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Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Data cake


As part of our R4D work we're thinking about the next stage in its open data strategy, building on the work done by Tim Davies with CABI on publishing the R4D data in linked-data formats. So this just feels right:

data cake

Image by EpicGraphic

Thanks to @Duncan_IDS for the link

Sunday, October 21, 2012

WBI social reporting apprenticeship programme on innovative procurement reforms

We're in South Africa this week for a new, exciting collaboration we have started with the World Bank Institute (WBI). It's about social media, ça va sans dire, but this time we'll be working with quite different types of development professionals and on a very specific topic.

Indeed, for the next four months we will be working with the WBI to facilitate an apprenticeship programme in Social Reporting on Innovative Procurement Reforms.

The rationale for this apprenticeship program is that innovative procurement reform initiatives are happening around the world, including in Fragile States. These efforts can offer powerful insights about what drives procurement reform. However, they are infrequently well documented and shared as practitioners don’t have tools or the support to document their work, leading to a missed opportunity to bring visibility to their work and share with peers.

The programme seeks to address this knowledge and capacity-building gap.

The WBI has identified innovative procurement champions committed to advancing public procurement reform, transparency and efficiency and we'll be kicking off the programme with a 3 days face-to-face workshop in South Africa. In the workshop, we'll train participants in the use of web 2.0  and social media  tools to capture and share their experiences.

One of the excellent features of this programme is that it goes well beyond the more usual social reporting training events. At the workshop, participants will agree the activity(ies) that they will explore and the colleague(s) with whom they will collaborate for the remaining months of the apprenticeship following the workshop.  It will be up to participants to identify and agree upon activities. These could include examples such as:
  • documenting their own experiences of what works, 
  • identifying  and documenting common good practices across countries or regions, 
  • developing training materials which describe the stages of a process or 
  • reporting on a deeper follow-through on the implementation of a specific activity.  
We'll support the apprentices with coaching throughout the duration of the programme, through online webinars, email discussions and virtual conferences.

All knowledge generated will be shared with a global community of practitioners for further learning and uptake - mainly through the Pro-Act platform.

In the video below, Marcela Rozo (WBI) introduces the Apprenticeship Program, its objectives and process.


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Monday, October 15, 2012

Using Feedly as your personal home page

In his post about Top tips for more effective advocacy Duncan Green recently wrote about the importance of setting up a personal home page as a way to keep on top of recent news and resources - before diving into your mailbox. He also pointed to the excellent guide by Owen Barder on how to set up your personal home page with Google Reader or similar services.

Most of the reasons and the advantages to use personal readers have been well described in these posts and there's no point for me to repeat them here.

What I'd like to share with you here is how personalised home pages are helping me to do my work, and what's the tool I'm using to manage my streams of incoming contents.

Not as common as it should be
But before going down into the details, one small reflection based on direct experience and observation from the social media trainings we conduct at Euforic Services: it really strikes me to see how many people still do not know or do not use personal home pages as preferred channel to 'read' the web.

This is true across the board and regardless of the background of people we train. In a workshop on social media for researchers we facilitated last June, only 1 out of more than 20 participants had set up his Google Reader, without actually using it. Similarly, in the social media workshops we're conducting these days at FAO, we are finding that well over 90% of participants do not know or do not use personalised home pages. That's a lot, isn't it?

What's in it for me
For me, my personal home page is the only way I could possibly keep track of about 215 (and counting...) sites and blogs - without spending all my day browsing around the net! The personal home page is the first thing I check in the morning, and then several other time during the day, to look for updates about relevant topics for my work (social and digital media, knowledge sharing and learning, ICTs in developing countries, etc), news from my country and the beyond, comments and analysis and...well..field hockey..

From my personal home page, I can manage different streams of incoming content, browsing my different sources and save items to read later, bookmark them in my Diigo and Delicious lists, share them through Twitter, Facebook and other social media channels. All in the same interface and with just few clicks.

Trying different tools..and sticking now with Feedly
After having tried different feed readers, for more than one year now my personal home page is set up using Feedly - and am really lovin'it!


The way I use Feedly is actually in combination with Google Reader. Indeed, Feedly provides two way synch with Google Reader so no matter if I add new subscriptions to one of the two, these get replicated onto the other. Same goes for items I read or save for later. Basically Feedly adds a much nicer interface of top of your Google Reader and allows you to browse your feeds more in a magazine style than in the dry, flat layout of Google Reader.

Besides RSS feeds, Feedly allows you also to import Twitter and Facebook content, and to tweet and share content to other social media media channels. Further, it promotes content according to 'social engagement', pushing on your front page the most popular items from your sources.

Oh, did I say that the Feedly mobile and tablet apps also look great? Maybe they are even better that the web interface for some aspects.

