Twenty years on in October 2021, the Dgroups Foundation convened an online partnership dialogue to look back and forwards, exploring how online collaboration in the development sector might evolve and actions we can take to prepare for the changes. The starting points were four critical areas for effective online interaction that we identified in 2020: (a) enhanced online participation and inclusion; (b) effective online communities; (c) appropriate online collaboration platforms and tools; and (d) sustained online engagement over time.

The October 2021 virtual meeting took these four critical online engagement factors and mapped them to three common contexts where they tend to be applied.

Before participants formed groups to share insights, discuss trends and identify future actions, we opened with a reflective chat show with Dgroups users and an interview with Nancy White. Following the group session, several participants joined a fishbowl exercise to synthesize some key insights from the event.

In a warm-up, participants shared the issues that were upmost on their collaborative minds, including: too many tools, do we need to rationalize them? cross-institutional opportunities and challenges; people coming together and connecting – more open spaces for knowledge sharing; the potential for linking up with everyone’s work and overlaps of interest; how to strengthen virtual communities of practice; collaborating in a world where divides seem to be increasing; is email too old fashioned? ways to build, trust, co-create, learn, network, dialogue; strategic decision-making on the right platform and the right setting; safety and inclusion issues; how online communities interact with  ‘real’ worlds; the decolonisation of knowledge and creating more space for Southern voices in global policy; post-pandemic working online; bringing very diverse groups together; communities.

They also identified an initial list of disruptive or constructive changes they see arriving by 2030. These included: Wide digital literacy … but scattered and polarized; information and old collaborations disappearing or not findable; more national control on information sharing channels and more monetization of data; augmented reality; artificial intelligence (positive and negative impacts?); info terrorism; moving away from face to face meetings as a response to the climate crisis; multi-lingual mobile platforms, contextualised spaces; cyber-attacks; more efficient work and quite constructive, but we need to maintain hybrid ways of collaboration; younger generations becoming leaders in collaboration and online dialogue; new generations of digital users determining what tools and interaction will look like; hybrid collaboration; smaller devices with high capabilities to connect us.

Online collaboration trends

The core of the meeting was a group exercise where participants looked at emerging future trends they observe around online collaboration. Based on these, the groups identified potential priority actions that we can take to prepare for or even influence what’s coming. Each group looked at one of the vertical or horizontal dimensions of our matrix, sharing insights, predictions and recommendations. The image below gives a simplified picture of the trends identified across all the groups.

What can we look forward to? The first answer is ‘more’ – more demand for online interaction, networking, collaboration and virtual events.  This will most likely complement trends accelerated by the COVID19 pandemic that caused a migration to online platforms across the world.  Even as face to face opportunities return, we expect many events to retain an online or hybrid element. Luckily, this trend will be matched by continuing improvements in internet connectivity and the spread of smart phones and other communication devices. Within organizations, much more intense online interaction will be through internal platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Yammer, Slack and so on where staff will become more digitally literate as they join and run online activities. Beyond these organizational environments, we expect to see a continuing growth in tools and platforms for every situation with some taking off and others keeping their niche markets or disappearing.

Alongside this shift to online, participants expect boundaries between work and life to blur, with online engagement likely to be full on, all the time, anywhere. A major trend is the expectation that this extra online demand will overload people, competing for time, diluting attention, and putting a premium on really essential and effective opportunities where participation pays off. With online no longer a novelty and attention diminished, it will be increasingly difficult to attract and sustain participation in events and online communities. But, people or communities that can offer a better or richer engagement do expect to counter this trend.

While generally concluding that we – the knowledge and collaboration community – need to improve our game, participants anticipate a boom in opportunities – technical and professional – that will open up new horizons (virtual, voice-based), help us cross boundaries of language, culture and distance, and drive enhanced abilities to deliver effective online interactions. Also on the positive side, participants expect that barriers to participation and the ways we exclude certain people will be properly recognized and translated into guidelines and practices for more inclusive online interactions. Nonetheless, many of the groups identified continuing challenges in the future to fully include and value the voices and experiences of women and youth, and to overcome barriers of poor internet access and language. Changing power imbalances is seen as a key part of this. There is also a sense that the coming generations will communicate differently, as digital natives, and explicitly tapping insights and energy of youth is critical.

In summary – there will be many more – and better – opportunities to engage, interact and collaborate online. We know this needs to be more inclusive and we will find ways to make it happen. We will need to up our game to attract and keep the attention and active participation of people in a market overloaded by online events, workshops and platforms. We will also need to continually enhance our facilitation and ‘participation’ skills to overcome continuing inclusion challenges.

Actions for future online collaboration

Alongside the discussions on future trends, the groups identified priority actions that could be taken to enhance online events, collaboration and interaction. The image below gives a simplified picture of the action areas identified across all the groups.

