis of the approach followed so far.

Some strengths to build on include that ComPart seems to fit well with future directions of the Alliance, it offers a useful toolkit to support emerging brokerage roles, it’s often easy to use and is fun, and it offers a high potential to collaborate both in the North and in the South

Weaknesses: we have to address include that it can add to existing workloads, it requires even more time ‘online’, the information is often not very structured, many of the people involved have weak ‘writing’ skills for such a platform, and there is still relatively little interaction and wide engagement in the different tools.

It offers several opportunities: to link with the ‘2/3 loop learning’, for people to ‘participate’ at their own time and place, to create and maintain institutional memory, to gain overviews of activities/knowledge, to connect with local oral cultures of sharing in the South, to reinforce existing practices of networking and community building, and to visualize information.

Some of the threats: Poor Internet connectivity in many places, lack of culture of sharing and joint learning, both in North and South, and the potential tension between the use of open Web2.0 tools and the use of proprietary applications such as Microsoft Windows.

We also polled participants to explore what additional opportunities are emerging to put ComPart into practice across the Alliance. This revealed a wide and diverse range of possibilities that we will investigate alongside recurring efforts to improve and extend the platform.

The next milestone in the project is a June meeting with potential ‘ComPart South’ enabling organizations to explore how best the approach and toolkit can be extended and enriched by engaging with development partners in the South.

Coffeeblips

No, not a new brand of cookies, but a quick way to capture views from workshop participants as they arrive for coffee at the beginning of a workshop.

On May 29th, we met with some of the ICCO Alliance Learning Facilitators and other ComPart 'activists' to take a look at our garden and see where we stand after one year of ComPart flowers.

As participants arrived at 'de Ster', together with the coffee we handed each group of two participants a card with two questions, together with a simple digital camera. We showed them how to film a short video and suggested they find a quiet spot to record each other reflecting on the two questions in a one-minute 'blip'.

Then, while Pete Cranston and Peter Ballantyne continued the main session, Chris Addison listened to the blips and prepared a quick powerpoint summary of the messages in the blips.

Henk Gilhuis shares his experience working with ComPart - please note, there's a reason the video is "a little upside down"!



The videos were later played back to all the participants [learning point: need loudspeakers next time] and, with the powerpoint summary, gave a chance for different perspectives to be heard and discussed. The immediacy of the data captured and the possibility to hear from 6 of the videos in a short time provided a quick basis for discussion. More details were then be brought out in the subsequent SWOT analysis of the project.

Lisette van der Wel shares her reflections on working with ComPart


Feedback on the video blips was positive. The process also raised awareness of the potential use of short videos in other workshops and projects. It was also an unexpected and fun way to start the workshop!

The term 'blips' comes from our use of 'Blip.tv' as a platform to publish video online. See, for examples:

http://iccoalliance.blip.tv/

http://euforic.blip.tv/


by Chris Addison and Pier Andrea Pirani

Introducing Interwise: 'Hello, can you hear me now?'

I am part of the steering group of the Capacity Development Initiative of ACT (a worldwide alliance of emergency aid agencies, which is composed of 10 people in 10 countries - ranging from India to Congo to Haiti. Last December the coordinating office of ACT in Geneva organised a teleconference. It was great - as was the Swisscom bill, which was 2000 euro for 2 hours of interaction. We need to have such a conference at least 4 times a year, so you will imagine that with our limited budget there won't be other traditional teleconferences.

Last Monday the steering group finally met for the first time in Geneva. ACT, becoming a bit nervous about future phone bills, approached ICCO to find out about our experience with alternatives for teleconferencing. Maarten Boers offered to help out with Interwise, of which ICCO has purchased a licence last year. We ended up doing a live conference of the steering group with Maarten sitting in Utrecht.

