Learning about upscaling of dairy development online and face-to-face
Heifer in collaboration with Agri-ProFocus organized a learning event on July 2nd about dilemmas in upscaling of dairy development. The idea to start online was born a few months earlier. The organizers felt starting online could help with the following 4 things:
Get to know each other so that a positive climate is created for learning together
Better content-wise preparation for the learning event with the participants by sharing and discussing case studies online before the event
Help to organize the logistics, in particular transport
Disseminate and validate the draft toolbox developed by Heifer
A team of three facilitators was formed with a variety of skills; one was a dairy specialist from Heifer (not familiar with online exchange), one process facilitator from Agri-ProFocus and one consultant online facilitation (external). As always, time for preparation was short and the team met only once for about 2 hours to get to know each other, plan and divide tasks – and actually started the next day!
The design There was one month left before the learning event, so that was the maximum time that could be used online. A dairy and development Ning platform was put together and a group of roughly 100 registered people from all over the globe were invited to the platform. The team chose to start parallel discussions: (a) the cases, (b) a thread of introductions, (c) an online game (two truths and a lie), (d) to ask for learning expectations and (e) logistics. The team agreed to communicate via mails and skype instant messaging and try to react within 24 hours to each others questions. Every week a message was sent out to all registered participants on the platform, tips from the facilitators were put on the homepage and updated when necessary and we made sure to welcome all participants with a personal note.
What happened? Roughly half of the invited people responded (50) and signed up for the platform. Immediately, they started to invited others working in dairy development, so we reached a total of 94 participants on the Ning. The cases and introductions were very active threads and all cases received comments from people who had read them carefully. We noticed that we had to invest to get a first reaction to a question, after which more people followed. Almost half of the ‘Ningers’ could not participate in the event in the Netherlands. That brought us to the idea to make short videos to post back for the others who were not present. Unfortunately this person fell ill and nobody could take over. Therefore summaries were made and posted back to the Ning. The online facilitation took each of us 12-20 hours of online facilitation over the course of 4 weeks.
In the evaluation 62% of the participants in the learning event indicated they logged onto the online platform. The comments were appreciative: “It got me involved in the subject”, “I contributed and learned a lot”, “Everybody has a chance” and “Good preparation, great introduction, up-to-date information”
What did we achieve? The online participation and discussions far exceeded the expectations of the organizing team, given the fact that most invitees are busy and not familiar with this type of online exchange. The case presenters on the learning event noted that people went deeply into the cases and they were able to go beyond trying to understand the case to a real analysis. There was a open, safe atmosphere which allowed people to be provocative and give constructive criticisms without others feeling attacked.
It is hard to measure the effect on the networking on the Ning. The online exchange allowed some acquaintance and dairy people are already well networked. Both factors helped to create a good atmosphere. Many people recognized faces from the ning and it probably helped to reduce anxiety levels because people had a clearer idea of whom to expect.
Most people carpooled- but it is hard to say whether that was a result of the ning. Only one person offered the carpool through the ning. We didn’t get a clear picture of the transport needs online. The draft toolbox was disseminated during the last week. Unfortunately we don’t have data how often it was downloaded (and less how often it was read). What would we do the same and what to do differently if we’d had to organize it again? We’re quite content and enthusiastic about the results, so we’d basically do the same thing we did. Investing in welcoming people, making sure a first person reacts online to questions, tips from the facilitator on the homepage and weekly summaries for all seemed to work well for this group of people with little online exchange experience. The focus on cases worked very well for the dairy professionals because it allowed them to go straight to the heart of their profession. The combination of skills within the team worked out well, as did the weekly or so skype teleconferences within the team. And of course part of the success can be contributed to the cases that appealed to the participants. Things to improve:
Plan enough time to make summaries of the ning discussions as an input for the face-to-face event. Since the reactions exceeded our expectations, making summaries was time consuming.
The icebreaker is good because it is low threshold activity for some participants. However, the ‘two truths and a lie’ was too complex. An easier icebreaker might get more reactions. One participant recognized the exercise from a face-to-face event, so you might go for a familiar icebreaker and translate it online.
Don’t combine two questions in one thread. One of the two questions might be ignored. Be very clear what your question is.
Navigation remained difficult. The lesson is to give priority to a very clear structure. However, for people who are new to ning or other online platforms the experience may remain chaotic, it is a learning curve for the participants. So it might also be good to allow more time for learning to navigate the online space, both for participants and facilitators!. An idea for participants may be to organize an online scavenger hunt on the forum or a teleconference for those who feel lost?
It might work better to focus attention of participant to plan case discussions one after the other rather than simultaneously. For instance, 2 cases per week. This helps to focus everybody’s attention. In our case, the period of 4 weeks was short for that because it takes more than a week to get a substantial amount of participants online.
Install analytics (eg. Google analytics) or ensure downloads via other sites that monitor the number of downloads so that you can monitor those data. For instance, you can upload a document on scribd.com and link to it on the Ning.
Friday the 13th, ICCO invited all interested to an afternoon in Utrecht, the Netherlands, about working with wikis in development organisations. Some interesting and honest stories from ICCO, Euforic and IICD were shared, and David Weekly, the founder of pbwiki was around to share tips for power users of pbwiki and get input from his customers so that the service of pbwiki can be improved. David seemed really committed to doing that and kept on asking everyone what their wishes were. Unfortunately for David, but funnily enough for us the following happened: while trying to convince everyone that he was not only focused on the USA, he called Dutch Danish or rather Dutch coffee Danish coffee. Well, Europe remains hard for Americans :).
Maarten Boers already shared the ideas behind the compart flowers adopted by ICCO in an earlier blogpost. Compart flowers have their basis in the compart wikis, that work as a kind of starting page for themes and teams. It was interesting to hear current experiences. 180 staff has been trained so far, and 80 staff of partners in the south have been trained. 58 wikis have been created, with more than 8000 views/month. There are only 40 editors, which shows that not many people are co-editing on the wikis so far. However, the wikis work as a referenct point and moved part of ICCO's harddisk online, so that this information is now accessible. Challenges are to make the wikis digestable and manage scale. Examples were shared of the Educafroc wiki, a private wiki to support a conference in West Africa. The wiki was used for participant introductions, upload 'blips'= videos, and have a Question and Answer sessie. Hence, it became a multi-medial report for the conference. Henk Gilhuis shared another example of a wiki about landrights in Brasil, also a private wiki. Lessons are that you focus on a concrete need, use a simple structure, manage access levels, provide timely support and make sure there is some fun too.
Euforic, the network for European NGOs is basically doing everything in a wiki. From intranet, via making presentations, to making project proposals, annual reports and archiving. I guess this only works if everyone is raving about wikis. Euforic created a great wiki as introductory to their web2.0 training called web2share. You can go their to find introductions into all kind of web2.0 tools.
For IICD, pbwiki worked as an easy entry tool, people experimented with it, and now wikis are part of their intranet. (zwicki wiki part of plone), replacing slowly the hard disk. A realistic example was the inetwork wiki from Uganda. It was a success at the time, but hasn't been updated for a year. This shows how hard it is to make wikis into living documents, if they are centered around a one-off event. An example is the web2fordevelopment wiki, which worked well around the conference, and is a repository, but not a dynamic, continuously updated resource.
Finally David Weekly talked about how he started pbwiki and that it enables easy online collaboration across departments or companies. Within companies, there may be easy solutions, or wiki functions, but across companies it was always difficult. PBwiki wanted to solve that problem by making a wiki as easy as making a peanut butter sandwich. But this is also a great service to organisations that are too small to have their IT-department.
A great power user tip that David shared was page translations. By adding this to your wiki you offer can page translation to your wiki visitors with one click: 1. go to google.com language tools 2. select website, source and destination language 3. paste the url by clicking on add link to your wiki page 4. you have automatic translations with one click
If you want to hear David Weekly talk about pbwiki, and how he likes to interact and improve pbwiki to meet customer needs watch the video below.
Online project management by Agriterra for more transparency
Collanos Collanos is a free tool for project management. It integrates all communication you can have within a project, so documents, discussions, notes, etc. So, instead of e-mailing to and fro or having to find documentation in several places, you can collect it all within this tool. It also allows for creating different project teams and you can assign tasks and deadlines to the team members. On the website you can take a tour and get a better idea what it is all about.
The basic features are easy and useful. If you would want additional functionality, they will charge you. During our meeting there were some questions about where the data is stored. It appears that all data will be stored on your own hard disk. So, in case Collanos would cease to exist you will not have lost all your documentation. It works as such that all documentation will be saved/copied to the hard disk of all team members and updated whenever they log on. A negative result of this is that you cannot log on to the tool from different locations and see all documents. For example you work with Collanos at the office, but you’d also like to work with it from home, you will have to create a second account for your computer at home and add that account to the group as well. As such you can have access to the team-documentation as well.
Agriterra's project management tool Agro-info.net Agriterra is an organisation working with and for farmers in developing countries. To register all the projects, Agriterra has developed a database that functions as our project-management tool and as such serves as our management-information tool as well: Agro-info.net . We highly value transparency about our work, so the information is accessible for anyone interested. Through agro-info.net we can also offer a website to the producer organisations (farmers) we work with. These websites are a copy of agro-info and as such a simple solutions for producer organisations to be represented on the web. All the projects Agriterra is involved in are being registered on agro-info.net and they can be followed step-by-step and in detail from application until they are finished. All participating organisations are added in the system as well the planned budgets and logframes. Once a project reaches the execution phase the contracts are added to the database. To monitor our actual activities we created a Results tab where we register per year what the results are, what was spent, how the project scored on some key points of our programme (participation of women in the projects, outreach, etc.). All information in the database is interrelated. So, if there is a news item about a project, this can be linked. Or when the report of a mission has been completed, it will be added to the documents and linked to the mission itself.
Collaboration with other organisations We are now in the process of increasing the quantity of information we can register in the Organisations-module to have the information about our customers in one place, but also to organisations we do not work with (yet) but are active in a country where we also work. The aim with this database is to become a resource site for and about producer organisations worldwide. So, if you would like to add your projects with producer organisations as well, you are more than welcome. Or if you are interested to see if the set-up of this database fits the needs of your organisation, you are invited to contact me Marjolein Hondebrink (hondebrink@agriterra.org)
Twitter provides you the possibility to exchange short messages with a large number of people. You can follow people, or otherwise, people can follow you. Twitter can be used in many different ways.
For example, you can use your twitter network to help you do your work. If you are looking for a guest speaker on a certain topic, and you can not directly find this person, than you can distribute your question to your network of twitter friends. It also provides possibilities to exchange your emotions, questions and other experiences. By spreading your message to a group of more than 30 people, you can always expect some responses from some people. So, in some situations this tool can be very helpful. But ofcourse, you have to build your twitter network first. When you start twitter as a new twitterer, it may seem like a stream of useless messages.
Nancy White: "So the bottom line, the value of Twitter depends on who you are connecting with, not the totality of the twitterstream (though that probably has value if you had the time to understand it and the patterns it holds.)"
Gerrit Visser from ICCO: "In itself Twitter may not seem all that valuable. With Nonaka’s old paradigm that knowledge management is essentially ‘connecting people to people’ I do think that Twitter in itself has an enormous potential. Yes it’s value may depend very much to the people you are connected to. I even dare to say to the ‘quality of your network’. The content that people share on Twitter differs as much as the people one is connected to."
Kwami Ahiabenu II from Ghana has set up an twitter account for the upcoming Ghanaian elections: Ghanaelections (see picture). Kwami explained that they did so with the following objectives in mind:
1.micro blog the upcoming elections providing short and concise news items
2. to direct more visitors to our website about the elections in Ghana
3. for Ghanaians living abroad, since they can not connect to our local short code service, an idea for them is to follow us on twitter and then linked it to their mobile, effectively having updates on their mobile phones using twitter instead of direct messages we will send to subscribers in Ghana
4. lastly we wanted to use the twitter to connect with other twitter users providing content on the elections unfortunately, there are only very few twitter accounts from this part; see a short announcement about our twitter and SMS service, wondering whether twitter is the right tool.
Surveymonkey helps Agri-ProFocus to organise meetings
At the Agri-ProFocus support office, we organise exchange meetings between professionals from research, private sector, NGO and government. Registration and feedback are very time-consuming and prone to errors, so this year we started to use SurveyMonkey, an online survey tool. We tried out the free version and then bought a Professional Annual Account for $ 180 a year. This allows for our logo, and the other 10 advantages you can read on their website.
Our experience with SurveyMonkey has taught us the following lessons: 1. we need to test a new invitation in our team; 2. we have to check people who misspell their email address; 3. we should allow for more than one response per computer; 4. after completion we direct to a website or a wiki for background information. 5. manual data entry is used for the odd participant who cannot enter the registration screen.
In our events too, one problem is with no-shows, especially if there is limited room available. We do politely ask people to cancel their registration by e-mail. Our events are free, we don’t think that an entrance fee would reduce the no-show problem.
One of the advantages of using surveymonkey for our registrations is that we can ask some additional questions about interests for certain topics etc. Surveymonkey registration allows us to ask for their priorities beforehand and their feedback and follow-up afterwards. This way we can link the learning with the doing. Network events then contribute to more and better cooperation in Agri-ProFocus.
David Jacovkis works for the Free Knowledge Institute and explained why and how you can browse and contribute anonymously to the internet. He tell us it is a basic skill that parents should teach their children. There is a open source software that you can download on TOR. TOR is an anonymiser tool. It makes use of a network of intermediate computers so that nobody knows from where you are connecting and to which websites. You will find the instructions- which are quite easy on the website of Torproject.
You can watch David explain this system:
If you want to know more about anonymous blogging, Global Voices has put up a technical guide for anonymous blogging which you can find here. It explains more steps like choosing pseudonyms.
Again I'm reblogging a post from the ICCO blog. Its written by Gerrit Visser from ICCO, who visited SNV in the Hague to learn from their interactive (online) learning spaces for SNV staff, e-learning.
Some of their lessons:
Take into account that one of the biggest bottlenecks can be the diversity in bandwidth at decentralised locations. Even after investing in the availability of satellites this problem occurred.
Start small and let it grow as you may gradually learn from evaluations or glorious mistakes.
Provide learning modules on a USB stick instead of downloading huge files in the various decentralised situations.
Keep the technology for the learner as simple as possible
Enhance the learning results by making optimal use of the visual as well as the auditive learning components.
SNV found that the advantage of the e-modules are the consistent messages in the initial phase of ones career within the organisation. A last tip:
A big variety of off the shelf training may be obtained from NetG, Microsoft and the Distance Learning Centre (UK). A provider in the Netherlands of video material for training purposes is the Training Facily Center (TFC).
Three lessons of a year of trying to introduce web2.0 tools in a research institute
The webtastings weblog has a blogpost written by Pete Shelton reflecting on the introduction of web2.0 tools for researchers at the International Food Policy Research Institute IFPRI. I thought it was a perfect match with the subject of this weblog, that's why I'm reblogging it here, but you may ofcourse check out the full blogpost too.
What did they do?
They offered a series of weekly trainings in web tools for interested researchers at IFPRI. Wikis, Social bookmarking, RSS readers, etc. The participants had not heard about the tools before.
What happened?
The participants of the training did not use the tools in the months following their training. So the team started asking why the participants did not use the tools.
What are the three lessons?
The 3 lessons they learned from this experience are:
1. Focus on the job rather than the tool. In the training the team was focusing on the tool rather than the application. Yet, it turned out that researchers wanted to see how this tool could be applied in their daily lives.
2. Researchers liked to hear experiences from other researchers. When a fellow researcher gave a presentation about her blog, it had a much higher impact than examples given by the trainers. People can relate to the lives and stories of their peers rather than others.
3. Don’t assume you know what researchers need- go out and ask them. When asked about their interests researchers gave answer based on what they thought the training team could offers, eg. wikis, social bookmarking etc. Yet, when they rephrased the question into: " What are some common communication bottlenecks you face in your work?" Many researchers complained of email overload. Others expressed the need for collaborative work spaces for posting data, figures and working versions of research. So then you can start raising the interest from there.
Personally, I always have the impression the way the tools are introduced matters too. If you get people excited about new possibilities they will go a long way to learn about it by themselves. However, if they get the feeling they have to use a new tool because someone else wants them to do so, they may not be interested at all. Lastly, these tools are social media, so it is hard to start a journey on your own, but much better to do it in a group.
‘Ontwikkeling is verandering’ (‘Development is change’) is the name of the so called ‘beleidsdialoog’ of the Dutch Foreign Ministry. In this dialogue the ministry tries to get input of Dutch civil society organisations and other stakeholders who are related to development, like the private sector, scientists, other ministries, and individual persons. It’s a process of several months which started in May and includes two live conferences (in a cinema, close to Ede), papers written by specialists on development issues and an online discussion via the website http://www.ontwikkelingisverandering.nl/. This dialogue will be rounded off with a report that combines the input of these sources and that will be presented to Bert Koenders, the Minister for Development Cooperation. During a feedback meeting in October 2008, Koenders will indicate which aspects of the report will be integrated in a new policy document for civil society that will be drawn up by the Ministry. The implementation of the dialogue is managed by MDF training&consultancy together with internetplatform OneWorld and specialist journal Vice Versa.
Internet forum The design of the online discussion was very straight forward. It is embedded in the official website (http://www.ontwikkelingisverandering.nl/) which provides a lot of information on the ongoing discussion: reports (written, audio, video) on the conference meetings, written papers by specialists on several development themes and – centrally located – access to the forum. The forum itself is divided into six different themes (Enabling environment, Accountability, Learning capacity, Complementary roles, Tasks 'North' and 'South', Public support) which start with a short introduction about what this specific theme should be about, so participants know how to focus their contribution.
Phone facilitation The online discussion didn’t start very spontaneously, the first week less than a handful of people contributed. Therefore it was decided that some old fashioned handwork was needed: about fifty people were approached by telephone to ask them personally if they would have time to contribute to the online discussion. The names of these people came from the participants list of the conferences. If a person wasn’t available at the time of the phone call, an e-mail with the same request was sent.The round of phone calls – about a days work - paid of: slowly but surely responses were added to the forum. A few weeks later about a hundred contributions were placed. Part of them were contributions of an other online forum, organised by Partos, a platform for Dutch civil society organisations in the international development cooperation sector. Their members had a (closed) pre-discussion on the same issues as the ministerial discussion. After we were given permission we were able to publish also contributions of some of these members on the dialogue forum. The pre-discussion of Partos, though useful for this platform, appeared to interfere with the official discussion. Participants didn’t want to contribute for a second time to a digital forum. Even though their individual contributions would be lost, as Partos decided only to publish summaries of the several discussions on the dialogue website.
Observations While the forum was running, a few remarkable developments could be noticed. First: quite a few contributions were long, some of them more than 800 words. Although in-depth arguments were appreciated, it might have put other people off to write. The sought for dynamics of the forum – with short, quick reactions like a real face-to-face discussion – hardly ever took place.
Second: the forum only rarely lead to a debate where people responded to each other. Instead people often just published their posting without referring to earlier remarks of other contributors. It’s a guess why. But maybe two things might have helped: the structure of the forum could have been more transparent. In order to see if a posting had provoked a reaction, you had to follow the thread in the discussion and look for (a not so visible) number to see if/how many new responses had come to an initial posting. It happened even to me, as one of the moderators of the site, that I missed three responses to an initial summary I had written. And another tool which might have helped would have been an automatic notification to participants of the forum, when somebody sends a new posting. This way you know instantly when somebody reacts on a theme and you are reminded that you can react (again).
Third: the participants of the congress advised that the website should not only support Dutch but also English as ‘working language’. Rather than being spokespeople for them, the Dutch organisations wanted Southern partners to be able to give their own input directly. The original idea was to keep the site as simple as possible and only in Dutch because the target audience of the dialogue are Dutch organisations and individuals. Because of this shift, the website was extended with an English ‘mirror’, after which new contributions were made both in Dutch and English. Existing postings though, remained untranslated. Although there has never been an obligation to write postings in English, potential contributors who write more easily in Dutch might have been made shy to participate after the language shift took place.A last observation that could be made is that some people didn’t want to participate in het online discussion because they also would attend (one or more) days of conference and share their thoughts in the debates there.
Recently I worked with a South African organisation to set up a monitoring system. The requirements were:
Compatible with requirements of several donors
Suitable for two project locations and headquarters of the organisation
Possibility for monthly management overviews for headquarters and for the Dutch partner organisation
Version control
Not too expensive
The solution we used, was Google Docs. A spreadsheet developed in Excel and uploaded on Google Docs with the following elements:
A worksheet with operational definitions of indicators used
A worksheet where overall target and baseline figures were filled
A worksheet for location 1, and a similar worksheet for location 2 where project staff will fill monthly realisations for all indicators. They see the target and base line figures as they fill the white cells.
A worksheet where monthly totals for the two locations are being calculated, compared with targets.
A worksheet where 6-monthly totals are automatically being calculated and compared with 6-monthly or annual plans.
A worksheet with some graphical representations, e.g. some key results expressed as a ratio of targets, compared with the time past. See second picture.
In order to skip some initial hurdles for using the system, I created the Google accounts for each location and had some training sessions with all who had to work with it.
The Dutch partner got viewers' accounts. The result: if data are filled from any one location at the end of the month, South African headquarters and the Dutch project officer can both see the gauges going up.
Version control is integrated in Google Docs, you can download the file back to Excel and upload a new excel version if needed. No more emailing wrong versions and retyping monitoring data. And all for free.
“If you can’t open it, you don’t own it” – Owner’s manifesto
On 22 May 2008 the e-collaboration meeting, Going Open! took place in Amsterdam. Hosted by the Transnational Institute (TNI), the meeting aimed to acquaint participants with “open source” and “open content” principles and case studies, and discuss the pros and cons of “going open”. The meeting was facilitated by Simon Koolwijk (Facilicom Consult), with contributions from Rolf Kleef (Drostan), Anne Sedee (Milieudefensie), Karsten Gerloff (UNU-Merit), Riny Heijendael (Milieukontakt International), David Jacovkis (Free Knowledge Institute) and Peter Ballantyne (euforic).
Following a brief, lively introduction by Rolf, Anne explained some basic concepts behind open source. She suggested we think of three layers:
Services (applications, web browsers)
Standards (e.g., HTML)
Devices & Software (hardware)
Open standards are a key part of modern society. For example, no one owns the specifications for a shipping container, such as you see stacked high in the Rotterdam harbour. They are “open” for anyone to use. Similarly, the Internet has open standards – a common language without which it would not exist in the form we know today. Given that the computer is the printing press of the 21st century – the tool we use to create, publish and distribute almost all information – the hardware and services we use on it have great importance. They are a form of knowledge and “when you give knowledge away, it multiples!” However, closed licenses for software are most common, which means you can access only the computer language/code; with open source software, you also get the source code. A “copyleft” license allows you to study, modify and share the source code. Economic benefits including stimulation of local business, positive impact on prices and knowledge transfer. However, many obstacles exists such as existing contracts & vendor lock-in, lack of an open alternative (e.g., with Skype) and ease of access to pirated versions of popular software like Microsoft Office. Despite the challenges, she encouraged us to remember that software’s functions are not the only consideration. Open solutions and user rights are a natural choice for non-profit organisations, she said.
Two group workshops followed, with Karsten leading a discussion on free software as a tool for social and economic development and Riny giving a “crash course” on open formats. See the Monday 23 May post by Joitske for a sound bite on the former.
David’s contribution on Open Education Resources began with thequestion: Can ideas have an owner? He explained the difference between copyright (all rights reserved) and copyleft (all rights reversed). Copyleft:
Guarantees the freedom to use, copy, modify, redistribute;
Transmits those freedoms to copies and derivative works;
Does not imply renouncing authorship attribution; and
Cannot be closed – once a material distributed with a free license, it’s open!
Using a free license encourages collaboration and feedback, helps disseminate your work, and adds it to a pool of existing free resources. There are many types of free license, which can be applied to a range of materials including software, technical designs, learning materials and artistic works. In most European countries, if you publish something without explicitly licensing it, all your rights are reserved. Otherwise, you can explicitly state what kind of license you are using, with a link to the copyleft license you have chosen. Be aware that in other countries, your work goes into the public domain if not otherwise specified! David particularly encouraged the production of Free Learning Materials, which optimises resources and efforts, provides independence from publishers and promotes truly global sharing of good practices. He closed with the following advice: choose a free license, build on what’s already out there, don’t “freeze” your work in an unfriendly format like PDF, and choose a suitable tool/platform.
The last portion of the meeting was a second set of group workshops. One was a debate game on open source led by Simon Koolwijk. In the other, Peter Ballantyne led a discussion on “Making Knowledge Open & Accessible”. He hypothesised that development information and knowledge that wants to travel and migrate needs open borders (or ways to cross closed ones). This means removing “border controls”, strengthening a system of “ passports” (open formats and licences) and “ visas” (open tools, standards, systems), and fostering a change of mindset whereby people are more motivated by the benefits of sharing than by fear of plagiarism, for example. He asserted that Web 2.0 is not only a collection of tools, but also a perspective recognising other people’s knowledge and helping it migrate to new places where it will be used in new ways.
