ComPart comes of age

"We've stopped playing and now we've started the game", said Reinier van Hoffen after the ComPart lunchtime meeting last week. He was referring to one of the themes that emerged at the ICCO Alliance Working Conference last year.

For the last two years ICCO staff have been working with the ComPart team to explore how best we can support collaboration and knowledge sharing across the Alliance using modern online tools. Browsing through the over 100 wikis, regular blog posts and collections of conferences and workshops material from events across the globe, it's clear that we are in a new, more advanced, phase.

A key indicator of this, of course, is that the ICCO Alliance Business Plan is being developed in a wiki, which means easier management of documents and comments than is possible in the traditional approach that has large numbers of documents flying around the organisation by email, risking confusion over which is a current version and increasing the email flood. At the same time several teams have developed workspaces to support their everyday work, with rich and varied content, using a number of tools.

Just do it!

To share the work that is being done across ICCO, ComPart organised a lunchtime 'show and tell' on Tuesday 23 February 2010. It was a well attended meeting, with staff from all areas of the organisation. The central activity was a chat show - a presentation from three teams of how the the ComPart approach is supporting their work. As you can see from the recording below, the teams are gathering a wide range of material and using several tools. Possibly more important is their enthusiasm for their work. All of the presenters echoed Mariken Gaanderse when she said, "For me the best advice (to my colleagues) would be just to start using (ComPart), because only then you'll find out what it provides you."



However, in spite of the progress and enthusiasm, many challenges still remain: not all staff are at ease with technological changes and the learning curve seems to be a bit steep for some. Moreover, some desktop or web based applications are not easily available for staff inside the ICCO building, limiting for example the use of Skype, the synchronization between Outlook and Google calendar, or the availability of AT&T Connect. Lastly, the enormous pressures on the Regional Offices during their set-up phase means many haven't yet been able to explore in any depth the ComPart approach and toolkit. ComPart is especially relevant in the new decentralised ICCO. So it is good to hear that regions such as Central Asia, which are more established, are now keen to engage with the programme, as Pepijn Trapman confirmed on his recent visit to Utrecht.

The debate and lively discussion offered us as ComPart Admin Team a great deal of insight in terms of expectations, challenges and issues that ICCO Alliance staff are facing as far as information, communication and knowledge sharing are concerned, and how ComPart can further support their work. The recommendations and issues raised are being integrated into our plans for 2010, and will be reflected in the way we support ICCO Alliance staff and partners.

Communicating Global/Development Research

This morning one of the open space sessions during the EADI-Information Management Workshop in Copenhagen was based on the question: What is so specific about communicating Global research? I had the pleasure to discuss this question with 7 other participants sharing experiences and point of views from various angels.

In the first place we had difficulties in understanding the concept of Global research and replaced it by Development research (assuming this concept would be clearer ;-).

Furthermore we argued that it is necessary to distinguish different types of researches and, for the matter of communication, also researchers:

• Academic research – researchers who apparently mainly communicate in peer reviews;
• Programme research – evaluations, monitoring of development programs and projects, by academic researchers but mainly by consultants (evaluations, consultancies)
• Experience based research – research in which the people actually involved in the development processes are directly involved (‘the people’)
  

These three types of research need different ways of communication (strategies, methods and tools). Thereby issues of validation (“truth” is not equal to “authenticity”) and access to money and power play an important role, be it in a different way for each of the three defined types of research.

They play a role in the way the ‘to be’ communicated information or message can be ‘translated’ for the intended audience. And again, this discussion group concluded that it is as important to make a distinction in the audience, be it academics, policy makers, program managers, press/media or the involved people themselves. This distinction also defines the strategy, methods and tools to be used to communicate about the research.

This all led to the conclusion that ultimately communicating about research is the same as any other communication: all depends who is involved, on the purpose and on the source.

But, while discussing the following questions arose:

Why does one go into development research if not to contribute to development?, and: Why then do so many (academic) development researchers adopt a mode of work which does not contribute to that aim? (by keeping the information among themselves and/or communicating in such a subtle way that is hard to follow for most audiences?

