IWC09: A new way of working

“A power shift","An open environment", "A meeting without decisions already made", "A chance to put our hands where our mouths are”. These are some of the sentences used by Jack van Ham in his introduction to the pre-meeting of the ICCO Alliance Working Conference.

In traditional meetings of this type normally much of the material would have been prepared before the event and participants would have discussed decisions already formulated in advance. Instead, this International Working Conference provides the opportunity to do things differently: participants will be working during the all week to "go home on Friday with new thoughts and ideas on how the ICCO Alliance will be working in the coming years."

Jack continues: "Do we have the courage to start this adventure? Is it possible to find common grounds among the different cultures involved in this process? We'll see Friday if we succeeded." However, defining a new way of working is paramount, as development cooperation has changed and there is a clear power-shift happening. An example of these is the case of the ICCO Alliance approaching a community in India to purchase carbon credits. This power shift where a donor becomes a customer for carbon credits and a poor community is selling a product changes the perspective. Clearly, we need to adapt to it.

Besides, the environment for the Alliance is changing in other ways too. Tomorrow the Government budget negotiations in the Netherlands will be held. This will probably mean a 700 million Euro cutback for development. This means the group will need new ways to be more creative with the money we have.

There is a great expectation, but also some nervousness, about the degree to which this IWC can put these new ideas into action, to in effect "put our hands where our mouth is." There is also excitement that new thoughts and ideas can emerge and that the group of participants can take co-responsibility for the way forward.

The pre-conference workshop is focussing on governance issues and structure, with participants discussing how the new governance structure will be working and outlining the mandate and roles of the different actors involved.

Participants will also have the opportunity to share and to discover their expectations of this working conference, and get to know each others.

Jack's final remark set the tone for the rest of the conference: "If you don’t have purpose it doesn’t matter how you work; if you do have a purpose, you need to agree how you want to work; if you want to walk fast, then walk alone; but if you want a sustainable solution you have to walk together."

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International Working Conference kicks-off

The International Working Conference of the ICCO Alliance kicks off today in Soesterberg. For the next five days, staff of ICCO and Alliance organisations, together with representatives of the Regional Councils, the International Advisory Council and Regional Working Offices will discuss, shape and define the new ways the organisation will be working in the coming years.

Before diving into the content, which will be dealt with in the next 4 days, the programme for this 'day zero' of the Conference focuses entirely on the governance structure of the organisation. It is in fact paramount to define the way ICCO will be working in the coming years and outline mandate and roles of the different actors involved.

The room is full with some 50 people from the International Advisory Council, the Regional Councils, and the Regional Working Offices. The people come from different countries and each of them has a different background in terms of relations with ICCO; some didn't know ICCO before being involved with it; others were vaguely familiar with it; some have been involved with ICCO partner's organisations; others knew about it through their association to ecumenical networks. This provides a great richness and diversity to built upon for the coming days of the conference. Talking around small tables of 5/6 people, the participants introduces themselves and get to know each other by sharing their stories, and exchanging their first thoughts about the conference. Some burning questions are already put on the table, and they will be addressed in the coming days.

This will prepare the ground for the the main part of the conference, starting tomorrow and lasting until Friday. Ingrid Richter and Ben Arikpo, two of the facilitators of the event, describe in the video below how the programme of the conference has been set up and what the process flow of the event will look like.



The objective is to "build community" and support participants in getting to know each other and capture the perspectives that are in the room. The facilitators will lead participants through a series of conversations about what's important for the future, which values they want to come alive and what are the priorities to focus on. Most important, as also mentioned by Jack van Ham in his introductory remarks, a lot of co-creation will come out from the conference: there's no pre-defined document that states these values and policies that people need to agree upon; instead, the real outcomes will be defined together by participants as the conference progresses.

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Reaching those outside the International Working Conference 2009

The ICCO Alliance is becoming a global player with decisions advised by partners and Regional Councils around the world. This implies a change in the way they do business. As Jack van Ham emphasized in opening the ICCO Working Conference a new way of working must be devised. This changes the way the physical face to face meeting takes place, but also the way that those who can’t attend can interact with participants.

The physical meeting is held in the Kontact der Kontinenten, but the virtual home of the meeting is a wiki. This focuses links to the various ways the meeting is recorded. Background documents, materials and presentations are augmented by short video interviews (blips), blog stories and continually updated wiki pages.

In planning this recording it is important to arrange parallel tasks. A reporter role for the sessions is arranged in relay, with more than one person recording, one in detail for the wiki, and one drawing stories for the blog.

