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:

• 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.

“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.

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:

• 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

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!

Dgroups can offer you the perfect solution. Dgroup is a longstanding successful development initiative that promotes dialogue. Supported by over 20 organizations, it currently engages over 290 000 people in all countries and territories of the world. It offers an easy to use email tool and an online platform for small or large groups that benefit from networks and discussions.

Join us on 22nd of March 2018 at 4 pm CET for a webinar organized in partnership between FAO and Dgroups. Listen to the experiences from FAO, CTA, and HIFA, three organizations that are active users of Dgroups and ask our experts the remaining questions you might have.

Suzanne Phillips from FAO will share her experience using a Dgroup to connect a global community of FAO Farmer Field School practitioners all over the world. She is in charge of the coordination of the global Farmer Field School Platform at FAO and decided to use Dgroup as an additional tool to ensure inclusion of all stakeholders, even when they have a poor internet connection, low IT-literacy and little time to engage in exchanges.

Giacomo Rambaldi from CTA will talk about the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) for Agriculture Dgroups – and how it has been instrumental to carry out a mapping of existing and forthcoming policies, laws and regulations governing the use of UAVs.

Neil Pakenham-Walsh will present how Dgroups is being used by the HIFA forums. These groups bring together more than 15,000 people from 175 countries to explore ways to improve the availability and use of health information in low- and middle-income countries. Dgroups is the platform enabling the conversation and dialogue on the HIFA forums.

To register for this webinar, please fill in the registration form.

For any further questions please contact dgroups@fao.org.

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.