A journey from Kigali to global influence

The Digital Agri Hub online community, commonly referred to as D4Ag, was established in 2013 with the launch of the first ICT for Agriculture (ICT4Ag) conference in Kigali, Rwanda. Initially, the community was known as ICT4Ag and primarily comprised members from ACP countries – Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. Over time, it evolved into D4Ag, reflecting a broader focus and a more diverse membership base.

When the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) transitioned stewardship of the community to Wageningen University & Research, D4Ag underwent significant changes. It has expanded to include members from Asia and other continents. Under Wageningen’s guidance, the community has become a dynamic space for listening, connecting expertise, identifying priorities, bridging knowledge gaps, and fostering innovation in agriculture.

D4Ag’s focus extends beyond traditional farming to include agroforestry, fisheries, and livestock production, encompassing the full spectrum of land-based production systems. This broad approach supports diverse agricultural stakeholders in navigating and leveraging digital technologies for sustainable development.

A diverse membership base

D4Ag is a thriving global community of 1,900 people from a wide range of stakeholder groups, including development agencies, researchers, academics, practitioners, entrepreneurs, and consultants. In addition to the English-speaking D4Ag community, the Digital Agri Hub maintains both smaller French– and Spanish-speaking D4Ag dgroups.

However, a critical gap remains: representation from farmers’ organizations. While the exchanges and discussions in D4Ag often focus on farmer-centric issues, direct input from farmers is limited. This reflects a broader challenge faced by many digital communities, where barriers such as digital literacy, accessibility, and confidence in expressing opinions limit participation.

Patterns of engagement: Active participants, lurkers, and inactive members

Engagement within the D4Ag community mirrors trends observed in many online groups. Approximately 8%-10% of members actively contribute, sharing ideas, insights, and driving discussions.

The majority, often referred to as lurkers, are silent readers who do not actively engage but gain knowledge from the group. Far from being passive, the presence of these informed lurkers highlights the community’s role as a resource for learning and inspiration, even for those who choose to remain in the background.

A smaller subset of members, however, remains inactive, neither reading nor engaging with the group’s communications. Recognizing and addressing these diverse levels of engagement is essential to build a more inclusive and involved community.

eConversations: Building dialogue and partnerships

Since 2022, D4Ag moderators have revitalized their approach to community activities, starting with an e-dialogue to identify training needs and opportunities, conducted in partnership with the Dgroups Foundation. This was followed by a series of eConversations, where topics of interest were identified through small surveys and polls, and partnerships were formed with development agencies and institutions that share similar interests.

Each eConversation typically spans a week, running from Monday to Friday, with secondary questions sometimes introduced the following week to deepen discussions. This flexible format ensures meaningful engagement while accommodating the varying schedules of participants.

Turning dialogue into knowledge: Summarizing and sharing insights

After each eConversation, moderators compile and share detailed summaries, including:

• Responses to individual questions.
• An overall summary with 3-5 sub-summaries.
• A compilation of resources cited during the discussion.

These summaries are published as wikis within the community group, with downloadable PDF versions made available on the Digital AgriHub website. Content is shared under a Creative Commons license, allowing others to reuse and build upon it, provided the source is acknowledged.

Community surveys show that a significant number of members actively read and share these summaries, underscoring their value in supporting participants and a wider audience interested in digital agriculture.

D4Ag’s top tips for community development and engagement

1. Leverage platform features to understand your members

Make full use of the features offered by platforms like Groups.io. Set up fields to capture relevant member data during the sign-up process. Recently, D4Ag began collecting metadata such as gender and geographic location, enabling a deeper understanding of its newer members compared to when the community first launched.

2. Proactively recruit new members and organizations

Continuously expand your network by reaching out to new members and organizations. For example, D4Ag recently connected with the Pan-African Farmers Organization (PAFO) and other regional farmers’ organizations to promote the community within their constituencies.

3. Collaborate with like-minded organizations

Build partnerships with organizations that share an interest in your topics. D4Ag has found success in partnering with various groups to co-facilitate eConversations, enhancing both the depth and reach of discussions.

4. Seek subject-matter experts

Actively invite specialists to contribute to your community. Platforms like LinkedIn can be leveraged to identify experts in specific areas and encourage them to join the conversation.

5. Prepare thoroughly for discussions

Don’t underestimate the groundwork required before launching an eConversation. At D4Ag, preparing for a conversation can take at least a month and includes:

• Drafting a conversation framework to outline the topic.
• Identifying and formulating key questions.
• Assigning roles, such as question launchers and summary writers.
• Scheduling emails and preparing templates.

This preparation ensures the conversation is structured and engaging.

6. Address member concerns to foster participation

Understand and address barriers to participation. Some members may hesitate to post due to language concerns or a perceived lack of expertise. D4Ag’s perception survey revealed that such fears are common, not individual weaknesses. Sharing these insights encouraged more members to contribute, creating a more inclusive and supportive environment.