If you haven't tried it yet, I suggest you give Feedly a chance. Maybe using feed readers to read the social web will be a different, much nicer experience as it has been for me.

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Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Content Objects - Nectar for busy social media bees

Online content on its own, however interesting, informative or attractive, is as static as a poster on a wall. It will attract attention from people who pass, who might tell other people, but the impact of the work you have put into developing and posting your content - often quite a lot of work - will be a fraction of its potential unless you put as much effort into promoting and spreading the word. After our first social media training workshops at FAO in July 2012 we developed a new metaphor to try and communicate both how this can happen and the value of the random connections which fuel social media communications and very, very rarely, make content go viral.

An iris in Oxford's Botanical Gardens 
During the second workshop at FAO last week we introduced the new idea, using a natural metaphor since, as ever, nature got there first. With some trepidation, to an audience composed mainly of scientists, we talked about the role of bees in pollination. It was an excuse to show nice pictures of flowers - always good after lunch - which can represent an individual content object - a photo, video, blog or tweet. Flowers have evolved a variety of mechanisms to attract the insects they need to reproduce - colour, shape, smell, location and their structure, making it easy for bees and other insects to visit, collect nectar and pass on. In the same way, content needs to use all the tricks of the trade to stand out from the crowd. As well as the normal techniques for making the content communicate, these days that means ensuring that 'share this' buttons, or the equivalent, are prominently displayed - like the landing stage of the flower (see the bottom of this blog post).

A bee visiting an iris, already carrying pollen
The second element in the metaphor is the pollen that collects on the bees as they go from flower to flower. Randomly, unaware of their central role in passing on genes, the bees transmit the pollen from one flower to another. The parallel with social media is, we hope, obvious: the famous - and very shaky - claims that a tweet reached n1000 people operates on the same principle. If someone re-tweets one of my tweets then all of that person's followers will see it and, in the random way that tweet-viewing works, a tiny fraction of them might spot something in the second that it scrolls by and pass it on, and so on.

To enrich the metaphor, bees go back to their hives and communicate the location of the flower. I was startled that this amazing piece of scientific decoding wasn't universally understood. At the risk of stating the obvious, as these pictures below show, patient scientists observed and decoded the movements of bees returning to hives and recognised that they were communicating direction and distance through a precise set of dance moves (well, sort of dance moves, of a bottom waggling kind). Other bees set off to the same spot, and so the cycle continues. Again, we hope the link to social media is clear: adding a link to a tweet, or mentioning people in a blog, or tagging a photograph is doing the same thing as the bee dance: telling our hive - followers, friends, readers - precisely where this good smelling, tasty, bright content object can be found.

Bees dance, communicating direction &  distance in relation to the sun

And in the wonderful way of the world, bees also turn the nectar into honey, which is harvested across the world by animals and humans. Without being too fanciful about it, this can be seen as analogous to the way that learning and knowledge spreads and is shared, where other people's ideas and learning help us manufacture something that is both new and made up of millions of ideas from other people, places and times.

It's always good when you arrive at a point and see the marks that show someone else has passed this way. I learnt that Peter Casier has developed a similar metaphor in his work for CGIAR on social media strategy. Peter uses the metaphor of candy and shops, where the research item is the candy, the site the shop, and the social media task is to go out and spread the word - through tweets, blogs etc. We must both have a sweet tooth.

Friday, October 05, 2012

Two sides of the Evaluation Coin

Evaluating projects is probably the most demanding of development roles. Good Development depends on learning, on knowledge sharing and on adapting projects to emerging issues and changes in the external environment. It sounds so easy put like that, but changing direction - especially if it involves reducing or closing down activities - is difficult and fraught. Evaluators walk into a minefield of expectations, anxieties, conflicting interests and plain old financial pressures when they take on the task of reviewing progress within a project and reporting back to all those who are involved - the people in whose name the project is being run, the project staff, the managers and the donors.

As we reported back in December 2010, together with CommsConsult and John Rowley, we carried out an evaluation of the AfricaAdapt project for the Institute of Development Studies (IDS). The evaluation, as many do, took up far more time than we had estimated - and budgeted - and was a difficult exercise involving a lot of negotiation, both with the client and the project staff. However, we learnt a lot in the process and the engagement with our colleagues was intense and, generally, enjoyable.

Determined to walk our talk we signed up for the  virtual writeshop process led by Irene Gujit for the Better Evaluation project. The aim was to work with the contractor - Penelope Beynon, then of IDS - to write a joint account of the project, exploring what worked and what didn't work, and suggest recommendations so others could possibly avoid the problems we faced.

Looking at the Better Evaluation new website, full of fascinating and insightful resources, including the report we developed on the evaluation - Two sides of the Evaluation Coin. It's quite possibly unique amongst the resources in being written by both the contractor and the consultants, and where we couldn't agree on a joint account, we spelt out our differences.