Social Learning in an IDS Knowledge Exchange

Carl Jackson, Ewen LeBorgne and I co-facilitated a knowledge exchange at IDS entitled, "Acting on what we know and how we learn for climate and development policy' Andy Newsham of the IDS Climate Change team, the lead organiser, blogged on the genesis of the workshop, as did the IDS Director, Lawrence Haddad, on the context.

The three of us were were co-facilitating as part of our work for the Climate Change and Social Learning (CCSL) project, a stream of work in the Climate Change for Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) programme. We wanted to weave the social learning approach into the IDS Knowledge Exchange, partly because we believe that it provides an interesting methodology to address the issue of how to move from learning to action and partly as part of our own social learning about Social Learning.

This first blog describes the approach and the programme, developed by the three of us together with Andy Newsham and Geoff Barnard of the Climate Development Knowledge Network (CDKN), one of the event sponsors.

This event brought together four different strands or ‘framing cases’ (1) which all related to an overarching learning theme in relation with the focus of the event: ‘acting on what we learn for climate and development policy’. We wanted to integrate ‘social learning’ activities into the event to reflect on the relationship between individual and collective learning, seeking to identify what circumstances encourage the collaborative learning and action at scale necessary to engage with Climate Change.

The social learning experience was based on the triple-loop learning approach:

1. Instrumental learning: acquiring new knowledge
2. Communicative: understanding/reinterpreting knowledge through communication with others
3. Transformative: examining underlying assumptions leading to change in attitudes and social norms and collective action, ideally

This table lays out some differences between these three learning loops


This event has to bring together four different strands or ‘framing cases’ which all relate to an overarching learning theme in relation with the focus of the event: ‘acting on what we learn for climate and development policy’. To make this conference an even stronger and memorable event that leads to effective change, we propose to integrate ‘social learning’ activities into the event to weave the reflections and actions together and tap into the transformative potential of social learning. We aim particularly to reflect on the relationship between individual and collective learning, seeking to identify what circumstances encourage the collaborative learning and action at scale necessary to engage with Climate Change.

The social learning experience will use the triple-loop learning approach:

1. Instrumental learning: acquiring new knowledge
2. Communicative: understanding/reinterpreting knowledge through communication with others
3. Transformative: examining underlying assumptions leading to change in attitudes and social norms and collective action, ideally

This table lays out some differences between these three learning loops:

	First loop	Double loop	Triple loop
Nature	Instrumental	Communicative	Transformative
Use of knowledge	Acquiring new knowledge	Understanding / reinterpreting knowledge	Examining assumptions behind (particularly dominant) knowledge
Focus (also temporal)	Efficiency (now)	Effectiveness (next)	Dynamic relevance (over time) / adaptive capacity
Key questions	What are we doing now and how can we improve this? WHAT IS	What could we do to improve the pursuit of our aims? WHAT COULD BE	What should we do to improve the way we think about improving our approach? WHAT SHOULD BE
Approach followed	Static, unilateral information flows e.g. dissemination of case studies etc.	Participatory communication, bilateral knowledge flows	Dynamic experience building, multilateral knowledge flows

As the event unfolded we planned activities gave participants opportunities to go through these three loops by examining successively:

• existing experiences: what are we doing now? 
• opportunities to integrate and improve our collective approaches: what could we do together? 
• reflections about how we are learning about our effectiveness in climate change work: what should we do to learn more effectively and remain relevant over time, build our adaptive management and critical thinking capacity to influence collective social learning and action at scale?

In a second blog I'll add my own learning about learning from the event.

Social reporting at ERF2013 annual conference

Image credits: GDNet on Flickr

I've just returned yesterday for Kuwait City where, together with colleagues from GDNet, I've supported the social reporting at the 2013 ERF Annual Conference.

This is the third year I have attended this conference which have always found to be extremely interesting events, in terms of topics discussed and quality of speakers invited. This year event focused on the rise of Islamist parties following the Arab uprising, and what this means for the economic development of the region.

The plenary sessions looked at the causes of the Arab uprising and the rise of Islamist parties to power in Tunisia and Egypt; a comparison between these countries in terms of economic development policy since Islamist governments came to power; and finally a look at some future scenarios for the region.

With a small team of just three people we had to be selective in terms of what social reporting we could realistically do. We chose the usual suspects but we also tried something new.

Even if the crowd was not particularly Twitter-savvy - and unfortunately participants were not provided with Internet access till the third and last day of the conference (no need to comment on this...) - we covered the plenary sessions with live tweets using the hashtag #erf2013 - several tweeps from outside the event re-tweeted and joined in the conversation.

We also recorded several short video-blips with most of the speakers at the event. The videos are available on YouTube on this playlist. Most - if not all of them are - are also published on the ERF blog, together with short write-ups of the plenary sessions.

Further, we collected all social media outputs into a daily curated summary using Storify - see here the social stories for day one, two and three.

