With a thematic focus on email and online forums for health and development professionals, the session was organised together with the Knowledge Gateway, which is running on the same technology that powers Dgroups and that is developed and supported by WA Research.  In this sense, the session was a useful occasion to compare notes and see how different initiatives are using the same technological solution.

Around 25 participants took part in the 90 minutes webinar, engaging in a lively and interesting conversation. The full recording of the session is available on the Dgroups Foundation channel on YouTube. Below here you can find a short summary and the individual recordings of the two presentations, which are also available for download on SlideShare.

IBP Knowledge Gateway – Share, exchange, transfer and apply knowledge

The first presenter, Angela Nash-Mercado from Johns Hopkins University Center for Communication Programme and K4Health, introduced the Knowledge Gateway.

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The Knowledge Gateway is an initiative of the Implementing Best Practices (IBP) Consortium, supported by a diverse range of partners such as USAID, WHO, UNFPA as well as organizations and institutions from developing and developed countries. IBP strives for finding ways to more effectively transfer, exchange and apply knowledge in the health sector. To achieve this goal IBP partners promote the set up and participation in Communities of Practice (CoPs). CoPs are indeed very effective and beneficial to their members in terms of, for example: finding and seeking help with specific problems; learn from each other; share and exchange information and knowledge; jointly create tools, standards and manuals; share best practices and lessons learned; promote collaboration; etc.

The Knowledge Gateway is the platform that IBP has deployed to support multiple virtual communities of practice, and it now counts more that 42,000 members from 220 countries and territories. The underlying software that powers this platform is the same used also by Dgroups, and it answers to the same principles: a web-based technology that functions through emails to support knowledge networks and communities of practice; it is designed to work in technically challenged countries and enables people to share, exchange, transfer, discuss, debate and access knowledge in and across countries.

Based on the rich experience in developing and facilitating CoPs on the Knowledge Gateway, Angela shared some design features and principles to keep in mind when setting up and moderating online communities and forums. Firstly, it is important to recognise that as the community evolves, so does the structure – so this may need to change or update depending on what the community is used for. Further, it is crucial to find ways to link the community to outside sites, experts and other communities, to broaden the dialogue and the perspectives. Additionally, it is key to recognize that there are (and will always be) different levels of participation in CoPs – and some members do not openly share, engage and participate. Equally important is to focus on the value that a CoP brings, to both its individual members and the organization they belong to.

HIFA2015 – A global community of purpouse to achieve health information for all by 2015

Neil Pakenham Walsh, the second speaker in the webinar, presented how Dgroups is used by HIFA 2015 (Healthcare Information For All by 2015), a global campaign to promote the availability and use of essential healthcare information in low- and middle-income countries.

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HIFA is a community of purpose whose members work together to achieve a shared vision: “A world where every health worker and every citizen has access to the information they need, when they need it, to prevent and manage disease and injury.” Through the community, its 6300 members share and exchange experiences to bring about increased effectiveness of healthcare information services worldwide.

The use of Dgroups seemed the most logical solution to enable this virtual sharing of experiences, and facilitate online dialogue amongst HIFA members, for different reasons. On the one hand, Dgroups is a partnership of 18 development organizations and a non commercial solution. On the other hand, in terms of technology, Dgroups uses email and this is more appropriate than web-based tools to reach rural areas in low-income countries. Moreover, it has unique functionality that allow HIFA moderators to add value to the messages that are posted by members.

The approach used by HIFA in the facilitation of the email discussions is defined as ‘Reader-focused moderation‘ and it aims at providing maximum added value to all members. This is done through the “subject” line, the “from” line and the “body” of the message, with the HIFA signature profile.

Additionally, HIFA is experimenting with new ways to make use of the discussions and messages circulate via the email list. Short extracts (‘HIFA-Voices’) of the email messages are selected, tagged and added to a searchable database. The database will drill “up” to major databases and “down” to the full text of the source message and discussion thread. HIFA-Voices have already been used to inform the development of a WHO Policy Guideline, and there is a huge potential for such a knowledge base to “become a leading source of practical and experiential data.”

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.

Supporting the Food for Cities global network

FAO has been a long standing Dgroups partners; indeed, this tool has been essential in supporting the work of the organization for technical discussions, knowledge networks,workshop preparations and follow-up, steering groups,online consultations, closed discussions and much more. To date, FAO counts around 9700 members in the various Dgroups it supports – almost double compared to one year before. A good example of the practical use of Dgroups is the online community associated with the “Food for the Cities” multi-disciplinary initiative.

The Food for the Cities Dgroups was set up as outcome of the “Food, Agriculture and Cities” workshop (September 2009), where  participants “decided to put in place an email discussion list to foster further collaborative work”. The main objectives of this list is to bring together people working on different aspects of urbanization challenges for food and nutrition security, agriculture and management of natural resources.

The membership of the group is very diverse, including participants from  the public sector (national and local governments, municipalities, and international organizations), as well as from the private sector, academics, NGOs and civil society. From 100 members in 2009, the group counts now over 1900 participants from different domains and positions.