7. Build a core group of champions

A thriving community needs a core group of committed individuals who maintain momentum and drive discussions. These individuals should believe in the community’s mission and focus on delivering value to its members.

8. Learn and grow with others

Collaborate with experienced partners to develop your skills. D4Ag’s partnership with the Dgroups Foundation helped the team improve their ability to plan and facilitate online discussions, providing a replicable structure for future conversations.

9. Cultivate a strong online presence

For young professionals, a strong online presence is essential for career development. As Giacomo advises, it’s not just about being visible but about the quality and content of your presence. Engaging as an administrator, facilitator, or active member of a community platform can enhance your professional reputation, build meaningful connections, and showcase your expertise.

IFAD Innovation Network

Gladys Morales presented the IFAD innovation network as an example of using online groups to discuss an issue in a community of interest. The IFAD Innovation Network is an informal group of innovation practitioners, authors, and global influencers that aims to reach 2,000 members by the end of the year. The network serves as a hub for innovation-related activities and initiatives within IFAD, as well as a mechanism for engaging with external partners. It provides a space for collaboration, dialogue, and learning, with the aim of driving innovation in IFAD’s operations and beyond. It is open to the public, and members include innovation practitioners, authors, and renowned global influencers in innovation, as well as individuals from academia, research institutions, private sector companies, and civil society organizations.

In terms of platform functionalities and features that are used to enhance collaboration, engagement, and knowledge sharing among members of the network, Gladys focused on the use of hashtags. Hashtags are used consistently to categorize posts related to specific innovation themes or projects. This makes it easier for members who are interested in that topic to find and engage with the post, to track the overall conversation and engagement around a particular theme or project.

CGIAR GENDER

Vivan Atakos introduced the CGIAR GENDER Impact Platform as an example of using online groups across initiatives or projects. She shared how they use the group platform to support networking and sharing across different initiatives related to gender in agriculture. The group brings together gender researchers from 14 research centers across the world, and the platform is used to actively enable internal knowledge sharing, learning, and collaboration. The group has 225 members, including gender researchers, donors, and practitioners interested in gender issues. The platform provides a safe space for informal exchanges, sharing of events, publications, job opportunities, and consultancies related to gender in agriculture. Vivian encourages membership by providing targeted emails to new staff members, inviting them to join the platform, and providing a link to sign up.

A group feature that is particularly relevant and used is the calendar – a convenient and effective way to track key events and ensure everyone is informed. It is a simple solution that makes a big difference in keeping members updated with the latest happenings related to gender in agriculture.

KM4Dev (internal) groups

The KM4Dev group is well-known as an example of a successful online Community of Practice. But behind the main, public, group, the KM4Dev volunteers and core group also use several other online groups. These are normally small groups, set up and used to facilitate specific processes related to the management of the community and community activities – for example: to organize the rotation of monthly volunteer moderators; to discuss research and research issues; to coordinate between KM4Dev Journal editors; to plan and follow up on Core Group meetings and discussions.

Sarah Cummings illustrated how these different subgroups work and how they are managed, and some of the platform functionalities that they use. In the volunteers’ group, using polls makes the process of identifying monthly list moderators very efficient – the poll functionality is part of the platform, and polls can quickly be set up and launched.

C4C Advocacy group

John Ede from Charter for Change (C4C) illustrated how C4C is using online groups to support their advocacy initiatives. Charter for Change is an initiative led by national and international NGOs aiming to implement changes in the humanitarian system to enable more locally-led humanitarian responses. The C4C Advocacy Group is a smaller group within the network that advocates approaches to address imbalances and inequalities in the global humanitarian system and make equitable partnerships with local and national actors core to funding streams. The group has approximately 150 members from local, national, and international NGOs, as well as allied networks and organizations working on the localization of aid agenda. Members exchange information and collaborate to advance advocacy as individual agencies and collectively as the Charter for Change network, driving progress on the localization of aid agenda.

The group uses the email list functionality of the online platform to organize calls and discuss joint statements or pledges, which are then fed back into the group for comments or additions. The group also jointly develops advocacy statements as INGOs and national NGOs to influence key humanitarian decision-makers or strategies and organizes localization-focused side events.

D4Ag online dialogue

Giacomo Rambaldi shared experiences with an online, facilitated dialogue that the Digital Agri Hub convened with support from the Dgroups Foundation.

The online dialogue aimed to identify priorities and gaps in capacity-building opportunities for digitalization in agriculture. The dialogue, designed and facilitated by the Dgroups Foundation, was conducted for a three-week period across various platforms such as Zoom and the email list. Other group features were used to support the process, such as: the calendar, to publish the dialogue timeline and milestones; the wiki, to explain the dialogue process, provide technical guidance to participants, and publish weekly discussion summaries; the hashtags, to organize messages and topics.