A recurring action across all the groups is the need for online activities to be better adapted and adjusted to target audiences. This includes planning for people with low bandwidth, planning around platforms with firewalls or heavy bandwidth requirements, planning for time zones, including people who could not attend a meeting, mixing immediate and asynchronous interaction options, including the full range of devices that people may use, exploring how platforms like WhatsApp can be part of the mix, and reaching across different age groups.

Knowing and adjusting to audiences is closely linked to the other recurring action to maximise participation in online groups, communities or events. Groups talked about the importance of good process design, preparation and facilitation, more democratic participation at different levels of a community, involving more people in the running of an online activity, providing incentives to contribute, keeping discussions and interactions focused and relevant to the agreed goal, distil out what’s really important, ensure that past discussions are retained and can be drawn from, and winning trust. Targeted social media around online activities serves to extend reach and reinforce communication.

Overcoming exclusion is a key part of a strategy to maximise participation. Participants suggest that more diverse voices must be brought to the centre of plans and actions (and currently dominant ones have to make space for these), youth in particular need to be meaningfully involved, and good practice needs to be documented and applied. As hybrid working spreads, we need to ensure that ‘virtual’ workers are not left out of decisions made face to face.

The group that focused on inclusion suggested that inclusion means: Southern knowledge, different types of knowledge, de-centering academic knowledge as THE knowledge, local knowledge, creating spaces where different types of knowledge act as equals. Being inclusive means creating spaces for different and diverse types of knowledge and people to interact and collaborate, leading to better performance. Inclusion is required within online engagements, to overcome connectivity issues, as well as differences in devices, language, literacy and identity that hold people back from participation.

Alongside diverse voices, using diverse tools, platforms and approaches is recommended as part of efforts to enhance and open up diverse modes of participation. There’s a strong call to build on what already exists, to avoid duplication and to work through existing communities and collaborations as far as possible. Collaboration is something we need to practice as well as facilitating it for others.

Finally, while diversity and inclusion came up repeatedly as key principles, participants called for actions to make sure our online spaces are ‘safe’, to guard against ‘fake’ news, and for us to increase our understanding and literacy around polarization and how to overcome it

Reflecting on the group discussions, participants highlighted some key points, including: While the principles are the same, the tools are different; we need to make sure we get young people on board; it is important to tackle inclusion and break barriers; email is outdated; always question assumptions and ask the participation questions before engagement; we tend to spend more time catching up than preparing for the future; communities need to have purpose and be effectively managed; the post-activity is as important as the activity itself; there are important differences between Communities of Practice and Networks; people can adapt easily to new online context if someone takes time to involve them;  with so many online workshop tools available, organizations need to select and embrace the right ones; online can be non-inclusive due to language; hybrid processes – like hybrid crops – have more vigour and are more productive.

The final fishbowl exercise stimulated some further reflections, including: we face major issues overcoming language barriers; early in the pandemic felt perhaps warmer as people experimented and discovered, now, we just rush between events; purely virtual relationships also work super great; how do we overcome events beyond our control, such as an internet provider going offline during an online meeting? I am not too worried about misinformation but more about polarization; with so many virtual events can we differentiate between those that really matter, and single them out from a process perspective? I think we could also stress a bit more and enhance capacity on Information Literacy; we are balancing between becoming echo-chambers and fighting info-terrorism/ misleading information; how do we keep moving forward even when the spaces are not truly safe (which is a huge and challenging aspiration) – are there ways we can be a greater force for good; or guiding people to the better spaces? intergenerational dialogue and learning is critical to foster.

All in all, it was another hugely interesting discussion. We were able to build out from what we discussed in 2020, deepening some insights and ideas. The whole exclusion/inclusion agenda seems more and more central and it is not just about how we include people with low bandwidth, across languages or genders and generations, but how dialogue can conitune to be diverse without polarizing and leading to even more exclusion. I look forward to picking up some of the ideas in 2022.

Our great appreciation to all the participants and also the various chat show, fishbowl and group facilitators and discussants.

During the closing fishbowl moderated by Saskia Harmsen, Giacomo Rambaldi, Hannah Kabelka, Neil Pakenham-Walsh, and Tarini Ross reflected on the meeting, the issues that emerged, and the main takeaways.

See the recording of the video here below. And check the other posts from the online partnership dialogue.

In this conversation with Nancy White, we looked to the future and discussed the notion of critical uncertainties – and how to navigate them for better collaboration and more effective international development.

See the recording of the video here below. And check the other posts from the online partnership dialogue.

In the opening chat show moderated by Peter Ballantyne, we heard from Louise Clarke, Steve Agbenyo, Ivan Kulis, and Nawsheen Hosenally, presenting their stories on how they got started with online collaboration. Together we reflected on the changes, challenges, and successes we have experienced – where were we, where are we now, what are our predictions for the future.