Interwise is based on a small piece of free software that every user needs to download. Only the conference organiser needs to buy a licence in order to book a virtual conference room, where up to 50 users anywhere in the world can log in for the conference. Of course it carries speech (as any telephone), but you can also use webcams, share powerpoints, send chat messages to all or some of the participants, and so on.

So, how was it received? A mixture of disbelief, and of eager acceptance. The first attempt to connect with Maarten failed which lead to statements like: 'just what I expected'. But when we discovered the right button for the volume control, everybody got excited: 'Hey! is that guy on the screen Maarten?' 'Are you sure this is at no cost?' 'Why doesn't everybody to this?'. Carlos from El Salvador and Arshinta from Indonesia had wireless access on their laptops in the room, and it took them less than 4 minutes to download the software, register their name, type in the unique conference URL, and enter the conference.

The challenge now is to ensure the others prepare their computers for our next Interwise try, mid-February. Any suggestions how we can do that are welcome!

Herman Brouwer

Presentation of ComPart flowers recorded

Last Thursday, the new system for Communication with Partners, the ComPart-flowers were presented at the ICCO offices. About 25 colleagues have attended this presentation. We assume and hope ;-) that more colleagues are interested in this system but for various reasons could not attend one of the three presentations. And of course it can also be of interest for others. Therefore we have recorded it and you can now see and hear it on-line.

To see the whole presentation of about 30 minutes follow this link. You can also have a look at the part where it is explained why you should cultivate the flowers. And if you are only interested in the slides of the PowerPoint you can find them here.

Please leave any comment or suggestion you may have.

Maarten

"Learning Facilitator"?: Wat een grote vriend…

(melodie What a Friend, Charles Converse klik hier om te luisteren)

Wat een grote vriend is ICCO (en kerkinactie)
Zoiets hadden wij nog niet
Een “learning facilitator”
Je gelooft niet wat je ziet

Altijd maar die financiering
Steeds maar weer datzelfde lied
Nu gaan we_eindelijk wat leren
Dank je Sint en zwarte Piet

Spreekt ‘ie Bemba of Swahili
Pakistaans of Portugees?
Kun je’m was’op zestig graden
Is’ie in Afrika geweest?

Maakt hij regen als we’t vragen?
Is’t een mens of is’t een geest
Kan hij zijn boodschappen dragen
Dan is’t alle dagen feest

Wat een grote vriend is ICCO (en kerkinactie)
Hij is ook een makelaar
Alles je wat je maar wilt hebben
Makelt ICCO voor mekaar

Wil je een pinda van Bokito
Of een glimlach van Poetin
Me Madonna op de foto
Zelfs de Paus gelooft erin

Onze grote vriend is ICCO
Kerkinactie is ook oké
Maak’len, linken, lobby, learning
Financieren is passé

We hebben geen geld meer nodig
Co-responsible, zó close
Neem gerust nog voor we sluiten
Een sigaar uit eigen doos.



Henk Gilhuis

e-collaboration and the ICCO learning networks: Report from a knowledge sharing session at ICCO, 28 June 2007

On 28 June, some 20 ICCO Alliance staff joined a session to be updated on different learning activities in the Alliance.

The first part of the session shared the results of an e-conference on capacity assessment and development (CAD) that was held in the first quarter of 2007. Joitske Hulsebosch and Simon Koolwijk outlined the objectives, process followed, tools used (dgroups and skype) and lessons learned. The presentation provides more details. Read the full report.

The second part of the session was a presentation by Peter Ballantyne on 'Knowledge Sharing Approaches and Tools for Learning in the ICCO Alliance.' This outlined the status of the project to develop an approach and tools to support learning through more effective information management and exchange. The presentation provides more details.