He also focused on some of the challenges of engaging people to contribute to such exercises. From a survey he conducted some time ago, the results indicated that members in online groups may be hesitant to contribute due to their language constraints, which make them afraid to write and contribute publicly to a dialogue. He suggested that a similar survey could be replicated, with a standard questionnaire administered across different Dgroups Partners groups to identify other potential challenges to engaging contributors.

The chat and discussion throughout the talk show highlighted how the groups.io platform is rich in functionality, facilitating member engagement and providing a voice to many. Participants also noted the importance of ‘democratizing’ online dialogue and exchange through user collaboration and engagement. Some participants also suggested organizing training for the community at least once a year to remind members of the platform’s functionalities and to foster adoption. Finally, participants suggested and encouraged to continue this type of experience-sharing events to all benefit from individual experiences across the Dgroups partnership.

This is the third of a series of short posts from the discussion. The other two posts cover:

• Online interaction around events and meetings – the peer assist
• Online collaboration experience exchange – the 24 February session

Talk to us if you look for advice, coaching, and support in your work with online groups and communities

Jessica Ball brought the questions. She works as part of the KM Team in the UN-REDD programme. Last year, Jessica started an online community, coinciding with a two-day event in Rome, where representatives from all regions came together – but not all members of the virtual community could join. Jessica admitted that they were a bit late in starting the group and didn’t have much time to engage people before the event. They tried to connect with online group members through summaries after day one and through a final summary of day two. Despite these efforts, she asked how they could more effectively engage the community around different online and in-person events.

What could be done differently, to support upcoming and future events?

Pier Andrea Pirani was the peer assistant. He offered an example from a project he was involved with as part of a larger team supporting a three-day, face-to-face, experience capitalization workshop. The workshop was preceded by a two-week online engagement beforehand, covering a lot of ground and mapping people, expertise, potential connections, and what was needed. By doing so, both participants and the facilitation team went into the workshop with a head start, and by the end of the workshop, it was possible to produce a significant list of products, some in draft, and some still in a conceptual phase.

5 key elements to support events

Engaging a group around events requires careful planning, clear aims, and engagement before, during, and after the event.

1. Set a clear purpose: Define what you want to achieve through the online interaction, and make sure it adds to the event and brings value.
   

2. Plan carefully: Keep in mind the needs and expectations of the group. Consider the format, duration, and resources needed – and be realistic with the time and resources available.
   

3. Engage before the event: Engage with the participants ahead of the event to build connections, gather insights, and prepare for the event. Use this time to map people, expertise, and what is needed. This can help finalize an event agenda and preparations. It can be useful for both logistics as well as on the substance of a meeting.
   

4. Engage during the event: Use the group as a space to reach out to people that cannot attend the event, and to share knowledge, documents, and additional information generated or discussed at the event. It’s important to have the right expectations and motivators so useful engagement can take place. Often, some form of curation and facilitation is necessary.
   

5. Engage after the event: Follow up with the community after the event to share outcomes, gather feedback, and plan for future events. Keep the connections warm and use the face-to-face meeting as a springboard to foster online participation post-event.

Particularly where several events are planned, such online support helps to link people, support continuing discussion threads and conversations, and guide attention to agreed follow-ups, plans, or previous documentation.

Events can be a powerful tool to engage and support online groups – and online platforms can really help in supporting and complementing events. By setting clear goals, planning carefully, and engaging before, during, and after the event, communities can be brought together to share knowledge, collaborate, and work towards a common goal.

This is the second of a series of short posts from the discussion. The other two posts cover:

• Online collaboration use cases in depth – the talk show
• Online collaboration experience exchange – the 24 February session

Talk to us if you look for advice on online support and interaction around events

The experience-sharing session on 24 February 2023 drew from our diverse partner network and their sector involvement to discuss and share practical strategies of different online communities. To do this, we used a typology of uses – or use cases – that we observe our partners to work with. We thought these would provide a useful framework to interact and learn while recognizing that most such communities have several objectives.

After an icebreaker session, Peter Ballantyne very briefly introduced the Dgroups Foundation and its journey since 2002. He summarized the typology comprising seven typical uses cases that we observe among partners:

1. around events – helping to prepare, plan, report, and follow up face-to-face, virtual or hybrid meet-ups;
   
2. across initiatives or projects – supporting collaboration and information exchange among participants in a defined project;
   
3. on an issue – sharing ideas and connecting people with shared interests in a topic;
   
4. for a knowledge product – reinforcing co-development of proposals, articles, or other joint outputs among a group of individuals;
   
5. for learning and capacity development – sharing information and lessons to complement training, mentoring, or other educational efforts;
   
6. for purposeful engagement and dialogue – holding guided conversation and interaction to improve practice on an issue or challenge;
   
7. for advocacy towards a goal – helping people share and align ideas and actions around a shared vision.