See the recording of the video here below. And check the other posts from the online partnership dialogue.

See also Nancy White’s visual notes from the chat show:

In this video, Tarini Ross presents how Charter 4 Change (C4C) has been using email based discussion groups to facilitate and enable its work and the collaboration amongst its members.

In this video Jana Dietershagen takes us to a quick journey through the Pacific talking about a four-year project on promoting nutritious food systems in the Pacific islands. A significant part of the project was to create a multi-stakeholder community and platform and to facilitate online and offline discussions and that would provide networking opportunities and strengthen the trust among the participants.

In this video, Rocio Sanz from the KM4Dev community provides a brief history and background of KM4Dev. She then talks about the KM4Dev monthly Knowledge Cafés and how they have been instrumental in growing and strengthening the community.

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!

Starting points …

We started off with 4 guest speakers sharing short lessons on the 4 critical online collaboration factors identified by participants in an earlier KM4Dev Knowledge café:

• Riff Fullan (Helvetas) about online collaboration platforms and technologies: what should we consider? – view his slides
• Nadia von Holzen (Learning Moments) about online facilitation and leadership – view her slides
• Yasmin Klaudia Bin Humam (World Bank) on community online engagement and participation –view her slides
• Saskia Harmsen (Oxfam International) on trust and safety in online communities – view her slides

Although talking about platforms and technologies, Riff reminded us that collaboration is about people, so they must be our starting point. While there are many different platforms – email-based, web-based, single/multi-functional – choices need to suit all the users expected to be part of the community. Observing that “no platform is perfect, but most have their evangelists”, he recommended we assess them according to our needs, what can be added, what capacities are required, any security/ safety considerations and a platform’s future-friendliness [watch the video recording of his presentation].

Nadia continued the focus on people, calling for us to make 3 switches in our community facilitation: Bring people and interaction online, and not content; maximize engagement through involvement; and treat online facilitation as a creative challenge and not as a technological one. As she sets out in her blog post from the session, good online facilitation and leadership start with clarity of purpose. With it, we can get people to interact by: 1) bringing a process online, combining the various elements; 2) structuring it for interaction, participation, and engagement; 3) playing with rhythm and pace; and 4) using plenaries for framing and breakouts for conversation [watch the video recording of her presentation].

Yasmin shared engagement and participation approaches and lessons from the FinEquity community that advances women’s financial inclusion. She highlighted two engagement types: 1) regular sharing and conversations among members; and 2) time bound ‘dgroups’ dialogues on specific issues and topics. To sustain community engagement, her community posts regular ‘asks’ on specific topics, empowers members to take initiative and enhances the value of the community to its members. Inclusion of diverse perspectives is an important consideration for which she says they prime the community to be aware of this, prepare co-hosts to proactively engage everyone, identify and motivate key participants and actively facilitate to include everyone [watch the video recording of her presentation].

Drawing from experiences in the Charter for Change (C4C) initiative and network, Saskia explained how trust facilitates online interactions among NGOs on ways to change humanitarian aid so it enables more locally-led responses. She explained how using the C4C dgroups communities have helped generate and reinforce a sense of belonging and shared purpose. Members can build pressure through collective voice, save time and resources to participate, come together on equal ground, facilitate cross-learning and take up of advocacy at global level. She pointed to a few ‘power’ pitfalls to avoid: Recognize the different capacities and support that participants have to avoid the best-funded and best-prepared dominating the interactions; similarly, poor connectivity of some participants can reduce their ability to effectively contribute. Equally important is to avoid information overload and use of jargon or sophisticated language and concepts that create insecurities in some participants [watch the video recording of her presentation].

Conversations …

Energized by the short presentations, participants formed groups to identify and discuss critical factors shaping their experiences with online collaboration, dialogue and interaction. Some of the points shared:

1. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many of us to consider online collaboration approaches and events, opening new possibilities and demanding new skills and processes. In particular we are seeing short-form seminars, workshops and meetings translated to virtual webinars, zoominars and meetups.
2. Perhaps reflecting the current boom in online events, attention to group and event dynamics emerged as a critical factor, covering everything from prior preparation, facilitation styles and culture, group size, purpose, simplicity, connectivity, IT configuration, time zones, languages, participatory formats, tools for harvesting, effective check-in, encouraging reflective thinking and listening as well as talking …
3. Escaping silo’s and building connections and learning across communities and groups is important; linked to this is the idea that conversations continue over time and different events/platforms, building out and encouraging better (and more inclusive) collaboration.
4. Inclusion of diverse perspectives, across time and space, from grassroots to boardrooms, multilingual, multicultural, and across digital or other divides (gender, age, race etc) emerged as a particular concern. As technical opportunities to participate expand, we must ensure we don’t leave anyone behind; and processes and engagement/facilitation of online events and groups should not exclude community members.
5. Trust was again emphasized as a critical factor. It contains aspects of inclusion, creating equal opportunities and ownership, and listening. But, participants wondered: Can you build trust online, in a short time window? It is hard to get without some face-to face interactions to establish and reinforce relationships.
6. Conversations on community platforms covered many aspects, from appropriate documenting software, simple and lower bandwidth email platforms, time requirements to learn and use platforms, the set of functionalities, technical capabilities and attitudes of group members, the value of technology-driven ‘pain’, overcoming resistance to change, and the need to often learn and relearn different new tools as they keep changing.
7. Under facilitation and leadership, some key factors include: Clarity of purpose and directions – this is what brings people together; thinking through with people what you are trying to achieve and work with technologies to help you to it; leadership from the top that makes it flow to the middle and bottom levels; starting where people are; process literacy, linked to facilitation skills; co-creation; choosing the right platform (links to diversity: access to tools, use of language); invite diversity, being comfortable with disagreement within collaboration; and active facilitation – discussion and interaction doesn’t happen organically.
8. For effective engagement, time commitments of community members is important (think of the pre-engagement, the engagement, and the post-engagement follow up); find ways for people to interact; pursue coherent strategies; engage wider process owners in our organizations to co-create/co-develop policies and programs; set ground rules of engagement from the start; encourage and reward active participation; ease of engagement; meet demonstrated interests; show the VALUE members get from the community (not just what they can offer); people are the content – and conversation is in the centre. But: Not everyone is ready for continuous learning and it is more difficult to collaborate effectively online when people don’t know each other in person.

One group identified some elements that do not work: setting engagement targets and then closing the community if these are not reached, despite some members benefitting; incompatible/different IT skills and platforms; lack of face-to-face opportunities – you have to ‘smell people first before you trust them’; insufficient trust; or the idea that it is easier to disengage behind a camera than in a room.

Looking to the future …

A second exercise asked participants to look 5 years forward to the specific changes we want that will most enhance the ways we collaborate and interact online in the wider development sector.  Five years from now, some of the changes we hope to see are:

• Most development collaboration will take place online. Online meetings will be the norm, but we will need to overcome real issues of inclusion, affordability and connectivity. Technology will continue to advance and become cheaper, becoming more ubiquitous – but what about bandwidth?
• Development work will be collaborative, co-designed, co-created, and without silos. We will have adopted agile and collaborative approaches, and the mindset among development practitioners will change towards curiosity, openness to change, iterative and flexible approaches, and open to experiment, try out and fail forward together.
• Connected facilitators and communities, e.g., global health communities, will collectively link up and add value across sectors.
• Funding for communities of practice on a level equal to funding for in-person meetings. All parts of societies will be represented into the development space/dialogue/policy, and we will see a reverse power balance: local communities to lead/facilitate talks following the partnership vision.

Words of advice and next steps …

The session concluded with a piece of km4dev advice derived from the discussions: “Engagement builds inclusion and impact”, but at the same time we all agreed that we need to continue the conversation.

From 13-31 July 2020, the Dgroups Foundation will organize a follow-up e-conference to document and capitalize on experiences with online collaboration, dialogue and interaction in development:  Join the discussion!

Report compiled by Peter Ballantyne and Jorge Chavez-Tafur

It is an exciting, diverse program put together by groups of enthusiastic volunteers. Kudos to them all!

On 3 July (1300-1430 CEST), the Dgroups Foundation is pleased to contribute to this effort through a session about ‘Online collaboration, dialogue and interaction – what works in international development’.

During the session, we will take stock of developments and opportunities in online collaboration for development, applying an experience capitalization approach to identify ‘actionable knowledge’ that improves our practices.  It will also kick-off an online ‘Dgroups Dialogue’ in July where we will explore, assess and learn what works – and what doesn’t – when collaborating and acting together online.

For this workshop, we aim to catalyze discussion around 4 critical online collaboration factors identified by participants in an earlier KM4Dev Knowledge café: online platforms and technologies; online group facilitation and leadership; online engagement and participation; and building trust.

Following short introductions and icebreaker, we have invited four speakers to share short discussion-starting presentations from their experiences, covering each of the 4 critical factors. Thereafter, we form breakout groups to share and document ‘what works’ for them in online collaboration, dialogue and interaction. After a short plenary pause, we will break out again to brainstorm, the ‘changes we want for the future’ in this area.

We won’t forget to virtually toast the KM4Dev community!

Register here for the Dgroups session

A complementary 2 July workshop convened by the World Bank will discuss ‘Lessons Learned from the World Bank Group: Nurturing Communities of Practice’