Who will blip the blip and blog the blog?

We went to ICCO this morning on a very important mission: explain to ICCO staff what the ComPart approach in the South was and how it could help them achieve their objectives communicating with partners more effectively. In other words, we had to be prepared to do a lot of convincing.

The room was nicely arranged; coffee, tea and cookies were available to warm up and be comfortable. Stephanie from Euforic was very smart and brought some stroopwaffel (special Dutch treat) to break up the ice, which worked quite well. But still, I saw our audience a bit skeptical, somehow doubtful perhaps, without knowing what to expect from the session.

We blipped a few attendees to get their first impressions before the presentation actually started. So, we were able to capture some of their expectations or, rather, some of their hesitations about what they were going to see in the morning.

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Click To Play

The ComPart support team had worked until quite late the previous evening to have everything prepared for this great moment! Discussions, printing and paper cutting, blipping, blogging were going on, combined with a bit of laughing… It made the time go by quite quickly, but very entertaining.

The presentation consisted on explaining the ComPart approach and how it had evolved since it first began its implementation. Real experiences were drawn from the work being conducted by enabling organizations in Southern Africa, Latin American and Southern Asia regions. The stories highlighted good practices and lessons learned from these experiences and gave our audience a flavor of what it was like working with the ComPart approach and how this system could establish a social network of partners across the globe.

As the presentation went on, I could see excitement in their eyes growing when watching clips of a video that documented the activities of a conference that took place in Burkina Faso last year. The use of ComPart tools allowed organizers and participants to express their thoughts and reactions about the discussions that were happening during the event, record and register important analyses and conclusions and show -whoever wasn´t able to attend- a taste of what was going on. They used short videos, blogs with questions and comments that furthered discussions, not to mention the wiki space that was created to help plan and coordinate the event more effectively and facilitate the work of the organizers.

Once the presentation finished, I was curious to see if the perception people had in the morning had changed or had remained the same. For better or for worse, I wanted to know if the ComPart approach in the South had achieved its main goal: convincing ICCO staff that this approach can actually benefit and complement their work and engage them in communicating and collaborating across borders.

What did our audience say?...

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Click To Play

So, after these impressions, my next natural question was: did we manage to convince them to blog the blog and blip the blip? What is your take?

by Rosamelia Andrade, RIMISP

Workshop: Working with Wiki's in Development Organizations - 13 February 2009

More and more development organizations are turning to wikis and other social tools to better communicate, document and share knowledge, collaborate, and exchange information.

Wiki’s are one of the most-used examples and are widely used in the ICCO Alliance ComPart initiative, as well as other development organisations.

On 13 Febrary 2009, ICCO and Euforic organised a workshop on 'Working with Wiki's in Development Organizations'.

This knowledge sharing session capitalized on the presence of David Weekly (founder and CEO of PBwiki) and other partners to share lessons and experiences, exploring how wiki’s are contributing to more effective development exchange.

Who's David Weekly?

I've been programming since I was about five, went to Stanford after coding for MIT and Harvard Physics, and am the founder of PBwiki. Our company has 30 employees and serves over 700,000 groups around the world - The Netherlands is our 12th most popular country for originating traffic, with about 30,000 uniques/month. My first trip to the Netherlands was in 1999 for the ACM International Programming Competition in Eindhoven; my girlfriend was our "team coach" and we snuck out to go clubbing in Amsterdam between events. A great deal of what motivates our team is the positive impact that we make in the lives of those that use our product: getting emails from Peace Corps workers in Namibia or seeing pictures of labs full of children in Costa Rica using our service really fire us up. I personally am very interested in this topic – I gave a talk in Geneva at the Palace of the United Nations in 2001 on community development technologies and attended the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia on the same. I flew to Ghana in 2004 to teach kids how to use computers. So of course we're very excited to be able to support development organizations with collaboration technology. I'd be delighted to hear what people are doing or hoping to do with their wikis and what other collaboration tools they're using in their organizations. Thanks so much for this opportunity!