While recognizing that online groups typically support multiple purposes, we thought it would be useful to explore the similarities and differences around different uses and how these shape the support and facilitation an online group needs.

The rest of the event dived deeper into different cases to identify insights for success.

The first element was a ‘peer assist’ where Jessica Ball sought lessons and feedback on how an online group could support event preparation, delivery, and follow-up.

Pier Andrea Pirani was her ‘peer assistant’ and he illustrated some ideas from an earlier engagement where a three-day face-to-face workshop used online groups before, during, and after the event. In that case, participants in the face-to-face meeting were invited to join a facilitated pre-event group where they introduced themselves, mapped interests and expertise, and pointed to additional resources. Material from this was used in the physical meeting. The group was also used during and after the workshop to start synthesizing insights and to support the follow up actions.

Next, Saskia Harmsen hosted a talk show where other use cases were the primary focus:

1. Gladys Morales from the IFAD innovation network talked about her online group as an example of an issue-driven community of interest.
   
2. Vivan Atakos from the CGIAR GENDER Impact Platform talked about her group as an example of a project or initiative-supporting mechanism.
   
3. Sarah Cummings from the KM4Dev community explained how several online groups are used internally to manage this community of individuals.
   
4. John Ede from the C4C coalition explained how this group of organizations use their online groups to support advocacy initiatives towards specific goals.
   
5. Giacomo Rambaldi shared how the Digital Agri Hub ran an online, facilitated dialogue to mobilise ideas across its online community.

Discussions revolved around technical issues and platform-related features, as well as facilitation and user-side concerns. Ideas and suggestions were floated to better support users and moderators in utilizing such platforms to their full potential.

Overall, the dialogue underscored the relevance of the Dgroups Foundation’s mission to support and enhance Partners’ online groups and communities through learning, peer-sharing, and experimentation to optimize platform functionality and facilitation processes.

This is the first of a series of short posts from the discussion. The other two posts cover:

• Online interaction around events and meetings – the peer assist
• Online collaboration use cases in depth – the talk show

Talk to us if you look for advice, coaching, and support in your work with online groups and communities

Download the case study (pdf)

Watch the video presentation below:

(see also the slides used in the webinar)

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for Agriculture Dgroups started in 2015 to “share experiences in developing UAV technologies and related software applications and in making use of small UAVs to improve the management of crops, fishing grounds and other resource-based activities.”

The adoption of these technologies is heavily influenced by regulations; CTA did an assessment across Africa Pacific and Caribbean to find out that very few countries had any regulation in place. Several countries were forbidding the import and use of drones; others were lacking any way to control their use. So, there was a clear need to shed light on the situation in the various countries and CTA relied a lot on the members of the UAV Dgroups to collect information.

How does CTA UAV4Ag use Dgroups?

One of the objectives of the initiative was to populate an online database of existing legislations. While a few databases featuring regulations governing the use of drones were available online, they were very scanty and for the most part not up-to-date. In 2016 CTA commissioned a study across the ACP (Africa, Caribbean and Pacific) states and benefitting from the Dgroup with members from more than 100 countries the whole community contributed to the gathering and verification of information about national legislations. Results were fed into a Global Drone Regulations Database which was being set up via the efforts of multiple development agencies and the private sector. This is a Wikipedia like platform with individual curators of national pages.

A dedicated URL [http://www.uav4ag.org/] has been created to welcome people into the Dgroups. The UAV4Ag community has been growing exponentially; it now counts close to 1000 members from around 100 countries, with over 1000 contributions over the past 2 years. The community has a presence on other social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook, but these are used very differently – Facebook for informal sharing of activities and Twitter as a news bulletin. Dgroups is clearly where the discussions are intensive and technical, and where the members are engaging to look at the legal aspects of drone technologies.

Why would CTA UAV4Ag recommend Dgroups to others?

There are several reasons why CTA would recommend the use of Dgroups to others. One key aspect is the issue of privacy – this is even more relevant these days with all the news regarding Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Unlike commercial platforms, Dgroups is really private: there is no parsing of content to serve your advertisements, there is no profiling of members, and nobody is going to harvest what you say, what you think, and who you are to make other, unwanted, use of that information.

Additionally, Dgroups administrators can easily customize the groups setting – defining whether a group is moderated or not, whether it is visible or not on the web.

Another great advantage of Dgroups is the possibility to create sub-communities – in the UAV4ag group for example, there are sub-communities that are geographically defined; others may be thematically defined. Commonly at CTA Dgroups is used around projects and events; for example, in the organization of conferences, it is very useful to have the possibility to create subgroups for the different working groups that are involved in conference organization. This kind of working groups are usually private and by invitation only; they are non-moderated, so the postings are going through immediately and the groups turn to sleeping mode when the event has been completed – but they can remain useful as a repository of information and exchanges around the event and its organization.

