In 2002, Dgroups was set up by a group of development organizations to more easily share knowledge, connect individuals and organizations and foster collaboration. It did this through easy to set up and use, low bandwidth email-based and online communities and spaces. By joining us up, Droups aimed to support individual efforts to collaborate online and to create wider, better-connected and more inclusive development communities that ultimately would make our collective efforts more effective.
Today, while the worlds of development and social change have massively adopted digital, virtual and online tools, applications and platforms, we still look for the best ways to engage, collaborate and act together, virtually. While we are often surrounded by digital ways to share, collaborate and talk still we struggle to facilitate and engage in genuinely enriching interactions that produce better insights, deeper collaborations and common causes.
The current COVID-19 pandemic has moved us all online, making the answers to these challenges even more relevant.
From 13 – 31 July join us online to explore, assess and learn what works – and what doesn’t – when collaborating and acting together online. Drawing on the experiences and lessons across sectors, platforms and regions, we will use an ‘experience capitalization’ approach that draws out our individual and collective insights to produce actionable knowledge that will help us improve our own practices.
We will build on recent discussions on some critical online collaboration success factors. We aim to facilitate and document an open dialogue on, at least, the following topics:
- online platforms and technologies – which ones, and how to make them work for us
- online group and community facilitation – what’s needed, what works, and how we can do it better
- online engagement and participation – how can we motivate people to contribute and interact
- building trust in online groups – how we can provide safe spaces and build confidence and trust
- inclusive online spaces – what we can do to foster equity, reflect diversity and overcome exclusion in our groups
- effective online events – what works, and how we can deliver better virtual meetings
- and more …
Please join us to co-create lessons and practices that will help us improve the ways we interact online. Conversations will be focused, facilitated and documented; you can choose to engage via low-bandwidth email or through the dgroups.io web interface.
Sign up for the group at: https://dgroups.io/g/dg-dialogue-online
The group wiki has more information on the agenda and process as well as tips to help you get the best from this platform and the discussion.
We welcome your contributions – to share a topic, case, or challenge for participants to discuss, to help facilitate, synthesize, translate or otherwise help deliver the event, or to suggest any brilliant ways to extend or improve this conversation. Send your ideas to dg-dialogue-online@dgroups.io
About the Dgroups Foundation
We provide simple, effective and affordable solutions, knowledge and expertise that supports online collaboration among organizations, projects, networks and campaigns in international development. Our four product lines are:
- Access: we help make development communities, their knowledge and expertise accessible.
- Brokerage: we provide advice, guidance and negotiated preferential access to third-party online solutions/platforms.
- Capacities: we help deliver experience-based peer-to-peer learning, mentoring, coaching, training and support for effective online collaboration and advocacy.
- Dialogue: we host online discussions and events on international development topics and issues.
By working together, better, we believe more inclusive collaboration and dialogue leads to better development results!