What did we learn? Participants said:
Definition of open source clearer.
Obtained new, economic and security arguments for open source.
Better sense of balance between ideological and practical debates.
Learned of new organisations during the various presentations.
The day ended with some discussion of the next e-collaboration meeting – anticipated for October at MDF – and more generally about the future of the group. Possible topics for the next meeting included computers for development, e-Governance, awareness raising on Web 2.0 tools and peer review of members’ organisational tools. Some participants recalled that the original purpose of the group was to share practical experiences with other colleagues using e-tools for collaboration. People queried whether the group needs a mission statement, concrete objectives and additional financial support for 2009.
In April I participated in a 2-day workshop by euforic on Introducing Blogs, Wikis, Newsfeeds and RSS, hosted by ECDPM in Maastricht. The purpose of my participation was to increase my knowledge of web-based collaborative tools for use in equalinrights’ work, particularly in relation to building relationships with and among human rights and development practitioners in our network. The workshop complemented ongoing research on such tools that I had been conducting. The workshop was very hands-on. The trainers made the sessions fun and interactive, and welcomed questions.
The first session of the workshop established the main differences between the World Wide Web in the 20th Century and in the 21st Century. The trainers highlighted the following in regards to using the “new web”:
5 Basic Approaches: Management - Tools • Publishing online – Blogging • Working together on a document – Wikis • Keywording your work – Tagging • A new interface – Feeds • Bringing info together – Mashup (e.g., euforic website)
5 Important Points • All about people – collaboration and shared understanding • Access – keep in mind that not everyone has high bandwidth • Motivation – key to help people understand the benefits • Content – still same issues of content management, e.g., risks, guidelines • Impact – measure what you’re doing
The next day and a half we explored four main tools of the “new web”. Descriptions of these tools and more can be found on the nifty euforic-ICCO web2share wiki.
Finding information – let it come to you! RSS, Feeds, Tagging, Googology
Making the news – blogging, video blogging, podcasting 120Mill created since 2003; Appeal to high # of small audiences
Social bookmarking – creating/sharing knowledge and information The favorite of the development field is http://del.icio.us – store, organize, share, search, manage!
Wikis – creating content collaboratively A wiki is a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites.
I found the workshop very relevant for equalinrights’ work. Other than providing an opportunity to enhance my familiarity with online tools, and that of our staff in general, the workshop has led to several proposed changes in equalinrights’ way of working and some new potential projects. Thanks very much to euforic for a great learning experience, and to ICCO for facilitating my participation!
Why is Open Source Software a good option for developing countries?
The ecollaboration meeting in Amsterdam had the title: Going Open! and focused on Open Source, Open Access, Open Content, etc. Karsten Gerloff of the United Nations University UNU-Merit explained why open source software is a good option for developing countries. Watch the 1,5 minutes video by clicking below:
Karsten explains that Open Source gives you the opportunity to adapt the software to your local needs (eg. in local languages!), to the local culture, or to include certain functions that are important to you. It gives you the fishing rod rather than the fish. It lets you build businesses on top of the skills developed and those skills remain in-country. This as opposed to proprietary software where money will flow out of the country.
On January 15th 2008 some e-collaboration collegues explored the possibilities of podcasting during a workshop facilitated by Marlies Bedeker from PSO and Mark Fonseca Rendeiro, alias Citizen Reporter. A podcast is an audio (or video), distributed over the internet with RSS feed. The use of RSS allows for easy subscription by readers (listeners). It is a relatively new medium of communication, it was only invented in 2004! Listeners can download new episodes automatically, for instance by using itunes.
During the workshop we concentrated on being a podcaster. How to produce a podcast? Why podcasting in development cooperation? How could we do that and what are the benefits and challenges?
A great advantage of podcasts is that they do not necessarily follow official media. Anyone can podcast so they provide excellent opportunities for personal messages and storytelling, such as those from Christian Aid relief workers reporting on field visits or Ryanne who communicates her experiences about her visit to organisations in Thailand. Listening to these stories immediately creates a feeling of closeness, like your listening to a friend. I personally experienced that this personal, friendly atmosphere adds power to the message, simply because it is personal.
These and other examples provided inspiring food for thought for our discussion on possibilities, benefits and challenges when podcasting for development. It seems that podcasts have a lot to offer. Addressing those who prefer to listen, let beneficiaries report on development results and enhance the personal character of information.
In Dutch: During the workshop Angelica Senders, Programme Specialist Capacity Development for the Economical Programme of ICCO, and Wilma Muns, webmaster at ICCO, enthusiastically discussed the advantages of podcasts and the possibilities they see to apply them in their work for ICCO. Click her to listen to their discussion
In Dutch: Simon Koolwijk, Senior Advisor in Capacity Building for Facilicom Consult, explains us how he was inspired today and why he believes podcasts can improve knowledge sharing worldwide. Click here to listen to his thoughts about podcasting
In Dutch: Joitske Hulsebosch, freelance consultant social media and learning environments, shares her vision on why she thinks podcasts can make a substantial contribution in the communication for development. Click to listen to her vision on podcast as a tool for communication
Mark is an experienced and dedicated podcaster. Why should development organisations engage with podcasting? Joitske Hulsebosch posed him this question. If you click on the video you can see his 3 minute answer.
Producing podcasts can be easy and quick. With a computer, headset and the free audacity software it is easy to record a conversation, story or interview and add some background music if you like. Interesting for the sector of development cooperation is that conversations, interviews or stories can be pre-recorded with voice recorder for later production with audacity. Anyone can produce podcasts; professional knowledge on broadcasting and podcasting isn't necassary. According to Mark imperfectness is even the beauty of podcasts.
More inspiration on podcasting for development can be found on Global Voice.
During the October 12 meeting of the e-collaboration group I presented the communication system that is being developed by and for the ICCO-Alliance with the very appreciated help from Euforic (http://www.euforic.org/). We cal this system the “ComPart-flowers”, where ComPart stand for COMunication with PARTners.
It is a collection of web-based tools, or perhaps better said mash-up of several WEB2.0 applications like Wiki’s, Blogs, Delicious, Dgroups, Blib.tv, slideshare, several google applications. The idea is that all these applications will be - and actually already are - used for communication among colleagues within the Alliance and of course also with partners in the South. In that way a basic condition for collaborating, Capacity Development and learning is set up.
We called it a flower because the whole setup can be seen as a sunflower. The heart would be a wiki, surrounded by petals with different functions, which can be accessed by links on the central wiki. So in fact it is a web space, which enables information sharing and finding, which supports reflection and learning, which enables communication and discussion, which is the place to document experiences and ideas. The by far larger part of the flowers are public, so anybody can view the content. But for adding new information or to make changes you need to know the shared password that is the same for all applications. The social tagging tool Delicious is an important element of the flower, because by tagging, various feeds can be “fed”. These feeds are used to share information with all interested and also to make it possible to “filter” information one wants to get and in that way kind of tackling the well-known overload we all have to deal with. Most of the tools also work with low-bandwidth conditions, but of course this is less applicable for lets say video sharing. In the design of the wiki’s we try to take into account the accessibility for those who have lesser Internet connections.
To make it easier to access the different flowers and its components – by one click - we have installed a “Compart toolbar” on all computers in the ICCO offices (see http://www.conduit.com/).
If you want to have a look at the Compart flowers you can find them here. And if you would like to hear more about the background and contents of the flowers you can look at the recorded PowerPoint presentation of the flowers: To see the whole presentation of about 30 minutes follow this link. You can also have a look at the part where it is explained why the flowers should be cultivated. And if you are only interested in the slides of the PowerPoint you can find them here. Anyhow we are very interested in your comments, questions or suggestions!
It can be challenging for VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) volunteers to access adequate learning support once they are in their placements. Conditions in the field are constantly changing and volunteers need support that is flexible, adaptable, and timely. To maximise our support in the field, VSO’s International Training Team has been working on a strategy called CLIC (Continuous Learning in Country). The strategy is a combination of building an online learning environment and a face to face implementation strategy.
Moodle Distance modules and e-courses are part of a repertoire of blended learning methods designed to let volunteers access information at their own pace, and to maximize the distribution of shared learning. VSO has selected Moodle as our online learning environment. Moodle was selected because it supports low bandwidth and has a lot of social and interactive features. At the same time we will be making Moodle available offline on USB sticks so that volunteers who do not have easy access to Internet can still benefit from it.
In November 2007 we will launch Moodle to our volunteers. Moodle will contain online modules that feature information exchange forums and home-grown "wikis". We will also experiment the use of wikis to find other volunteers with similar expertise areas, and to share videos via YouTube links. We will launch Moodle as a ‘baby’ that will need to be fed by the contributions of volunteers.
A bit of History After exploring different open source tools, and getting acquainted with Moodle in the January e-collaboration meeting, we decided to choose Moodle as our new online learning environment. We created a test Moodle environment on a Dutch server in February 2007 and since then we have been training staff in competency-based learning and how to develop distance modules. In the period July to now we have contracted an e-learning designer who has been adding e-learning modules to Moodle. We copied the test version to a hosted environment in September. We are working on the final touches of the web design (with the help of our partners in India), and have started to do functionality and usability testing.
E-collaboration meeting In the e-collaboration meeting of October 12th we have conducted a usability test of VSO’s Moodle. This gave the members a chance to see how we have set up the Moodle environment for our volunteers. It gave me the great opportunity of testing our Moodle site with some experts in the field of e-collaboration. A grasp from some of the conclusions from the testing:
- Participants tended to get lost between Moodle sites and internal links. Changing the colour of the Moodle site, and opening other sites in pop-up windows can prevent this.
- There’s many different ways in which participants explored the environment, which is good fun to observe. For example, not everyone scrolls down automatically. This meant some testers didn’t find the editing functions in the wikis.
- Moodle offers a ‘search courses’ function. It’s easy to mistake this for an automatic search the site function. It’s quite a disappointment for participants if they can’t use the function as they expect to.
- Is the environment too course oriented? Do I need to focus more on the interactive functions?
Furthermore it was extremely useful to have experts around to give me some creative suggestions. For example: connecting to maps so participants can spot where everyone is located, discussions on building in security tools. Or how about using a package that can build a module in Moodle offline, and who knows… pod casting may be an interesting new project to explore, next to our YouTubeWiki.
Of course I hope this has also been useful for the testers. For those of you who haven’t been able to attend the testing, and would like to find out more about how Moodle is used in VSO, or about our tests, please send me an email: l.meijerink@vso.nl
Meeting a Moodle expert of Ned-Moove, Pieter van der Hijden Now that we have our own Moodle environment, I felt it was time to get in touch with more experts in the world of Moodle. The Dutch Moodle union was the right place for me to connect to. Pieter van der Hijden talked about this group of 80 members who are all using Moodle, varying from administrators, to teachers, and aid workers. They organise at least one big event annually. This means easy access to a lot of Moodle experts. You never know when that might be needed! Individual membership costs € 25,- a year. More information can be found on their site or moodlemoot.
We conducted a week-long experiment with Twitter, for 12 people who were not yet familiar with the tool. In this blogpost, we'll describe the experiment, and we'll summarize the reflections and new ideas for applicability of the tool. I'll also share my own ideas about Twitter in more detail.
Twitter is: A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? Basically you update your information continuously with short messages (max. 140 characters) and you can follow/be followed by others who read those messages.
Our experiment was introduced with the following instructions (here summarized):
Sign up for a twitter account at http://www.twitter.com/ (in the right upper corner) and add a photo of yourself by clicking on Your Profile and share you twitter account (eg. http://twitter.com/joitske) in the wiki and Add the other participants to your twitter to follow them.
Twitter away during the week…. You can twitter by logging in to Twitter.
Experiment with messages for the whole group by using @ecollaboration
Type of content: Share what tools you are working with, what tasks you are busy with in your organization, and ask the (stupid) questions you never dared to bother others with.
Write down your experiences in the wiki.
The experiences summarized:
Though the interface looks clear, people needed quite some time to find their way. How to find the message? Where to reply to a direct message? etc. Someone felt like she might have missed some opportunities in the tool. It doesn't take a lot of attention, but needs frequent attention, hence people felt that it is time-consuming. People differed in their opinion of seeing added value: "it's fun to know how the others spend their time, but not really helpful" someone said.
Possible applications of Twitter:
It's interesting to see that people have very different opinions ranging from "The additional value of use isn't big", via "I would focus to use it for information exchange such as questions or recommendation and not to exchange moods or any kind of actions" to "I can see the potential for project teams that need continuous communication, or organisations or people that want to communicate to their "followers" about a conference, a campaign, or general news and progress. Also for theme focused groups (like e-collaboration)".
For me it has shown again that a new tool can be very uncomfortable in the beginning, especially if you don't know how it's going to help you to do your work. It may actually take longer than a week before you get at a certain level of comfort. Personally I started to enjoy Twitter after some days, because I really got to know some people better by what they are doing. I also got some interesting links to blogposts etc. but to follow that up takes time. So it easily diverts your attention from what you were doing. A colleague in Ghana added me to twitter too, and that experience made me realize that you can be very close with a group of people anywhere through twitter, much closer than through mailing lists, online forums, or an occasional chat session. Knowing his concerns, and frustrations (eg. with uploading) reminded me of the different context in Ghana.
But as someone said: it needs discipline to exchange and have added value. And it seems that this is not for everyone. That brings me to the observation that tools like twitter can bring new linkages and communication (I learned quite a lot more about the 3-5 people who were very active!) but you have to be carefull not to create too many divisions if people who don't find a tool intuitive are left out. On the positive side, almost half of the people who twittered, were not at the face-to-face meeting, so it is a way to engage a different group of people than with a face-to-face meeting.
Riny Heijdendael has given a short introduction on how to use mash-ups of different techniques to connect existing Wikis to Mapping tools like Google Earth.
Milieukontakt International supports a global network of environmental NGO's. Since 1.5 year they deployed a Wiki for their network development. They use it to connect countries and (mainly) environmental themes, exchange professional experiences and develop project proposals and intern(ation)al strategies.
Riny Heijdendael explained during a meeting what he is working on right now: One of the major problems I encountered was that more and more the network faced the problem of finding the relevant information, both on a geographic as a thematic scale.
Questions arose like these:
How do I know what other themes are being addressed in my region or country?
Who is working on the same theme as I am?
How can i quickly connect to the part the network that can enhance my strategy for my own region or theme?
How do I present my local knowledge to a broader audience without having to set up a "website", including all the hassle?
How can I setup a joint strategy with my local network about a certain case (without learning any new system)
The Milieukontakt International already used a wiki for a time, so it seemed to be good idea to try to integrate these questions with a more "visual approach". Maps perfectly fits this vacancy. Connecting the geographical oriented and visual approach of Google Earth with the existing wiki was a logical step.
For this an online database has been created, that collects locations and themes, and could be presented it in such a way that you can browse countries and themes in Google Earth and Google Maps. Once you see the selected regions or themes, you may see public information about this location. The public information is handled by the wiki, and the content is delivered by anyone in the network, mostly the people that reside in the area of this location.
But once you are a member of the network, you have the ability to use the location as a starting point for joint strategy formulation with other NGO's that operate in this region. This information though is not visible to the general public. In this way it is possible for local NGO's to both present public information about the specific location, as well as to define a joint strategy on how to deal with this location within the network.
Of course these mash ups already exist, like wikimapia and countless others. What we try to show here, is that restricting the information to a certain domain (in this case, environmental issues) and combine it with a restriction of access (general public versus network members), you can use these mash ups as a strong tool for public participation.
A concise diagram below explains how the dots connect..
A short visual on how this could look in Google Earth: Since I just chose a country and a theme, I think you'll forgive me that this is only a sample :-)
And even as an author you have some remarks (who hasn't..):
Worldkit, an alternative mapping application framework, was my favorite because it has the opportunity to "timestamp" locations: in this way it would be possible to record issues and locations at a certain time. As you may know, a lot of problems occur because of the history of a location like: "did you know in the 50's there used to be a chemical factory here?". Even better: for strategy formulation the knowledge about future plans is invaluable, and this type of "future mapping" is possible as well with worldkit. I decided however (for now) to comply to KML standard, because I expect that a lot of other institutes might provide their data layers soon as well. In this way we can combine quickly environmental data from, let's say UNDP or FAO with our own data, which could provide valuable insight in causes and effects. In the future I am thinking about transforming KML to be available to Worldkit as well, hopefully by XSLT conversion.
Well thats it for now, I hope you enjoyed this explanation. Please feel free to comment to riny [ at ] ekois.net, and as a last remark: all this stuff is NOT about geekiness, but about applicability...imho
Milieukontakt International’s wikis reduce work chaos
I interviewed Chris van de Sanden (in the picture) by Skype about Milieukontakt’s use of wikis and how the use of wikis support their work.
A colleague of Chris, Jacobien Ritsema worked with Riny Heijdendael to introduce wikis in the organisation in November 2005, and right now Chris can hardly recall how he used to organize his work before there were wikis in his life… Milieukontakt uses wikis for internal communication, but also started to use it with partners in Central and Eastern Europe. The first wikis were doku wikis and were used to develop project proposals collaboratively with a few colleagues; to take notes during meetings and to share notes. Recently, partners in 12 countries in Caucasus, Central Asia and the Balkans have been introduced to a doku wiki about about organizing support activities in their own countries in order to prepare a conference that will take place in Belgrado in October this year. The wiki incorporated an integrated chat, where basic discussions took place on how the guidelines should be. After this online conference, the partners continued their work on the wiki, where they wrote down their concerns and input in preparation of the Belgrade conference. You can see a screenshot of a wiki here: Milieukontakt has used this video of Commoncraft to introduce the advantages of wikis, and so far the partners have reacted very enthusiastically to the use of the wiki. In comparison with the regular “open” character of public wiki’s this platform is restricted to the about 480 members. To see the video they used, click here:
The introduction of the wiki “I am not an early-adopter” stresses Chris, “I first resisted the use of new tools as doing my job is my first concern”, which in his case includes a lot of training and project proposal writing. Learning about new tools takes time, which is time away from your core job.
So how did Chris as a non-early adopter get convinced of the advantages of using a wiki? He learned about it through his colleague, and it helped that the director was involved in the wiki-initiatives. Notes of meetings were shared through the wiki. But Chris got really convinced when he realized that there is a lot to be gained from working through a wiki. First working jointly on project proposals through a wiki is made easy because all have access to add or change text and you always know what the latest version is. And from the beginning it was fun and special to work with the wikispace, having access through a password. He realized that it is ideal for gathering training materials. Before having a wiki, it could happen that you realized after conducting a training that a colleague had developed a similar training. With the wikis, it is much easier to know what training materials already exist. In getting used to working with the Wiki it also helped Chris to have someone nearby to answer his practical questions. Being referred to a manual doesn’t work for him.
Wikis stimulate more equal, creative ways of working together Chris has the impression that working with wikis has had a large influence in changing the way people collaborate. The dynamics of collaboration change, working together becomes flatter, more democratic and more creative, and working through wikis seems to really contribute towards that change. For instance: ‘we had a new member from Moldova in the international training group. She introduced herself in the who-is-who part of the wiki, she had direct access to all materials that were developed so far and could start immediately contributing to the training materials.
Downside of working through wikis The downside of our current way of working is that we have become very dependent on the computer. In fact, you always need a plan B. Once our IT staff took down our internet connection on a Friday, which really disrupted our work.
Things being worked on by Milieukontakt
Notification service: if you write a proposal for example, it would be nice to send an invitation by email to your country/thematic group for their input.
Integration with georeferenced data: We are building a system that connects the wiki with geographical data: in this way you can quickly see who is working on what themes in your own region, discuss plans and monitor progress.
Improving navigation: next step will be that menus will be dependent on which groups you are member of
Increase possibilities to convert HTML/Excel/Word documents on the fly.
Make a set of default formats available, so that postprocessing content to printed versions will be easier.
Things to consider while working with wikis:
Since there is complete freedom to structure your work, it can quickly grow out of hand. Make sure that the basic structure is discussed before.
Moving complete parts into an archive for example can be tedious work: try to organize your content in such a way that time-referencing is possible
Make sure every user has a personal page, and presents himself on a Who is Who page. This is an excellent training for new members.
Find one or two early adopters in each section: nothing is more frightening then talking in an empty space.
Let users use their own language. If you are curious, get a translation service.
Introduce some funny things: for example we have a list of “secret” words that will include pictures in the text, get RSS feeds on a page, start a chat etc. For example : DOGME includes a jumping dog picture in your text.
See if you can make meaningful statistics: what is hot, who writes the most etc.
Our experiences with Moodle in a learning trajectory on Capacity Development
In the past six months we (PSO) experimented with Moodle, an online learning- and working environment we used in an action learning trajectory on ‘The how and what of capacity development’. And it seems worthwhile to share some of our first experiences with you in this blog. Mainly because we find it wasn’t very easy to integrate an online platform in the broader learning process. How to design an environment in which new users can find their way? How to integrate an online environment in the design of a f2f learning trajectory? And how to stimulate participants to actually make use of the online environment? To tempt them to use it for finding useful sources (like articles, working materials, interesting links), as well as collaborate on working documents, provide feedback, join a discussion or have a chat session with other participants. Our reflections, experiences, insights and first suggestions for follow-up…
Why an online environment? The design of the learning trajectory consists of an action learning process for about 15 to 20 people from diverse organisations, all involved in capacity development. Leading in this process are the organisational questions participants work on. Questions that are important for their own organisation, pressing, and supported by the management. We organised monthly meetings, as moments for reflection, exchange of experiences and input by so-called ‘experts’. The experts were invited to make their contribution in an interactive way, in general they spent half a day with the action learning group, at times in the action learning sets, at times using others group formations. The approach to action learning we adopt assumes that the participants remain responsible for their own learning and for developing answers to their own organisational questions in between sessions.
As a lot of work in this learning trajectory needs to be done in between meetings, in their own organisation (doing some research, interview colleagues, explore new insights, apply ideas to own practice), it seems worthwhile to have an online meeting- and working place in addition. Moodle provides participants a place to meet each other, collaborate, give feedback, have a dialogue on common topics, and share experiences. As social learning is an important principle in this learning trajectory (the idea that people learn with and from each other by reflecting on and working with real organisational questions), the combination of f2f meetings and an online environment seems useful. And challenging as well!
What have we learned so far? For our own reflection we used three perspectives: technical aspects of Moodle, Moodle for supporting social learning, and an online platform as one learning element in a broader learning process. What have we learned so far?
The technical aspects of Moodle Moodle is an open software system, free available to download from the internet. Not too complicated, there are several very useful instruction videos, examples of Moodle environments, and online communities for help. Primarily designed as a course environment, which you notice by terms as ‘course’, and ‘teacher’. There is a basic lay-out which provides some structure in which you as a designer have a lot of freedom to design your own environment (with functionalities like a wiki, forum, assignment, questionnaire, and overview of articles and links). As facilitators of the learning trajectory we learned-by-doing. We designed along the way, discovering new options and possibilities, exploring the online system, as the learning trajectory progresses over time. The on-line introduction courses available for Moodle help late-comers to become more familiar with the Moodle.
Introduction of Moodle to the group From the beginning of the learning trajectory we made it clear that the action learning content on capacity building and learning on how to work with Moodle, as a method would be combined and evolve over time. This is an ambitious set up and potentially makes for a dynamic learning environment. Latecomers to the learning trajectory show the digital divide, younger latecomers are quick to explore the Moodle environment and form opinions on it's use and compare features with other interactive software, such as Skype and Google docs and internal portals such Oxfams' KIC. Older participants, the 40+ age group both in the original participants and the latecomers show that they are reluctant to join the Moodle environment.
Gradually building the environment Intentionally we gradually develop the Moodle environment. For example, we started with information on the first learning encounter and a wiki space to work on your own action learning plan. Later we added other functionalities, such as a forum, library and a chat function. Our aim was to allow the participants to gradually become familiar with the environment. It would possibly be too much of a challenge if the first entry/access to the Moodle would entail a large amount of time and effort to become familiar with the learning environment. By allowing participants and facilitators of learning to gradually add to the environment, there is an element of surprise and discovery involved, that hopefully motivates participants.
Structure in the design On reflection it would probably be helpful to make our working design of Moodle more explicit. More design in the form of a plan or explicit ambitions, like what sort of processes do we want to stimulate between participants? What is needed to do that? This might have 'forced' us to share the ambitions and the intended approach more explicitly. In hindsight it is obvious that we have tended to let people drift. For instance, although we were upfront about combining the action learning on capacity building with learning on how to work with an on-line learning environment, we have tended to reflect on this as a sort of side show. We would collect feedback on the difficulties, and 'forgot' to celebrate successful experiences in plenary, such as chat forums or reworked action learning plans.
