The objectives of the dialogue were to:

• Fill gaps in knowledge on current capacity building products on D4Ag
• Identify capacity building needs, gaps and priorities for different stakeholders
• Shape the possible contribution of the Digital Agri Hub for new capacity building products and partnerships with existing actors
• Networking and community building as by-product

The dialogue was conducted on the D4Ag discussion group. This space, hosted by the Digital Agri Hub, brings together a very diverse set of stakeholders, such as digital entrepreneurs; agricultural entrepreneurs; individuals and institutions investing in digital agriculture; international development organisations integrating digital solutions into their activities; farmers and agribusinesses deploying digital solutions; and research, policy and decision making bodies who need to understand and keep pace with the development of the sector.

The Dgroups Foundation and associates brought their knowledge and experience of designing and facilitating online events and dialogues.

The dialogue was organised with a mix of ‘live’ online events (a kickoff and closing webinar) and a facilitated and moderated email-based discussion.

The webinars were attended by 126 and 59 participants respectively, the overall feedback was very positive, and appreciative of the participatory design of the events. For the kickoff webinar, 98% of respondents to the session evaluation found the facilitation of the event effective or very effective. 80% found the topics addressed and the exercises conducted during the event relevant to understanding the purpose of the online dialogue.  

The email-based discussion ran for three weeks, with a discussion question posted each week. An important feature to keep the discussion active was the weekly discussion summary, shared at the end of each week. It provided a summary of the emerging discussion topics and issues, in order to document the discussion as it unfolded. The summaries were posted back into the discussion group, and also published on the group wiki pages. As these pages are public they could be shared outside the community members.

An initial database of available D4Ag training products was also produced. The database uses the database feature available on the D4ag community space. It is accessible to community members after logging onto the platform and it has around 100 entries. Entries included were sourced from a survey that the Hub had administered earlier in 2021.

Overall, between the webinars and the e-discussion, the dialogue involved 194 unique participants from 58 different countries and territories. Specifically, the e-discussion recorded 74 contributions over 13 separate discussion threads.

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.

At its simplest, Liberating Structures could be presented as a set of 33 participation formats and facilitation methods. But really it’s a lot more than that. It’s a language unto itself – a language of collaboration.

Ewen briefly presented some well used and known Liberating Structures such as 15% Solutions, Troika Consulting, 1-2-4-all, 20/15 Crowdsourcing, TRIZ.

LS are modular so you can nest one inside the other, combine them together, scale them, in a set of infinite possibilities.

Ewen also reflected on what advantages Liberating Structures bring to our practice, regardless of the type of meeting and events. LS bring a conscious and explicit effort to involve everyone from the outset, making space for each individual reflection and contribution.

Ewen concluded by sharing the 10 principles of Liberating Structures and invited everyone to explore LS and ‘borrow’ from it for ideas and examples in our online or offline work.

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!

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’

He ended by posing some questions for participants to help identify the critical issues around online collaboration that could help guide and focus follow up activities and a planned online e-conference about online collaboration, dialogue and interaction.

See the presentation on Slideshare and a video summary from the event.

Participants were asked to work in groups to respond to these two questions:

1. Which factors are the most critical to successful online collaboration, conferencing, dialogue and CoPs? [eg: technology, participation, facilitation, connectivity, capacities?]
2. Which issues or topics do we need to know more about? To improve how we operate

Responses shared were clustered into four groups, see below, which we hope can guide deeper discussion later in the year.

Which factors are the most critical to successful online collaboration, conferencing, dialogue and CoPs? [eg: technology, participation, facilitation, connectivity, capacities?]

Which issues or topics do we need to know more about? To improve how we operate.

Responses shared were clustered into four groups, see below, which we hope can guide deeper discussion later in the year.

Critical success factors for successful online collaboration, conferencing, dialogue and communities of practice

Technology, platforms …

• Usability
• Accessibility
• Connectivity
• Which platform for which purpose? For which community?
• Capabilities

Facilitation …

• Processes, events
• Purpose, Design, Leadership, Management (of Participation, Inclusion, Interaction)
• Skills and capabilities

Trust building …

• Values
• Ownership
• Relationships
• Safe spaces
• Freedom to speak
• Responsibility
• ‘Communityship’

Engagement and interaction …

• Participant-centred and customized design and processes
• Human connections
• Involving the right people
• Group dynamics; encourage formal interactions, discovery of shared interests, networking
• Full participation
• Conversational leadership,
• Meeting dynamics and motivation
• Engagement over time

We express our appreciation to KM4Dev and the participants in the café who eagerly participated and shared their ideas and insights.