While it started as a simple discussion list, for both informal information sharing and structured conversations, the Food for Cities Dgroups has slowly been evolving towards an open knowledge platform and a community that provides common ground on“food systems approaches” and tries to connect other networks/initiatives working on these issues, within and outside FAO.

In terms of achievements, the Food for Cities Dgroup can be considered an effective global network for information sharing on meetings, preparation of visits and reports. It has also been used to facilitate the writing of the discussion paper Food, agriculture and cities (2011) and the development of a local food system approach.

In spite of this, some challenges remain and should be taken in consideration when using Dgroups. First and foremost, developing an effective list requires trust from the participants, and this needs time to be developed and established. In the case of Food for the Cities, it took up to nine months to get the list really active and the members to contribute and engage in online discussions.

Moreover, Dgroups at the moment doesn’t allow easy integration with other online collaboration tools, and this seems a bit of a limitation as group members are increasingly asking for an evolution of the Food for the Cities communities towards more collaboration.

Dgroups for learning in SDC thematic networks 

The use of Dgroups in SDC is also well established and increasing, especially after last year roll out of the new redesign of the platform. A variety of business functions are supported by Dgroups, such as preparation of events and meetings, ad hoc discussion and thematic exchanges, just to name a few. The presentation in the peer exchange focused on the use of Dgroups for learning in SDC thematic networks, exemplified by the case of the Employment and Income Network.

SDC thematic networks are set up around a focal point, a core group of thematic experts and the wider ring of network members, formed by a diverse group of SDC collaborators, practitioners, consultants, as well as members from academia and think tanks. The Employment and Income Network is used to facilitate thematic discussion and exchanges amongst group members to foster their learning on the issues related to private sector development and vocational skills development. By the same token, the members use the network to improve their development interventions and share good practices.

The group is quite big compared to other SDC facilitated networks. The discussions are not moderated but rather facilitated by a good team of online facilitators. Messages are not censored but group facilitators provide synthesis of the discussion for making them more digestible and of immediate use by network members. Having resources for the facilitation of online discussion in the network is a key element of its success, and one of the take away messages from the SDC case.

As in the case of FAO, some challenges remain in the use of Dgroups in the context of SDC thematic networks. While the new online platform presents some new, good functionality for networks administrators, not all members know how to make the optimal use of the platform. For example, not all members complete their online profile, resulting in a loss of information for network administrators.

Additionally, being the evolution of the IT environment and of SDC and cooperation offices as such, may require in the future the deployment of different tools that could present a better fit for the work to be done.

Finally, and related to the point above, the current multi-platform approach that currently support SDC thematic networks may have to evolve to a one single  platform approach in the future to foster a more focussed communication.

]]> 928 https://dgroups.info/2013/04/slides-from-the-dgroups-peer-exchange-16-april-2013/ Wed, 17 Apr 2013 06:13:14 +0000 http://www.dgroups.info/?p=912 After the one held last November, on 16 April 2013 the Dgroups Foundation hosted a second Online Peer Exchange.  Two Dgroups Partners, the FAO and the Swiss Development cooperation, presented their experience in using Dgroups effectively to support communications, knowledge sharing and learning in their work.

The slides are available online at Slideshare and below here.

Kristin Kolshus and Julien Custot presented how Dgroups is used at large at FAO and shared the specific case of the Food for the cities Dgroup.

http://www.slideshare.net/dgroups/fao-dgroups

In the second presentation, Carmen Eckter and Carsten Schulz shared how SDC is using Dgroups, and focused on the specific case of the Private Sector Development discussion group.

http://www.slideshare.net/dgroups/sdc-dgroups

A short report of the meeting and the recordings of the presentations are also available on this blog and on the YouTube Channel of the Dgroups Foundation.

This is an open session for all with an interest in Dgroups, to discuss how to use Dgroups to effectively support communications, knowledge sharing and learning in their work.

Two presentations will provide food for thoughts and elements for discussion:

• Carmen Eckter and Caster Schulz will share with us how SDC is using Dgroups, and focus on the specific case of the Private Sector Development discussion group;
• Kristin Kolshus and Julien Custot will give us some insights on how Dgroups is used at FAOand present the case of Food for the Cities.

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

If you are interested in participating, registration is open on this Eventbrite page.

A lively conversation followed the presentations, with participants exchanging experience on how to manage conversations across multiple languages, how to foster user participation, and how to develop and teach facilitation and moderation skills.

Networking, collaborating and communicating with Dgroups

The RWSN had joined Dgroups just over one year ago, and the presentation from Sean Furey brought an interesting perspective on how his organization has used Dgroups and where it fits in their digital ecosystem.

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RSWN is a network of over 2400 members across more than 94 countries.  Members are all professionals and practitioners working on the different aspects of rural water supply such as sustainable groundwater development or equity and inclusion.