Mixed responses For participants who are new to an online learning environment, the threshold can fast become too high. "Halfway, I lost my password and have not yet had time to retrieve it. It takes a while and effort before this is in working order’. Even though the Moodle has an automatic password replacement button, exploring such easy access options is not automatic for all. Others struggle with trying to arrange a face-to-face meeting. ‘As a result I pick up the phone to contact a fellow learner, as that is simpler and faster’. Such access problems thwart the use of Moodle, the open source origin implies that there are bugs and integration issues with existing computer and network settings within the organisations that participate. The great thing about the open source nature of Moodle is not only that it is free, it continuously improves and that online assistance and queries get a fast and rich response.
Benefit of success experiences ‘I joined the learning trajectory half way. The on-line environment was a stimulating way to get an image of the progress and achievements of the learning trajectory. The Moodle gave me an insight in all that and as an information source it was very effective. I tried to upload a document and that was unsuccessful, so after several attempts I gave up and asked one of the facilitators to do this’. Everybody needs easy access and some effective responses from fellow learners to realise the benefits of the online environment. Without those, the Moodle does not become part of routine work and easily gets shelved. For the facilitators working with Moodle appears to offer several advantages, such as publishing information e.g. programmes, questions to learners; sharing documents, chat forum and tracking access and activity for and of all learners. The 'special' rights e.g publish to all, that can be assigned to facilitators are very powerful. The reflection space for facilitators was used once. Could it be that the technical possibilities appeared to be overwhelming for first time users? Overall we struggled to combine supporting the action learning sets and using Moodle to collect our own observations and reflections. In this sense we, the facilitators, do not appear to be very different from the learners. An important lesson was that half way we removed the barriers between the action learning sets so that all would view the ongoing activities, in the hope that this would be inspiring or motivate actions amongst the observers.
Certain body for mutual inspiration The participants were divided in three action learning sets, in order to allow participants with similarly focussed questions to be linked. We expected that this would encourage further focus in the learning questions. This division in three sets was continued in Moodle, so there were three separate working spaces within the overall Moodle environment. This approach proved to be effective in the f2f situations and less so in Moodle, possibly because fewer participants were active online. The fact that in the first instance the results (output) of the action learning sets were only visible for the fellow learners in the set, lead to divisions between individual participants and the action learning groups. This was changed as we realised the unexpected outcome of the divisions and the associated lack of synergy and mutual inspiration. We suspect that this was too late in the trajectory to achieve a surge of active contributions and significant change in the use of Moodle.
Peer pressure online Another important point of attention in an online environment is peer pressure. This social dynamic is more present and obvious in a f2f work setting, online work creates a different setting. Such pressure can be of significant value when working in an action learning environment and with intensive collaboration. The personal encounter, a mutual relationship will make anybody more committed to agreements, people seem to realise that a worthwhile contribution to the learning of others is a serious commitment and then absence will be noticed. We sought to encourage such responsibility between participating learners by working in smaller groups and making such groups responsible for the time in between f2f encounters.
Your limits as a facilitator We saw the Moodle environment as a place for Information gathering as well as for collaboration: sharing tools and experiences, having joint discussions, working together on concrete products. In the f2f meetings we regularly made agreements on ‘assignments’ we would be working on in between meetings. The Moodle environment seemed a perfect place for working on these assignment, share ideas, meet, provide each other with feedback (to us). Some participants made use of this option. Especially when you already have some experience with web tools as wiki or googledocs, Moodle is quite similar in use. E-collaboration is more effective when several participants use the online environment to share their materials. As facilitators we were sometimes struggling with our role: as we see participants responsible for their own learning process, how far should we go in stimulating them to work in a particular way? We can support them, provide them with the right tools, give them access to possibilities, help with problems. What are our limits? And when do you accept that something you would like to be working, is not?
What are ideas and recommendations for follow-up?
Participants mention their time restrictions to work in between meetings. ‘We are so busy, it is not easy to make time for learning in between. It would be helpful if online moments are planned as well.’
It is important to constantly ask yourself the question which tool is appropriate for the kind of process you want (dialogue, discussion, sharing, feedback, etc) to stimulate. Use of specific functionalities (e.g. chat, wiki, forum) asks for certain skills. For first time users it is helpful to have some concrete tips on ‘how to use…’, and to realise that having a perfect chat requires some experimenting and practicing.
Some participants prefer f2f contact above using Moodle. ‘In between meetings it was easier for me to grab the phone to contact someone, or even meet f2f. I feel more comfortable with that in stead of using chat or Skype.’ For facilitators to reflect on interaction and progress in between meetings it is important to not only focus on the activity in the online environment; lots of things might happen outside your direct scope (‘behind the scene’).
The next time we would pay much more attention to ‘getting to know the environment’. By practicing with it in the f2f meeting, having a simple exercise online, providing a short manual on ‘how to use..’.
Introducing a kind of rhythm for short and small events to get familiar with Moodle, combined with creating results with respect to the content of the learning trajectory. Just to get the Moodle motor started.
Make sure you have a certain ‘volume’ when you want to work collaboratively. And as facilitators make use of the Moodle environment in the same way as you ask from the participants. Your own learnings might be of tremendous help for others. And insights you gain from own practice can be translated to actions you ask from others.
How to lobby for a pro-skype policy in your development organization
Satish Vangal conducted a survey on the km4dev (knowledge management for development) listserv about access to skype in the workplace. He posted the interesting results back on the list. As you can see from the graph, still 26% of the organisations (56 individuals replied from 46 organizations, and organizations were counted) have a complete ban, but in 7% of those cases, people still use it anyway. Another 15% allowed it, but with restrictions on uses.
He also listed some good points to consider while lobbying for a pro-skype policy in your development organization:
NUMBERS: 3 in 5 organizations (that responded to the survey) allow SKYPE with no restrictions. An additional 15% allow a restricted or unsupported use of Skype.
MAIN CONCERNS - SECURITY AND BANDWIDTH: The two major arguments I.T. people have against SKYPE are Security and Bandwidth. Invite them out for a drink to make your case! Ask them if their concerns are primarily bandwidth or security.
BANDWIDTH – DO A TRIAL: If they say bandwidth, suggest a trial to see if other things like email / web browsing slow down significantly when multiple people in the office are on Skype calls at the same time
SECURITY: Most I.T. people have a ‘gut’ reaction to something like SKYPE, which is a bit of a black box and so they feel it is an unacceptable security threat.
WIDE-SPREAD USE BY OTHER ORGANIZATIONS: Tell them that 75% of your colleagues are using it – and you can mention organization names from the table above.
FAR BIGGER SECURITY THREATS VIA EMAIL: If security is a concern, tell them that a dumb user (like ourselves!) clicking on an unknown attachment or link in an email message is much more likely to get a virus into the system than anything that utilizes Skype.
COMPROMISE - VOICE/TEXT ONLY, EXCLUDE FILE TRANSFER: Tell them that some orgs allow voice and/or typing but no file transfer (by blocking specific ports). This could be an acceptable compromise.
ACKNOWLEDGE EXTRA WORKLOAD: Tell them that you agree that embracing something like Skype may involve more work for the I.T. person initially – showing people how, etc. and the benefits don’t accrue to them obviously.
ORGANIZATIONAL BENEFITS: But benefits to the organization will be significant, and cost savings in phone calls over time will add up. Most importantly, people will be making calls that they would not have dreamed of in the first place – calls between Bangladesh and South Africa for example – and other countries where national monopolies impose high calling costs via normal phone lines.
WHAT ELSE?!
Personally, I would say that if it is possible to collect data over reducing costs calls from other development organisations, that may be even more convincing than just saying that it will reduce costs.
In the e-collaboration group, several comments were made, one being: "It is a security risk as a black box, especially with all kinds of add-ons. And it hasn't earned a reputation yet.You might want to point your sysadmin to "Skype for Business", a version where you can include Skype in security policies for workstations, to at least be able to control and update everything as part of regular maintenance. " and "A good moment to start with that appreciation for system administrators is the last Friday of July that is "System Administrator Appreciation Day", your chance to express some love for the hard-working and often hard-to-communicate-with individual(s) behind the technology in your organisation :-)
Another person added: "In my opinion skype is very valuable (frequent user as well), but not for making regular phonecalls (skypeout). Skype has been steadily increasing their rates, including a call setup fee of 3.9ct. With general VOIP you can make most (european) landline calls free (for example via voipcheap or similar services) and it can be used by loads of so-called softphones (like gizmo or 3cx).
For all who ARE allowed to use skype, you can still go through our skype tips for the advanced user. If you like to know more about your to use skype in combination with a phone bridge that allows you to call in with a regular phone you can read our experiences with online conferencing.
A collection of stories about e-collaboration experiences
The booklet is ready!
In the past months we collected stories of organisations using e-collaboration in some way, varying from using Moodle as an online learning platform to Teamspeak as a software tool for having an online meeting with partners located all over the globe. Most of these stories can be found on this Blog with the same name as the booklet 'I-collaborate, e-collaborate, we-collaborate'. But we also found it useful to have the stories in hard-copy.
We hope to inspire you with these experiences, stimulating you to take this first step, using your work as a laboratory for experimenting. Or see whether you can make your colleagues, partners in the south, or other people around you enthusiastic for more collaboration at a distance. You can find the pdf of the booklet by following this link: http://www.pso.nl/knowledgecenter/documenten.asp?category=74
When you are interested in receiving a hardcopy, please let me know by sending an email to: wagenaar@pso.nl.
Roadblogs: GTZ Egypt's experiences of introducing blogs for internal exchange
Christian Kreutz worked for two years at the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) in Egypt. The German Technical Cooperation works quite decentralized having country offices in most partner countries. Projects are mostly located throughout the countries. Efficient communication and fruitful knowledge sharing between projects and field offices are a challenge. Regularly, meetings help a lot but are not enough for an effective information exchange. The daily interaction happens mostly through email or a monthly newsletter, which does not always reaches everybody leading to the usual information overload. Valuable information and experiences are lost in individual email folders or are not always communicated outside the project team.
Objective:To achieve a better horizontal communication, promote corporate identity, enhance knowledge sharing, and achieve more efficiency. New incentives throughout blogging will enhance opportunities for cooperation and lead to a better networking.
Implementation: Set up of a blog on a server with a classical layout of two columns including the full comments on the left side. That is important in order to motivate people to leave comments. Everybody from the staff has read and written (author) permissions. Categories help to filter between different themes and act as communication channels. A group with 5 enthusiastic members built the critical mass for ongoing entries. Email communication for general information (e.g. meeting schedule) was changed to the blog, which was important in order to raise "pressure" on everybody to at least read the weblog. The blog and a policy was presented on all different staff meetings combined with a training on how to use the blog. The overall expenses and resources (time) were quite low for the installation and the training.
Development:The first few months were quite difficult. Many people were skeptical about whether it would work, and criticized it as being a work overload. After four months and a lot of word of mouth propaganda, new authors came into the game. Also important is that some information was only distributed via the blog. As a next stage, people, who did not get specified training, wrote articles. They either learnt it autodidactically or had it explained by a colleague. In the first half year, the blog had up to 10 entries monthly. Now, after two years, there are more than 30 entries monthly from 50% of staff. The type of content is more and more differentiated: announcements, articles, documents, meetings, presentations, invitations, and recent development of projects.
Critical factors:Face-to-face introduction and training was a must. A critical mass of 5 authors was also very important. Patience in the beginning phase is needed. One key factor was to channel some information only throughout the blog, which previously went over email. The management has to support this form of transparent and horizontal communication. Another factor is a solid policy. The introduction of a blog has to be also seen as a power shift. Some colleagues have better opportunities to communicate and are better informed through a blog. The design and layout (usability) has to help in every possible way to navigate and understand the web content.
Results: A virtual meeting place for all employees has been created. The blog is well accepted and is a middle point of common organizational communication. In an internal survey respondents felt they were better connected and saw more potential for cooperation. The blog builts a network between projects and different offices, and enabled a jump in information exchange. The blog has well written articles and summarizes and describes all important activities and development of different projects. Alltogether it is a valuable resource for information, an archive, and helps to get a better picture about the organizational life.
12-weeks Online Conference on Capacity Assessment & Development
From 9th January – 27th March 2007 an online conference was held on capacity assessment & development. Fourteen capacity development advisors from ICCO working in 14 different countries participated in this conference. It was decided to use two basic tools in the process, an e-mail based discussion platform (Dgroups) which facilitates participation with low bandwith internet connectivity, and skype teleconferences. A few other tools were supporting the online process.
The process The E-conference started with introductions through Dgroups. This was followed with a start-up meeting using skype and the highspeedconferencing phonebridge where two participants shared and presented their case studies and where participants were able to ask questions. Subsequently, for two weeks experts joined the group and presented some statements. Participants responded and reacted on a number of statements such as “Values vs Tools”; “Donors stay away please!”. In early February we moved on with smaller group meetings through skype, so that advisors could bring in their own cases & questions. In each meeting two to three cases were discussed over a period of one hour, whereafter the discussion was continued through the Dgroup. Between February and the end of March we held 5 skype meeting. The online conference was closed with a final review skype meeting and an anonymous online evaluation.
Participants’ experiences The overall event was highly valued by the advisors. Especially the smaller skype conferences with participant cases and the D-group discussions about own cases were appreciated. One participant commented. “I have learned a lot from each others’ case studies. You discover that you are not the only one struggling with similar issues.” Other participants express similar comments. “By reflecting on my own work and talking about my experiences it helped me to understand my difficulties better. Also the responses and questions of other made me realise that I am doing quite OK, despite all challenges.”
Some of the participants were also involved in a one-to-one coaching program. They expressed that the coaching helped them to discuss personal and sensitive issues, while the online platform with ‘peers’ helped them to gain more in-depth understanding about their work. One participant expressed she felt less need for a coach being involved in a forum with peers.
Challenges Many of the participants felt overwhelmed by the high number of e-mails. Around 4 participants switched off the daily receipt of D-group mails. One of the recommendations was to make the e-mail traffic less intensive or to create a more user friendly virtual learning environment. Daan van Bree, one of the ICCO advisors, who just finalized his contract and who is currently working for Music May Day, expressed his concern about D-groups and digital assertiveness. “I first had to get acquainted with the techniques and the platforms, before I felt ready to start sharing my feelings and opinions.” It is good to prepare people in advance, so that they have more digital assertiveness. View Daan’s comments by viewing the following video:
Facilitator experiences It was good to work as a team of two facilitators for the skype conferences, one paying more attention to the technical aspects of the meeting, like re-connecting people who have dropped off from the conference, the other paying attention to leading and facilitating the conversations. It also helped to take notes during the skype conferences. The fact that people appreciated the later conferences more may also be related to the fact that they all became gradually more accustomed to the use of teleconferences and the particular technologies. Since people felt very overwhelmed by the large number of e-mails, they really appreciated the fact that the facilitators made summaries of each discussion.
Overall the process took longer than planned. On the one hand, we extended the process from the planned 8 weeks to 12 weeks to give people room to react and reconnect, on the other hand, it might have been better to close on the indicated date, as it created unclarity about the process.
As facilitators, we discovered that it is very rewarding to facilitate such a group of advisors who feel isolated and are happy to be connected. On the other hand, we noticed that the facilitation process takes a lot of time and can not be planned. At time, advisors will respond during the weekend because they have good internet connectivity so you have to be on stand-by at all times. Again, it helps when you can team up as two facilitators, so that you can inform the other facilitator to be alert when you are offline for longer periods.
We can compare the process to face-to-face facilitation, yet, it is more complex, because you have an additional task of introducing new technologies and helping people get at ease. It was really remarkable though, that a lot of innovations came from the group itself, for instance, phoning each other into the teleconference using a cheaper option like call2
The way forward – Sustain the Community of Practice! According to one of the recommendations from the participants, a co-ordinating committee will be formed to discuss around 6 cases per year, and have one case every two months. This process will be facilitated by a rotating leadership. Up to the end of this year we will guide this group to become a sustainable “Community of Practice” (COP) which will share experiences about capacity development of local people and organizations. In the meantime we will use this time to build institutional knowledge on how to sustain a COP.
This article is written by: Simon Koolwijk, Joitske Hulsebosch, Angelica Senders & Maarten Boers
The Youth Zone program concluded in 2003 that more attention was needed for support to junior experts in development. PSO, VSO and ICCO started a pilot project of e-coaching for juniors which took place between september and march 2007. There were 10 participants, 3 coaches and every coachee had 4 hours coaching time over a period of 6-8 weeks. The coachee and coach choose their own means of communication. Skype and e-mail were most popular, though a few used instant message (either MSN or the skype chat function). Karen Bakhuizen evaluated this e-coaching experiment and presented the very positive results on Friday May 25 at a meeting of the e-collaboration group hosted by the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam.
Chris van de Sanden interviewed Karen about the most surprising outcomes of the evaluation and the future of e-coaching. You can click on the video below to hear Karen's ideas.
Karen expresses her surprise with the fact that e-coaching was so much welcomed by the juniors, this was beyond her expectations. They have needs for specific support like reflecting on their role as junior expert and functioning in an intercultural environment. Nobody in their environment could meet these needs. The coaches at the distance were able to provide this support. Karen foresees a big future for e-coaching since it is a cheap and effective instrument, so it might be a good instrument for senior experts too to support them in their personal and professional development.
From the Idealware website, which provides candid Consumer-Reports-style reviews and articles about software of interest to nonprofits, centralized into a website. Through product comparisons, recommendations, case studies, and software news, Idealware allows nonprofits to make the software decisions that will help them be more effective.
Screencasts – movies that capture tasks performed on a computer – can be powerful communication and training tools, and you don’t need to be a Hollywood filmmaker to create them. Beth Kanter walks through why screencasts are useful, how to create them, and some of the software tools that help in the process.
If you provide end-user technical support, people likely ask you about the same software tasks over and over again. What's more, you've probably discovered that not everyone responds well to text or verbal instructions. What if you could send those people a brief video showing the procedure, accompanied by your voice walking through the important concepts?
Or what if you need to provide some quick training on a new software package to a bunch of folks around the country, or you want to demonstrate a new concept – perhaps how to collaborate using social bookmarking software? A video that combines demos of some of the key tasks with an overview of the concepts around the software could provide a compelling introduction.
Riny Heijdendaal, Harry van Oosterveen, Dorine Ruter and Simon Koolwijk have shared some skype tips, so together it makes for a list of 10 Skype tips for the Advanced skype user.
Here we go:
Tip 1: You can add echo123 as a contact person to test your headset and microphone settings. When you dial echo 123 you will be invited to speak and the recording will be played back to you so that you will hear your own voice as a a person to whom you are talking on skype would hear you.
Tip 2: Skype has a lot of short commands which make it easier to type fast. You can find the commands by typing /help in the chat function. An example of a command is /me which is short for your name. So if you type /me is hungry is will be displayed as Joitske Hulsebosch is hungry. (but only if your name is Joitske Hulsebosch).
Tip 3: One of the commands is /alertson [text to match]. If you for instance type finance instead of [text to match] only messages that contain the word finance will make your skype blink. Easy if you're in a discussion with a bunch of people and only want to be notified if someone is talking about "financial" things for example
Tip 4: You can create a link to a skype name, for instance in an email. Upon clicking on that name, a call is started. To do this, create a link to 'callto:skypename'. People have to be logged in in Skype to be able to make the call by clicking on this link. By the way a direct link to an e-mail address (opening an e-mail interface when clicking on the address) can be done by creating a hyperlink to'mailto:name@address.org'.
Tip 5: You can record skype conversations or interviews by using recording tools. You can record skype calls and make them available for others lateron in mp3 format, so that they can listen to it on their computers or ipods. There are various tools from free to paid services. For instance skyperec (free, I haven't tried this), Audacity (can be used for free, but I found it hard to get all parties clearly audible, my own voice was recorded better than the voice of parties on the other side). And hotrecorder. For hotrecorder you pay almost 15 dollars but the sound is good and the interface is very user-friendly. You can convert the audio file to formats like mp3. When we did small skype conferences during an online event for capacity building advisors, this allowed people who had travelled to remote places to listen to the recordings lateron.
Tip 6: If you start skype you can add some options to it, for example: to get rid of the splashsreen, look at your skype shortcut, and add /nosplash for not showing this.
Tip 7: To use skype with a large group (more than 9) you can use a phonebridge like Highspeedconferencing. This allows you to connect a larger group, but also people with a landline of mobile phone can call into the same conference. This can be a great advantage when you have a mixed group of people, people with good skype access and experience, and people who prefer to use 'ordinary' telephone. Or you can organise/participate in a skypecast. Skypecasts bring internet conversations to life, think of them as your own personal online radio station. You host the show, chat away or play the music, take the calls from listeners or open up the airwaves to everyone who has joined in. (anyone with experiences?)
Tip 8: Use an answering machine with skype so that people can record messages to you when you are offline (pretty much like the anwering machine function of the regular phone).
Tip 9: You can use skypeout to call someone into a skypeteleconference. You need to charge some credit to your skypeout account. Then you can add a person's regular or mobile phone number by clicking on 'Call phones' and 'add skypeout contact'. The person with his/her mobile phone number will be shown in your regular skype contact list. You can create a conference call in the regular manner, and include this person. When I was in Ghana and my internet was irregular, it was good to have this backup system, and I was called in on my mobile phone. The costs are about 0.07 cents (dollar or euros?) per minute for most countries in Africa.
Tip 10: You can download Unyte.net and use it to share your screen with others on your skype call. It can be used in combination with skype so that you can invite the other skype users to look at your screen. You can point to certain spots on your screen, so it is a good tool for instructions at distance for instance.
A story about Skype for development:
When I was in Ghana this month, I had a meeting with our Dgroups facilitators who had been trained. They exchanged and expressed that it is sometimes hard to know why discussions flow or do not flow, a kind of lonely job. They thought it was a good idea to set up a group coaching system and I proposed to use skype conferences. Surprisingly, within 5 minutes, everyone had given me their skype names, so it had become quite a regular and normal tool for this group! It makes it very easy for me to continue coaching them while being in the Netherlands, which changes the pressure that is there on my visits to Ghana, and opens up possibilities of supporting their learning process in a more continuous manner. We have planned a fixed day, but with the electricity off days in Ghana (every 2 days 12 hours off), it is not always easy to know whether you'll have electricity, so that may be a factor that will influence the sessions.
Another short story: At a certain moment when I was in the Netherlands, and my colleague in Ghana, the coordinator in Ghana contacted me on skype to ask something about the schedule of my colleague in Ghana. Since I had access to his outlook agenda, I was able to help him!
On the previous face to face meeting we had with the e-collaboration community, facilitated by Kontakt der Kontinenten, we had several e-tools to be explored. One of them was Moodle, introduced on their own website as: ‘a course management system (CMS) - a free, open source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities.’
I was looking for an online environment which could be used in a learning process based on face to face meetings and learning in the own workplace in between the meetings. For guiding the learning process in between I was thinking of using an online platform, where participants can meet, share ideas, experiences and stories. And where they can work together, have discussions on specific topics, and give feedback on each others products. I know Near-Time (http://www.near-time.net/home), but this platform doesn’t have any chat, forum or discussion options. So while I was looking for something else I heard about Moodle.
In the meeting with the e-collaboration community we explored Moodle, having several computers giving us access to this platform. We tried out some features, like having a chat conversation, starting a discussion and uploading documents. As always it takes some time to find your way in a new e-tool. It felt like having a ‘first touch’, as if there is so much more to discover. And there probably is! Afterwards, Agnes interviewed me about what I see as possibilities in Moodle, take a look:
Now, three months later I am using Moodle in an action learning process with 25 people! It is an intensive learning by doing process in which I learn about Moodle, all possible features and ways to design an environment in which members can find their way easily and can do what they want. Not so easy as it seems like. Besides that I learn a lot about facilitating this online learning process. Questions arise, like: what steps are helpful, what responses, how to stimulate members to share experiences, how to create a learning process between the members. Very interesting to learn about!
I have recently decided to explore the option to use audio to capture, and distribute online, knowledge sharing which takes place during face to face (f2f) events. As there may be other non multi media specialists out there, who would like to enter the world of "audio capturing", I am "capturing" my own "learning by doing" process here in case it can help others (smart enough to do more research than I did) to get a jump start.
Why
Some target groups are less inclined than others to use written text to share knowledge. Audio can be an alternative medium to share knowledge via the internet.
Also audio requires less bandwidth than video, thereby reaching those with only low bandwidth access.
Recording a f2f event also creates the opportunity for those unable to attend the event, to benefit by being able to listen to the discussions which took place.
Audio is of course not collaborative in the sense that immediate feedback and response or interaction is possible, but it can feed online collaboration with a different format of input besides written text.
And audio can be transcribed to text at a later date, using services provided online, but this is the next phase in my experimentation.
