The expectations

By Diego Reinoso, Rimisp - Centro Latinoamericano para el Desarrollo Rural

¿Qué esperaba antes de venir?

Al salir de Santiago de Chile esperaba poder aprender y compartir con un grupo de personas sobre cómo las herramientas Web se pueden convertir en una excelente herramienta de trabajo.

Antes de ver si se cumplirían mis expectativas, recorrí Amsterdam por dos días. Imperdible: Museos, canales, coffeeshop, barrio rojo...

El lunes llegué a Amersfoort junto a otros participantes del ComPart Enablers' Workshop.

Mi otra gran expectativa era conocer a personas de distintas partes del mundo. La expectativa fue sobrepasada por los hechos y puedo decir que he conocido a personas de Mali, Burkina Faso, Kirguistán, Uganda, Nepal, etc.

Han pasado dos días y mis expectativas han sido satisfechas. Ha sido una interesante experiencia para reforzar mi conocimiento sobre algunas herramientas y redescubrir otras que no conocía. Me es especialmente útil para mi trabajo en la actualización del Blog Red Prensa Rural y el sitio Web del programa Dinámicas Territoriales Rurales de Rimisp.

Aún quedan dos días y creo que surgirán nuevas expectativas que seguro serán satisfechas en el Workshop.

[An English translation attempt..]

What I expected before coming?

Leaving Santiago de Chile hoped to learn and share with a group of people about how Web tools can become an excellent tool.

Before seeing if it would meet my expectations, I walked around Amsterdam for two days. You can not miss: Museums, channels, coffeeshops, red-light district...

On Monday I arrived to Amersfoort with other participants of ComPart Enablers Workshop.

My other big expectation was meet people from around the world. The expectation was surpassed by the facts and I can say I've met people from Mali, Burkina Faso, Kyrgyzstan, Uganda, Nepal, etc.

It has been two days and my expectations have been met. It was an interesting experience to enhance my knowledge and rediscover some other tools did not know. It is especially useful for my work on the update of the Blog Red Prensa Rural and the website of the Rural Territorial Dynamics program of Rimisp.

There are still two days and I think that surely will create new expectations will be met at the Workshop.

Extra! Extra! Extra!
You want to see the best zoom of the history and listen to a Chilean speak a bad English, press play:

First blog training session receives participants´applauses

Just when you think that you have everything under control… technology never fails! Despite the technical difficulties we experienced this afternoon, we are proud to say that the first training session on blogs went really well… at least we hope!

Most of the registered participants attended the session and we also had a few more unexpected people, but we were happy to have them. The introduction about blogs that Diego prepared was interesting and with lots of details and information. But the best part came later with hands-on demonstrations on how to create blogs and how to post an entry on Blogger.com. We were very pleased to have so many questions and see how engaged people were. Didn´t anticipate that at all! Even though Diego had some problems with his head-sets and couldn´t listen to other people’s comments, he was able to conduct the training session really well and he answered most of people’s queries. The fact is that time went by super fast and there wasn´t enough time to address all the important comments and concerns people had.

Well, that just means that there is great demand from people to learn more about web 2.0 tools and great opportunities for the ComPart approach. We are glad to contribute to this and help people get involved.

Overall, I think this was a real team effort! Getting organized to overcome the technology shortcomings, exchanging headphones in the middle of the sessions so Diego could hear what others were saying, asking participants what their questions were and passing them on to Diego and getting a list of participants and their organizations and countries were some of the tasks that Virginia and I did for this first session.

But the results were great and most importantly people felt they gained something from the session. We gave them homework, though, and we really hope they go to the training blog and start posting. If they do, we’ll post them here pretty soon!

Huge demand for ComPart training sessions in Latin America

An overwhelming response received the organization Rimisp when it publicized its calendar of training sessions on the ComPart approach a few weeks ago. The Rimisp-ComPart team will deliver a series of online training workshops to ICCO staff and partners in the region. The topics selected for these workshops range from blogs, its use and management, to collaborative work using wikis. An overview of web 2.0 tools available online will also be part of the training sessions offered by Rimisp online, free and in Spanish!

Diego Reinoso, from Rimisp, processing registrations from ICCO partners interested in ComPart online traning sessions

The first session will take place tomorrow Thursday at 3:00pm (-4:00 GMT) which will have the participation of 40 people from various organizations based in countries such as Peru , Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia and Nicaragua.

Rimisp: catching up with the web 2.0 proliferation (2)

Hi, this is Virginia Soto-Aguilar Cortínez journalist of Rimisp. I would like to thank Maarten and ICCO for teaching us this new tools. This is an opportunity for Rimisp to improve its communication and learn “how to survive in web 2.0’s world”.

As a Latin American Center for Rural Development we really need to be in daily connection with our partners, and these interactive tools are really good to create virtual communities. We wil use the calendar tool to share information about our internal activities, we will show our videos, photos and slideshows with the tools BLIP.TV, FLICKR and SLIDESHARE.