'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.



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By Stephanie Zwier

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:

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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

Plus ca change...or...how far have we come?

On the one hand I feel really positive about the two day workshop. The participants brought together an enormous amount of experience and creativity, from across the globe, and people worked very hard ("it was really intense" was one feedback I feel guiltily pleased about, as a facilitator.) As Maarten said, the output is forward looking and imaginative yet also practical and focused.

But, the issue of how to engage and encourage people in organisations to share learning and ideas with each other inside and across organisations South and North is as old as the development business. Olivier Sagne encouraged us to recognise that both horizontal and vertical sharing are important but we know it is the horizontal sharing which is the most difficult.



My own experience starts with the Arid Lands Information Network-Eastern Africa (ALIN-EA) which promotes exchange of ideas and experiences among Community Development Workers (CDWs) in the Arid and Semi-arid Lands (ASALs) of Eastern Africa. www.alin.or.ke.

"The origins of Arid Lands Information Network-Eastern Africa (ALIN-EA), formerly Reseau d'Information des Terres Arides - Arid Lands Information Network (RITA-ALIN), date back to 1987 when Oxfam GB held a partners conference in Cotonou, Benin. As a follow-up of workshop resolutions the Arid Lands Unit (ALU) was established within Oxfam GB in the United Kingdom. In 1991, RITA-ALIN programme moved from UK to Senegal as a unit of Oxfam, and was later launched in 1995 as an independent British charity. In 1999, RITA-ALIN closed the offices in Dakar, Senegal, leaving the eastern Africa wing of the network operating as ALIN Eastern Africa with concentration in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Ethiopia."

ALIN stands out because it has evolved its methods with technology. It still produces a paper quarterly, Baobab, but it also uses WorldSpace satellite services to reach remote locations with its information; has CD archives; increasingly uses Video and links with Community Radio. So on the one hand this is a story of a tenacious NGO maintaining its core business through intelligent evolution. On the other, much of the work that they are doing - workshops with grass-roots community development workers, training in communications (writing) with workers and community leaders - is exactly the same as some of the techniques and ideas we were discussing.

Does that matter? Isn't it simply that the old techniques still have their place? But there is still a strong demand for services of intermediaries like ALIN in the same areas they have always worked. So perhaps the most relevant question for ComPart is what will be the impact of the new technologies that we are introducing? The reaction from the participants at the workshop is positive - they see a need and believe the approach and tools will make an impact. Our challenge, I think, is to explore how to improve communications long-term with these approaches.

..as the kids always chant at the back of the car, "are we there yet"?


Pete Cranston, Lisbon, 19/6/08

ComPart South Workshop 16 and 17 June 2008, Lisbon (2)

It is amazing how much a group can do in two days. After all introductory and explanatory talks yesterday, today we mainly used to work in two groups. The question to the groups was Each Group imagined a programme and a region in which it would be executed, and find out what should have been done and how by the end of 2010 as to make the ComPart idea support the quality of the programme. After hard working both groups came with very realistic and good scenarios about what could happen. Of course we did not find solutions for everything, many points have to be worked out still, but we have an excellent basis to work on further. It was also very nice to hear that all expressed their willingness to keep on working and contributing on the support of ComPart in the South.

As an interesting detail we also learnt about a for most of us new way of presenting the results of group work, using “Freemind”. In the picture below such a presentation is shown.



As so often during this type of workshops we had some moments of confusion as you can hear from David Barnard (SangoNet – South Africa), but - also as so often - confusion can very well lead to clarity.

Click To Play

So after two days of hard working we all enjoyed a good meal while watching “The footbal games”, and together with the one Italian and the one Dutchman we could end the day satisfied an very content. Many thanks to the Euforic team for the very good preparation, logistics and facilitation!

Now we are looking forward to the following next days in which we will participate in the KM4dev meeting.

Maarten Boers

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

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