The beginnings, in hindsight
As the saying goes, "hindsight is 20-20" and I can clearly see now that some further preparation would have been beneficial. My advice to anyone undertaking a similar endeavour, is primarily to try it out initially in a context with no pressure to succeed. Test your hardware and software beforehand. In my defense, it was a spur of the moment decision to start my audio endeavour at the ecollaboration f2f event, so I made do with the tool I had, which was my mobile phone.
Mobile Phone
I used the speech recording functionality on my mobile phone. Only a couple minutes into the discussion did I notice that the recorder automatically ended after 5 or so minutes, so I had to keep pressing record, thereby not being able to record a full conversation without interruptions.
In the evening, once having transported my recordings via bluetooth to my laptop (another learning curve surmounted), I saw that the format of the file (mp4) was not recognized by the various multi media software options I had on my computer. Further investigation via Google taught me that I need to encode (i.e. convert) the file to a mainstream format. To do this I needed to download and install new software. The "mobile phone - audio file" endeavour has ended there for now.
Capturing audio via video
During a second (non-related) event I decided to use my digital camera, using the video option to record voices. The benefit of this approach was that I was easily able to edit the files afterwards using the visuals as memory triggers regarding the beginning and ending of sessions. So I could edit the files and provide them in sections which were intuitive for the rest of the group.
But here again, it was a learning by doing process to find out how to extract only audio from a video file. I first used the free tool, windows media encoder. The options I choose to encode the file, took almost as much time to complete the process, as the audio file was itself. So either I need to examine windows media encoder more closely, or it is not a quick tool to encode video to audio. Finally I found the option to extract only audio from the video file, using Adobe Premiere's own encoder. This went very quickly. I now have doubts however, if I have compressed the file as much as possible because I now have audio files of 50 minutes which are 23 MB large... not really a feasible option for low bandwidth usage.
Future, mp3 player
The next attempt I plan will be using my mp3 player which also has a sound recording option. Taking into consideration that the mp3 player is focussed on audio, I expect the resulting files to be smaller and therefore more practical for a target group of low bandwidth users. I also expect the files to be in a mainstream format, no or minimal encoding necessary. But this last experiment I will undertake with a purely experimental approach, not expecting to have usable files as a result.
Below are tools used and/or discussed during the the latest face to face (f2f) ecollaboration meeting. I've tried to describe them from the context of my work at IICD.
All in all I can say the f2f meeting of the otherwise virtual ecollaboration group, was very usefull to gain exposure to a variety of online collaboration tools and share experiences with other users facing similar challenges.
It reminded me of the importance of the preparatory process and research necessary to match an online tool with each groups specific goals and context. In order to do so, and be in a position to advise regarding the usage of tools, it is important to keep your eyes open and stay up to date on the scope of different tools and platforms out there which can be used. And what is more beneficial than to do this with a group of people undertaking similar challenges? So a big thank you to the organizers of the f2f event and to the initiators of the ecollaboration Dgroup!
Even before the meeting started, a fellow participant geared me towards "Gably" (thank you Dorine). We were each positioned behind a laptop with wifi access, browser open and she suggested we open a shared "gably", which allows you to create a shared chat interface, on the fly, based on simply filling in a similar domain name. Take any domain name and insert gably.com before it and voila, you can chat with anyone else who follows the same steps. See if anyone else if loking the the ecollaboration gably right now by going here: http://gabbly.com/iconnect-online.org
The effect in our case was similar to "passing notes in class" as we were sitting next to each other, but were using the chat interface to comment on, and share extra information, with regards to the presentations taking place.
In the context of my work at IICD, the downside of the tool is that it does not have an archive function. The upside for my work and that of my colleagues is that no application had to be downloaded and installed to be able to chat with each other. For my colleagues who sometimes communicate electronically with partners who have to make use of internet cafes, it is a very accessible way to chat with each other. It is also a handy tool when giving feedback on a website as you both inherently have the same webpage and chat window open.
The Focuss project was the first presentation. See blog post by Joitske. My fellow-laptop-user and I were familiar with the focuss project and with the Google Coop tool. If you haven't taken a look at Google coop yet, it is really worthwhile to do so. You can "steer" google to search in a specific selection of websites determined by you or a community of users. And by pasting a small snippet of code into your website, voila, you have a Google powered search, searching through your own specific selection of websites, embedded in your own website as an extra service to your visitors! What makes it even more interesting is that you can manage this tailor made search engine with an online community.
For thematic oriented groups, such as we have at IICD, this tool could be very powerfull if managed by a thematic group. Each member could contribute to building a shared thematic Google search and it can be implemented on more than one website, thereby truly sharing the ownership of the tool.
The search for relevant content
The issue of building a tailormade search engine is of course to find, or facilitate the finding of, relevant content for our work. So quite naturally the tools Google Scholar and Google Books were suggested as alternatives in the mission for finding relevant content.
Some specific tools were examined in smaller groups...
This is a videoconferencing software package. It is not free, and its low-bandwidth-adaptibility has not been tested. However the demonstration did show that it is a tool which can be considered by non-profits as being good value for money, and user friendly.
A free "alternative" mentioned was Skype combined with UNYTE which facilitates file sharing and remote desktop control. I have the word "alternative" in brackets because this combination does not provide all the functionalities Interwise does (such as hand raising and microphone control), but it strives to reach the same goal: remote electronic synchronous communication and desktop sharing, amongst a group of people. Both Skype and Unyte offer extra functionalities with paid subscriptions.
I wasn't active in the moodle group, but as my computer was located next to the group, I couldn't help but eavesdrop a bit. In the discussions taking place within that group I was reminded of the pitfall which is often made with electronic tools, and that is trying to facilitate an online collaborative activity with a tool which was not developed for that purpose.
Moodle is an elearning platform, designed with extensive functionalities to facilitate classroom-type learning. Of course some forms of group activities, not elearning specific, can be hosted in a moodle platform, but why would you if there are other platforms out there developed specifically for that purpose? Each online endavour should consider carefully the needs of the target group, and all the platforms available to facilitate those needs specifically.
Dgroups for example has the charm of being an extremely simple platform. In my experience this means that you can effectively apply it for a miriad of purposes, as our use of the platform at IICD also proves. Because of its simplicity, it does not have overly dominant characteristics to influence the manner in which its members collaborate. It has been known to be put to use for a broad scope of online collaboration activities such as communities of practice, project based work, newsletters, mailinglists, distributed knowledge sharing networks, etc.
Let me contradict myself immediately by stating that one dominant characteristic of dgroups is that it was specifically developed for low bandwidth users, often first time users of online tools. Therefore, logically, the downside of dgroups becomes apparent when you have a group of web-savy people with highbandwidth access. These users are sometimes better facilitated in a platform with more extensive functionalities such as chat, file versioning, etc. However the functionalities in Dgroups (calendar, resources section, web interface and email) go a long way to facilitate all kinds of online collaboration efforts.
Other groupware platforms which really deserve attention are: Basic Support for Cooperative Work BSCW and PhProjekt (open source). Maybe we can consider these in the next meeting and the differences between elearning platforms and groupware platforms?
FOCUSS a search engine for development using Google Coop
Michel Wesseling of the Institute of Social Studies in the Hague gave a presentation during our meeting on January 12th. He talked about their efforts to create a search engine for development called FOCUSS. We interviewed him afterwards so that others who were not present at the meeting can also learn about Focuss! Here's a summary of what he says in the video interview, but you are invited to listen to him by clicking on the triangle.
Why do we need a specialised search engine like FOCUSS?
If you want to have specialised answers from a search engine, you need to limit the number of resources that are indexed in a search engine. With FOCUSS we want to create a subject-oriented search engine for development studies.
How does FOCUSS work?
We started about a year ago. We use google coop. We work with librarians of 15 different institutions who select websites to be included and bookmarks of practitioners are also indexed in the FOCUSS search engine.
What are challenges to make FOCUSS work?
You'd expect that developing the technology is a challenge but the biggest challenge, however, is to get people to work together. To stimulate them to make bookmarks is the biggest challenge. So now one colleague will work one day per week on marketing and stimulating people.
When can we start using FOCUSS?
Today! You can go to focuss.eu. It's operational. In the help and about pages you can find information on how you can contact us to contribute to make FOCUSS more worthy for the development studies.
Using a virtual learning platform in a 10 month action learning programme
Hettie Walters from Wageningen International was the lead coach in the SNV Advisory Practice Learning Programme (APLP). She shares her experiences using e-collaboration tools in the programme.
Could you describe the importance of virtual learning was in the programme in one sentence?
“The whole backbone of the Advisory Practice and Learning Program was based on the virtual learning platform.”
Why did you use a virtual learning platform?
“We wanted people to be able to participate in the programme from their actual workplace. APLP involved 60 people working in different places in the world. We wanted to link the learning process to the actual working situation. Instead of taking people out of their work situation to a training set, and than hope that -when back in their working environment- they are able to apply what they have learned in the training, we wanted to use an action-reflection learning approach whereby people stay for the largest part of the programme within their working situation and apply the learning, reflection, experimentation and change in the actual workplace. We figured that the best way to facilitate such the learning process was using e-tools.”
How was the learning process organized?
“The people worked together in Action Learning Sets, groups of 6 people from mixed geographical and sectoral backgrounds. These groups acted as support groups to the individual members in their learning process. The virtual learning platform was the means of connection and interaction between the members of the action learning groups and the coaches. It allowed people to participate in the learning program from their actual workplace. Each group had it’s own coach. The individual coaching was done by means of chat.
How is online coaching different from face-to-face coaching?
"When using chat for virtual coaching you can only use one of your senses. You can read and write, but you don’t see somebody’s facial expression, their comfort or discomfort in a particular situation in a coaching session. However we noticed that the text chat function gives you much more opportunity than we envisaged at the start for understanding what the other person was saying, feeling, and sometimes also was not saying. I think it is because the text chat changes the pace of the conversation. While the other is writing you have time to think about what you will write. You can reflect on what the other person said, what you are sensing, what you read in the omissions. It helps to create more depth in the coaching sessions. We were pleasantly surprised by the effectiveness of coaching using text chat. "
How were group chats prepared and facilitated?
"Most of the learning sets had a rotating division of tasks. Someone had the role of timekeeper, another was moderator, another ”process guardian” . Everyone would get feedback after the session on how they performed in their role. We noticed that when problems arise in a chat, it is very difficult to change the process while in the chat. We also found out that for the group chats to be effective, proper preparation of the group chats by all participants was very important. It has to be clear to everyone what the chat session will be about. Without preparation the chat would not be focused. Preparation of chats was done using the discussion forum. Either someone would propose a problem he / she wanted to discuss, and formulate specific questions. Other times the initial discussion was taking place in the discussion forum. "
What was the optimal group size for chat sessions?
“The size of the group was also important in the effectiveness of a chat. Normally 4-5 people would participate. We occasionally used the chat with larger groups of 7-8 people. This was too big because attention would have gone down even before everyone would have had a chance to contribute something on a certain matter.”
What were prerequisites for the virtual learning process?
“Connectivity, availability and readiness to learn (ability). The connectivity is the only technical prerequisite. The others have to do with the action learning and reflection process itself. People find it very difficult to combine learning with working. You either work or you learn, and for learning you go out of your workplace. Making yourself able and available for learning in your work situation is very difficult.”
Which tools were most useful in the learning programme?
"The virtual learning platform had several functionalities, a chat function, a discussion forum, a library, an archive, a calendar. The most important for the learning process were the combination of preparing the reflection using the discussion tool and deepening the reflection using chat.”
What are essential ingredients to keep online interaction going, to keep people motivated and inspired?
“It is very important to plan properly in the group: what is going to be done when and by whom. If not all group members stick to that process, they frustrate the process for the others in the group. It is also important that people know about the others in the group. If you only met virtually, it is very difficult to understand the context of the situation others are working in. We did not plan enough F2F time with he members of the learning sets to get to know each other. Therefore we made some changes to the new action learning program. To help people to get to know the situation other group members are working in, we decided to have F2F meetings of the learning groups before the start of the virtual phase.”
Facilitating an online discussion to foster cooperation between two development organisations
Joost Oorthuizen from Agri-profocus, an organisation working for strengthening of agricultural producers organisations in the south (in the picture a producers organisation with melons) organised a so-called Dgroup e-conference during the months of October and November 2006. The e-conference discussed the possibilities and constraints of future co-operation between two Dutch development organisations, i.e. SNV and Agriterra.Agri-ProFocus is a partnership of 21 Dutch development- and teaching/research organisations, set-up to improve and increase services to agricultural producer organisations in the South. Since it was one of his first experiences with the email-based discussion forum called Dgroups, I asked Joost a few questions about his experiences with an online conference using Dgroups.
Why did you want to organise an online discussion?
The main reason is that the staff of SNV is operating in various countries of the South. The staff of Agriterra is based in the Netherlands. If SNV staff would be working in the Netherlands, I would simply have organised a one-day workshop. But that wasn’t an option.
We needed this discussion very much to allow for decision making. So far, the idea of future co-operation was only discussed at top-management level. We had no idea whether the professionals of both organisations would support the idea, and would see the concrete relevance and need of working together. If the top-management would have decided without their input, then we would have a paper agreement, and there would have been no support and probably a lot of resistance within both organisations to operationalize the agreement.
Also, agreements on co-operation, are in the end, agreements between people. Professionals on both sides had to get to know each other, to understand each others’ ideas and preferences, and slowly start to trust each other and become enthusiastic about the possibilities of working together in the support of producer organisations in the South. As development co-operation is about committed people with strong ideas about what is wrong in the world, and what should be done about it, it was important for the professionals “to taste each others’ kidneys” (Dutch expression) and see whether the other party would fit in their own mind-frames and belief systems. So, getting to know each other was not at a personal level, but rather at an ideological level.
How did your design of the online event look like and how did it work out in practice?
The design was pretty straightforward. I planned for a 3-week conference, each week discussing one of three major topics. The management of both organisations invited a number of their core staff to participate. On Agriterra side (which is a small organisation), about 8 people participated, on SNV side (large, nearly 1000 advisory staff), about 20 people staff participated.
Before the e-conference started, we held a survey type of research among core SNV staff, in which they were asked to indicate their relationships with Agriterra partners in the field. This was used as a starting-point for the e-conference, and also helped to select the SNV staff that could participate. On the Agriterra side, I organised a meeting with the professionals to explain the ideas of co-operation, and asked for their active participation in the conference.
In practice, the design worked out well. Around 20 out of the 35 D-Group members participated actively and wrote long and interesting emails to each other. Some other staff was asked to join in the conference, as participants felt that their participation was needed. The main change to the design was that participants felt its’ time-frame to be too tight. We thus took two or even three weeks per topic, so the total period became 7 weeks. This was OK, it was not too long for people to loose interest, and it was long enough for people to say whatever they had to say.
I took some action ‘behind the scene’ to get some people involved that I felt should participate more actively. I approached some personally, as I knew them or I could talk to them face-to-face, some others were approached through the management.
At SNV, more than 50% of the core staff are not Dutch. Their participation was more limited. I guess the main reason is that they do not know Agriterra very well, nor can they fully appreciate the need for an organisation like Agri-ProFocus.
You are an experienced face-to-face facilitator, and this is your first online experience. What is different as an online facilitator?
Well, my first observation is that there is more similarity than I expected. Also e-conferences need facilitation, and participants do want such facilitation, and strongly relate it, very much similar to the way they appreciate face-to-face facilitation. So, as a facilitator, one can ‘connect’ to the participants, take ownership of the process of the discussion, ‘lead’ participants towards certain outcomes. This is easier and more similar to facilitating workshops than expected.
Another observation is that e-conferences are far less intrusive than face-to-face meetings. The latter requires people to sit together, to listen to each other, to listen to a facilitator for often too long a time,etcetera. How often do we not feel that we waste a lot of time during face-to-face meetings, or that we have to work with/listen to people who do not really appreciate. So, this e-conference method leaves participation much more open. One can easily ‘vote with your feet’ (mouse) if not interested. Put more positively, people can participate whenever they like, whenever they are up to it, in their own time- and energy frames!
In the literature on change management, there is an important concept of “co-creation”: it means that change processes require commitment from both outside change agents and inside managers and professionals. When using methods like e-conferences, outside facilitators do not have to be too worried about being too central to the discussion and thus blocking creation on the side of the participants. One can only intervene through text, and not through a number of other means available to face-to-face facilitation. That of course makes your textual intervention all the more important (tone of writing, number of textual interventions, etcetera).
Looking back at this conference, what have you learned from it for a next conference?
Well, my main lesson is that it is easier to do than I expected, people do easily participate and it can be a very useful tool. So, I would more quickly turn to this method, even for issues to be discussed between people living in the Netherlands!
When you don’t know how to ride a bike, walking is always faster!
An online conference call seems like a simple, cheap and accessible way for bringing a distributed group together. As we use our e-collaboration community as a laboratory for experimenting with e-tools, we decided to prepare an upcoming f2f meeting using online teleconferencing. In the first meeting we experimented with High Speed Conferencing. High Speed Conferencing is free and uses a phone bridge that connects both Skype and regular phone users. Having Skype and regular phone users on the same call might be very helpful for international communities.
Experiences with High Speed Conferencing This online preparation meeting was with eight participants, some of them knew each other quite well, others were joining the group for the first time. We had planned for a one hour meeting. A summary of our experiences:
Phone and Skype. A great advantage of highspeedconferencing is that people can phone in, so that people not used to Skype are not excluded.
Preparation for smooth start. High Speed Conference was a new e-tool for all of us. It was set up by one of our members. The time had been set in advance, participants had been announced. Still, the preparation seemed quite chaotic, it took us some time to get started: checking the connection, contact details, microphone, sound. Illustrative statements in this phase of the meeting were: ‘I do not manage to call this number!’, ‘I see you on Skype, but how do I get in the conversation?’ and ‘Are you online now?’. Lessons we learned: - It came out to be important for the person-in-the-lead-for-setting-up-the-conference to join the whole conference, and have a specific role in getting everyone on board. - As a facilitator, try to be online 10 minutes earlier and have all skype addresses in advance, so that you can easily add everyone to the chatspace. When in the chat, it is easier to direct people into the conference. - It was very helpful to use Skype for providing assistance.
Quality of sound. In this conference we experiences many problems with the quality of sound: a lot of noise in the back, some people sounded very far away and others were so close that it felt like they were sitting right beside you. One person could only join the conversation using chat because we couldn’t hear him. Some statements: ‘sound quality was poor. As if I was trying to receive a BBC broadcast during WW-II. Some people (e.g. John) were easy to follow. Others not at all. Sometimes I heard nothing - but was that a true silence, or was someone speaking without my knowing? Sometimes I heard the noise of a voice, some words I could recognize, others not. It took a lot of energy to listen. I often felt disconnected.’, and ‘the noise made it difficult for me to think and contribute to the conversation, because of the effort it took to hear others and listen carefully.’ Something that might be of help is the ‘mute’ button (‘mute your own line so other people can’t hear you’ and ‘unmute your line so you can contribute to the conference’), but we didn’t try. The facilitator could try the following:”mute all participated and unmute them one by one, to see where some noise was coming from.
Using supporting tools. During the conference we had a few participants taking notes using the chat function in Skype. This was found very useful, especially with the bad quality of sound. It makes it possible to keep up with the dialogue, even when it is hard to hear the talking very well. Remark is that there is always a short delay in the notes compared to the saying. When you really have to rely on the notes it might be difficult to play an active role in the interaction with others. After the conference one of the members sent out the Skype chat transcript for everyone’s reference and use. This makes it possible to reread what has been said, reflect on the conversation, make a summary of the output.
Group size. We found out that there is a big difference between having an online conversation with a group of 4 people or with 8. With four it is easier to recognise voices (know who is speaking), to make everyone contribute to the conversation, define agenda and focus, have a discussion/ dialogue, make decisions. Of course part of these aspects play the same kind of role in a face-to-face meeting. A larger group requires much more structure and facilitation. And specific effort from participants.
Level of security and comfort. A teleconference (using a new technology or for a person unfamiliar with teleconferences) adds to your level of insecurity and discomfort, that you have in new groups. So if you have a new group, you can hardly get people to feel secure enough to get good work done. After all, these are all things that you have to consider while choosing for a f2f meeting, an online asynchronous discussion, a chat or a teleconference. A participant who was new in the group: ‘If it had not been for the explicit remarks that we were dealing with an experiment, I would have felt disappointed about this meeting. It was emotionally stressing. I compare this with meetings a had in South America, were I just started speaking Spanish. Even though I did not understand everything, it did not feel right to keep questioning: 'what do you mean', or 'would you repeat this?'. Still, people might ask for my opinion and expected you to participate in decision making. The experience with skype may be even worse: In the situation of our conference I could not check your faces, there were no lips to be read, no clues from the context. I felt insecure. I was so busy trying to listen that I had no energy left to check with the notes. I did not make notes myself, because I felt insecure about the content-value of what I could add.’’
Role participants. Participants need concentration to follow the dialogue, and focus for contribution, the willingness to express your feelings. In a f2f meeting, when you are confused about something or don’t agree, others will see this by observing you non-verbal signals. Online I felt like having several choices in such a situation: you can leave the dialogue and hitch on again when the content has changed. Or you raise your voice and express your feelings. Interesting observation of one of the participants: ‘I can hear that John has a Skype tone and rhythm of speaking that is slower then he does in face to face conversation.’
Make the picture. Because you don’t see each other, you have to rely on the sound of voices. “I found out that, during the conference, I was trying to make an image of the situation (‘the picture’) in my mind, giving the conversation ‘more colour’. The photographs of participants in Skype were very helpful to me. When you know the people who participate, you easily learn to recognize voices. In our conversation we had a new participant; for him it was helpful to say your name before talking. In the beginning this requires specific attention, but I can imagine you will get used to it when doing this more often.”
Facilitation of the conference. As in a f2f meeting, it is very helpful to have someone facilitating the process: setting the agenda, guide the conversation, summarise, stimulate knowledge sharing, focus and decision making, and supporting people to contribute and share their ideas and thoughts. Two concrete methods were helpful in this meeting. Getting to know each other by doing a small introduction round on alphabetical order. You might as well use the clock or the list on the Skype chat.
And closing the meeting doing a short round of summaries or impressions of this meeting. Lessons for next time: · It helps when someone now and then summarizes what has been said, collects concrete action points, keeps track on time and agenda (focus on content), makes space for all participants to contribute, suggests methods that are helpful for sharing ideas, thinking together, and coming up with new ideas. · What we experienced in this online meeting is that the conversation can ‘drop dead’ like we all are thinking by ourselves. Till some point it is okay, but when it starts feeling uncomfortable…Maybe here is a task for the facilitator to give the conversation new energy, by giving a summary, asking a new question, doing a proposal.
What are the advantages of an online meeting above f2f meetings? In international communities or groups with members geographically dispersed, an online meeting might be a very effective way of having contact, sharing thoughts, working together. When you can choose whether meeting up in a f2f meeting or online, it seems that online teleconferencing tools bridge the distance, but do not speed up the conversation or decision making process. You might take some more time, and another type of energy and facilitation for an online meeting. In our experience it felt like the amount of work completed in an online meeting is less than in a f2f meeting. On the other hand it costs less effort for us to meet online.
Questions worthwhile for further experiments: · What can help build relationship, sense of individuals and of the group? · How to deal with those periods of silence in the meeting? · Practices around who is speaking (i.e. say your name before speaking - not everyone can hear voice differences) · Issues around size of the group: what size is maximum, how to handle larger groups? · …
Experiences from: Joitske Hulsebosch, Mirjam Schaap, Russell Kerkhoven, Steven Scheer, Maarten Boers, Simon Koolwijk, Angelica Senders, John Smith, Sibrenne Wagenaar
The E-collaboration network, a CoP and a laboratory
Based on the input of John Smith, learning facilitator
Don't plan ahead too far, outline a few steps, practice a lot. These wise words summarize quite well the advices given to our e-collaboration by the learning facilitator John Smith. A learning network, which according to him was a great example of a community of practice. One year ago we had a workshop on e-collaboration which was the start for what now is a learning network, with 60 members, regular meetings a d-group and a weblog. Time to look back, and forward. We were very happy with the opportunity offered by PSO to provide us with the assistance of an experienced learning facilitator, John Smith to help us in that process
John Smith started of with a number of Skype interviews, both with active and less members of the e-collaboration network and with the organising committee. The findings of these interviews were the basis for an afternoon session at ICCO in Utrecht in which about 12 people participated during his ideas were further elaborated. After a digestion period of a month this meeting was followed by a Skype conference with 9 people. This article is a summary of the insights that this process has given us. It will not elaborate much on the past but focus on points of reflection and next steps in order to develop our network into a flourishing CoP.
Main points of reflection on the e-collaboration community
Clarity on our mission, identity of the group: The network started off with the inventory of tools and the technical aspects of using them. Gradually more attention is paid to the application of the tools. Also the relevance of the group for our organisation becomes an issue. The adoption of e-tools is put in the perspective of the wish to increase the effectiveness of our organisations. Currently the mission of the network would be better described as “influence the judicious adoption of e-tools”. The relevance issue is important. It is good to have a mission statement for the group even better when it is understood by all members and discussed on a regular basis.