Last but definitely not least, we had done a bit of R&D (as in "robbing and duplicating") and got inspired by the multimedia coverage of the recent TED Global 2013 and their TED Quotables. We created a series of images with the most relevant quotes from speakers and participants at the ERF conference. While a bit more time consuming than we'd expected, these images worked well as we were displaying them on the big screen in the plenary room before each sessions started, alternating with pictures form the event. This attracted the attention of the participants who could view them as they were entering to attend the sessions. It was a nice experiment, and I think one I'll repeat in future social reporting of events.

Besides blogging, tweeting, blipping, photo-sharing and slide-sharing, what do you use when you do social reporting?

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Research to Impact Hackathon ....and the winner was...

Well, we were all winners, if truth be told, in the sense that we all learned a lot from the experience of the Hackathon at iHub Research in Nairobi last week. To begin with, the iHub itself is still under three years old yet has blossomed into an extraordinary innovation centre at the centre of a buzzing ecosystem of developers, projects, events, people, good coffee and, well, more people. There are over 10,000 registered members of the iHub community and it was through those networks that we were able to attract so many creative and plugged-in developers.

One of the newer projects is iHub Research, one of the co-organisers of the event. Leo Mukutu is Research Manager there and she was one of the judges of the competition. In this clip Leo describes the role of iHub Research and the criteria she used to judge the entries.



There were six entries in all, and in this video clip people from each team describe their proposals - and you can see who won!

(Update: a summary blog from iHub research) 

'Let me Hackathon that thing'

'Every good piece of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch', says Eric Raymond, author of the fabulous book on Open Source software, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Hackathons evolved to harness that personal passion of software developers to create interesting code that solves problems - or sometimes, just create elegant, interesting code simply to see what happens. Organisers provide a context - for example software platforms such as Ushahidi that constantly need to to be improved or movements and campaigns such as development data or aid transparency which need lots of programmes to import and aggregate data or present the data in a form usable by others and the public - and a space, with coffee, cakes and chocolate. Developers who enjoy working individually or in teams and are moved by the spirit of the organisers come together and have fun.

The Research to Impact Hackathon is different in significant ways to a standard hackathon. Firstly, there is often criticism that these events produce a lot of interesting but unfinished code, which is either taken over by the sponsor and developed internally or simply abandoned, with the developers un-engaged in the follow up. The sponsors of this event, IDS/ELDIS and CABI/R4D see this event as Phase One in a longer term process. They are providing small prizes for the best products but committing larger sums to supporting the development of particularly promising ideas and prototypes that have the potential to increase the use of research data.

Secondly, we wanted to provide focus to the developers based on an informed understanding of specific challenges faced on the ground, in East Africa, by those working in agriculture and nutrition, challenges which constrain the use of development data and opportunities it offers to enrich the development process. However, we had to steer carefully between being too directive of the developers - which could reduce creative and risk appearing to be asking for some free labour to help large organisations solve their problems - and not providing a clear enough set of scenarios.

So we were a bit anxious about how Day Two of the Hackathon would develop, especially since we were joined by some new developers who hadn't had the introduction to the personas, challenges and triggers which emerged from Day One of the Hackathon nor been part of the Ideation session. We should have known better: we are in the iHub, in Nairobi, Kenya, at the centre of a vibrant developer community, supported by the ideas and contacts of iHub Research. Many of the participants had been trained in mobile application development at the mLab - yet another source of energy within the iHub ecosystem (and the iHub is not even three years old!). And all the developers were in some way or another connected or developing software solutions to the needs of those in the agriculture value chain.

We introduced the data available from ELDIS, R4D and other relevant open data sources, including the World Bank's data site and the rapidly growing Kenyan Government OpenData portal; the ways to access the data through the ELDIS open API and the tools which Tim Davies is developing to access the data, including in Linked Data formats. Finally we introduced the personas from Day One, together with the ideas which had been rated as having the highest potential impact and most viable as the basis for developing a Proof of Concept in only two days (and nights!).

Chaos of the most productive kind ensued. People discussed ideas; formed, and reformed, teams; ate sausages; asked for more information about the personas; drank coffee; got support in exploring the data and learning to use the access tools available; fed-back ideas for discussion; storyboarded and planned; ate cake; began to hack. By the end of the day four groupings of ideas and people had emerged, all interesting and within the frameworks we had established, and some with the beginnings of demonstration code - either created or imported. Then we went for beer.

Day Three is a hack-day: teams will continue working on their ideas, preparing for a presentation on the morning of the fourth day, in some kind of Dragon's Den format. While the progress has been remarkable for two days, the acid test is, of course, what the teams can present on Day Four. Given their commitment to the longer term, the organisers are looking as much for coherent plans and realistic assumptions as finished code - but watch this space.

Research to Impact Hackathon with iHub Research, Nairobi

Open data on the web makes it possible to take information on research from many sources, and to generate ‘mash-ups’ that make it available in different places, on different platforms, and in ways that support action and impact. Open data can be remixed to answer key questions in ways that were not possible before.