Do's and don'ts of e-conferencing – based on the CAD experience

Do's

Don'ts

Combine face-to-face, dgroup, skype and other platforms as tools in involving and stimulating people to learn. Avail a budget and time for a moderator / facilitator who will keep the group active. An e-conference requires committed facilitation. Focus on a specific theme which is a priority to the users. When the theme is important enough, participants are willing to cross different hurdles to get accustomed to e-collaboration. A homogenous group facilitates communication and participation. Start with a smaller learning group or community of practice; 10 - 25 participants is optimal, but design for expansion. Thoroughly prepare the e-conference. Obtain regular feedback from participants to make the technologies and the learning processes work.

A Dgroup alone does not always work for e-collaboration Do not develop a learning environment without facilitation Do not overload people with too many mails without helping them to deal with it. (possible solutions are daily digests, online reading (not receiving mails) or separate discussion threads to which people can subscribe) Do not think that one time facilitation or introduction of e-learning tools is enough. It requires a lot of care, facilitation and attention. Don't design a rigid program whereby all participants need to participate in all steps; design for flexibility in participation.

See: http://icollaborate.blogspot.com/2007/06/12-weeks-online-conference-on-capacity.html

Issues arising from the awareness session

1. Develop a learning alliance toolkit. When to start and how to start?
2. Train people in knowledge sharing methods (Wiki, blogs, bookmarking, dgroups, etc).
3. Tp make e-collaboration work, a mind shift is needed in the Alliance.
4. What are the structural solutions to become a learning organisation? Does management create conditions/ support communities of practice sufficiently?
5. How do people learn? Info management is just one aspect. What works for partners? What are partners requirements?
6. There need to be “private” or closed spaces as well as the open forums.
7. What level and kind of facilitation is needed to support the learning networks?
8. The dream is to find a solution to all the meetings?
9. To be effective, the electronic and web-based tools require clear organisational focuses.

Both presentations are available on the learning support web site (http://iacdrc.pbwiki.com/).

Download the report.

Human Rights and ICCO's Learning Programme

If there is one truth in working on rights-issues, it is that cooperation is indispensable: individual organisations – in the South or the North - cannot realistically hope to achieve much by themselves.

Especially in the field of Economic, Social and Cultural rights (ESC-rights), more and more experience and insight is being gained in the struggle to gain recognition of these rights. Experience shows that information-gathering and analysis of decision-making processes, (both local and international e.g. the machinery of the UN), lobbying at local and international level with the results of this analysis, and defining joint strategies (for example in preparing parallel reports) is sharpening NGO-agenda’s.

All of this requires actively seeking complementarity and extremely agile information-sharing across continents and specific fields of ESC-rights. Good examples of where that can lead is in the broad and empowering process involving many local NGO’s in the preparation of a parallel report, (as in the case of Brazil) and the preparation, under discussion now, of an international database and monitoring system for the Right to Food.

ICCO's active membership in the International Network for Economic, Social & Cultural Rights, and other examples point to the growing influence of multi-partner initiatives to ‘make rights real’ also show that the human rights movement cannot do without effective, flexible tools for communication and joint learning.

We have foud that the use of Dgroups greatly helped participative preparation of nearly 60 human rights activities organised by more than 80 organisations from four continents during the World Social Forum in January of this year: a sub-group of 25 organisations used the same mechanism for organising specific gender-related HR-activities.

More and more, the results of research, among others to understand the implications of judgements by regional Courts of Human Rights and UN-institutions and their mechanism is becoming available. We will also need systems to disseminate and work on the insights gained and translate them into increasing institutional capacities to effectively occupy the space available.

This will be one of the main challenges for the short term in which ICCO needs to combine the efforts of it Capacity-building and Knowledge units, with our programme specialists and related partners in South and North. One example of such an effort going on right now is to define how we will participate in building the monitoring system for the Right to Food.

by Pim Verhallen

KM4dev workshop 2007

KM4dev is a community of practice about Knowledge Management for Development. It has about 800 members from all over the world, although mainly form the US/Canada and Europe. Since I joined this community somewhere in 2005 I really learnt very much from all discussions and information generated on the list and its wiki .