The boundaries of the group, group membership: The discussion on the relevance of the group also includes that of the boundaries. Who can become member of the group, how open are discussions. How big, how diverse do we want to become. Diversity in the group is already high, different levels of comfortability with e-tools, different expectations of the group. There are also differences between the organisations behind the group. This creates the risk of a break down of the group in smaller groups. The variety can also be an asset, especially if learning relations can be build in the group. Members might also be members of other groups. Make use of this, let them in new things learnt elsewhere.
Community of Practice (CoP), a laboratory: After the discussions with John it becomes clear that our network is, of course, a Community of Practice. A community of practice of people interested in the use of e-tools in order to improve the effectiveness of development cooperation. This particular topic offers the very interesting opportunity of making the CoP a laboratory in itself. A laboratory to gain experiences on the the triplet: tools, applicability, adoption.
Repertoire of tools used: This laboratory function can be benefited from even more by adding more technical tools to the repertoire used by the group No better way of gaining experience on the applicability of different e-tools then in the context of our own CoP. Every event is an opportunity to practice new tools and learn about their applicability. This learning should be an active process, choose for intervisions (sort of peer assist) rather then the nice stories.
Leadership: This group is inter-organisational, this makes it more challenging for leadership. But the fact that members belong to different organisations make the group also appealing for shop-talk, kitchen-sink-talk (kijkjes in elkaar's keuken). How come that one organisation is more successful in adopting certain tools then others? Framing and sense-making is an important role for the leadership. How to shape and sustain this leadership is a challenge.
Suggestions for next steps
Once a year a community-wide discussion about it’s relevance. This can help members frame their engagement. And it might give organisations a reference point for measuring the value. It creates energy for learning.
Use the diversity of the group as an opportunity for contribution. For example by working in small focus groups.
Value both f2f and on-line vents, improve both, look at the rithm, combine tools. Create enough room for shop-talk (e.g start each f2f meeting with a short round of experiences), create room for contact, develop ways to include new members.
Use the Blog as a main publishing tool for the community to describe experiences, not only the successful ones, also the one from which lessons can be drawn.
Gradually move from the emphasis from ‘tools’ to the ‘process’ in which they can be used. Attention for framing and sense-making. Make link to organisational learning in own organisations.
More concrete actions: add one-to-one contact (like telephone interviews), add RSS feed to member’s blogs, add more frequent telephone conference calls (smaller groups, narrower subjects). Learning from those groups then shared in broader community via notes, audio, pod cast, f2f.
See the community as a warehouse for resources: e.g. one member is hosting a paid wiki (or conferencing tool), of which other members can make use of.
Expanding the network, yes or no: Are people from more commercial organisations welcome in the group?How public are resources and conversations in the community?What will happen with the intimate sense of ‘solving problems together’ when the community grows?What (+) and (-) would be entailed by inviting partners from the South?
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Angelica Senders (ICCO) en Sibrenne Wagenaar (PSO)
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e-(collaboration) After reading the previous post on e-collaboration I was a bit puzzled. In the report the following conclusions are being drawn: The main driving force for e-(collaboration) is determined by the personal interest of one (or more) person(s) in an organisation. It also becomes clear that each organisation (or person) more or less designs by trial and error and needs to ‘re-invent the wheel’. This means that much depends on coincidence and not on appropriate research. This raises questions, at least on quality control. The two main reasons mentioned to start e-collaboration are information sharing and building or maintaining relationships. However, much of the content in the report reflects on the technical issues of using tools, and on implementing them (the organisation or even a person selects a tool and introduces that to the partners). Basically, what I miss is the part of collaboration, which is so prominent in the title. Is using Skype a form of collaboration? Or is it just a communication tool and nothing more? For me it is only a communication tool just like a telephone or e-mail. And yes, some form of collaboration can be achieved by using the communication tool, but it is not collaboration by itself. So what do I think e-collaboration is? In the past we, at The Network University, have encountered this question many times. This originates from us offering collaborative e-learning for many years now, and especially in the first few years we did this (1997-2000), people had no clue what we were talking about. To go into this some more, I will first post an explanation before continuing with my question.
How TNU thinks about collaboration Collaborative learning programmes are not based on individualised reading and a single final examination, but rather on multiple interactions leading towards common and negotiated understandings, based on differences in ideas, knowledge and attitudes amongst the participants and the coaches. At TNU we believe that the educational experience should be process and not just product oriented. In order to achieve this we promote active learning. In other words: we expect our participants to ask themselves: 'What do I need to know to solve the problem at hand and how do I gain access to this information?', rather than: 'What is it that you are going to tell me today?' The collaborative learning experience is structured primarily through assignments. In our online environment students are asked to work together in order to complete the assignments at hand. The focus is on constructing an individual knowledge and skills base within the context of a wider group. Participants are required to actively take on different roles within the group. In fulfilling their different roles they have to take into account their own knowledge level and understanding as well as that of the audience. In order for this to be effective, participants need to take an active approach to learning as well as take responsibility for how someone else understands things.
In this latter aspect the sense of ‘community’ is vital. The shared responsibility is increased by the fact that all contributions are added to a communal knowledge pool (hosted by the organisation but maintained by the group itself). Collaborative learning, we believe, promotes active learning and increasingly thoughtful participation in the learning process, leading to a greater understanding of the issues being tackled. So what is central in our opinion of e-collaboration is an online community. Although such a community has to be created and maintained, we see it as a surplus with the courses we offer at TNU. Our participants are from all parts of the (mainly southern) world and therefore can enrich each other with different approaches and solutions to certain questions.
And it is especially this part of e-collaboration that is missing in the report. First of all I see a north-south approach in the collaboration, while, as is mentioned in the report, sometimes the southern partners are more equipped (in knowledge on e-tools) than the individuals in the Netherlands. But what in my opinion is missing most is a ‘social plan’ of the use of such tools. The impression is that choosing and experimenting with the tools is the goal, while it should be the collaboration (and the tools a means). In the past I have seen many projects which started under these premises and not only did most of them withered away into oblivion, it also left the partners who were invited to participate in a total confused state. What was their role, what was expected from them, and what was the purpose of the exercise? To conclude, my advice is to always start by thinking of the goals of the usage of any tool for e-collaboration, and the social process that directs its use.
We tried to cover the field of e-collaboration among Dutch NGOs as broadly as possible, to give an impression of the many different ways Dutch NGOs use e-collaboration in their work. The interviews are held with one person from an organisation, who was in many cases the initiator of the project. All stories are independent and relate a personal opinion of the interviewee about e-collaboration. Therefore it is not possible to collate them all together although we can use these stories to highlight the questions people encounter, and the stimulation and starting of the process. The interviews are the basis for these conclusions, although the meetings of the learning community and the interaction at the D-group helped in formulating the questions and problems more strongly.
These conclusions are built up the way the interviews were. I will start with the overall view of the phase Dutch NGOs are in, concerning the implementation of e-collaboration in their work. Then I will take a look at where they started from and how became enthusiastic. The reason they started comes next. What will be made clear there are the problems people sought solutions for or what they wanted to achieve by using e-tools. I will present the processes intended or provided to stimulate in a table per initiative. The influence of partners in the south will come across next. Then the implementation stage follows. How did people start looking for the right tool, how did they approach and convince others and how are they planning for the future? Then I will give an overview of the benefits e-collaboration brought to the people who are experimenting with it and also an overview of the difficulties they encountered in the broadest way. Finally I will present some recommendations for people who may like to start e-collaborating, which will mainly focus on the issues that have to be taken into consideration before starting.
Orientation and experimentation
One general observation is about the phase Dutch NGOs are in at the moment. Overall people are getting curious and are seeing possibilities for themselves and for their organisations in e-collaboration. People are experimenting, exploring and trying out different e-collaboration tools. They are on the search for the benefits e-collaboration can bring and how they can best approach and implement this. A good example of this is the size of the e-collaboration group: with 57 members it indicates that people are interested in e-collaboration as well as in e-collaboration with others interested in the subject.
A tool or the process as a starting point
E-collaboration is approached from different angles: people can start with an e-tool and experiment with that. Or people start from a process in their organisation or between partners that they want to improve. These are two different ways to go e-collaborating, but many principles or problems account for both approaches, as well as why people start e-collaborating in the first place. The initiators are not necessarily technicians or already experienced with e-collaboration. Overall all they are curious and like to experiment with ICT from a personal interest. They often know their way around the internet and this could be one of the reasons they can so easily see the benefit of sharing over the internet. If you are familiar with the different ways the internet is used, you already have seen the way it could work. If you read blogs, make use of wikipedia and if you need any help on a topic you can go search on Google and often end up at a forum where other people provide your answers, so you can already see the value of sharing knowledge. These people have beliefs about e-collaboration for instance like: ‘It helps in communication with partners’; ‘we have to go that way in order to not get behind’; ‘it would be fun to experiment with the possibilities’; ‘if he (a colleague or a friend) is so enthusiastic there has to be something there.’ In every organisation experimenting with e-tools, most of the time there are one or two enthusiasts, unless the initiative comes from the organisation management. The ‘man with the vision’ is then harder to locate.
The reason for ‘doing’ e-collaboration
Information The reasons for starting using e-tools can be divided into two categories. The first is centered around information. Information sharing, searching, collecting and management. The benefit of e-tools here is the fact that information can be made accessible to a lot of people in their own homes, that they can access at their own time. Information is also more and more about experiences and knowledge of others, since people see similar problems arise with other people or organisations. A question that one comes across regularly is: How can we learn from the experience of others? How can we make this implicit knowledge explicit and make use of all knowledge out there? Interaction among organisations and within organisations, entering into dialogue and discussion gets more prominent with the goal of learning from each other. The difference between knowledge and information comes into the mix at this stage. In the initiatives studied there is a clear guideline of where knowledge and where information is shared. The definition of information is that it can be easily spread and copied and therefore it exists in static documents or text. Knowledge on the other hand is what people know and have learned and this comes out in conversation, discussion and training courses. This also means that sharing your knowledge by sharing documents or reports is very hard.
Relationships The other category of reasons why to start e-collaboration in the first place is about people and relationships. E-tools create the possibility to work closer together, to get more informed about the progress or the situation somebody is in, which make cooperation easier. Overcoming time and space differences are the most obvious benefits of e-collaboration by maintaining or building relationships. Development is about working across borders, so e-collaboration can really help out there. Good relationships are also crucial if knowledge has to be exchanged and people want to learn from each other. People need to have a sense of trust in order to exchange knowledge, so the relationship building should always come before the learning part can start. This is often done by meeting face-to-face. There are also practical reasons to use e-tools, like money-saving, but improving relations or the information flow and learning from each other are main reasons lying behind e-collaboration. The processes behind that came across in my research can be found in the research rapport. Due to technical problems I couldn't displat them here.
Influences (from the South)
Despite all the benefits people sometimes have to cross an initial barrier. This barrier can be overcome by the enthusiasm and clear vision of somebody else or by experiences with similar projects in the past. The influence of partners in the south is also apparent. If they start using e-tools, then the organisations in the Netherlands will become positively influenced by this. The stimulus thus often comes from others. Although it can be very hard to influence others in their opinion about e-collaboration, it does turn out to be one of the main reasons people start. Enthusiasm is the key. People need to get convinced to start thinking: “wow” this sounds like fun, something new and exciting and the options are endless! On the other hand this thought can also be very scary. I will get back to this when I discuss the difficulties you can encounter.
Design and implementation stage
When starting an initiative about e-collaboration different steps need to be taken. These steps can be very different whether you start from a tool or a problem/process and whether you are on your own or your organisation has taken up the initiative. The budget available also makes a huge difference. I will now discuss different questions encountered.
How to choose the right e-tool? First of all there is the choice of an e-tool. This question will not appear if the tool is the starting point, but if you want to improve a process or solve a problem, you have to choose a tool most suitable. In situations where some sort of training or course is the issue, the type of tool is quite clear: you need an e-learning tool or online learning platform. If this is not the case you need to start from the process and try to see to what qualifications the tool should possess. Is a synchronous or asynchronous tool needed? Does it have to be accessible at low bandwidth? What features does it have to contain? What is the price? Is it user-friendly? Can the tool be expanded? Is in-house technical support available? And so on. Concluding from my research there were never real problems with finding a tool. Here you can see that the initiators know their way around the internet or people make use of their own personal network. They start searching for tools and compare a couple of them. Often there is a friend, relative or colleague who has some experience with a certain tool. The smaller organisations often start looking for open source systems or free applications. Larger organisations have in general a larger budget to spend, so they can let something be designed for them or design a system themselves. Most of the time the decision of what tool to use is based on the opinion and experience of someone else. Very often people have tried an application. As soon as it provides all the features needed and it seems to work well, people stick with what they have come across. Continuing to look further as soon as you found something that seems to work does not really happen. This also seems to be the only way to go, as you can never compare all tools available and as long as it suits your needs, you got what you want. Once you have selected the e-tool, other issues will arise. How do you regulate access, quality, openness, moderation? These are questions that need to be answered and this will come with trial and error. Organisations often try to keep their systems as open and accessible to as many as possible in the beginning, but as soon as quality and safety come in the way, measures are taken.
How can people become involved and motivated? Once the tool has been selected and customised you need to involve people. New tools have to be introduced to those who will work with them. This can be done by simply providing the tool and let them figure it out themselves, or instructions can be given. Both happen just as often, but it depends on the tool and the people. Most e-collaboration tools are self-explanatory, if you have a basic experience with computers and the internet. Mostly people are approached with the tool and not for the process to be improved. The introduction of the (pre-selected) technique always comes first. This is a hurdle that has to be taken as people are very often reluctant to try new things. This approach can work for people, because it happens a lot that once people start to use an e-tool they cannot do without after. I have not come across initiatives where people are approached with a process they want to improve. I tried to look from processes in this research, but since I focused on different e-tools somehow, an e-tool always came first. From the possibilities a certain tool can provide I looked at how this could add benefits to somebody's work. This approach is not recommended in the literature. Looking from your own work and identifying obstacles or problem situations is mostly recommended. From there a solution can be sought in e-collaboration. The experiment with del.icio.us proves that the starting position from a tool can work very well, I even think these types of initiatives are very valuable. Tools have to be explored to get the best out of them and people who see the potential are the best in proving their worth. This is only workable for people who are interested, eager to explore and curious about the possibilities. People can be approached by newsletters, but mostly people are introduced to a tool personally. They will get a face-to-face explanation about how they can use the tool in their work. Providing the opportunity to try it out for themselves is also a way. This can work very well, as people then cross the first technical barrier. After introducing a tool, people have to be convinced to start working with a certain tool. First of all, if it is about an entire organisation, not all people are approached at once. The people that are very likely to be interested are approached first, so that they can then help spread the word. As I have already mentioned: an enthusiastic colleague can be of great influence. The main goal is to create a positive attitude towards e-collaboration. This is done by introducing the tools in a fun and informal way. Participation is encouraged by positive reactions to contributions which can shape people’s attitude and can form a sense of trust. It is also a way of rewarding people for their effort. Another way is to reward them directly by providing opportunities for them or to show them, in a rating or publication, that their efforts have been appreciated. This also works for people who maintain a blog. Comments can stimulate them to keep going, because that indicates that people read the blog and the topic or opinion has taken their interest. Another important thing is (technical) support. If people can go to somebody when they need help, or if they are connected to somebody with similar usage, like a buddy-system, then people become more comfortable. They don’t have to go trough the struggle on their own. Somebody facilitating the process can also help by adding structure to it.
What questions have arisen for the future of the projects? Since most e-collaboration initiatives are still in the exploring and experimenting stage, they are still trying to promote the initiatives and have not yet come to the stage where they have to make sure that everything will be kept running. What you can see is that people are starting to think about questions like: How will we expand the group, how can we make the initiative more broadly used, should we assign a moderator, which role will this moderator fulfil and when can we leave it up to the participants? Also rules are being set together, as sometimes the need for some regulation appears. Overall there is a tendency to make e-collaboration more the common way to do things or even to institutionalize the sharing and cooperation with others. Another common next step is expansion, both expansion with new tools or features, as well as expansion of people. There is never an 'end goal' about the range or time span. People always view the current initiatives as the start for more, which can be a tricky thing, because people will never be satisfied this way and might overlook too quickly what they have accomplished.
Main benefits of e-collaboration
The main benefits people find in their work are closely related to the reasons why people started collaborating in the first place: It saves time and money, information storage is better and information is more easily retrieved. People can get more involved with the work of their partners or colleagues who are far away. It gives the opportunity to have contact with people in other countries working in the same field. People get connected and the available knowledge becomes more visible, because it is stored and shared in online discussions. Some less obvious benefits are also present. Contacts become more informal and more regular. This results in better mutual understanding and better relationships. Another benefit of documenting information or work online is the value people attach to an overview. For instance, like with the Wiki on the course. It gave the initiator of the course an overview of what has been done there, which can also be easily shared. Besides that it can promote a sense of pride. Something tangible has occurred from the effort made, which can be seen as a kind of reward to people. This is very evident with e-learning courses where the students have a place to show what they have done. Another benefit not always immediately recognised or articulated is the way e-collaboration can contribute to a sense of community. There is a place (virtual although visible and accessible to all) where people come together and create something. This place, the name of the group collaborating and the fact they all share a goal, all create a sense of group feeling. People can be in this group for different purposes: for enriching someone’s knowledge or creating a specific plan or document, but if the group works right, a trust is formed trust, as well as reciprocity between the members. This can be very beneficial in future work, because social capital has expanded and entry points to knowledge or skills are acquired.
The difficulties
I expected that people would have difficulties looking for the right tool. There is so much available today, which makes it hard to decide which tool to take. A lot of the applications available are also for free and it costs a lot of time to compare them all. I perhaps did not hear this from the people I interviewed, because they obviously found the tool they wanted to use. However, they do encounter some technical difficulties sometimes. Problems like bugs or other technical problems like low bandwidth or spam are always obvious obstacles. These have to be solved (or accepted!) before you can see any further. Another problem I expected was with collaborating with partners over the internet. What I found was that partners are less reluctant to try new e-tools than expected and that they sometimes are even ahead of us. Of course there are bandwidth and other technical issues, but all partners within the initiatives of this research are very positive. Another thing people come across is the difficulty to make the essentials visible for others. The benefits, the possibilities it offers and all that e-collaboration can offer have to be made clear. These are the visions the initiators were attracted to. Unfortunately these aren’t the most tangible things. In addition to this, a lot of time and effort has to be invested before the results are shown. This can very easily hold people back. They can only see the additional work or e-mails to be read and the benefits seem to lie far away in the future. The fact that benefits are not easily visible and the fact they are also hard to make visible can also cause problems with the employer. Time invested cannot always be justified and this time is often not taken into account in the job applications. Another issue is trust. Trust is one of the main requirements for building a relationship, according to the theory about social capital. Unfortunately, there is no explanation provided about how trust can be gained or established. What can be seen in this research is that the lack of trust, trust between people, or with the tool or with another culture can result in an incorrect use of an e-tool. This is particularly clear if it is about people’s opinions or thoughts shared in a Wiki or a D-group. People get the feeling that sending a message to a D-group or placing a thought on a Wiki is a form of official publishing. Therefore only balanced opinions or complete thought-through considerations are shared and not ideas in progress, which can really hold back a discussion.
Issues to consider: recommendations
When starting an e-collaboration initiative some things must be kept in mind. They seem quite obvious, but this does not detract from their importance. First of all: make sure you know what people want, or have a clear picture of what kind of process you want to improve, and how. Is there a lack of information about a certain subject? What subject? Are relationships in need of improvement? And in what way: personal or closer co-operation? More sharing or sharing of a higher quality? These types of questions come first, and then you can adjust your strategy to their wishes. The next step is to formulate a clear goal and to make appointments clear so everybody knows what to expect and what is to be expected from them. This goal should be specified as best as it can, with a time span, the people involved the quality and quantity of interactions, etc. The tool used must fit the goal and most of all be integrated with the process. If it is not used, then it probably didn’t have a clear purpose or need. Don’t add tools or features just because you can. Every feature must have its purpose or, if it cannot be hidden, the choice to omit it must be made clear. Additionally, people have to be given proper time. This is time to get used to the tool, as well as time to sustain usage. You cannot expect people to e-collaborate alongside their work, unless it replaces a part of it. The organisation sometimes has to adjust policy in order to create the opportunity to work with these kinds of tools. Furthermore, make sure the foundations are solid. Do not overload people right away, but start with one or two features and only when people are used to them can you start to expand. A feature-overload has to be prevented at all times. People will get overwhelmed too easily and won’t know where to start. If you introduce e-tools in your organisation, then it works if you start informally and in a fun way. Let people try out the tool for themselves in a face-to-face meeting and don’t forget to emphasise the benefits e-collaboration can bring. People need to have a vision about what it can mean for them and their work and provide back-up and support where people can go for help afterwards. The initiators in my research always have a positive attitude towards the use of e-tools, but they can come across people with a negative attitude or negative experiences. Even if you are or want to be the initiator, you can have feelings like: I will never get people motivated, it will only cost me a lot of time, and it will never work. In my research I have not met such people, but in the e-collaboration meetings these issues do come across. From my point of view, the point is to keep yourself enthusiastic and keep being inspired by what you see in e-collaboration. Focus on small successes and try to get some people on your side. There are always other people who are into trying some new things and if not, involve them with your enthusiasm. Don’t think that e-collaboration is necessarily a large project: A lot is available, as well as possible and the trick is to choose the option right for you. Just starting to use Skype can already be a big advantage for you and/or your organisation. Do not underestimate this. Once you get familiar with one simple tool, the step to the next one is very small, but does not necessarily have to happen. The concept is: take what you can use and leave the rest! You also have to keep in mind that the start is just the beginning and you are still a long way from this once you have implemented and introduced the tools. The facilitation of the process comes next, which can easily be forgotten at the start. This is all about: think about what you are going to do, how you plan to do this and how you plan to keep this going.
Dgroups Dgroups, or ‘Development through Dialogue’ is an online home for groups and communities focused on international development. The platform provided is simple, non-commercial (no ads), respectful of privacy, and targeted at low bandwidth users in the South. It currently hosts 1884 groups with 66,589 members. Dgroups was created in 2001 by a partnership of development organisations who share a joint vision of the need for a common platform for development-related online communities. Current members of the Dgroups partnership include: CIDA, Hivos, IICD, ICCO, IICD, Danida, FAO, KIT and SNV, among others.
The next interview took place at August 31, 2006 with Sarah Cummings from KIT.
“I have a very wide variety of roles in Dgroups. I am a researcher, creator, representative of a member within the partnership, facilitator, passive and active member of Dgroups, all at the same time. At the moment, I act as moderator for 2 groups and am an active member of about 8-10 groups. I have been interested in online communities for the past few years and have done some research in the past. Now I am starting a research project about Dgroups themselves.” What are your points of interest or main focuses in your research? “It is still at the design stage but the main focus is on investigating the function, role and effectiveness of online knowledge networks in development, looking at Dgroups. I will be building on some research undertaken in 2004 but I think Dgroups are being used more strategically than two years ago and that should also prove interesting to investigate. I’m planning to look at: who are the members and the facilitators, how is gender visible in the groups and does use vary depending on continent. I am going to take a survey monkey as my main method, complemented by interviews and case studies of individual communities.”
Positive attitude
How are Dgroups used at KIT? “We have about 20 groups here, which support specific projects or are used to keep in touch and cooperate with partners. We notice, for example, that new members of online communities are often reluctant to share their opinions, because they feel every word will be judged.” With your mixed role in Dgroups you must have a lot of experience with how the system works for people. Do you have some tips for people who struggle with aspects like motivating people to post their reactions? “I would suggest that, if you start a group, you should have a clear goal of what you want to achieve with it. Then everybody will know what to expect, and what is expected of them. Next, begin with a round of introductions so that people can get to know one another. If a new member comes in, a personal e-mail with a word of welcome will offer encouragement. Your messages should also have a clear structure. Start your e-mail by briefly mentioning the subjects you’re going to talk about. This makes it easier for people to scan the messages and avoids the impression of information overload. I would also advise taking a positive tone. It’s important not to be critical, particularly in the beginning with inexperienced members, but if you must be critical, make it constructive criticism. If you share your opinions, try to be as clear as you can so as to reduce the chance of misunderstandings. In a discussion, it’s important to make your position clear and not be afraid of making a fool of yourself. These ‘tips’ seem very obvious, but they’re useful to keep in mind. Some people seem to have a knack for clear-cut responses, others rapidly get disorganised or write very long messages. In the end, the most important thing is that participants should realise what e-collaboration can do for them. If they don’t see what they can get out of it, they’ll simply say they don’t have time or don’t need it. Some people might even consider e-collaboration a sort of threat, because it means getting knowledge and information out in the open.”