CTA also uses Dgroups extensively to create, animate and nurture communities of practice. These are usually public, accepting unsolicited membership applications that are reviewed by group administrators. Usually, these communities are moderated, to keep the flow of message relevant and avoid contributions that may be disruptive to the discussion.

“Dgroups is a real powerhouse for communication and exchange in the development work.” Giacomo Rambaldi, Senior Programme Coordinator ICTs – CTA, The Netherlands.

Download the case study (pdf)

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)

The case study is based on an interview between Dgroups Board members Saskia Harmsen and Sean Furey (RWSN).

Download the case study (pdf)

Watch the interview here and read the full interview transcript below.

Full interview transcript

Saskia Harmsen (SH): How did you learn about Dgroups and maybe a little bit about your work and how you came to learn about Dgroups in relation to your work?

Sean Furey (SF): I joint Skat which is a consultancy based in St. Gallen in Switzerland in 2011. And I was hired specifically to help with the Rural Water Supply Network, which is a global network of practitioners working in rural water supply, helping to take the network to the next level. The network really had just been an email list with a whole list of email addresses on a spreadsheet and every time we tried to send out a newsletter or communication it would crash our e-mail service. So it was a deeply unsatisfactory situation. But my colleague Bertha Camacho is a knowledge management specialist and she’d been using Dgroups I think for various knowledge management groups such as KM4Dev and at SDC; I think Helvetas had been using it. So through her connections and her use of the platform she said “Well, you know, this this would be great for RWSN as a networking tool, why don’t you give it a go.” So that it was really for her recommendation that we had a go with Dgroups, it fitted the bill for what we needed.

SH: Did you start using it in 2011 immediately or after?

SG: We did some test in 2011 for me particularly just to get a feel for how it works. And then it was at the beginning of 2012 when we really launched it as our main online networking tool. So that our digital strategy as it was then was that we’d have the RWSN website which was being rebuilt at the time. And we’d looked at similar networks such as Susana which is the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance and the route they got is that they developed a website and they put a bulletin board within that website that built that functionality. We didn’t go down that route. We thought it would be better to use Dgroups. The traction of Dgroups was that a number of people would be using it already. We wouldn’t have to attract people to basically have a new log in and all the rest of it. It was an existing platform. It was independent. And it was low bandwidth. So it was really in 2012 that we migrated the spreadsheet database, we sent the invite to everyone in our old database to joint Dgroups. And that had the advantage as well that people were then actively signing up. So of the like three thousand email addresses, twelve hundred people signed up. So we knew that we had twelve hundred active members so that was very useful.

SH: And you mentioned having looked at sister platforms and networks to see what they were using. Did you look at other solutions for similar functionalities for what you needed? And why did you end up going for Dgroups?

SF: Well there were sort of free email groups or listservs. There were some social media platforms, you know Facebook or Linkedin, but none of them were really that good for what we thought we wanted as both a membership database and a flexible discussion platform where we could have structured discussions as well as mutual support groups for question/answers. So we have members who post questions such as “I’m in Ethiopia, where can I find decent quality PVC piping.” There’s all sort of technical questions and then people from within the group would then be able to respond. And because we’re a practitioner network people who are working in the field doing stuff, it’s really important that the platform is as low threshold as possible. So no advertising, no commercial kind of overheads, just the message. That was the real attraction of Dgroups.

SH: Just for my understanding do you have a number of groups running in parallel or you have a mother group for example with a number of subgroups?

SF: The way we structure it is that we have the overall RWNS community under Dgroups, which now has a I think up 8200 members. And we use that top level group to send a quarterly newsletter and for major announcements. We don’t allow any discussion because with a group that size it would just annoy people. So that top level group is strictly controlled.

We have then five thematic discussion groups based on our strategic topics that we have within the network and within those we have a number of subtopics. So we have discussion groups around those. And those are coordinated by the theme coordinators in our partner organizations, such as WaterAid and IRC.

And then other groups are just grown organically depending on where the interest is. So groups on solar water pumping or on rain water harvesting. We’ve had some groups that have emerged organically from particular geographical areas so for example in Rwanda we’ve got a very active water and sanitation group there, just for people within the country. That flexibility has been really helpful and also the ability to structure it so that for example if you’re a member of the solar pumping group that’s within the larger groundwater group, you are a member that sub community but you also a member of the higher level group and that means you could have been involved in the broader level discussions but when there’s something particularly niche, people who are just interested in that topic can take part in that.

SH: You mentioned that the thematic groups are coordinated by people within your partner organizations, like WaterAid and IRC. I was just wondering, since you are in a network, your partners probably have to agree to using a particular solution. Were people already familiar with Dgroups and was it easy or did you have to advocate for Dgroups? How did that work out?

SF: I think it was it was a pretty easy sell because people saw the simplicity of the interface of the website and also the fact that it can be used purely by email. So you don’t even need to go to the website to use it, either as a user or as a moderator. That’s powerful. We just did some basic training with our partners in different organizations. And it’s kind of run itself. Then if people have particular queries or concerns or if they want a particular feature or come across a particular bug, that then let me know and I pass it on.