Creativity in presentations

Once a year the community organises a face to face workshop. In 2006 I participated for the first time and really got thrilled. It is so inspiring to talk and share experiences with peers and work together on developing new insights and learning new ways of working. That was the reason that I joined the ad-hoc organising committee for the 2007 workshop which was held the past days in Zeist, The Netherlands (sponsored by ETC, PSO, IICD, IRC, Hivos and ICCO). Also this time it was a very inspiring meeting in which again I learnt a lot, I met many interesting people and I received an overwhelming quantity of useful information. I am sure all these lessons and wise advices will be useful for our work, and you can be sure I will use them and try to make them accessible to all of you as far as you are interested. But as an overall impression I really got the impression that we are “on the right way” with our CDP within the ICCO-Alliance, and for me that is really motivating.

You can find more information on the workshop on its blog and on the KM4dev-wiki mentioned above. Although I must admit this wiki is not a very good example because it is not very accessible ;-), plans to improve the wiki have been made though! Therefore here the direct links to two concrete examples of the results on Benchmarking and on Graffic Facilitation.

Peer review of Peer assist?

Op donderdag 24 mei bespraken we de nota: .. van Ria van Hoewijk van I/C-consult. Hier kwamen de volgende do’s and don’ts uit naar voren

Peer review

Peer-review als een instrument voor intercollegiale toetsing en accountability, dit instrument wordt gebruikt in de academische wereld (toetsing van wetenschappelijke artikelen) en visitatie-commissies (beoordeling van collega-instituten) meestal gericht op het handhaven van kwaliteit en standaarden.

Peer assist

Is een instrument voor collegiaal advies, meer gericht op het leren.

De persoon of organisatie dient ‘eigenaar’ en ‘vrager’ te zijn zonder een verplichtend element.

De peer-assist moet direct aansluiten bij de leerbehoefte van de vrager, deze bij voorkeur zal zelf de ToR of vraag moeten formuleren.

Betreft het een breder proces waarin verschillende organisaties mee doen, is de vraag of dit niet een te verplichtend karakter heeft en of deelnemers echt willen leren.

De peer-assist wordt uitgevoerd door collega’s die bij voorkeur vanuit een zelfde positie of thematiek werken, en dus ook voor dezelfde uitdagingen staan.

Voorkom dat verschillende elementen – leren, evalueren en beoordeling – niet door elkaar lopen en spreek van te voren af waar het accent op ligt; is het om te leren dan kunnen er niet achteraf consequenties voor de partner aan vast zitten. Is het om te evalueren welke waarde wordt dan aan de peer-assist resultaten toegekend, etc.

Maak het proces niet te zwaar, en laat de ruimte om het proces zijn eigen dynamiek te behouden en bespreek van te voren goed wat de scope van de ‘peer-assist’ is.

Let op dat je als donor er niet een te groot aandeel in hebt (ook al financier je het traject) en spreek bijv. af dat je inzicht hebt in de follow-up agenda, maar niet in de concrete adviezen. Als ‘kritiek’ of adviezen op papier worden gezet krijgen ze vaak hun eigen dynamiek, die soms door anderen binnen de organisatie minder worden gewaardeerd.

Maak een duidelijk onderscheid tussen uitwisseling, exchange visits (meer vrijblijvend) en een peer-assist of peer-review traject (minder vrijblijvend, vooraf resultaten benoemen).

Bedenk bij het gebruik van het instrument ‘peer-review’ dat culturele verschillen kunnen meespelen. Niet in elk setting is het gebruikelijk dat kritiek wordt uitgesproken, laat staan op papier wordt gezet.

Een self-assesment van de vragende organisatie is vaak een zinnig onderdeel van het proces

Ook binnen ICCO zouden we het instrument ‘peer-assist’ meer kunnen gebruiken, bv bij de ontwikkeling van programmatisch werken, waarbij collega’s feedback kunnen vragen.

geschreven door Erica Wortel