Report compiled by Peter Ballantyne

Download the case study (pdf)

Watch the video presentation below:

(see also the slides used in the webinar)

Healthcare Information For All (HIFA) is a global community of purpose – a virtual community of practice where everyone is working together towards a common goal. Dgroups uniquely has the functionality and the enabling environment to make this possible.

The issue the HIFA campaigns are trying to solve is that people are dying for lack of knowledge: children are dying because they are not given simple life-saving interventions like antibiotics for pneumonia or sugar and salt solution for acute diarrhoea. Most of these deaths are in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia and there are also countless premature deaths in adults which relates again to failure to provide life-saving treatments. Tragically these treatments are often locally available, but they are simply not provided due to lack of access to basic healthcare knowledge and information. HIFA is aiming towards a future where every person will have access to the healthcare information they need to protect their own health and the health of others.

When HIFA was launched in 2006, it received a letter of support from the World Health Organization saying that “Healthcare Information For All is an ambitious goal but it can be achieved if all stakeholders work together.” According to HIFA Coordinator Neil Pakenham-Walsh, Dgroups is the best approach that he knows of to bring stakeholders together around a complex development or health challenge.

How does HIFA use Dgroups?

HIFA has been using Dgroups successfully for more than 10 years now. It uses an approach to moderation called Reader-Focused Moderation. This technique focuses on meeting the needs of readers of messages, so every message that goes out on HIFA should be relevant and understandable; if there are any queries, the moderator deals with the author before the message is posted. Every message also includes the author’s profile underneath it, so readers always know where the author is coming from.

In terms of approach, HIFA members firstly worked to agree and define the goals of the community. This is paramount in a community of purpose: there needs to be a consensus about the purpose of the community. In a second phase, HIFA members explored the many aspects of how to improve availability and use of healthcare information and indeed many other related aspects of improving quality of care, achieving the Sustainable Development Goal 3, and achieving universal health coverage. To do this, efforts were put into building a critical mass so that HIFA could advocate for better financial and political support for health information provision and use.

HIFA has just topped more than 18,000 members, getting about six or seven new members joining every day. The community has been expanding rapidly and without any slow up in the growth at the moment. Besides the main HIFA group, there are currently four other HIFA-related groups: CHIFA, also in English and focusing on child health and rights; HIFA-Portuguese and HIFA-French as language-specific groups; and HIFA-Zambia as country level group. HIFA-Spanish is also about to be launched.

More than 300 health and development organizations have officially declared their support for the HIFA vision and about 40 different organizations are funding the initiative. This allows HIFA to run 12 projects including, for example looking at the information needs of community health workers, the information needs of citizens, the information needs of policymakers, and then health specific projects such as family planning with support from K4Health of the Johns Hopkins University. HIFA main strategic partner is the World Health Organization (WHO) and there are four staff of WHO on HIFA steering group. The main funding partner is the British Medical Association.

Why would HIFA recommend Dgroups to others?

Firstly, it simply works. The CommunityCloud, which is the software that Dgroups runs on, works better than any other tool for communities of practice.

Secondly, Dgroups is a partnership of United Nations agencies, bilateral agencies, and NGOs – all committed to International Development, human rights, and social justice. Dgroups’ three hundred thousand users are primarily driven by wanting to create a better world, in antithesis of the commercial models of the social media giants.

More importantly, with a budget of just £50k per annum, HIFA is demonstrating a significant impact. This had been confirmed by the findings of a major external evaluation carried out in 2011 which concluded that HIFA achieves an extraordinary level of activity on minimal resources from which many people around the world benefit.

None of this would have been possible without Dgroups.

Download the case study (pdf)

Download the case study (pdf)

Watch the video presentation below:

(see also the slides used in the webinar)

The Farmer Field School (FFS) approach is an adult informal education approach that uses learning by doing to empower farmers to understand their ecosystems. Extension workers, farmer organization staff, and private company staff are trained as facilitators and help a group of farmers to experiment on different practices throughout the cropping season. This has different impact in terms of yield increase, sustainability of practices, growth margin, to name just a few.