In 2011, the Secretariat of the organization turned to Dgroups as it seemed ideal to fulfil different tasks such as managing members with an easy to use membership database, sending out a monthly newsletter to the network and fostering interactions and peer exchanges amongst members.

In practice, Dgroups is used as central members database where users can opt in and register. Other social media tools such as LinkedIn and Facebook are used for promotion and to raise the online profile of the network. Social media channels attract interested users back to the RWSN website and encourage them to register on Dgroups.

Once registered, RWSN members participate in thematic, structured email discussions; outputs from these discussions have often fed into related work on the international agenda. Members also engage in ad hoc discussions and, increasingly they provide support to each other with technical queries.

In the 12 months it has been using Dgroups, RWSN has experienced clear benefits in terms of networking amongst its members. Further, Dgroups has made collaboration and communications much more effective.  The main challenges ahead now are to engage more practitioners in the network, and how to be more inclusive and have more multilingual discussions.

Engaging stakeholders in agricultural research in Africa

Myra Wopereis looked at the issue of managing conversations in different languages in her presentation on how FARA uses Dgroups.

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The organization uses Dgroup to connect to its wide network of diverse stakeholders working in agricultural research in Africa. These actors meet face to face every three years during the African Science Week. Dgroups allows for easy communication and information sharing, to keep stakeholder connected and engaged in dialogue. A total of over 2500 members from 102 countries are currently part of the FARA network on Dgroups.

About 50 sub-communities have also been created over time. Some of these have been created as part of thematic projects such as PAEPARD, RAILS and AfricaAdapt and they see a steady increase in terms of membership and interactions.

FARA finds that Dgroups is especially beneficial in terms of broadening the participation of different actors in the agricultural research dialogue, with non-research stakeholders joining in the conversations.

Besides managing multilingual conversations, one of the main challenges FARA faces is to balance the trade off between having moderation and participation in the different Dgroups communities. On the one hand, having a moderated community ensures that the quality of the conversation is maintained and members are not receiving too many messages. On the other hand, moderation can inhibit participation from some group members.

Discussion

In the Q&A and discussion that followed, participants exchanged interesting observations and shared their own experience in working with Dgroups:

• As RWSN example demonstrates, it is important to establish the specific role and benefit Dgroups has in the broader digital ecosystem of the organization. Likewise, it is important that all the different tools work together and reinforce each other.
• A key asset of Dgroups is the fact that it operates well in a low bandwidth environment. For development organizations, this is critical. Even if social media tools such as Facebook and LinkedIn are increasingly popular in developing countries, email based online groups are much more accessible to those with low bandwidth.
• Maintaining a good level of conversation is hard to achieve, especially in diverse online groups where members have different level of skills and experience in online discussions.
• More should be done to improve the knowledge that users have of Dgroups – both as email and online tool – so that their contributions can be of good quality. In turn, this will ensure that more members feel the benefit of participating in online groups.
• Online conversation doesn’t just happen that easily. But structured discussions that are time bound, short and specific, work well in Dgroups. In general members’ participation in these types of discussion is higher than in open discussions.
• When you have global groups, language is sometimes a barrier and exclude many from participating in online discussions. Organizations have been responding in different ways to this challenge. Some rely on volunteers to translate key messages in languages other than English. Other organizations  have encouraged users to post in their own language and use tools such as Google Translate to translate messages from a foreign languages. Others instead have created language specific sub-communities that have different conversations from the global list.
• When it comes to group animation, the role of the group facilitators and moderators is critical in many aspects. However, the skills required to perform these roles are not always present. While different organizations use different approaches to find and train group moderators, the iMark module developed by FAO and other provides excellent self learning material to build skills in online facilitation. However, it takes long to go through the whole module before being able to apply the new knowledge or passing it on to others. Maybe Dgroups could look into working with the iMark partnership and develop specific materials to facilitate Dgroups.

As this session illustrated, Dgroups is used in many different ways and we have a lot to learn from one another to support knowledge exchange, communications and facilitation. This series of online Peer Exchange sessions will continue in 2013 to broaden up the discussions and hear from other Partners how they have used Dgroups in their own organizations.

See also

• Slides from the Dgroups 2012 Online Peer Exchange
• Full video recording of the 2012 Online Peer Exchange

During the peer exchange, two Dgroups partners organizations shared their experiences in working with Dgroups and making the most of it to support daily business practices. The slides are available online at Slideshare and below here.

Sean Fleury from the Rural Water Supply Network (RWSN) explained how they have been using Dgroups to put the networking element into the work they do. Dgroups is used as membership database and this allows RSWN to engage and interact with the members even when limited/low bandwidth is available.

In the second presentation, Myra Wopereis-Pura described how Dgroups is used at FARA, the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa. Through the use of Dgroups, FARA can broaden the dialogue on agricultural research in Africa by involving non-research stakeholders in the conversation. Moreover, Dgroups is also used as efficient advocacy tool and for focused, time bound online discussions and consultations.

A report of the meeting and the recordings of the presentations are available on this blog and on the Dgroups Foundation YouTube Channel.