One of the most interesting developments in the R4D project, which we have been supporting with CommsConsult and CABI, has been converting the metadata in the R4D database of DfID funded research to Open and Linked Data formats. The Institute for Development Studies (IDS) ELDIS team have been travelling in the same direction - working to open up access to their research information including by creating open APIs allowing anyone to tap into their 15+ years of curated development research. The rationale for this is that every year institutions, researchers and practitioners generate thousands of datasets, reports and articles about development issues. To give some idea of scale, DfID funds £200 million worth of research every year. Yet, much of this knowledge remains underused, locked away in online repositories such as R4D and ELDIS.

Presenting personas at the Research to Impact Hackathon

We tested this, perhaps a little unfairly, by asking the participants during the first day of the Hackathon we're working on this week in Nairobi, most of whom were subject experts we'd invited to provide context and scenarios for the developers to get their teeth into, how much they used either R4D or ELDIS data. About half had accessed the sites, very few accessed them more than once or twice a year. Yet these were researchers, information scientists and knowledge workers with intermediary NGOs like ALIN, all prime targets from the materials.

"Hackathons" (also known as a hackfest or hack day) are events in which computer programmers join forces with a number of other experts, such as designers, investors, project managers, and spend a short intense period together to develop technical ideas and solutions. The Research to Impact hackathon is focusing on the research data from R4D, ELDIS and other relevant sources - including those from Kenya such as KAINET - relating to agriculture and nutrition. We brought together subject matter experts with technical developers to explore and create innovative prototypes to increase the use and impact of research in development. The hackathon is being at the Nairobi iHub by iHub Research, a new programme within this open innovation space.

The first day focused on generating scenarios - use cases - for the developers to work on. We started by asking participants to identify some of the reasons that research data isn't accessed or used. The group then selected seven typical 'user types' who represent key potential audiences for the data. These personas included extension workers, researchers and knowledge workers - key intermediary roles for re-purposing data and linking with primary players in the agricultural value chain such as farmers, input suppliers and market intermediaries. The group also prioritised fleshing out the role of policy actors, key to addressing the whole range of issues which impact those working directly in agriculture. Working in groups these types were profiled and linked to the challenges previously identified. After rapid peer review specific 'triggers' were identified for each of the personas, things which might motivate them to change their behaviour in relation to the data. The personas will be shared in the EuforicWeb wiki as the Hackathon develops.

Evaluating ideas at the Research to Impact Hackathon

A group of developers joined in the afternoon. They were presented with the personas and had time to interrogate the subject specialists. We finished with an ideation session, when all participants were given 10 minutes to come up with at least 10 suggestions for technical developments - mobile or pad apps, web widgets or small pieces of linking or bridging code. Those ideas were located on a matrix representing high/low impact, high/low viability - in terms of being able to develop a proof of concept in the succeeding two days. There were an extraordinary number and range of ideas, both creative and very applied. The ideas which were voted as high/high will be taken into the hackdays to help kick-start the process.

Evaluation of CTA web2.0 and social media trainings 2008-2010

One of the most interesting piece of work we carried out in 2012 was an evaluation for CTA of its web2.0 related capacity building events (2008-2012). The goal of this study was to learn from three years of this web2.0 and social media training programme; to understand which demographic is the most enthusiastic adopters of web2.0 tools, and the impact that digital tools have in terms of personal development and institutional changes.

CTA Web2forDev Training Opportunity - Photo credits: Web2forDev website

Today, a blog post on Web2forDev summarises the main findings of the study:

• Between 2008 and 2010, CTA delivered 20 web2.0 related capacity building events, reaching a total of 510 trainees from over 20 ACP countries, mainly in Africa
• Not surprisingly, trainees under 36 are more likely to adopt web2.0 applications, except for online social networking, which interestingly was not affected by age;
• Female trainees have higher adoption rates than males for almost every web2.0 application;
• Trainees working for NGOs and national and international organisations are more likely to adopt web2.0 tools than those in educational and research institutions;
• Nearly 90% of trainees have improved their capacity to search for, access and share information;
• The use of the iMark module is the preferred way chosen by trainees to introduce colleagues and co-workers to social media;
• Bringing about systematic adoption of social media in institutions is much more challenging.

The article has generated some interesting comments and discussions, both on the Web2fordev website as well as in Web2forDev community on Dgroups.

A follow up post will soon be published to presents some of the recommendations included in the final report.
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Dgroups 2012 Annual Meeting and online peer exchange

As part of the management support services we are proving to the Dgroups Foundation, we're working with the its Board to organize the 2012 Annual Meeting.

After having met in Rome last year during the ShareFair , this year Annual Meeting will be held online on 15 November from 14:00 GMT and it will consist of two parts:

1. The Dgroups Partners Business Meeting - open to Dgroups members
2. An open peer exchange session on “How to make most effective use of Dgroups” - this session is open to all interested participants. It will be the occasion to hear from two different Dgroups Partners, FARA and RWSN, which will share their experience and lessons learned in using Dgroups for their work. 

If you are interested in joining the public peer exchange session, few seats are still available from the event registration page on Eventbrite. 

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