Getting information out
In Dgroups a lot of information is shared and knowledge exchanged. What do you think of the ways this knowledge is shared with people outside the groups? “I really like the Wiki used by KM4DEV. I even used it in parts of my research as it yielded such brilliant information – pearls of wisdom! – which I would never have been able to find anywhere else. One of the reasons that the KM4D Journal was started was to share the deliberations of the community outside the group.” Could Dgroups be improved to stimulate knowledge sharing even more? “It would be nice if you could link different Dgroups more easily or could share files among groups. This, and many other ideas to stimulate knowledge sharing, are things that the partnership are working on at the moment.”
Communicating with partner organisations through the internet
What is Skype and what can you do with it? “With Skype you can talk to anyone, anywhere for free. Forever.” The slogan leaps out at you from the Skype homepage – Skype in a nutshell. Skype is a way to make phone calls to people on the other side of the world, for free. What do you need to use it? The only thing you need is a (reliable) internet connection, a computer and a headset.
The next interview took place at June 2nd, 2006 with Gerbina van den Hurk from NIZA.
Free and easy
Around 24% of the Dutch population uses Skype. Sometimes because their friends or family live far away, sometimes to cut costs. “I have been using Skype for a long time and I was always amazed why no-one else used it at NIZA, my organisation. In our profession, it’s ideal, because phoning partner organisations in the South is very expensive, and Skype is absolutely free. I discovered Skype through an international organisation of which I am a board member. They don’t have any money, so they use Skype a lot. I wanted to introduce the programme to NIZA, but wasn’t sure how to in the beginning. People thought it was a bit strange and preferred familiar means of communication. People prefer sticking to what they know. My goal was to help people find out that Skype isn’t so strange at all. I’d love people to see the potential of Skype." What do you see as the potential of Skype? "Our partners are far away and it’s hard to build a relationship with them when you hardly see each other and stay mainly in touch through e-mail. Skype is an easy and cost-free way of phoning. So it leaves more room for small-talk which also benefits the relationship. I think that Skype should become a standard tool in improving relationships.”
Enthusing others
“At one stage, one of our partners told us to start working with Skype. They used it a lot and did not understand why we didn’t. This was the trigger for people at NIZA. I think they didn't want to lag behind their partners. Then, about six months ago, I gave a short demonstration of how Skype works. More demonstrations turned out to be needed, but people did start to understand it." Did you succeed in the end, and why? "I think that my informal introduction to Skype helped. Everyone could experiment freely and slowly get used to the tool. Official guidelines from the management may exert too much pressure and I don’t think that’s conducive to people’s attitude towards the tool. Also, the headsets are in my room. If people want to Skype, they have come to my room first to get one. This also gives them a chance to ask me questions, or for help if they have problems. I think it’s very important that people feel they can turn to someone for help. NIZA is now using Skype, which I’m very happy about!” Are there any difficulties in getting started with Skype? “You need to download the application and create a user account, for which you need to invent a Skype name for yourself, and a password. An e-mail address can be added in case you lose your password. There is nothing complicated about that. If you want to use Skype, you just log in and you can talk with other people online. It’s much like MSN Messenger: you need to add people to your contact list before you can start a conversation. If people aren’t online much, like some partners in the south, you should set up a Skype appointment. You can easily schedule an appointment by e-mail or telephone, so you’ll be sure you’re both online at the right time.”
Better relationships with partners Has Skype achieved want you wanted to achieve? “Yes I think so. At least there’s more room for conversations about day-to-day things which has helped improve relationships. I am now considering introducing more e-tools. Everyone’s becoming familiar with Skype now and realises that there’s nothing complicated about it, and that it works. Now, I’d like to introduce del.icio.us, wikis and blogs. I’ll introduce them during an informal lunch, so that people don’t feel pushed. I am planning to invite some people working in the development sector, who already use the tools. Then they can explain what the tools can do, and NIZA staff can focus on the tools that will work for them."
Another point of view
I used Skype for the first time on September 6. I am embarrassed to admit this, but I am used to chatting a lot with my friends over MSN and I don’t have any friends or relatives living far away! My first experience was a conversation with a total of 5 people and we discussed the agenda for the e-collaboration meeting on September 20. I cannot say it went flawlessly! People ‘disappeared’ or only segments were heard of 2 people talking at the same time. I think we spent half the time talking about issues concerning the connection and whether we could hear each other properly. In the end these problems were solved as somebody else became initiator of the conversation and invited the rest. The computer of the person starting the conversation probably makes a difference to the quality. All of this must sound awful, but in my opinion these problems can contribute a lot to a conversation if the intention is to improve your relationship. I couldn’t stop laughing about everybody’s: ‘can you hear me’ or ‘who is gasping so loud.’ Ice breakers could not be formulated any better! This also provides people with a shared story and is it easy to switch over to talk about the conditions somebody is in. For example: ‘do I hear rain’ or ‘are you gasping so loudly because of the heat.’ What I am trying to say is: the more you can talk around the specific work topic, the more you get to know one another. A common framework can be created with shared stories. A webcam can also contribute to this: An image can tell you more than a thousand words.
This is a post explaining how you can read blogs as a basic introduction for people who are new to reading blogs; you can read them every now and then, or systematically. It is written by Dorine Ruter and Joitske Hulsebosch.
How to read blogs?
There are various ways to read a webblog ('blog') that you think is of interest to you. The main choice you have to make is whether you want to visit the blog every now and then, or that you want to be up to date with every new post on that blog.
1. You want to read the blog every now and then
The following are ways to remember the blogsite online; (of course another option is to write down the link in your agenda or wherever is handy for you...):
You can add the link to your Favorites / Bookmarks in your internet browser;
You can use the History of your internet browser. This will only work if you are visiting the blog regularly. In that case the blog address will appear in your recently visited web addresses. If you don't visit it for a long period, the history of your browser may no longer remember the URL (=the weblink)
You can tag it with an online social bookmarking tool, like e.g. del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us). To find the blog, you have to make sure that you use a tag that helps you to find the blog whenever you want to read it. This has the advantage that you can find it on any computer with an internet connection. The other advantage of using a social bookmarking tool is that others may find the blog of your interest through the tags you use. A more elaborate explanation of del.icio.us can be found at:
2. You want to read the blog systematically and you want to track any new post
There are various options again if you don't want to miss any new post on the blog. Almost all blogs have an RSS feed system and if you 'catch' those feeds with a RSS feed reader you will know whenever something new has been written. A lot of blogs have a 'subcribe by email' function. You may have to find out what works for you.
Email
You can use the subscribe by e-mail function which looks like the following and can be found at the right side of the blog (sometimes on the left-hand side). The only thing you have to do is enter your e-mail address and hit the 'subscribe me!' button. You will receive every new post in your e-mail inbox.
If your favorite blog does not have this option, you may ask the owner(s) to add this function! Alternatively you can create an account at e.g. Feedblitz and add a new feed yourself by entering the blog address.
RSS
A program known as a RSS feed reader or aggregator (the names RSS reader and RSS aggregator are both used) can check a blog on behalf of a user and will display any new blogposts that it finds. You can use any RSS reader. An RSS reader can be used not only to stay up-to-date with blogs, but with any other website that has an RSS feed. You can recognise the RSS feed on a blog for example by these signs:
There are lots of RSS readers; some allow you to read whole news items through the reader, others show the first lines and you can click on the item to read the full article online:
Or you can use an aggregator specialized in blogs. Here you can subscribe to the blogs you like to read and it will indicate which blogs have new blogposts. You will also be able to read them without going to the actual blog itself.
Personalised home pages are a special type of RSS reader which offer RSS aggregating functions too. The home page will open every time when you start your internet browser (eg. Firefox or Internet Explorer). In one glance you can see the new headlines of services you are subscribed to (see picture). You can add blogs to your personalised home pages too, discussion groups with RSS feeds or the weather forecast. You will see the headlines of new blogposts and can click on them if you want to read them.
The tool: Groove Operating via a network, Groove Virtual Office software allows teams of people to work together as if they were in the same physical location, through their website. What can you do with Groove? You can share files, track data and processes and get work done together with people who are not in the same location. What do you need? Groove is available in different versions and different price categories. There’s a version that runs on low bandwidth and a full version, available at a higher price. You can ask for price information at the Groove website. A 60-day trial version is also available; after the trial period a number of features will no longer be operational, but the core - like the document sharing feature - will still function.
The next interview took place at August 18, 2006 with Anja Panjwani from ETC.
Communication
“We wanted to improve communication with partners in the South. We’ve always used e-mail and telephone and now and then received a report or update on how they were doing, although it sometimes took time before we heard anything. Especially when a project plan or the like was involved, when we’d only hear from them when they were finished. It meant we never really worked together on a project, because we couldn’t give our input until the final version was ready. So we started looking for a place to share documents. And discovered Groove.” How do you use the application? And what do you mainly use it for? “I haven’t checked out all the options yet, as we’ve only just got the full version. We worked with the trial version before, but the function we most use is the file sharing option. Before Groove we always had reports available on the website, but that can’t compare to what Groove offers. It gives us the option of sharing documents in progress, so we can work on them together. Groove now contains documents like knowledge profiles, project proposals, contracts etcetera. One of the big advantages of Groove is that all files are shared automatically, as they’re stored on your own hard drive. So you don’t have to be online to access them. For our people in the field, who will be travelling with laptops and won’t always have internet access nearby, it’s perfect. They will always have the updated information to hand. Added documents are also marked with an asterisk (*) so you can easily see how many updates and new documents there are. Uploading is simple, as Groove works from you own Windows Explorer. The options available in the standard (trial) edition include shared files, discussion, calendar, sketch, web links, shared pictures and notepad. This gives an impression of the way you can use the Virtual Office.”
Just like Microsoft Office
How did you get started? “One of my colleagues suggested Groove, so we decided to try it out and downloaded the trial version. I think it’s the best way to get to know a new application, because you can only find out if it meets your needs by experimenting with it. We’ve only used it with our partner in Tanzania. Our colleagues there have introduced them to Groove and shown them how to use it. At first it was all very new so we spent a lot of time trying out the different features. It’s a very easy programme to use because everything is much the same as Microsoft office.” Are there any rules about using Groove, or is there someone keeping an eye on the process? “Someone’s responsible for the projects in each country, and they will also monitor the process at Groove a little. Different users have different rights. You can be a manager, a participant or a guest. This way there is some kind of hierarchy in Groove. We are currently working on a guideline. For instance, one partner added a lot of pictures, which are too heavy to download at low bandwidth. We have to set up parameters for this, which is what we’re currently working on.”
Sharing and contact
Does Groove meet your needs? “I am very enthusiastic about it! We share files, keep it all organised and if I need one of the partners I can contact them using Groove. It constantly shows who is online and who is currently in the workspace. There’s also a chat function and a message function. The latter is very similar to e-mail, but I found that contacting the partner using Groove leads to a quicker response most of the time. They probably receive a great deal of e-mail and not many Groove messages, so they can deal with those with more quickly. We do still use Skype if we need to talk, instead of the chat function. The Groove chatroom is very open, so everybody in the workspace can see the conversation. Although it’s often used to say ‘let’s Skype’. We do use e-mail less, which is a plus for me. Before, documents were sent back and forth and that happens far less often now.” Has the relationship with your partner improved? “There’s far more discussion and cooperation, so I’d say our working relations have definitely improved.”
The KIC project The OXFAM-NOVIB KIC project is an international project consisting of an online portal, face-to-face meetings, virtual workshops, expert meetings and discussions. KIC stands for knowledge infrastructure with and between counterparts. The features of the online portal The most important features of the website include: room for online communities, document sharing and locating partner organisations. (At the partner locator.) Before entering the website you have a choice of four different languages: English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. Visitors can also access the site in a low bandwidth version the site although not all features will be accessible that way. The portal will be public, with some closed areas reserved for members only. All partners and affiliates will be granted access and interested organisations can gain access on request. The information will be kept as open as possible. All partners are provided with the option to freely upload documents. News items will be supervised by a knowledge expert to guarantee the quality. A moderator, who can give access to other people, will oversee the communities. This can be set when a new community is created: people either request access or the moderator invites people. Every member has a profile, containing information about their job description, their organisation and the field they work in. Other members online are visible and can be approached by chat or e-mail.
The next interview took place in August 2006 with Jan van Ansum from OXFAM/NOVIB.
Working together, sharing knowledge and finding each other
“The KIC project contains multiple components and aims to increase and stimulate the exchange of knowledge and collaboration with and between OXFAM counterparts and affiliates. The online, multi-purpose portal is part of this. It offers the option of sharing knowledge at the specialist sites by uploading documents to exchange experiences. People can collaborate online in the online communities, while the portal also provides a listing, a kind of ‘yellow pages’, of all partners. Access to the portal is open to all affiliates and partners; around3000 organisations in total. Visitors can also access the portal for news items and general information, but won’t be able to access all parts.”
Learning from the experiences of others
How did this project get started? “The idea for the project was first conceived about four years ago. It looked as though all OXFAM processes could be better regulated and our partners asked us if we could come up with a way of exchanging experiences with other partners. They saw other partners encountering similar problems and issues in their work and wanted to share their experiences. The project was eventually developed by two OXFAM affiliates and some 30 partners.” How has it progressed so far? “The portal has been online since 1 July. We don’t give all partners access straight away; it’s still being tested at the moment. The lay-out can still be improved in places, and we intend to improve it gradually. Initially, we allow access the organisations which were involved in the design process. We also give them a script for entering the page so they can explore the entire portal step by step. We also make sure they receive a feedback list so they can tell us what they like, where they have difficulties or have suggestions about things to be added.”
Practices and the partner locator
What I like most about the portal are the ‘yellow pages’ and the options for sharing experiences. Can you tell me more about those? “The yellow pages are the partner locator. We’re planning to register all partners, counterparts and affiliates in the system so people can locate them. Only a few are registered at present, but the list is expanding. You can search the locator by area, theme and country. There’s information about each partner, its location, main themes and goals. There is a ‘practices’ menu where people can share experiences. This is where you can upload documents, with descriptions of experiences useful for others. We refer to these experiences as ‘good, bad and new practices.’ A template can also be downloaded, so they can use the right format for sharing. If a document is being uploaded, the region, theme and language of the practice must be indicated. People can search for these indicators. Each of the portal’s registered users is free to upload documents, so there’s never a risk of bad quality documents. A peer reviewing system for documents, and “expert reviews” will differentiate between good and lesser quality documents and practices. If the KIC team finds that too many people add irrelevant documents, authorisation for adding documents can be limited.” Did you take any precautions to encourage only uploading good quality documents? “We created an option for readers to rate practices as a way of avoiding lower calibre documents. A practice is awarded a certain number of stars, depending on its value to others. This way, we hope to encourage people to only upload high quality documents. Of course we have to wait to find out if this will work.” Motivate and reward
How are you planning to motivate people to make an active use of the portal? “We will announce it in our newsletters and suggest that people check it out. We are also working on ideas for rewarding those who share the best practices. As I mentioned, we let the users of the practices judge them themselves. We’re thinking about introducing a reward for ‘the best practice’. Alternatively, all practices could be published in a book. We are also considering offering people an option to chat with a manager or expert. Chat is one of the portal options. You can see who is online at any time and start a conversation with them. Offering a chance to talk to people who are not normally easily accessible might attract users to the portal. Everybody also has his own profile with their name and information about where they work. We also want to use these profiles to indicate how active people have been on the site, with information on how many documents someone has uploaded, for instance.”
2 Months later…
Now it's almost two months since the portal went live. Has word spread already? “No. So far only the individuals and organisations we have directly approached know of it. We’re planning to send out a mailing when the holidays are over. But that’s not to say we’re not doing anything to publicise our portal. OGB, the OXFAM affiliate in Great Britain has field offices in the south and those people visit the partner organisations to encourage them to use online communities. They look at how their work could benefit from communities and how they could use communities to further their objectives. So we’re working hard to get communities started, but so far people only find out about the portal through other people or from mentions in the e-letter.” When the portal was set up, you sent feedback questionnaires to the organisations. How did those people respond to the system in general? “Well, it took a bit of effort to get an initial response. We had to call people to get the forms back; finally, only about 10 were returned. . I guess they didn’t have time to fill them in. The overall reaction was positive. People thought the layout was logical although they couldn’t find much information relevant to their work; but that information will come from the uploaded practices.”
Practice documentation
Let’s go through the features individually: how are the practices doing? Have any been added? “Yes, but mostly because some organisations were approached personally to ask whether they’d share one of their practices. People really have to be given an opportunity to document these practices properly, which requires time and effort. In the future we want to institutionalise uploading practices more, so that it will be included in job descriptions. This way we can make sure they will be given time to make them.” Do you already have an example proving the benefits of the shared practices? “I know there’s a keen search on for a success story so it can be shared with other organisations. There are rumours but, because people are so eager for success, they may be reading more into it than there actually is. Another problem in searching the practices is that sometimes more than one practice is contained in one document. Which is a problem for the search option, as a number of practices cover several areas, which means they may go undiscovered and unread.” Have any practices been star rated yet? “Not yet. By the way, here at OXFAM we held an in-house rating for some new regulations or approaches for the entire organisation. We hardly got any responses to that. I think the system is still too difficult. We had already planned on dividing the rating into different areas, such as the method used in the practice and the degree to which someone could apply the practice in their own work. This might make it easier to rate a practice. This will then present us with the challenge of averaging these ratings. If everyone finds a practice mediocre but it has genuinely benefited one individual’s work, which consideration will weigh heaviest?”
Retrieving counterparts
And is the partner locator finished now? “Regrettably, not. It is very hard to retrieve the information about all counterparts. There’s not list of them anywhere, waiting to be printed. But the difficulty we’re having in collecting information on the partners proves just how useful the locator will be. We expect it to become the portal's main attraction. Unfortunately we’re also having a few technical problems. The locator isn’t working as we would want it to work at the moment.” How’s the chat function getting on? Is it already in use? “I think it will only be used if more people join the portal. We’re still considering attracting people by inviting a number of experts or gurus in certain fields to go online.”
Another point of view
The online portal of the KIC project contains many features and could be described as the ultimate e-collaboration tool. People can co-operate, share experiences and knowledge, retrieve information, communicate and find partners and affiliates of OXFAM/Novib. There are no features missing.
It is hard not to become overwhelmed due to the many available options In order to make the best use of it you should start by looking at your own situation. Where do the constant struggles in the process remain? What could be done more efficiently? Where is there miscommunication or a lack of information? From there you can look at the portal and choose the feature best suitable for your purpose. The many features don’t have to be used all at once. The offer of so many features at once in one portal is often not recommended. Since OXFAM/Novib is such a big organization with many requirements from many different people, they have chosen to offer all of these options. It is up to the users to choose the right ones from all the options made available to them. If you are targeting a smaller group you should keep in mind that only the features necessary need to be developed. It is important that the option to add features at a later stage is kept open. E-collaboration tools must be able to grow with their users’ wishes.
What is the HRIA Centre? The HRIA Centre is an interactive resource centre. It is based on a content management system (CMS) and should become a platform for the exchange and retrieval of information and knowledge on Human Rights Impact Assessment. What can you do at the centre? At the moment the centre is accessible to everybody in need for information about Human Rights Impact Assessment. Core information can be searched in four different areas. There is an explanation of the 8 steps for a cyclical approach towards policy development and project management, developed by HOM with material about these steps. A collection of instruments for approaching HRIA is available. There are also case studies about the subject and, finally, information on organisations working in human rights impact assessment, news on the issue and interesting links. What do you need to get there? The centre is set up in such a way that everybody should have access to it. All you need is an internet connection.
The next interview took place at July 17, 2006 with Jan de Vries and Dave Hardy from HOM.
Information supply
“We came to the conclusion that there was a wealth of information on Human Rights Impact Assessment, the subject we are currently working on. However, the problem with most information is that it is targeted at a specific audience and not presented under the umbrella of human rights impact assessment, and other people have difficulty retrieving it. We wanted to create a simple, easily accessible system so people could find all this information concentrated in one place. It provides general information, like the definition of Human Rights Impact Assessment, plus tools and instruments that people can apply. About a year ago, working with a freelance consultant and a web developer we’ve worked with before, we started to shape the tool. We began with a questionnaire to get an accurate needs assessment and circulated it among 150 stakeholders; we received around 60 responses. We then proceeded with the outcomes. After a few months we developed a beta-release of the system that identified a number of problems, which were solved with the official release.” What were your starting points? “The system had to be easy to use and clearly structured, because a wide range of people had be able to work with it. Because the system is available to people all over the world, the system had to be technically accessible. And accessible for those who are colour blind. It was also important to design the site so that the layout wouldn’t be affected by changing the size of the text in your internet browser. This isn’t always the case in all regular websites: the text size often doesn’t change at all. The site is English language only, although some documents will also be in other languages. We considered a multi-lingual site, but the centre will probably hold information on topics covered by the larger organisations, and we assumed that English would be sufficiently established as the principal language there. But although the system is English language at the moment, we may well make it available in other languages in the future.”
Taking it step by step
“In the end, it took us a year to set up the centre. This is pretty fast! We use an iterative approach though. At the moment the centre is mostly a database for information retrieval. The site has now been online for a week and we are still working on approaching people and networks about the centre. We won’t expand the features until our system has become more widely known. We will eventually develop a login section giving people the opportunity to upload their own documents. At the moment, only HOM has this authorisation. From then on we will fulfil a more managing part in the project. We also want to be able to provide online education modules and workshops.”
Yahoo Messenger and Groups
Do you use any other e-tools in your work? “I also use Yahoo Messenger to keep in contact with our partners in Asia. They are actually more used to tools of this kind than we are. They conduct a meeting at a scheduled time once a week, when everybody makes sure to be online so they can all take part. It seems like an ideal situation to me. In the Netherlands, it sometimes seems as though people prefer e-mail. The technology is available, but people can’t seem to find the time to get round to using it. I also used a Yahoo group once in a project, as a free alternative to a D-group. The only difficulty is that every participant has to create a Yahoo account and a Yahoo e-mail address. And there’s a good chance you’ll be flooded with spam. Besides the Yahoo group I also used Writerly once with someone in Italy. It’s an application that helps you to work on a document with others. It’s very effective for the draft version, but when completing the final document it’s best to split it up. With Writely, it's hard getting a good layout.” How do you think e-collaboration can benefit (Dutch) NGOs? “I think work can be done in a more effective way but, as I already said, too little of the available options are used. You really need to invest some time in getting to know new technology. I also came across the downside of the internet once at a conference. At the break, half the people headed for the library to check their e-mail and search for information. They seemed to have forgotten the value of exchanging ideas with the rest of the conference-goers. People may be drawn too easily to their computer screen nowadays.”
Another point of view
There are two ways of collecting information: collect the documents, or collect the places where you can retrieve the documents. The HRIA centre focuses on the first and del.icio.us is an example of the second approach.
The way the centre has come into existence is an example of thinking from practice: A missing link was discovered and from there the design of a solution began.
A question asked with a portal like the HRIA centre is: how open should it be? The more open, the more freedom visitors will have and the less work there is to HOM itself. A danger is that the overview and the structure and quality will get lost.
A weblog or blog According to Wikipedia, A blog is: "Blog is the contraction universally used for weblog, a type of website where entries are made (such as in a journal or diary), displayed in a reverse chronological order. Blogs often provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic."
The next interview took place at September 21, 2006 with Wouter Rijneveld from Woord en Daad. Expressing yourself
“I started my blog around March this year. Since then, I’ve posted about 50 items. I started blogging because I read a lot and sometimes the things I read frustrate or stimulate me. Which urges me to express my opinion somehow and somewhere. I am quite active on the internet, so I knew about blogging. It seemed to me the perfect way to express my views.” Do you want to achieve something specific by blogging? “No, it’s something I do purely for myself. I simply want to be able to express my views. I don’t try to change the world, which probably wouldn’t work anyway with the way I blog. As you can see, I blog about a wide variety of topics: very personal things, like the birth of my son, but also about issues connected to my work. If you want to achieve something with a blog, I think you need to keep a clear focus. I realised this when I registered my blog at certain services, which make finding my blog easier. I always find it difficult to choose the categories to put my blog in.” Can you describe the subjects you cover? “I blog about development, religion, general news and personal issues. You might say my main theme is unfair trade or the injustice in the world. I’ve considered splitting those topics into two separate blogs: private and development. But this means keeping two blogs going and people who read my blog now will have to start reading two. And because I blog for myself, I didn’t really see the need.” Why did you choose blogger as a blog service? “I searched options for free blogging and came across Blogger. Its very user friendly, which is an aspect I looked into. Later, I tried out a couple of other free sites, but didn’t feel they offered many advantages compared to Blogger. One problem I did encounter is that Blogger does not allow putting posts in categories. But I got around this by tagging my posts at delicious."