SH: I’m wondering if there’s a particular story or an anecdote or something that you could share about a time when you felt like using Dgroups platform, or the solution or even the Partnership on a wider level, really made a difference in the Rural Supply Network’s work. Anything that comes to mind? How has Dgroups at some points contributed significantly to your work?

SF: Well I think a great example actually is where we engaged with the then UN Special Rapporteur on the human right to water Catarina de Albuquerque. She was developing a handbook on human rights to really engage with practitioners and people doing stuff on the ground about what the human rights water meant and what sort of guidance they needed it. So we ran a structured discussion in collaboration with Water Aid. That was then great for her to have this broader discussion with with people in about 60 different countries, in local government, in community organizations, in NGOs, in the private sector who would raise challenging questions or just ask for clarifications for such this big, global, quite important but still quite nebulous concept; what does that mean on a day to day level? And then we were able to bring a lot of those issues out that we then presented to her again in a webinar so that she was able to respond to some of those issues to a broader audience. And then the transcript of that webinar turned into a publication. So we were able to use the all these different forms of communication and it was a truly two way communication as well which was incredibly helpful for Catarina but it was also really valuable for our network members as well.

SH: How long was this structured e-discussion?

SF: I think that was three weeks. Typically we run them between three to four weeks.

SH: And how many people participated?

SF: In that one probably around 150 I think. We’ve run a number of e-discussions on the Dgroups platform on groundwater, on sustainable services, on a whole range of different topics. Typically between 50 and 250 people get involved. What’s nice about the Dgroups platform for e-discussions is that people take a lot of time and effort to input in the discussions. If it’s something like Twitter or social media sometimes the inputs can be very superficial whereas we got really substantial always meet the essays. Particularly we had a recent on the role of local government in rural water supply and we had some fantastic contributions from Ukraine to Cambodia from Honduras from all these different countries, really explaining how the situation works in their context, what frustrations are, what the opportunities are. That was really rich discussion.

SH: And how does SKAT see this? Because of course you work for one of the programme it runs. How does SKAT see your work with Dgroups? Is it valuable to the organization itself?

SF: Yes I think to broader what we do, we’re also involved in other non RWSN Dgroups such as KM4Dev- Knowledge Management for Development; also in the SDC internal water network. So it’s very useful tool for us to communicate with our partners. It’s probably the main tool that we use as an organization for communicating with all our partners and clients all over the world. It’s very important to us.

SH: There are other aspects of course in Dgroups, besides the platform and the solution. But there’s also a partnership and a kind of an ethos or a vision that the Dgroups community has. How does that align or is that of any meaning to you at SKAT or for RWSN.

SF: Definitely. SKAT is very much a knowledge driven organization, it’s what it was set up for in 1970’s. It’s very much about learning and interaction two way exchange. Dgroups is a fantastic platform for doing that and it really helps that the ethos of the organization behind it is very much around that, that it’s not just some top down transmission tool for PR purposes but it is a truly leveled playing field where it doesn’t matter if you’re a government minister or working or just a private individual. You can still chip in and interact, that’s great. It’s really useful.

SH: And that really aligns with SKAT’s vision or ethos it sounds like.

SF: Yeah definitely. Very much so.

SH: Are there any insights that you generated about using a platform or using Dgroups platform or maybe more communities of practices in general for the type of work you do. Anything that may be useful for other practitioners?

SF: I think what we’ve learned is what makes an active group. Because we’ve got a lot of groups and some of them are really active, some of them aren’t active at all, and some go through cycles of being super active with a huge amount of traffic and then they’ll maybe for a couple weeks, maybe even a couple of months just die off, nothing happens. And then someone will post a question or an idea or something and it will just spark this huge debate. I think a lot of it has to do with having a critical mass within the community, which seems to be in the order of 500+ so that you have you have enough people who sort of lurk and listen. Actually you don’t really hear from those much but what you meet them face to face events they go: “Wow that was really interesting! I’m always opening these emails and they are really really great.” But you never get feedback from them online. So just because people don’t respond doesn’t mean to say that they’re not taking value from it. Then you have the people that maybe contribute once in a while if there’s something they’re particularly interested in or they feel they have an expertise or have experience and the chip in. And then it’s important to have a core of maybe 10/20 people or maybe even as few as 5 who will respond to anything. I mean maybe they won’t always say the most sensible things but they’re valuable because they will maybe say something provocative that will then bring other people into the discussions. So I think you need a good mix. Some of our communities particularly the groundwater communities is very active. I think because in that particular topic there’s a huge depth of experience so we’ve got a number of practitioners who are on the edge or past retirement age who have a huge amount of knowledge from what they were doing, all sorts of drilling programs back in the 60s and 70s and 80s. It’s been a really valuable inter-generational exchange of them being able to pass their hard won knowledge to sort of younger engineers. In other communities where the topics are a lot newer and there isn’t that depth of expertise- say particularly some of the human rights things or around ICT- there isn’t that depth yet. So it’s sometimes harder to maintain that level of engagement. Finally I think one important thing to recognize is that a lot of online engagement is most useful after face to face discussions, it’s not a complete replacement for face to face meetings. Once people have met face to face and they come to know each other, they trust each other a bit more then that could lead to online exchange which gets to a bit more depth.