The process followed the steps below:

• Preparation of a wiki platform to hold background, logistics and schedule information for the meeting.
• Promotion of participation through the wiki, with nearly 400 people being invited to the passworded wiki.
• A focus on the process and determining how this could be recorded.
• A focus on the participants and all actors to consider how their thoughts and activities could be recorded.
  

Preparation
The wiki is prepared with the participation of the organisers and facilitators to present the instructional and logistical content for participants.

Promotion
The promotion of the use of the wiki for the meeting is made through a series of emails, linking to the relevant content uploaded onto the wiki. Participants are then invited individually to have access to the passworded wiki.

Recording the process
The working conference needs to link with an overall story. The scene setting requires a story from the organizers, a clarification of the process, a description of forthcoming activities, the sessions to cover during the week and the final conclusions. The wiki is updated live with key questions, observations and findings as they emerge in the discussions.

Viewpoints of the participants
Having set the context the wiki needs to reflect the views of as many participants as possible. With this in mind a series of blips must be arranged ideally considering that participants interview each other. These arranged feedback must be accompanied by encouragement to add comments to the wiki and encouragement for those remotely participating.

A structured news session each evening is produced on video to record key points raised during the day, produced by the ICCO comunication and IT department . This 10 minute bulletin is broadcast every evening at 8pm, see the site.

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Great expectations generated by ComPart training

Last week, Rimisp concluded the first cycle of the ComPart approach training sessions delived online to ICCO staff and partners in Latin America. The cycle included 3 sessions that focused on web 2.0 collaborative platforms, such as blogs and wikis, as well as a number of online tools to enhance the work of social and development organizations in the region.

Participants had the opportunity to learn about these tools and were able to practice online and in real time the concepts and techniques that were shown during the session.

The idea behind the training sessions was to provide people working within scattered teams with the tools and platforms available to make their collaboration easier.

The Rimisp team was pleased to receive positive comments from participants who have acknowledged the importance of these training sessions in their daily work. Samuel Baron, from Colombia, told us that after the training sessions, he has started using wikis to synthesis, share and update information from different team members located in various towns in Colombia. The wiki has allowed them to work collaboratively and in their own time.

The training sessions will continue and we hope participants will find them useful!

Online Community Building: Gardening vs Landscaping

We talk about the 'Compart Flowers' and use the metaphor of gardening when we discuss how to use the tools to work with different communities. Here's a link to a blog that uses the same metaphor and discusses the issue of how to support community building emergence. A quote: "So what's the secret to successfull community building? You guessed it: be a great gardener and avoid the temptation to landscape"

Thanks for the link to Peter Ballantyne, who is going to garden in ILRI from September. He'll be sorely missed from the Compart programme.

Pete Cranston

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!

Using wiki for linking and learning in Indonesia

During the meeting ‘Working with wiki’s in development organisations’ I was inspired to also use a wiki in an upcoming conference I was co-organising in Indonesia. From 23 until 28 of June this conference was held and I think it was a success, also the wiki part of it, although the wiki still needs to prove itself…

I proposed the wiki to the organising committee three months before the conference as an instrument for the participants to keep in touch and exchange information after the conference. Everybody was immediately very enthusiastic, but were also a bit hesitant about the computer capabilities and internet facilities of all participants. In the end we decided to introduce the wiki to participants interested and capable of working with computers and internet; so voluntary and not an official part of the program.

We found an IT specialist from a partner organisation that was willing to guide and prepare the wiki process. This proved to be essential. He translated the wiki tutorial into Indonesian and trained a group of young people that would write the reports during the conference how to use the wiki so they could upload their reports on the wiki. He is now also the one people can ask questions to if they have a problem with the wiki.

By sending all participants the tutorial we tried to get people to use the wiki already before the start of the conference, but this was not a big success. Without training or introduction the step to start working on the wiki is too big. During the conference this was fully compensated though. Many participants liked the idea of a wiki, especially for its possibility to keep in touch with other partner organisations and to share information with each other. Almost all participants joined the (voluntary) wiki workshop, signed in and read the information. Some also placed comments or made their own page.

People are still a bit hesitant though with placing information on the wiki. One of the reasons for this is that people are not sure who else are reading all the information they put up there. We discussed closing the front page, so only people registered can see and join in on the wiki, but this only partly solves the problem and it also makes the information less accessible for people interested.

So introducing the wiki was a success, but whether it is useful for the future will depend on whether people will keep on adding information to it. By the way, if you want to check out our wiki, go to: diakonia.pbworks.com

By Miriam Nagtegaal