Other people’s feelings
How is your blog connected to your work at Woord en Daad? “It isn’t. I only share my opinions and as my interests concern my professional life, some subjects overlap. When I explicitly refer to development-related issues, the problem is that I then somehow have to consult or get the approval from Woord en Daad with every post I write. Since I’m only blogging for myself, I want to avoid going trough the communication department. My work does influence my blog a lot, because I come across interesting issues at work. However, the reverse hardly ever happens: my blogging doesn’t have much influence on my work. The only thing might be that blogging accentuates some feelings, which I might also express in my work. I try to avoid naming Woord en Daad in my blog. I won’t specifically mention anything that directly opposes the views of Woord en Daad. This also holds for my former employer. I do not want them to take offence with me. In general, I am very careful when my views directly oppose someone else’s. If I read an interview, I will refer to that interview but without specifically naming the interviewee. I don’t want to make personal attacks. I also avoid rubbing up someone in my own network the wrong way, although I usually take a critical stance on issues.”
To be, or not to be known
How did you get your blog publicised? “People gradually became aware of it in my own network. Half were positive while the others didn’t give any specific reaction. I guess they didn’t see the point in sharing your opinion over the internet. They also might regard me as too critical. People aren’t always clear why I like to share what I share. I don’t really promote it much. After all, my initial goal wasn’t to attract a lot of visitors. Although I have to admit that I keep track of hits on my site; I’m increasingly interested in visitor numbers and really enjoy people reacting to my blog. That way you get some credit for your work. The only promotion I do is to enter the address of my blog whenever I create a profile anywhere on the internet. It is also registered with Google and connected to a website I have with a friend.” Do you get a lot of visitors? “I get around 7-10 visitors a day. It’s not a huge number - the maximum is around 50 visitors a day. People seem attracted by unusual viewpoints, but sometimes they get to my blog through very weird word combinations. I can see the search words that lead them to it. Because I cover many topics, there are a great number of possible combinations. As my blog isn’t in English, people who can’t read Dutch will log off pretty fast. I get the idea that more individuals then organisations visit my blog.”
Corporate blog?
Do you see any potential or advantages for a corporate blog? "We did a trial and kept a blog during a field visit, but the time involved and practical questions like 'what can and can’t you make public directly' and who would be interested enough in the projects to read such a blog, convinced us against continuing the experiment. But it might be continued for certain special events."
Another point of view
I don't keep up a blog myself. I have the feeling that I don't have anything to share, so I would not know what to write. I have used a blog once for a course at the university. We had to record there what we wrote. At that time it didn't really make sense to me. I thought the teachers chose a blog just to have something else instead of WebCT Vista, which we always used. Now I am beginning to think that I could have kept up with the blog to organise all I have ever written. It is a very useful tool to show progress or a change of ideas over time.
The tool: Teamspeak Teamspeak is a software application for online meetings. The programme has to be downloaded and installed on every user’s computer, and another application: the server application, has to be installed on a server. This can be on in-house server or, if that is not available, the programme can be hosted somewhere else. People need a microphone and speakers (preferably a headset) and Teamspeak is free of charge. Teamspeak vs. Skype Teamspeak is comparable with Skype. Both have the facilities to make phone calls over the internet, only with Teamspeak more people can be added to the conversation. Also with Teamspeak you can broadcast an image of who is talking and the conversation can be recorded, and a chat function is available. Participants in a conversation can also be housed in different ‘rooms.’ This makes it possible to split the group during a discussion, so smaller groups can talk things over separately, or to hold different meetings at the same time. Teamspeak seems to work better at low bandwidth than Skype, although the quality of the sound can be reduced.
The next interview took place at July 3, 2006 with Dorine Ruter from ETC.
Meeting at a distance
“Over a year ago the programme committee of RUAF (Resource Centres for Urban Agriculture and Food Security - www.ruaf.org) came to me with the question whether I knew a tool that would make it possible to conduct a meeting over the internet. The group consists of about 10 people and they are spread over different countries across all continents, i.e Peru, China, Senegal. The programme committee has one face-to-face meeting each year, during which members exchange information regarding the progress in their region and the problems they encounter and talk about how to continue the work in the coming year. There was a need, however, to meet on a more regular basis to share successes and exchange and discuss how to address problems that occured. Additional online meetings will fulfil this need, but have some practical advantages over additional face-to-face meetings: participants only have to be available during the meeting (a few hours) and there are no costs involved such as flight tickets and accommodation. The regular and informal character of the online meetings should support more exchange and closer links between the various resource centres.”
The quest
How did you handle this question? “I started trying out different options (MSN Messenger, Netmeeting, Skype). We used MSN messenger for our first meeting for example, but the (fast) typing turned out to be difficult. Besides that, chatty conversations can become chaotic really fast if everybody replies to the same message. You get double messages where both say the same thing and can lose the overview really quickly. Thirdly some participants preferred a tool that supported synchronous conversation with sound. This would be closer to a real meeting. I also tried using Skype, but at that time Skype only allowed a maximum number of 5 people for conference calls and that wasn’t enough. Eventually I received a reference to Teamspeak. Teamspeak is a tool that is used a lot in the gaming world, but it seemed perfect for the purpose of the programme committee. It provides the opportunity to actually speak with more people at the same time over the internet and that was just what I was looking for!" Downloading and log in
“In order to use Teamspeak, you need a client application for each member and one server application. Here at ETC we didn’t want to deal with the technical implications of hosting the server application on our own server, so we decided to let the application be hosted somewhere else. We chose a provider experienced in hosting Teamspeak. This costs us only a few euros a month. The people that want to participate in a meeting need to download and install a client application. This application is rather large in size (5.59 MB), so in areas with low bandwidth this can take a while. A backup plan was to send the application - downloaded by us - on a CD-ROM. However, all participants managed to download the application directly.” All this sounds pretty complicated. “Oh no, that really shouldn’t stop you from using the application! Software installation is something that always needs to be done, whether you are using Skype or MSN or Teamspeak. After that, the use is fairly simple. If you want, you can try the software first from the Teamspeak website. You only have to download the client application and than you can use the Teamspeak server. All the information you need is provided by Teamspeak. What information do you need to set up Teamspeak for your group? “Participants need the usual login name and password to connect to the server address. They also need the direct number of the server, a so called IP address. To help people set up and use the software I wrote down a step-by-step description for the participants, which contains all the data people need, (including the login and IP address) and exactly what they need to do to take part in a meeting. Even the simplest steps are mentioned in this document, since that’s were things usually go wrong (e.g. Make sure you have a headset, Check that the volume on your computer switched on). It happened to me once that I had been testing someone’s connection and equipment over and over again, because he couldn’t get any sound. It turned out that the volume of his computer was switched off!”
Testing and preparing
Do you encounter a lot of technical problems? “No, not really. I always make sure to implement some testing time for each of the participants, about a week before the meeting will take place. New members that join a meeting for the first time need to download the application or sometimes the computer settings, which makes a firewall stand in the way, are changed. These kinds of things are still fixable at that moment. Besides that, we ask the participants to be online 15 minutes before a meeting starts, to have a last minute check and solve some the last problems, like a volume button that is switched off. During the meeting I am reachable by MSN, Skype and regular phone in case somebody encounters problems.” All this sounds like there is really a need for technical backup. “It can come in handy if somebody, who’s not taking part in the meeting itself, is around for technical assistance, so the meeting facilitator can concentrate on the actual conversation. Technical backup is not absolutely always necessary. If you just want to talk to someone or with a few people, all you have to do is login and start the meeting. But with the meetings I support, there are around 10 people involved and it already takes a lot of effort to find a date and time that everybody is available. So if you have found a moment that all can take part in a conference call, you want the meeting to go flawless.”
Sharing problems more easily
What is your experience with online meetings so far? “We have conducted a meeting with Teamspeak about three times now and the people involved are very pleased with the process and the tool. They just wanted to consult each other more often and now they can with the use of Teamspeak. People can come forward more easily with their smaller problems, because of the informality in comparison with the annual meeting. Naturally meeting over the internet (and especially meeting over low bandwidth and without visual contact) is not the same as meeting physically. Some aspects during the meeting must be kept an eye on more carefully. For example, you need to make sure the background noise is as little as possible. Teamspeak provides a ‘Push to talk’ mode. When somebody wants to activate his microphone in order to talk, they must press a keyboard button. When not speaking, he/she leaves the microphone muted. This reduces the noise input from those participants that are listening. This feature also visualises who exactly is talking, since you cannot always recognize someone’s voice when it’s digitalized. Also you have to find a way to make sure not everyone speaks at the same time. When meeting without visual contact, all cues for when to speak and when not to, are missing. When using the ‘talk button’, a green dot appears before the participant’s name. You can use this feature to give notice when you would like to say something, a bit like raising a hand if you have a question. This prevents people from talking at the same moment and helps the facilitator keep an eye on who would like to contribute. Still, if you want to you can talk simultaneously of course. A minor disadvantage of Teamspeak is I think the way the chat function works. To use that you have access a menu by mouse, so it doesn’t work very well while talking. If it did, like with Skype where you can talk and chat at the same time, the chat function can be used to take the minutes. Everybody can than briefly enter what they have been talking about.” Do the conversations run smoothly? “Yes that is going really well. The goal is to share your experiences and problems, so people tell their story and others respond to that.
See the team while you speak Is there a future with Teamspeak at ETC? “I think we just continue to use it at the meetings, because it works really well for our purpose. We’ll be on the lookout for low bandwidth conference software with webcam functionalities, though, since we believe this would help connecting and sharing during the online meetings."
Another point of view
Server application… Client Application… Hosts… Technical difficulties? No, just a way to talk to a few people at the same time, without submitting a conference call at KPN. I tried Teamspeak myself. It is really easy. The only question to me seemed: when will I be using Skype and when will I use an application like Teamspeak? A lot of people are familiar these days with Skype, or have at least heard of it. The main reason Dorine choose to try Teamspeak was because more people could be added to the conversation. I see several reasons for trying out Teamspeak:
With Teamspeak it is much easier to take turns. If a discussion leader is missing or if there is a very large group, it provides a very clear view of who wants to talk next. The green dot that lightens when people want to speak. At Skype the only option to make this known is by just starting to talk.
A second reason for trying out Teamspeak is when you encounter regular problems with quality. If Skype does not deliver the quality you need, it is hardly any trouble to check if this will be any better with Teamspeak.
A final reason could also be that you just want to compare different applications for yourself without blindly choosing the one best known. (Skype.)
A reason not to try Teamspeak is if you really cannot see any value the application might add. For example, if Skype works very well and you don't have large meetings over the internet. You can only tell for sure after you tried it out!
What is it that you use? Wageningen International uses an e-learning platform, which is defined and maintained using a Content Management System (CMS) What are the main options of the CMS? Courses websites can be easily defined, developed and maintained. The system contains multiple websites, a library and there is a link to a discussion forum. Groups of course participants can be given special rights in the system.
The next interview took place at July 6, 2006 with Mirjam Schaap from Wageningen International.
Meeting place
“I work in the Capacity Development and Institutional Change Programme. I am one of the administrators of the CMS we use. We started to design this system about 4 years ago. We have different websites for the courses we provide and we were looking for a place to manage all these. We decided to design our own system, because we couldn’t find any application that conformed to our needs. We have a lot of clients abroad and not all these people have access to the internet. Therefore we were looking for a system with the option to place selected contents of a website on a CD-ROM.” What are the features of the CMS? “There are about 35 websites inside the CMS now and each website has a library. People can keep their own library bookmarks inside the system and they can place a profile with a photograph of themselves. The contents of the profile can be adjusted per website. That way people can see who else is taking part in the course. The website developed using the CMS is the meeting place for the course and contains all information about the course. Course participants can upload information to the website. A while ago we also developed a discussion forum or actually we made a link to a forum, which is not integrated into the CMS.”
Proud of what you made
How do people respond to the system? “It is all very simple and website owners – often course leaders- find their ways quickly and easily. Besides that we have an extensive manual to the CMS. From feedback from our participants we got the impression that people like the fact that there is a place which contains all their work. It makes people proud to see what they have done. It gives a sense of: ‘Look! This is what I made.’ The forum isn’t used extensively yet. The idea behind it was that people could stay in touch and support one another after the course. During the course a plan of action is created and the participants are supposed to put this plan into action in their work situation, after the course. The forum would then be the place to talk about the difficulties or problems people come across. They can consult each other and support one another. Unfortunately, when the forum is not moderated, people do not use the forum a lot.”
Integrating the forum with the course
Have you taken steps to encourage people to use the forum? “Yes, we have tried a couple of things. What we want is that people don’t consider the course to be finished after the weeks or months in Wageningen. We want people to consider the face-to-face course to be a part of a learning process of several months. The discussions on the e-forum are another part of the learning process. Right now the participants meet at the beginning of the course and the forum will be brought into use later on. What we hear is that people find it difficult to change from the relatively easy way of communicating at a face-to-face course, to the more complicated contact at the forum. This is why we want people to be already active on the forum, before the course takes place, but this is very difficult. Also we will put more effort in moderating the forum. We are also considering implementing a buddy system in the future. Every participant gets linked to another participant for feedback and support. They should then use the forum to keep each other posted. We also noticed that calling upon the expertise of the forum participants works to increase the activity on the forum. We posted on the forum that we are working on another similar course and that we would like their input. More reactions came through than normal, but that doesn’t work for everyone.” Is the forum the only option for interactivity? “We are currently looking for a chat application, which we can integrate into the CMS. We want to use an open source application, but the problem so far is that for most of the chat application to work, people have to download big files. But we want to keep the tools which support the online learning as light as possible. Downloading big files doesn’t fit into keeping the use of the system accessible for people with slow internet connections. So we are still looking.”
Content management
What are the most important features of the system for your purposes? “The fact that content from the different websites the CMS manages is very easily transferable or shared with another website is very useful to us. Subjects or courses are often alike or share similar backgrounds and with the CMS we don’t have to create the same content twice. The most important benefit of the system though is that the content can very easily be taken and viewed offline. You can mark the different things you want to place on a CD and it is taken care of. This way we can distribute the information very easily to people without internet access and document the information. This was also the main reason why we chose to create our own system. The forum we selected to use also has an advantage: you can choose whether you want to receive the posts made in your e-mail box, like at D-groups, or you can go to the website and check them there. If you receive them in your mailbox, you can also reply by e-mail, and you can also start a new topic by sending an e-mail. If you post something at the forum you can also add an attachment, but to keep the e-mails small, you will not receive the attachment in your e-mail box. Instead it gives a notice quoting the size of the file, so you can go view it online. These attachments can be viewed linked to the forum posts, but they are also listed in a small library.”
Basic
Are there any future plans for the CMS? “Well, we are looking for a chat function, as I have already mentioned, but you have to be careful not wanting too much. We encountered that with the forum and the library for the attachments. With every new feature you start to see a lot of other options to add and most of them don’t even require a lot of work. We want to keep the CMS as simple as possible. The system now works well with low bandwidth and we want to keep it that way.”
Tools should be used “The major challenge is to increase the use of the tools to support learning processes in our courses and projects. It is not the tools themselves that are important. We are now working on the pedagogy of our blended learning, and try to put more effort in facilitating and moderating e-collaboration. Also we plan to develop short bits of e-content which can be used for self-paced learning.”
Another point of view
The advantage of building an application yourself is the control. You can decide yourself what you want to adjust or add. The downside is that you have to do the adding and adjusting yourself. Nowadays many applications are available to choose from.The added forum is a clear example of a feature that is not specifically developed for a clear use or need from the participants. The problems of the low number of visitors are due to the fact that the participants of the course do not need the forum at the moment to finish the course. Once a need is created, for instance, like the initiative to make couples and let them support each other, people will start using it themselves. This also explains why asking for somebody's skills only works half the time. People reply if they want to show what they know or just want to be helpful. There is nothing more in there for them, so they will only do this if they have the time and can bring the effort.You can also approach this from another point of view. Since the forum isn’t used there is no real use for it, so why do you want people starting to use it? It is a choice you have to make: do you consider the process as an important stimulating feature or can you accept that the forum is not used?
Mind Mapping is a powerful way of expressing thoughts. The basic technique is to combine lines, text, and images to represent related ideas and concepts. Some applications are: making choices, organize own ideas, organize other peoples ideas, stimulate creative thinking, make overview of collective brainstorm ideas, group mind map, way of analysing, problem solving, making a diary, preparing for an article or story. I find mindmapping as a technique very worthwhile to use in so many different ways. Worth trying! For more information, take a look at: http://mindmap.startpagina.nl/
Tools available The easiest way to make a mindmap is using coloured pens and paper. There are also several online tools available. An overview:
In a face to face meeting on 20th of September with 25 people interested in e-collaboration, we used mindmapping as a way of getting the conversation about e-collaboration started. Some used on of the e-tools, others used paper and coloured pencils.
Questions for small research: What are the costs? Is it worth the price? How user friendly is the tool? Think about aspects like: easy to use, well-organized, freedom of expression, flexibility, attractiveness of result, etc. How satisfied are you with the end results? Can you do with the tool what you would like? What do you see as advantages compared to making a mindmap by hand? What is the added value? How would this tool help you in your work? What are concrete situations suitable for using this mindmapping tool?
Experiences with e-mindmapping-tools
A nice way of introducing yourself to someone else.
Mindmapping is very helpful in a brainstorm activity. For me it is not so easy to brainstorm behind a computer, using a kind of structure given by a software tool.
When you want to present something (e.g. the content of a manual, ideas in a formal presentation, ingredients for a project) and you want to have them in a non-structured way, a mindmap can be very helpful. Using a software tool makes the presentation clear and neat.
The software tool Freemind and Imagination are for free.
Imagination offers the possibility to work on the same mindmap together. This can be very valuable in e-collaboration.
All programmes have the possibility of saving and sending the mindmap to others. When someone else receives your ‘imagination mindmap’, he will also be able to see the ‘development’ of the mindmap; the way the thinking went in making the mindmap.
There is a different dynamic in the process as well as in look between a mindmap made by hand and one made by software.. Using visual images (one of the powers of mindmapping) is much easier by hand.
D-groups D-groups is, accordind to the website: "the starting point for fostering groups and communities in international development. We are a partnership which caters to both individuals and organisations by offering tools and services that bring people together. Whether you are trying to support a team, a group, a network, a partnership or a community, we hope to provide you with the capacity to do this in an environment which is simple, non-commercial, respectful of privacy, and targeted at low bandwidth users in the South.”
The next interview took place at September 5, 2006 with Maarten Boers from ICCO.
Use of a mailing list
“I am in charge of an internal project entitled ‘Capacity development, Knowledge systems and Networks’. In brief, this project aims to stimulate systematic learning both in-house, as well as with and between partners. There is no escaping from e-collaboration then. I was already familiar with knowledge sharing using mailing lists, because I was involved with the Grupo Chorlaví, a learning network in Latin-America. This network started in 1998 and its purpose is the sharing of knowledge and experiences about rural development in Latin-America. So, in that way I became familiar with the possibilities that a mailing list can offer and I saw the potential for ICCO. Forces can be joined to make both sides stronger. This is why we became a partner of Dgroups. We wanted to stimulate collaboration at ICCO and with partners.” How do you use Dgroups? “Until now we have created about 22 groups of which 8 are in-house groups. The latter are mostly used for preparatory stages of meetings or to make policy plans. Real discussions are still mostly held face-to-face, because people are close by. The groups we set up with partners are mostly learning networks.”
The essence: A community
Are people eager to start a Dgroup? “I am promoting the use of Dgroups by approaching those colleagues who I assume will be interested, because not everybody will see the potentials right away and many people – not only within ICCO – seem to have some resistance to the use of “new” web-based tools. So the idea is to get the people who are already interested using Dgroups and let them share their experiences with others. In that way I hope a snowball effect will take place. Good experiences and enthusiasm from colleagues can stimulate others. Some groups were started just as an experiment, where people can go to check out for themselves what Dgroups are all about. Most people are reluctant to start one though, because they primarily see it as a source of extra e-mail. The biggest problem is to make clear what Dgroups really are about. The basis of a Dgroup is sending e-mails to a (large) number of people with one address, but this can also be done with a normal e-mail, where everybody replies to all emails. The benefits of the use of Dgroups are that all e-mail is stored in one place together with documents and links – the groups’ web-site. It is easy to retrieve a message you accidentally missed or the documents placed on the site. The website can also be accessed from wherever you are, so you don’t have to go to your own computer or even ever store them in your own e-mail box.” What do you see as the essence of Dgroups? “Dgroups have the potential to create communities. Unlike just sending e-mails, there is a place people can go to. The mere fact of having a name of the group itself also helps to create “community-sense” and even trust among the group members. You can refer to the group by its name.”
Dgroup etiquette
How do you see Dgroups evolving in the future for ICCO? “ICCO is decentralizing and becoming a real network organisation. There will be regional councils and regional work organisations. So I think Dgroups will be an instrument for the internal (management) communication of the future ICCO-network-organisation. But of course Dgroups will also play an important role in the knowledge sharing among all parts of the network organisation and its partners.” What do you think are the main problems with Dgroups? “Spamming is a real nightmare for Dgroups. Messages originating from the Dgroups server are often marked as spam, so people won’t receive the messages in their normal e-mail. Within Dgroups we are doing everything possible to avoid these problems. Another problem is that people find it difficult to write their ideas or opinion in an e-mail to people they do not know very well, because they see it as a form of official publishing. That might be also the reason that – mostly in the South - the e-mails are written quite formally, with many lines devoted to just courtesy alone. In that way a real open discussion is very difficult or even impossible because formality “kills” open discussions. So what you see is that people use the Dgroup as an address-list. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but that depends on the initial goal the group was set up for. There should be a way to introduce some kind of etiquette for the use of Dgroups, which stimulates people to use it more loosely and so it becomes common knowledge that a message to such a group does not have to contain all formalities of a formal letter.”
The tool: wiki A wiki is a website where users can easily add, delete or change the contents. For both editing and reading the website there is the option of making the wiki public or available to a specific group of people. What can you do with it? On a wiki you can add text and upload documents. What are the requirements? A wiki is an online tool, so an internet connection is essential. There are various websites where you can make a wiki free of charge, such as pbwiki.
The next interview took place at August 15, 2006 with Saskia Harmsen from IICD.
Exchanging knowledge
“We used a wiki during an international workshop in Zambia for trainers from Africa. We wanted trainers to exchange knowledge amongst themselves, rather than us giving information to the trainers. We used a wiki to document all of this knowledge.” Why did you use a pbwiki? “A wiki is a very convenient way to create content together with other people. Also, you can always change the content when you want to. That’s why a wiki is very useful in collecting and saving the knowledge that was exchanged. The trainers that participated in the course are all ICT-trainers. We are proponents of the learning-by-doing principle, so in this way they could experience the tool for themselves. We used ‘pbwiki’ because we had tested several Wikis for user-friendliness and their suitability for the needs of the workshops and pbwiki came out on top.” How did you introduce the wiki? “We introduced the wiki in a fun way. We asked participants in the workshop to tell a story about themselves. More specifically, we asked them to tell something about the day that changed their lives, so we would get as many interesting stories from people as possible. To get the details of these stories, we also asked all participants to interview a fellow participant. That’s why the stories were more in-depth. After this, everyone had to place the story on his/her own page on the wiki. We used this way of working throughout the whole workshop. As soon as people had discussed things, they had to place it on different pages on the wiki themselves. We never gave them any proper explanation about how to use a wiki. There were only a few trainers who were already acquainted with wikis, but everyone understood the ‘edit’ and ‘save’ functions. There were a few people who needed a bit more time before they started to fill their page, i.e. two or three days. I don’t know if this was because they didn’t know how to go about working with the wiki or if there was another reason. It is also possible that people wanted first to wait and see what others had put on their personal page, or that they weren’t happy as yet with their own page.”
Bandwidth and privacy
What was the reaction of participants to using a wiki? “The people read the other participants’ stories and created something together. This promotes a group feeling. The initial plan was to extend this group of trainers with other trainers, but the original group decided they preferred to keep the familiarity of the initial group. They said things like: ‘ok, but then these new people will also have to add their story to the wiki.’ Some people are so enthusiastic that they still occasionally enter the wiki and make adjustments to their story, for example.” Were there any problems when using the wiki? “We had some problems with bandwidth, especially when logging onto the wiki. It sometimes took quite a long time before you could enter. Maybe this was also due to the fact that everyone often worked on the wiki at the same time, because every participant had to place his/her material on the wiki after each session. In principle, we had a good internet connection, and we’ve not tested what the problem was. Also, occasionally the pages just disappeared. Sometimes someone had written and saved a page, but it didn’t appear on the wiki. Occasionally, this was annoying if people had typed directly onto the wiki and had to start all over again. Also, for some people the fact that the wiki was public was a problem. Everyone is able to see what others have posted on it and sometimes people had posted a chain of thought that was only part of the picture or their opinion. When they placed this on the wiki this informal information all of a sudden appeared to be formal. Not everyone enjoyed the fact that their developing thoughts appeared on the wiki, in black and white, with their name beneath it. At the time, I wasn’t aware that it is possible to hide the wiki from the public, so I’d like to ask the trainers whether they would prefer this. I would prefer keeping the wiki public. For me, the wiki is a source of information and it gives me the possibility to show others what has been discussed during the workshop. It gives a very good overview of the course. It’s a pity that it’s impossible to get the visitor statistics to the wiki with the free version. Currently I can only see who the last ones were to make adjustments to it and to which part, but I don’t know if the trainers are also using the wiki as a source of information.”