The FFS approach was first developed by the FAO in 1989 in Indonesia with the rice growing farmers to deal with some specific problems faced by these farmers. Since then, the approach has expanded massively to over a hundred countries as of 2018 and it went from just looking at integrated pest management of rice crop to a variety of other crops and production systems, and the different problems that farmers encountered in these areas. Moreover, this approach has been taken up by several other organizations such as IFAD, national and international NGOs and governmental agencies. As a result, there are now between 4 and 10 million farmers who have been trained, in addition to all extension workers, farmer organization staff, and private company staff trained as facilitators.

This scale and success of the FFS brought also some new challenges. How to maintain the quality of facilitation in this fast-growing number of field schools? How to create synergies and avoid duplication of efforts? And ultimately, how to support the growing FFS global community? To answer this question, in 2017 FAO decided to set up a Global Farmer Field School Platform with the objectives to: (1) Facilitate the exchange of knowledge, expertise, and information among all the different practitioner in the FFS community of practice; (2) help document and improve the visibility of FFS achievements globally; and (3) promote the quality of the field school through the harmonization and collaboration among the different FFS community members.

How does FAO FFS use Dgroups?

FFS maintains a website, hosted and managed by FAO with the support of growing number of institutional partners. The website brings together relevant documentation on the FFS approach, news and events, as well as a Roster of FFS Experts.

However, in addition to the website, the FFS team also wanted a way to connect and allow the different FFS practitioners across the globe to talk together and exchange together in a dynamic way. Most important, this dialogue space needed to be inclusive and allow access and participation to different people, including the ones in remote areas, often without good internet access and with limited IT skills.

For this reason, the FFS team decided to use Dgroups to connect all the members in a global, growing, community of practice. Members of the community on Dgroups are mostly from Africa and Asia. The community already has about 1,000 members from 107 countries, mostly in Africa and Asia.

So far, members have engaged in more than 117 discussions, contributing in different ways and around a variety of topics. Some discussions have been led by the Dgroups facilitators, for example asking members questions on issues such as climate change and how they have been dealing with its effect in FFS. Other discussions have been started directly by community members. Members of the community have reported using the content of the discussions to help write documentations and publications.

Why would FAO FSS recommend Dgroups to others?

The FFS experience provides some clear, useful insights on the advantages of Dgroups to connect a global community of agricultural practitioners:

[bulletlist]

• Dgroups is free of charge for end-users
• Dgroups is easy to use – it doesn’t require elaborated IT literacy to use, which makes it inclusive
• Dgroups is email based – it doesn’t require strong bandwidth and users don’t need to remember their login and password to participate, as once signed up all messages go directly into their email inbox
• Dgroups is easy to moderate – this makes it light for administrators, who can then focus on content and community facilitation.

[/bulletlist]

“The Dgroups is the most dynamic part of the FFS platform and it keeps growing in members and contributions, resulting in a very positive experience for both community administrators and members.” Suzanne Phillips, Farmer Field School Team – FAO Plant Production and Protection Division.

Download the case study (pdf)

So what is Dgroups?

During a recent webinar organized in partnership between FAO-Dgroups, Saskia Harmsen from the Dgroups Board gave a short introduction to Dgroups, what it is, the organizations behind it, and why it is the platform of choice for online communities of practice and communication for development.

(see also the slides used in the webinar)

Dgroups as a Partnership

Dgroups is a partnership of development organizations (UN agencies, bilateral agencies, NGOs) who collectively support global communication for development. Our shared vision is a world where every person is able to contribute to dialogue and decision-making for international development and social justice. At the moment, Dgroups has 15 Full Partners, 9 Associate Partners, and 3 Project Partners.

The Dgroups partnership is formally constituted as the Dgroups Foundation, a non-profit foundation registered in 2009 in the Netherlands. The Dgroups Foundation is owned and administered collectively by the Full Partners.

Currently, there are three different Dgroups membership options, each with different levels of financial contribution and different rights. This means that the spaces for dialogue and decision-making are opened up and information is shared much more broadly than in the silos – perhaps technical silos or organizational silos that exist within our sector. This is something that we all believe in and that we can make happen – by being part of the partnership.