SH: I was wondering have you seen any differences between for example global groups where you discuss particular topics or where you allow for questions and answers to come, as compared to country based groups or country focus groups. What is important and what contributes to successful exchanges?

SH: The only really active group is Rwanda and I think that’s quite a small group of people that know each other quite well and meet face to face on a regular basis and so this is just a kind of added value to that process of meeting in and exchanging, in what is quite a small country anyway. It would be nice to have more regional exchanges, particularly say let’s Latin America or Southeast Asia, but that hasn’t really taken off yet. There is the issue of language of course. We try to do as much in English and French as possible, increasing we’re doing things in Spanish as well but. It’s never easy.

SH: I was wondering if we could think ahead, maybe into the future a little bit. Of course we want to remain relevant as a platform- and we have been since the launch in 2002. What I was thinking, Dgroups has a vision- you talked about that in relation to SKAT’s vision- where everyone is able to contribute to dialogue and decision making in international development and social justice. So if we were to think ahead you know about seven years or something, actually I think that is true, we have a long way to go, but I think that it’s true that everybody is making a contribution, that everybody is participating in dialogue and has a role to play in expressing themselves and being heard in international development and social justice. What do you think or how do you see in this vision, how do you see Dgroups contributing to that, making such a future possible?

SF: I think there is a risk that the digital divide will get bigger between those who have easy, cheap or free access to the internet and those that don’t or have a very unreliable or expensive access. So I think Dgroups has an active role to play in trying to bridge that gap. I think particularly those who have access to very high speed Internet connections, to the latest smartphone technologies or whatever. There’s always the there’s always an assumption that I think goes into a lot software development, that you have the latest kit, that you have bandwidth connection. And I think some countries are making that leap frog to the next generation of communications technology but an awful lot aren’t and we need to be mindful of those who might not be able to use communications platform. Being able to communicate through e-mail, although it’s seen as increasingly so antiquated, I think it will continue to be an important exchange mechanism. I think the challenge that we have over the next seven years and it’s already happening now, it’s just the firehose of information that we’re getting from different sources, there’s just so much being generated, shared all the rest of it. It’s becoming very difficult to really find out what’s the good stuff, what’s the high quality information. And with all the different options available if people want to have a voice, where’s the best place to do that, so it’s actually going lead to the outcomes that they want to see.

SH: And linking that back to the Rural Water Supply Network’s work, how do you envision making sure that people will know to go to your content, to your communities, for good quality content? If there are similar networks on Facebook or Linkedin or people exchanging and talking everywhere, how do you envision that in RWSN’s future you’ll be able to provide that kind of content and value?

SF: Increasingly we’re coming into this term knowledge broker, the human element so that things aren’t just driven by algorithms but there’s still people that are able to sift through the information and understand it and digest it and be able to link people together with each other. But also link people with the information that is likely to be most relevant to them. And I think that’s going to be an increasingly important role for us as networkers and knowledge manages is not to completely hand everything over to the automatized networks. A lot of it still comes down to trust and it comes down to person to person human interactions as well so that we properly understand people’s different perspectives on what sort of things they need and what sort of things they can contribute as well. So that good ideas are championed to another level and that’s another role that we see ourselves as a network is that where there really good grassroots initiatives, to help those get documented and presented in a way that those agencies that are able to take those initiatives to scale, can go: “Ah! That’s really good. We understand that we can do something with that.” So I think that’s an important role that I don’t see diminishing any time soon.

SH: And how do you see your use of the Dgroups platform contributing to that into the future? You know in the next five or seven years.

SF: Well I think other ways of communicating will come up. I mean, right now we use webinars a lot and that’s working really well for us. That hasn’t replaced Dgroups, it’s very much complementary. In five years, who knows, we’ll probably have moved on from a webinar format onto something else. But I think Dgroups will clearly continue to need to evolve but I think that at same time it’s got a very clear, basic kind of role and I think it will continue to do that.

SH: You mentioned Dgroups will have to continue to evolve. I’d be interested in understanding more what you think, where it needs to evolve to. But also to understand from your perspective or SKAT perspective, what perhaps Dgroups as a partnership or as community might want to maintain or further develop for you as an organization to keep benefitting from it, to keep engaged as a partner in the Dgroups partnership.