Rimisp: catching up with the web 2.0 proliferation (1)

By Rosamelia Andrade*

Rimisp (Latin American Centre for Rural Development) is a small regional NGO working on research projects related to rural development, poverty reduction, economic growth, social inclusion and environmental governance in various countries of Latin America. Its office is located in Santiago, Chile, but as a regional organization, Rimisp also has personnel based in other countries such as Bolivia, Ecuador and Costa Rica. Rimisp partners with several public and private institutions that help implement our projects and collaborate with us in different capacities.

The structure of the organization in itself bears important challenges to the internal communication process. This is probably not that uncommon nowadays when many organizations have flexible working environments and human resources located in more than one geographic setting.
Several project coordinators in the organization have expressed repeatedly the need to have communication systems in place to improve the internal communication amongst team members in a way that is easy, yet effective, and without investing an enormous amount of time figuring out how something works.
With this challenge in hand, the communications team at Rimisp received the visit of Marteen Boers from ICCO, an old friend of the organization who knows well the limitations and challenges we currently face.

Maarten worked with us setting up a 4-day hands-on workshop schedule that included collective and individual meetings with team members as well as working sessions to learn specific collaborative tools that could help our organization deal with the difficulties of communicating in the world of web 2.0

The week with Maarten opened a whole range of new tools, platforms and ideas that we could implement in our organization, not because we didn´t know about the existence of this material in the web, but mostly because he showed us how these tools have changed the way people work with one another and how we –as an organization- could benefit from it.

I think the most important thing that I learned from these sessions is the fact that we –Rimisp and its members- have to start thinking about a different approach to our work. This means, we need to change the way we do things; the way we view things. We are not alone in the world. Other people are doing similar things and they are interested in what we do. The present times prompt us to share information as opposed to restrict knowledge. And we need “to get out there,” where other people co-exist (collaborative platforms), to share with others what we do best.

I believe there is significant potential for Rimisp to begin implementing and using collaborative platforms and tools. The first step would be to bring on tools that could directly solve their most pressing difficulties, for example sharing a common calendar of appointments, meetings, events, etc, so everybody in the organization and in specific teams are informed of what is going on with one another. Or a platform that would help them share documents and allow them to work collaboratively to obtain a final version that incorporates everybody´s input.
The next step is to show all the members of the organization the type of tools and platforms that are available and what they can do for the organization and the teams. I think this could motivate people to incorporate new instruments into their daily routine and activities. Sharing experiences from other organizations going through similar processes could also be useful to encourage people to adopt this new way of doing things.

Finally, training and capacity building are extremely important in the success of integrating new collaborative avenues in an organization. People feel much more inclined to accept something when they learn how it works and when they see that is actually working.

In Rimisp we have started producing a strategy to implement new collaborative platforms and tools to our daily work. This will not be easy and it will take time. At least we know that our people have needs and challenges to resolve and they are open and excited to learn how the web 2.0 could help them. A good indication is that they have begun asking what this is all about...There is hope.

Rosamelia Andrade is the Communications Coordinator of the Rural Territorial Dynamics Program at Rimisp. She is a communications professional with experience working on international development projects. For more information about Rimisp, please visit www.rimisp.org

Murphy’s Law always present

Santiago de Chile. These days I am having the wonderful opportunity to work with one of ICCO’s partners on the introduction of Web2 tools for their communication and sharing needs. The objective is to share ICCO’s experiences on introducing ComPart within the own ICCO organisation and to discuss and realize the first steps for this organisation on their challenging new path.

It is all about RIMISP a well known - and I would guess respected - organisation working on all kinds of rural development issues in Latin America. They are obviously not unknown to publishing on the web. Just have a look at their website(s) and I am sure you will agree they are very well made (content wise and also for the clear “navigability”). However the staff is very interested to get to know more on how to use the Web2.0 to improve their internal and external communication.

This 4-day workshop was really well prepared. A few days ago I received quite a long list of the expectations of the individual staff members about the workshop. In the short video below Rosamelia Andrade, who has been preparing and coordinating the workshop, summarises these expectations. I really do hope that, together with all involved, we will be able to answer them.

Click To Play

Anyhow the first day was tempting. As so often in these occasions Murphy’s Law was confirmed once again. Although I already knew that one never should combine an on-line and a face-to-face meeting because it is impossible to give due attention to “both listener groups” at the same time, I did it again because most of the staff wanted to participate in the introductory presentation of possibilities and quite a lot of them live and work all over Latin America and/or are travelling. Of course right before and during the actual presentation all possible technical problems showed up (failing headsets, crashing laptops, connection problems, etc). Nevertheless we succeeded to have a good start and a discussion with more questions then I could answer. The interest and even “hunger” to get to know more about all the possibilities was very evident.

Of course I will keep you informed about the results once we have finished these interesting and also for me very “learning” days.

by Maarten