Agknowledge Share Fair - Recordings of virtual and blended sessions

As I wrote in my last post, we recently supported 4 sessions from the Agknowledge Share Fair in Addis with options for remote participation.

If you hadn't have the chance to attend the event in Addis or online, here's where you can watch the recordings of the sessions we supported.

• (Introduction to) Liberating Structures (Fisher Qua) 
• Social Reporting (Pier Andrea Pirani and Pete Cranston) 
• Working with Virtual Teams (Nancy White and Ewen Le Borgne)
• Liberating Structures: Part 1 - Part 2 (Ewen Le Borgne and Pete Cranston)

Note, the videos are mostly unedited so use the navigation on the left end side of the Adobe Connect recording playback to skip through the different parts of the video.

As you'll see, it's not an easy job to combine onsite and online facilitation and ensure participation and engagement. But with practice, experience and the desire to experiment, a lot can be achieved to create participatory, blended meetings. 

Blending online and offline meetings - 5 short lessons from Addis Share Fair

Earlier this week, we supported 4 sessions from the Agknowledge Share Fair in Addis with options for remote participation. As well as giving people that could not travel to Addis the opportunity to participate in part of the event, for us this was also an occasion to experiment more with Adobe Connect and how to use it to support online and offline events - and blend them together.

In designing the remote participation, we had decided to try with different formats and modalities of e/participation.

• A webcast of a session from Addis via Adobe Connect, with online interaction carried out via chat and breakout rooms
• Two sessions where the conveners joined in remotely, and online and offline participants interacted in various ways from group chats to bilateral chats to small groups in breakout rooms
• A blended session with activities in parallel on site and with a fully blended group, with two people from Addis joining three online participants into Adobe.

We’ll be having a debrief with the rest of the team that supported this experimenting. And we’re collecting feedback from participants, to understand how they have experienced these sessions, and how they can be improved. But to get the conversation started, here are 5 quick takeaways from this recent experiments:

1. Online and offline have different pace and dynamics
   We probably all knew this before but experimenting to bring remote participation into a face to face meeting confirmed how interactions and exchanges have a very different pace, online and offline. In the former, the feedback loops are much slower.
2. Split the processes - and bridge in debrief
   Because interactions work differently online and offline, running the two in parallel is easier to manage. You can have the same activities F2F and online, but these may have to be facilitated in different ways. For example, you may go through a set of 1 to 1 chats between physical participants, while having a group chat with all virtual participants. The exchange and cross over between online and offline can be done in the debriefing sessions.
3. Blended ain’t easy
   It’s very different is when you try to have physical participants interacting in small groups with online participants. This requires a lot of preparation, and an optimum use of the technology, not only to avoid sound issues but also to make sure participants can interact using text, video and voice.
4. You need a team

Depending on the type of e-participation that you want to enable from a face to face meeting, you may need different people being part of your facilitation team: two facilitators (one onsite and one online), one technical host and, if the onsite facilitator isn’t experienced with blended meetings, one ‘blender’ who connects online and offline from the physical meeting room.

5. Always have (some) Plan B(s)
   Always be prepared for what can go wrong. For example, in one occasion we lost the video and audio feed from the room - it’s important to have ways to notify participants immediately, and be ready to fill in this gap with other activities.

We’ll keep on reflecting on this experience and experimenting with tools, approaches and facilitation techniques, and we’ll make sure we share our findings here. Let us know what your experience is with blended online offline meetings and what we can learn from other experiences.

Pier Andrea Pirani

Learn with us online at the ‘AgKnowledge Innovation' Process Share Fair

On 25 and 26 May, we'll be joining the ILRI communications and KM group in Addis Ababa and several partners in the AgKnowledge Innovation' Process Share Fair.

The focus of the event is on the "design and delivery of truly effective ‘process’ improvements that lead to applied innovation, social learning and value for money (in agriculture)."

While Pete will be onsite in Addis, I'll be connecting online; together we'll facilitate and host one session on social reporting. We'll also provide technical support and participate in the other 3 sessions that are open for online participants.

To help us organise we’ve set up Eventbrite pages for the four sessions currently open, so please register here (all times East Africa Addis Ababa/Nairobi):

• Mon 25 May, 10.30: (Introduction to) Liberating Structures (Fisher Qua) http://bit.ly/1S0DG4q
• Mon 25 May, 13:50: Social Reporting (Pier Andrea Pirani) http://bit.ly/1QWIJRM 
• May, 15.50: Working with Virtual Teams (Nancy White and Ewen Le Borgne) http://bit.ly/1HmYr4b 
• Tue 26 May, 11.00: Liberating Structures (Ewen Le Borgne and Pete Cranston) http://bit.ly/1Ftf0hi

We’re experimenting with different types of online engagement, from a simple webcast of a Liberating Structures workshop session to more interactive formats, with presenters both online and in the room, and participants able to interact equally with those physically and remotely in the room.

If you're interested in learning and experimenting with us, please do register for the sessions and join us online next week!

