These events shared two objectives:

• Investigate and discuss the state, potential, and challenges of digitalisation for agriculture (D4AG) in the regions; and 
• Introduce the work of the Digital Agri Hub in collecting, curating, visualising, and disseminating information on digital solution providers in the three regions.

The first two events – for LAC and the Francophone regions – were designed in the form of a virtual trade show: in each event, 12 solution providers pitched their solutions, and participants were invited to discover more in breakout rooms. 

Both sessions also had either opening, scene-setting presentations or a closing, interactive chat show with invited guests.

Participants in both events appreciated the level of the speakers, the relevance of the solutions provided, the networking and information exchange, as well as the design and facilitation of the event. Possible improvements for future, similar sessions include having fewer solution providers presenting, and/or a slightly longer meeting time.

The Asia launch event was designed as a Policy Dialogue on Regional and Country Policies and Pathways. It focused on D4Ag policy and regulatory frameworks; technical and human capital; and the infrastructure and business environment for digital agriculture transformation. 

Because of the format of a policy dialogue requiring a more ‘formal’ and ‘managed’ setting, we opted to host this event as a Zoom webinar, designed around two facilitated panels with guest speakers. Audience interaction was achieved through the public webinar chat; the Q&A module; and Menti. 

One advantage of the webinar mode over meetings (besides the more detailed meeting reports generated by Zoom) is the Q&A module. If well managed and used in a coordinated manner between meeting facilitators, session moderators, and speakers, it can help harvest, answer, archive, or bring offline a large number of questions. 

We supported these events with:

• Overall session planning and design;
• Facilitation – in Spanish for the LAC event, with Rocio Sanz as the lead facilitator; French for the Francophone event, with Ewen Le Borgne as the lead facilitator; and English for the Asia event, facilitated by Jessica Ball;
• Sourcing and coordination with session interpreters – with Agostina Sueldo coordinating live interpretation Spanish/English and and Serge Dalli coordinating live interpretation French/English;
• Liaising with speakers and participants – for guidance on platform and process;
• Technical hosting – on Zoom;
• Post production – follow up messages to participants; Zoom reports; session recordings, materials etc.

Talk to us if you look for facilitation support and advice for your events, meetings, and conferences

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

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

[bulletlist]

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

[/bulletlist]

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

Stay tuned to learn more!

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.

Facilitated by Lucie Lamoureux (KM4D Associates) the webinar was designed mostly as a peer-assist session. Two participants presented two case studies, illustrating the challenges they face in maintaining their communities of practice (CoPs). Other participants and the facilitation team provided feedback and suggestions on what can be done to overcome the challenges identified.

http://www.slideshare.net/dgroups/troubleshooting-your-dgroup

The first case presented the very common issue of stimulating participation in a community of practice. Their internal group comprises users in the headquarters and users in decentralized offices of a large international organization. In this specific case, the trend is for users in the decentralized offices to be less active, and therefore missing the opportunity to exchange and learn through the community.

Amongst others, webinar attendees suggested the following options and advice to deal with this issue:

• Keep restating the purpose of the community;
• Produce and share with the community some curated information;
• Keep on asking questions;
• Produce email digests/summary;
• Keep engaging the members by teasing out their ideas;
• Run it like a “journal”: new piece of research to be highlighted when published, and the members can comment. Leverage the possibility to have direct access to the author;
• Collect/share also the “thank you” messages, as it builds the community spirit;
• Ask the participants to state their expertise, and then invite “behind the scenes” to contribute to discussions when relevant;
• Convene a physical conference to build and strengthen links. This has proved to be very useful, but also very expensive;
• Consider that 10% active participation is common in several online groups and communities.

The second case focused on the challenge of responding to requests from within a CoP to transform a CoP from an informal and flat network into a formalised structure. This specific community is a mature and very active network, where some members want to take it to the next step. Proposed solutions for this case include:

• Breaking into subgroups – when the dynamics justifies it;
• Surveying of members – considering the risk to capture only the voice of the minority;
• Giving mandate to a specific subgroup to explore the way to work jointly for a limited time (year?)
• Split the group along the formal / informal pattern.

If you have missed this webinar, you can access the webinar recording or download the slides we used in the session.

You can also find the materials from the previous two webinar in this series at the links below:

• Learning the ins and outs of the Dgroups platform
• Developing and supporting your Dgroups

Last but not least, if you have any further suggestions for the cases highlighted here, or have additional topics/challenges about facilitating your community that you’d like to discuss in future webinars, please let us know in the comment section here below.

Facilitated by Lucie Lamoureux (KM4D Associates) the session was designed around three presentation blocks of about 12 minutes, each followed by a 15 minutes interaction and discussion for participants to ask questions and contribute their experience.

In her presentation, Lucie brought participants to reflect to the main community challenges and enablers; the strategic drivers and applications for online communities; and the importance of facilitation and what the main tasks of an online facilitator are.

http://www.slideshare.net/dgroups/developing-and-supporting-your-dgroup

Lucie also shared some useful resources and reference that can be used to plan the design of a new online community, or the re-launch of a dormant one. Some of these resource include:

• The IMARK module “Knowledge Sharing for Development”
• The IMARK module “Building Electronic Communities and Networks”
• The FAO Community Design Aid

If you have missed this webinar, you can access the webinar recording or download the slides we used in the session.

The third and last webinar in the series will take place in May 2015 and will focus on Supporting and troubleshooting your online community.  Registrations will open soon.

ECDPM and Dgroups are partnering to pilot a series of three free webinars to learn the ins and outs of the Dgroups platform, the basics of online community building, and tips and tricks that are at the heart of online facilitation.

Last week, the first webinar in the series took place and looked at technology – with a specific focus on the Dgroups platform.

This platform is well known in the development community, with more than 700 active communities, 150,000+ active users, working in International & intergovernmental organizations, Government agencies, National and international NGOs, ICT- and knowledge focused institutes. Over 400,000 email messages are delivered each day through the Dgroups servers, and over 50% of these emails are exchanged with & within African countries.

The core and killer app of Dgroups is email. Every user can contribute to a community simply by sending email. This is the most inclusive way of participating in an online community, because everyone (or, at least, everyone who has an internet connection, even if this is only occasional) has email and there’s no learning curve. It just works.

In addition, each community on Dgroups comes also with a webspace that includes archive of discussions, members’ profiles, library of resources and other tools and functionality that the administrator can turn on and off as needed. WA-Research, the organization hosting and maintaining Dgroups, is constantly improving the platform in response to Dgroups members’ requests. Not all features, sometimes even the most simple ones, are known and used by users and administrators. So content-wise this session was about the different things groups administrators need to know about using Dgroups via email, and the (many more) things they can do with the website.

http://www.slideshare.net/dgroups/using-dgroups-in-all-its-features

The webinar went well and was appreciated by users. We had about 20 participants. Feedback received in the post webinar survey was also positive.

If you have missed this webinar, you can access the webinar recording or download the slides we used in the session.

The second webinar in the series will take place on 22 April 2015 and will focus on Developing and facilitating your online community. In this session you will learn where to start when launching an online community, and how to enhance members’ engagement. Registrations will open soon.