SF: You know it’s not easy to look into the future! I think one of the biggest barriers that we see is around language– and that is an area where I think technology is progressing quite rapidly in terms of translation, being able to translate. As I said we try to do things in English and French. But there are so many different language. And when we’re engaging with people in Central Asian, they’re using Russian you know. There are also opportunities I think. If these technologies developed that people can use more localized indigenous languages as well to communicate and to have their voices heard, that would be fantastic. In the past where I’ve worked in Central America, in Guatemala you find that in a lot of places only the men speak Spanish and the women speak the local language. Maybe in the future they will have to the opportunity to communicate and have that translated into English, French or whatever- and that will just open up a whole new world of potential directions.

As we’re seeing at the moment with apps like, you know AirB&B and Uber and things like that, they’re redefining how those particular sectors of the economy are working. And for better or worse. I mean there’s huge, huge debate of some of these issues. I think in the space where we’re working in, we don’t know yet, we don’t know what sort of disruptive changes are likely to happen. It may be a lot around the accountability of how development and aid works at the moment- which has a lot of problems and could have a lot of improvement, particularly in terms of who is accountable, to whom and for what. Right now the users or- to use a terrible term- beneficiaries, which is not very helpful; but you know they are also the people that don’t have much say on the aid they receive. Do they need it? I think we’re working in a sector that is ripe for disruption and it’s just a case of how is that going to happen, how will that manifest?

SH: I was just thinking while you were talking how in my experience Dgroups relates to that a little bit- all the networks that we had set up and they’re still continuing today, a lot of times those users or the people that are doing the grassroots projects are the ones that through being active and voicing their concerns, have taken a much more prominent role, have gained a much more visible local voice than they had initially. So I’m thinking also in terms of, you know, people being assigned roles simply on the basis of seniority or on the basis of, you know, old boys network or whatever systems may be in place, versus other people becoming more and more visible have right to speak, have relevant experience. And these networks I think are also contributing to the fact that people will no longer be silent about important decisions going to people who are never speaking out on networks, who are not visible, who do not have a role in bringing people together, a role in forming opinions, a role in listening, whatever it might be. And still getting the positions that are important positions on a national level- internationally I can’t say so much. And more clarity on who deserves a leadership role and who doesn’t.

Those are all the questions that I had for you. Is there anything else that you want to talk about your work with Dgroups or SKAT’s involvement?

SF: I guess just one other example. I’ve talked about e-discussions and interactions which have been by us as a Secretariat or as theme coordinators around a particular topic. But sometimes it comes the other way – an interesting example of that is in the very specialized field of hand-pumps and rural water. Through the discussions and organic debate over the course of a year, one of the things that I did was I got all of those hundreds of e-mails and I produced a synthesis document. It’s a lot of work but it’s really valuable to take that time, sit down and spend a couple of days just reading through these emails extracting the ideas and information that’s come out through that organic debate. What came out was a really strong message around corrosion and iron in water. This is sort of an issue that’s kind of been known about by everyone of those who fit the background but this really brought everything into focus and we were able to say: “Right, this is a clear priority for this network.” There are organizations today that are going around particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and they’re drilling holes in the ground and they’re putting in iron pipes into corrosive groundwater, and those pipes are rusting in no time. No time at all of the pumps are failing. And that’s a scandal. I mean that is just ridiculous. I mean, such a waste of time and effort and frustrating the hope of the users because the users are left with something that they think is going to make their lives better and actually within a couple of months they’ve got orange water coming out of their pump and six months after that the pump’s broken. So this is something that clearly came up from our membership as a really high priority to tackle. I think that’s also a good illustration of how Dgroups is a powerful tool but as moderators and as facilitators we need to take the time to listen as well. And that’s not always easy.

For this session, we had the pleasure to have as speaker Angela Nash-Mercado from Johns Hopkins University Center for Communication Programme and K4Health, who presented the Knowledge Gateway. This platform is running on the same technology that powers Dgroups and that is developed and supported by WA Research. The session was a useful occasion to compare notes and see how different initiatives are using the same technological solution.

The second presentation by Neil Pakenham-Walsh (Global Healthcare Information Network and Chairman of the Dgroups Foundation) looked at how Dgroups is used by HIFA2015, a global campaign and community of purpose striving for Healthcare Information For All by 2015.

This session will look at “Email forums for health and development professionals.”  Two presenters will share their experiences:

• Angela Nash Mercado will present how the Knowledge Gateway (which uses the same underlying software as Dgroups) connects people working in health and development through email discussion forums;
• Neil Pakenham Walsh will give us some insights on how Dgroups is used by HIFA2015 (Healthcare Information For All by 2015) to promote the availability and use of essential healthcare information in low- and middle-income countries.

This is an open session for all with an interest in virtual communities and networks for heath and development, to discuss how to support communications, knowledge sharing and learning.

A facilitated Q&A will follow to allow participants to compare notes and foster peer learning.

If you are interested in participating, please register on this Eventbrite page.