Listening to the Roots - Focus group on indigenous knowledge #SFAddis

What are the areas of integration of indigenous knowledge in different African contexts? How can indigenous knowledge be active content in future farmer's mind and actions? What can we do to conserve indigenous knowledge for its fair, ethical and active use by all? Indigenous knowledge work is scattered and project based: How can we bring it together and permanent?

These were the leading questions that informed the focus group session on indigenous knowledge at the Agknowledge Africa Share Fair.

Convened by Anke Weisheit (Mbarara University, Uganda) and facilitated by Pete Cranston, the session followed the world cafe methodology, with five speakers offering food for thought with short 5 minutes presentations. The majority of the time available was left for participants to discuss around tables and address the leading questions.

Sylvia Nyana from Penn State University presented on the role of libraries as centers for the dissemination of Indigenous Knowledge. In her view, African libraries should be reinvented from the current Western model to better serve the needs of the communities they want to support.



A different experience was shared by Luke Olang from the IGAD Climate Prediction & Applications Centre (ICPAC) in Kenya. In the initiative he presented, he explained how they are trying to compare traditional ways of 'rain making' or rain forecasting with modern science information, and harmonize the two for climate forecast adaptation at the user level.



Anke Weisheit addressed the issue of institutionalizing indigenous knowledge. The model she presented aims contributing to a better awareness and valuation of Indigenous Knowledge Systems with the aim to harness the potential of Indigenous Knowledge for socio-economic and political transformation.



Three other presenters shared their experience on:

• Traditional ways and processes that knowledge is created and shared in Africa;
• The Mwana Alirenji multimedia community project;
• Indigenous knowledge in utilization of local trees shrubs for Sustainable Livestock Production in Central Tanzania.

You can read more about these experiences on the Agknowledge Africa Share Fair wiki.

The discussion from the session will continue online, using a wiki to write a book to be published in open access.

Slow Knowledge and McK snacks at AgKnowledge Africa

Although a lot of our work in Euforic Services is to do with the use of new media and ICT tools we also get involved in Knowledge Sharing activities, including of course IKMemergent. At the AgKnowledge Africa ShareFair we joined a group of vintage and 'novello' KM4Dev members to organise the face to face Knowledge Sharing stream on the initial training day. As I describe in this post on the IKMemergent Giraffe blog, it was a great opportunity to reflect on how new media tools need to be integrated with more traditional knowledge sharing and communication tools.

Interview with Owen Barder at the AgKnowledge Africa Share Fair

After his inspiring talk during the opening session at the AgKnowledge Shair Fair, Owen Barder took few minutes to sit with us for a 'coffee-blip' - a short video interview over a "bunna", the Ehiopian traditional coffee.

In the interview, Barder he defines development as an "evolutionary process", where we have to "try, fail and learn", a process that begins with variation and then selection."

In this process, we need to have a diversity of ideas and therefore we need to have access to open, free information and knowledge on which we can form our ideas and discuss around issues.

AgKnowledge Africa Share Fair: Training on video sharing

It has been a busy day today at the AgKnowledge Africa Share Fair taking place in sunny Addis Ababa. The event will officially open only tomorrow, but today already more than 180 participants gathered at the ILRI campus to attend the training and learning day 0, or as it has also been dubbed, the "Day Oh, now I now how... !"

The day has been divided in 2 blocks of 8 parallel training session, each focussing on different tools and methods to share information and knowledge, collaborate and co-create content. These sessions covered topics such as working with audio and radio, making the best out of the media, face to face methods for knowledge sharing, working with Mendeley, using Google Geo products and Google Apps, blogging and collaborative writing. The day was then wrapped up by our social media 'elder' Peter Casier who brought all these different tools - and more - together to provide participant with the broad perspective on social media and how they can be applied to support, enable and make our daily work more effective, as individuals or teams - video recordings will follow.

In the context of this training day, I facilitated 2 sessions on video sharing. Both sessions where really well attended: in fact, with around 25 people in each group, at first I wondered how I could manage such numbers, given the fact that I planned for a very hands on training. Eventually, besides some technical problems with participants not having the possibility to install editing software on their machines, it all worked out for the best.

I kept the introduction part at the minimum, just some 20 minutes to provide participants with a quick intro to video sharing, or 'blipping' as we like to call it. We are not professional filmmakers, but we think there's a great value in recoding short video interviews (on 'blips', indeed) during face to face events, to record a meaningful comment, a provocative thought, or an interesting experience. After the intro, participants divided into small groups and went around the campus, interviewing each others. When back in the room, we went through the editing process together, and then each group tried out editing their videos by themselves, adding subtitles, transition effects and music with Movie Maker. Finally, they uploaded thier content on the Share Fair training account in Blip tv. Check out some of their products, and see how far some of them when in just a couple of hours training.

At the end of the session, I did some blipping myself with 3 of the participants, to capture what they have learned, and get some first impression about how they think they could use video sharing in their work.



Event tought quite intense, the training and the all learning day was agreat success. Now waiting for the official opening of AgKnowlege Africa Share Fair tomorrow morning and the rest of the programme of what promises to be a be a great event.