Dgroups as a platform

Dgroups is also a web-based platform that hosts, powers and connects the groups. The Dgroups platform is hosted and maintained by WA-Research, a small company in Switzerland that has for 20 years been building and refining its communication software, CommunityCloud, driven largely by the needs and priorities of Dgroups.

Dgroups Partners and WA-Research collaborate to ensure the platform meets a diverse range of needs for online groups, communities of practice and communities of interest. Instead of each developing their own in-house systems to create and manage online communities, the Dgroups Partners have joined forces and resources to develop a common tool and system that can also support cross-organizational communities of practice and foster collaboration across different organizations.

Some key figures are useful to give a sense of the scale of the Dgroups platform:
[bulletlist]

• At the moment there are more than 700 communities created on Dgroups – they take different shapes and different forms, from public to private, closed or open to the public, moderated or unmoderated. Communities have also many different sizes, some having many thousands of members while others are very small technical groups with just a few people. It all depends on the specific needs of each group.
• Overall there are almost 300,000 registered users on the Dgroups platform – ranging from members of international organizations or government agencies to local and national NGOs, interested individuals and professional groups. So there is a very diverse user base in all of the different communities.
• The platform enables the delivery of more than 400,000 email messages daily – this is the power of the Dgroups platform as many of you will have experienced. The Dgroups platform works better than any other communication tool for meaningful, global, multi-stakeholder communication.

[/bulletlist]
So what are some of the key features that make Dgroups powerful?
[bulletlist]

• Dgroups is very simple to use for administrators and for end-users – Users do not have to log in to a web-based platform to participate. Instead, they receive and send directly as part of their everyday email experience. No technical knowledge is needed for users to engage in dialogue – everyone knows how to send and reply to an email!
• Dgroups is multilingual – the user interface is available in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and Russian. Users can just use the tool in the language in which they are more confident with.
• Dgroups is flexible and scalable – each Dgroup workspace allows for customizable individual profile members and they can be grouped by tree or customizable email delivery preferences from immediate delivery to daily delivery to weekly summaries. There are also RSS feeds and an open API that allow you to integrate a Dgroup into your own web page.
• Dgroups is non-commercial and respectful of privacy – this is very important for many users and administrators. Unlike other services such as Google Groups or Facebook Groups, on Dgroups there is no advertising and data is not being shared with third parties that are then using it for their own purposes. This is one of the very big reasons why people and organizations opt for the use of Dgroups.

[/bulletlist]
Dgroups targets low bandwidth users – it is really email focused and its technical developments are carried out to make sure that email remains at its core and that the web interface remains as light as possible.

Dgroups as a global public good

Last but not least, Dgroups can be described as a global public good – with the Dgroups Partnership making the platform available to actors across the development sector and thereby hosting a large family of discussion groups related to international development. This is a real strength and an opportunity of Dgroups.

Making the case for Dgroups

So if your organization is looking for a solution for online communities, why should you consider joining and using Dgroups?
[bulletlist]

• Because Dgroups is about appropriate technology – the focus is not about building fancy technology but about what works and what is sustainable over time, not just in terms of financial sustainability but also and especially in terms of access and use.
• Because Dgroups is an effective and flexible tool – group administrators can focus on the content and do not need to spend time with technical setup, or supporting users in answering technical questions. This way, group administrators can really focus on communication, collaboration, information sharing, etc. – basically, to get their work done.
• Because of its shared ownership model – the different Dgroups partners invest just a fraction of the resources that they would need to develop and maintain a similar system in-house.
• Because Dgroups can contribute to reducing the duplication and fragmentation of online communities, which are a barrier to effective development and social justice

[/bulletlist]
We encourage organizations that share our vision and are looking for a solution for online communities to join us!

The full session is now available for playback on our YouTube channel and below here.

The total recording is just over one long. You are welcome to watch it all, or jump straight to the part that you may be more interested in:

[bulletlist]

• An introduction about Dgroups, by Saskia Harmsen
• The Global Farmer Field School Platform Dgroups, by Suzanne Phillips
• Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) for Agriculture Dgroups, by Giacomo Rambaldi
• HIFA Dgroups, by Neil Pakenham-Walsh

[/bulletlist]

Over the coming weeks, we’ll publish a series of individual posts with each case study and presentation shared during the webinar.

Stay tuned to learn more!