Cooperation
What opportunities do you see the wiki providing? “Besides ‘saving’ knowledge as we did during the workshop, I think a wiki can also be useful for jointly developing a program or policy. This often happens through e-mail, but that then results in sending different versions of a document back and forth. In a wiki the document is online and the participants can directly change things themselves. It is clearer. I see it as a book in which everyone can write his or her own chapter.”
What is Moodle? According to their website: "Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a 50,000-student University."
The next interview took place at June 27, 2006 with Camillo Villa from HIVOS.
Moodle
“At HIVOS we use D-groups very intensively, as well as Skype. I also use Moodle in the workshops I provide. This has nothing to do with HIVOS though.” Can you tell me something about Moodle first? “I needed an e-learning programme, so I started searching different applications to see what my options were. Then I ran into Moodle and found it worked very well. I use it at workshops and the application is ideal to shape the content of the course. It is a very easy to use e-learning platform and doesn’t require high bandwidth, since it is very basic. You can upload documents and keep a schedule. This way you can keep all the information together and the information is accessible to all course participants. Multiple courses can be simultaneously stored and the number of participants is not limited. There is also a forum area, which has the option to redirect all posts to your e-mail in case you don’t want to keep checking online.” Is Moodle hard to work with, or hard to get started with? “No, all options are self-explanatory. To start working with Moodle you have to install a server application on a server, although there are websites that offer you the opportunity to work with Moodle on someone else’s server. You can then create your course there. If you want to try out Moodle, you can do this very easily on their website, where they run a demo version. You have access to all the options an administrator would have, so you can make and change a course or add participants plus all the other Moodle options.”
Moodle and partners
You use Moodle outside HIVOS. Do you also see possibilities for using it at HIVOS? “Absolutely. We often have different projects going on with partners. They all have different timeframes and different themes. Moodle would be a good place to store all these projects. Especially when writing a report together or going over a proposal. At the moment people use e-mail to do that, but that means that documents are being sent, commented on and returned. This goes back and forth and the result of this process is lots of documents in e-mail boxes. If they could use Moodle for this process, all steps from the initial to the final document would be kept in one place. This is particularly convenient if a colleague is being replaced. The replacement is then able to trace the process and see what decisions have been made. Besides that, it can also be a place where presentations or photographs of the launch of a project can be kept. In that way the online environment can also strengthen the team spirit. If the information is private you can close off the entire area, but you can also make it public, depending on what you want.
D-groups
“At HIVOS we use D-groups a lot, but that is not surprising since we are one of the founders of D-groups. We have two different ways of using the groups. One is internal at HIVOS. Every department has its own D-group, where for example announcements are posted. We also have separate D-groups for the coordination of teams or for specific tasks like writing a business plan, for example. Besides the in-house groups, we have D-groups with different themes and groups for our partners.” For what purposes are D-groups usually employed? “The idea behind D-groups was to create a low-bandwidth working space, where people could share knowledge and work together. What D-groups are ultimately used for is mostly not known. The most that we can see is the number of messages sent, but the knowledge exchanged and created within the group remains inside the group. For instance, in all the thematic groups there are hundreds of questions and answers that have been posted. This information is usually only used by the individual who asked the question and maybe some other people inside that group, but it doesn’t go out of the group. I think that a tool should be developed to enable search options through these groups and make this knowledge publicly available; this could be done in combination with wikis or blogs. It is a shame that all the information gets lost inside the group.”
They are aware of the systems, but don’t know how to use them
How do you think that e-collaboration can contribute to the work of Dutch NGOs? “I think working together gets easier and more information can be shared. The problem is that lots of people talk about new technologies, but don’t have any idea how to use them. That’s why we’re planning to offer our colleagues an introduction to the new tools, so that they can become more familiar with the tools available. People shouldn’t see new tools as replacements for the older ones; in some cases they are complementary. I don’t think that a tool should combine all possible features available, like communities, chat functions, sharing spaces, etc. Different tools can be used to help you get all the functions you want, but they don’t necessarily have to be implemented in the same system."
Another point of view
Applications are designed for a certain purpose. There are applications for talking (Skype, Teamspeak), applications to share documents, applications to create documents together (wikis) etcetera. This does not necessarily mean though, that the applications need to be used for this purpose only. Off course they are best suitable for what they are designed for, but most of the time you can use them any way you like. Camillo has named another purpose for the use of Moodle. Originally, Moodle is an e-learning tool, so its purpose from design perspective is to shape online courses. Camillo sees an opportunity here for projects. There is a calendar, multiple users can be added and there can be added a time span to the course. These are all aspects of project and course needs. I myself once used an MSN community in a course at university to share documents, discuss roles and tasks and announce deadlines. An MSN community is not designed for courses, but why not use it for one? From my point of view this blog was not intended as a normal blog. I just saw it as a way to publish my research in a nice format, as an alternative to a website. I did not really see the need to keep it going and up-to-date like with a normal blog. What I saw was an easy way to share the interviews, where people could leave comments. As excited as I am about the idea that people are willing to keep it going, I still don’t believe that people will no longer read a blogpost if it is outdated. Of course my research will be dated very soon and it is important that people who read it know when it took place. Especially in a field like e-collaboration that is evolving so quickly.
The intranet at the Red Cross provides news and information to their employees and volunteers. It is closed for people outside the organisation.
The next interview took place at Juli 19, 2006 with Aad Steenhorst from the Red Cross.
Digital comfort
“At a certain point in time it just becomes clear that you need to switch to digital ways of communicating and that happened at The Red Cross over two years ago. Digital information is easier to distribute and store. More and more of our volunteers also have e-mail addresses, so it made sense to use the internet more. Moreover it can be very convenient to have a collection of news and information that every professional and volunteer has access to. In the past when somebody, say a volunteer or somebody else, phoned up with a question, he would have been referred about five times: Nobody wanted to take the responsibility for answering. In 1999 the service bureau was set up to overcome this problem. Since then 95% of the questions can be answered right away. In 2006, the intranet now seems a very good medium to store all information, so that we can also refer to that and also where people themselves can find the information they need.” So the intranet has arisen from the need to go digital. What can be found and done on the intranet? “There is a news section, a calendar and a place for document sharing. Those are the most important features. People have access to it from home, they just need to login. Naturally the volunteers and the professionals don’t get the same access. Certain parts are disabled for the volunteers. We have different subjects on the site, which can be divided into staff information and the activities of the Red Cross. Staff information is only accessible to the professionals. The intranet can best be seen as a databank on everything concerning the Red Cross and is aimed at professionals and volunteers. One of the goals we wanted to achieve was that everybody could have access to information at their own time and place.”
Realization
How did you get started from the identifying the need to arriving at a digital resource? “We approached a company to design a system for us. I don’t know very much about that, but they set it up for us. When we received the system, it seemed to me like we didn’t really know what we had bought. We had to figure it out when we got it and could start trying out the options. There has been a team responsible for the intranet set-up: team intranet. There are people from communications and the ICT department, for instance, in that team.” Is the intranet well set-up in your opinion? “The intranet offers great advantages and opportunities. I just think there’s hasn’t been enough thought gone into the people responsible for providing the content. There are web editors assigned to different parts of the content. The only problem is that these people are not given any extra time besides their normal duties. They are supposed to provide information for the intranet alongside what they have always done and that has proved to be problematical. You can see some parts of the intranet are quite active and up-to-date. It really depends on the time people have on their hands and how much they’re motivated to make the effort. The front page of the intranet is currently not really up-to-date. For instance, some news items should have been posted in the second column. Currently it is empty. The problem is that a date is attached to the news and when it becomes too old it is sent to the archives. You can still find some news there, but it is not a really an inviting place to visit when empty spaces appear.”
Information attracts people
What are the responses to the intranet? “Everybody was very positive in the beginning, although there were some login issues at that time. Fortunately these have been resolved now. The greatest obstacle now is the content. That should be kept up-to-date and refreshed regularly. The web editors need to be encouraged, one way or another.” How do you think this can be accomplished? “Perhaps mentioning the importance of the contents in the newsletter would help or maybe when we can maintain statistics of every page. If a lot of people visit a certain area of the intranet, these positive responses can encourage you to invest more time, because you don’t want people to get disappointed with the information available. If on the other hand relatively few people visit, you might possibly like to attract more visitors, because you don’t want to lag behind the other editors.”
Basics come before greatness
What kind of future do you envisage for the intranet? “I always say: Better have a living dwarf than a dead dinosaur! The basics must be taken care of. Web editors need to be given extra time to provide the information for their part of the intranet and the intranet must develop into a real knowledge centre. When somebody phones us with a question, which I mentioned was one of the goals we wanted to achieve, we should be able to say: go to this place on the intranet and you will find what you are looking for. If all that is going well, we can, for example, consider expanding its function and adding more interactive parts. Right now we have communities and polls, but the polls don’t work properly yet. We need to take care of the basics first before we can go thinking ahead and we really need to start thinking about using those features too.”
Another point of view
The intranet at the Red Cross is a good example of how problems can cover up other things. It is comparable to an onion skin, where every layer covers another one and the core can only be reached if all separate layers are all pealed away. For the intranet the technical problems with the log-in had to be overcome, before other problems became visible. The problem that then appeared is the lack of content. As far as they can see at the moment, the users of the intranet are positive about the system, taken into consideration that the information will be kept more up-to-date. As long as this is not the case you cannot say for sure if no other problems will arise. The users’ attitude can be very negative or perhaps people encounter difficulty in finding the information they need.
What is Claroline? Claroline is an open source e-learning environment, where workshops can be shaped and participants supervised. What are the features of Claroline? You can set out instructions or assignments, keep a schedule. Claroline contains a knowledge bank, forum and a chat application. What do you need? It is open source, so free of charge and a server application has to be installed on a server, either in-house or hosted elsewhere. High bandwidth is not necessary as the application is kept very simple.
The next interview took place at Juli 18, 2006 with Hanneke Spaans from MDF.
Exchanging information and guiding students “MDF is a management training and consultancy bureau for enhancing management capacities of professionals and organisations in the development sector. We offer individual trajectories to people in the development sector, but also stimulate mutual collaboration. About two years ago the need emerged for an e-collaboration platform. We first started to look what our needs were. We wanted the students to be able to make an online portfolio and to exchange information and we wanted to be able to give the students assignments, instructions and exercises. We started looking at different types of open source software, but soon came across Claroline. A member of the team had good experiences with this tool and it offered all features we were looking for. An added bonus was the fact that the application didn’t require high bandwidth. At low bandwidths the platform is very easily accessible as well.”
Portfolio
What is the main use of Claroline for MDF? “Claroline is mainly used by the student to create a portfolio. In the International Advisory Trail we work with competencies: Students need to make clear which competencies they already possess, in order to create an individual trajectory for the ones they need to master. They need to be able to prove the competencies they say they already have, and that forms part of the portfolio. Documents can be uploaded here, such as word documents, excel sheets, powerpoint presentations and PDF-files by students and coaches. Unfortunately pictures, movies or sound files are not possible in the version we are currently using. These may have been added to later versions, but we are having problems with the upgrade. An advantage of Claroline, in comparison with for example D-groups, is that students can make their own categories in the files they upload. They can create folders and place the documents there. Subsequently it‘s easy to change the location of the documents from one folder to another.”
Subdivision
How is Claroline subdivided? “You start at a general website and after logging in you get access to your own section. Every student has their own space on Claroline, which they mostly use to upload their portfolio. Only the student and the coach assigned to the student have access to this space. The coach and student meet face-to-face at least once, which I think is essential for maintaining a good relationship in the future. A degree of trust has to be established between them and that doesn’t happen very well online. Furthermore, our system on Claroline offers websites specifically devoted to the different competencies, which only the coaches can access. Here the coaches can find examples of assignments to give to their students. Also bookmarks and literature concerning the competency are available in that section.” Do the coach and the student have any contact through Claroline? “No, they mostly use the telephone or e-mail. I would like to see that happening more though, because it is an easy way to keep up correspondence and store it somewhere central. Right now all discussions are stored in individual e-mail boxes and that can be awkward, especially if the coach is replaced for whatever reason. It can be difficult for the replacement to find a good overview of what has been discussed.”
Start-up and experience
Do you explain anything about Claroline to the students or provide them with a manual? “We only send them a small document, where we briefly explain what the intention is behind using of Claroline and what the application is all about. This isn’t a big deal. It’s more like a preparation, so they know what will be next. Claroline does have a very extensive manual with a separate one for students. This manual can be downloaded by the student if the need arises. Claroline is mostly self-explanatory. The biggest disadvantage is the bugs. For instance, the forum doesn’t work properly. A warning pops up when you try and make a post, so we’ve had to shut the forum down. However, that is also one of the great advantages of Caroline: All features can be easily activated or de-activated, so you can just show the students and the coaches what they only really need. If you just want to make use of the calendar for instance, you can just turn of the rest. It’s a pity that the students don’t make more use of the application. I think this is partly due to the bugs. Students upload their portfolio, but other activity is very low. We’re working on integrating Claroline with our website. We will then make use of the more recent version of Claroline and hopefully the bugs will be resolved by then.” So the forum is closed, but are there any more options for information exchange or communication? Like a chat-room feature? “There is an option to chat, now you mention it, but I’ve never tried it before. Let’s try it out right now. There is a message there already, but it only shows the time and there’s no date. I guess somebody has wanted to try it out before. As an administrator I can delete the message. Let’s make a new one as a normal user. The text I type is displayed nicely and there is also an option to save the conversation. Oh, that’s nice: A document with what I just have been typing appears in my document section. We’ll have to remember this.”
Skype
“Skype has been used here at MDF for a while. My colleagues got very enthusiastic about it as soon as they heard about the application and everybody started to use Skype. But what happened was that the in-house network was becoming very slow because of this. So, the IT section then told us not to use it any more. I’ve just received an e-mail this morning. They have set up a separate computer room to use tools like Skype and MSN. They’ve connected them to a separate server, so the network won’t suffer any more. I’ve still to go and check it out, but I think it’s very positive they have created this opportunity.”
The tool: del.icio.us Del.icio.us is an online tool. Its potential is described in just 3 words on the website : keep, share and discover. Information on the internet can be collected, shared and discovered online with this social bookmarking tool. All the information stored on del.icio.us is public, so everybody can see and search all the collected bookmarks of other people. What can you do with del.icio.us? Bookmarks to websites and online PDF-files can be documented online. The user can assign so-called tags to these bookmarks. A tag according to the website is: “just a word that describes an item saved on del.icio.us.” By assigning different tags to a bookmark, a description is provided of the information behind the hyperlink. The bookmarks cannot be categorized, as you would in the ‘favourites’ of your internet browser. Instead of assigning categories to the bookmarks, in del.icio.us you can place the tags used under a heading. These categories and the tags are displayed on the first page of del.icio.us, so you quickly get a good idea of the owner’s field of interest.You can subscribe to other peoples’ del.icio.us webpage. Their links will appear in a separate section of your own del.icio.us webpage. With every hyperlink added you can see how many people have the same page bookmarked and who they are. What do you need? Del.icio.us is online, so you need an internet connection, and it is free of charge.
The next interview took place at June 7, 2006 with Joitske Hulsebosch from IICD.
Knowledge sharing and finding people
“I’ve used del.icio.us for while now, since January 2006, and I think it is an ideal tool to organise all the information that I gather in and around my work. I tried it after a discussion we had online about web2.0 tools inCPsquare, but started to get enthusiastic when I talked to Peter Ballantyne and his ideas on how to use it to produce a feed with relevant links on a certain topic. At first, when I’d just heard about de.icio.us, I couldn’t really picture the benefits for myself. Because of Peter’s vision and our experiment with the possibilities of the tool, I started using it more intensively and invested time in learning for instance how to cluster tags. I use del.icio.us to bookmark all interesting websites I come across when looking for information for work or just to keep up. Besides keeping all the information organised I also use del.icio.us as a search engine.”
Can you tell me anything about the experiment you started around del.icio.us and social bookmarking? “Around February of this year we (myself and my colleague Nynke Kruidering, Dorine Ruter from ETC and Peter Ballantyne of Euforic) came together and decided to start a little experiment with del.icio.us to see what social bookmarking could do for us and how it could help in our work. We shared an interest in actually experimenting with web2.0 tools. Our areas of interest and work are very similar, we are all interested in knowledge management and development cooperation. So we started thinking: “why look for information separately if we can share?” We could produce a feed with the links we found by using a unique tag for resources we want to share with others. That’s why we chose to make use of a special tag: km4dev_pilot and we made a habit of using this tag for all our resources related to knowledge management in development. Del.icio.us offers the option of an RSS feed for a tag, so it is very easy to create a list of the bookmarks that were added by our group. And Dorine used Superglu to ‘glue’ our tags together. This way it is possible to make a feed with bookmarks for a particular subject. We recently also created one around health and ICT at IICD. To help each other even more, we agreed that we would also add tags concerning the kind of information and the geographical area the link refers to.”Helping to find interesting information on the web and share it: that’s what it is all about! But how did you get together? “I knew Dorine from the e-collaboration group and we were both using del.icio.us, although Dorine was using it more intensively than me. Peter found us online through del.icio.us, because he noticed we were active taggers on del.icio.us. And I brought in my colleague Nynke who was also interested. So it’s not only possible to discover information, but also people with similar interests to you! It is relatively easy to find people with certain interests using del.icio.us. If you add a bookmark del.icio.us automatically tells you how many more people have added that same link and you can quickly click to their del.icio.us webpage. Sometimes there can be around 8000 people, but if there are only 1 or 2, I often check if they’ve collected more interesting links.”
Easy to use
“It’s easy to get started: you only have to create an account on the del.icio.us website. You need to create a username, password and provide an e-mail address in case you lose your password. Then you can get started and add your bookmarks.” Is getting started that simple? “Getting started is very easy. You can add buttons in your browser, which enable you to simply add the site you are currently visiting by clicking on that button (called ‘post to del.icio.us’). You add a small description, add the tags and you are done! You might want to add your old bookmarks, which can take a while, but after that they’ll be nice and organised. Adding bookmarks as you work or while searching for information is also almost no trouble at all. After that you automatically go back to the site you were on and continue where you left off. Because of the ease of adding tags, you’ll also add websites that are not needed at the moment, but that contain interesting information. This may be very useful in case you need to search for that subject later on. You don’t need to search any more for what you have already found.”
Benefits for work
Can you give an example of how it has made your work easier? “Recently I had to prepare for a presentation about web2.0. The first thing I did was search my del.icio.us webpage with the tag web2.0 and I quickly found a lot of material I had come across earlier. It saved me a lot of work and time. I could select some of those as handouts, and had excellent inputs for my presentation. It’s also very useful when a colleague comes over with a question, and I know there are interesting things to read on a certain subject. Mostly it doesn’t seem worth investing the time if I have to start searching for materials that I know are interesting for that specific subject. Now I can quite easily send a link from del.icio.us with all material I have found before.” Are there any aspects of del.icio.us that are harder to get familiar with? “I can’t say that anything is hard. At first I didn’t immediately notice that the tags could be organised in clusters, until I saw it on Dorine’s del.icio.us webpage. Then I started to look how this could be done which was quite easy. Del.icio.us doesn’t have a whole lot of options, so you quickly get to know the ones available. Besides that we always have our little group where you can ask for help. We keep in touch by e-mail and Skype, where we discuss technical questions. For example, I wanted to use an RSS feed at del.icio.us for myblog. Dorine helped me with that. Now the latest del.icio.us bookmarks are displayed on my blog.”
Teamwork
Has the co-operation between you always been this good or have there been changes in the relationship with the others in the experiment? “We have become a real team, even though we have met only once! We are all very enthusiastic about our collaboration with del.icio.us, and that leads to a sense of being ‘partners in crime.’ We have extended the group, but the 4 initiators are more active. We all share the fun of exploring the possibilities of the tool. That is clearly demonstrated in the discussions we’re having about a new tag. We scheduled a Skype session to discuss this, because we wanted to come up with a good name. Besides that we are also more aware of the subject somebody is currently working on by looking at the bookmarks added. But if you don’t have any idea about how useful a resource is, or what the others thought, it won’t stimulate any discussion.” Are there any disadvantages or would you like to see some changes made to the tool? “I never really thought about any changes. I am used to del.icio.us as it is now and changes would only mean that you’ve got to get used to it again. What I did notice is that although information can be shared on the internet, you can’t give any opinions or discuss any material. So, I use my blog for that.”
More people, more information
What would you like to achieve with del.icio.us? Do you see any big ideals behind the tool? “We’d like to involve more people. We just need to take care to make sure that new people aren’t overwhelmed by the ease with which we use the tool nowadays. We probably need to support these people at the start. The current plan is to expand the group to seven people, but I can’t tell yet how much further we can and will go. The more people, the more information there will be, and there is a limit to what we can handle. The larger the group, the less influence you probably have over the quality or type of information tagged. We could also think about having a smaller group of taggers and expanding the users by promoting the feed. The audience can get very big, because everybody is free to look at what the taggers have added. The taggers should consist of motivated individuals, who people can put their trust in and who are active information workers. The quality of the bookmarks must be maintained by the taggers. Also, the taggers shouldn’t consider the tagging as extra work and it should fit into his or her day-to-day work.”
Partners’ reaction
Who would find del.icio.us useful? “I think everybody whose work is involved with knowledge and everybody who wants to be kept informed about certain subjects. As I already mentioned we also started an experiment with a unique tag within IICD about health and ICT, where we have come up with a new tag, ‘ehealthroundtable’. It is amazing to see what happens when 3 people start tagging, you find so many more useful resources than when tagging alone. We also introduced this to two of our partners in the south, and their reaction was positive, but different to what we expected. The problem was not the bandwidth as we feared before, as del.icio.us seemed to work well with them since they had broadband connections. These partners indicated that they foresaw a problem in the time involved in searching for resources, tagging them, and making use of the resources. They just have to see how easy it is and that it doesn’t take much time once you get used to it. A practical introduction to tagging as a collaborative event can stimulate this. Dealing with information overflow is a real problem though, hence we might need an ‘infomediary’ to pre-select the best materials (short and concise).
Another point of view
As soon as I heard about this social bookmarking tool, about 2 months ago, I started my own list at del.icio.us. I was shocked to see all the material and information I had lost during my years at the university. The only way left for me to retrieve some of it, was looking at the references in the papers I have written, but these contained only literature I used and that is definitely not all that I have come across.
While searching information everybody must be familiar with the feeling of: “I have read something about this subject before, but where was that?” The most annoying part was that I couldn’t stop looking before I had found it again. The longer I had to search the more irreplaceable that information became! Often it was a complete waste of time, for I never retrieved it. If I had only bookmarked it all!
Another advantage I see for myself in del.icio.us is the overview all bookmarks give about the subjects you have been working on. I often think: “What was it again I learned at the university, at what subjects specifically have I looked closer and which researchers were important with that certain concept? Especially as you start an internship, you start to wonder about which subjects you should know a lot about. All I have now is a list of the courses I subscribed to. With del.icio.us a look at my tags will do all the work!
And how many work could I have saved myself and my fellow students! If you are in the same course, you are working on the same subjects, but we never really shared information, only by specific requests. If I could do it all over again, I would have created a very extensive databank with all literature online about new media and digital culture, in cooperation with the other students.
This blog is about e-collaboration. It belongs to the D-group: “e-collaboration among Dutch NGO’s,” which is created by a joined initiative of PSO and IICD in The Netherlands. The members of this group all work in the development sector and have a shared interest in e-collaboration. The purpose of this blog is to share personal stories about experiences with working over the internet. Different tools and processes will come across. Personal opinions and views are central to these stories.
What is e-collaboration?
E-collaboration is defined as: “collaboration among individuals engaged in a common task using electronic technologies.” For the purpose of this blog I take this definition further than just collaboration. E-collaboration is then about working together, sharing knowledge, learning and communicating over the internet and providing or make use of facilitations to find information or people.
Why e-collaboration?
E-collaboration makes it possible to work together across time and space with equal access and possibilities for all. In the utopian view this is the promise. In reality people encounter challenges. Boundaries have to be crossed constantly: working with different organisations in different parts of the world and with separate time zones, with people from different cultures, who speak different languages and have unequal access to technologies. E-collaboration can overcome some of these boundaries. This is what makes e-collaboration attractive for the development sector. It opens possibilities for improved and closer working with people in the south. Besides that the need for collaborating with other NGO’s becomes more and more visible. Social, economic and environmental problems become more complex and inter-related and exchange of knowledge is necessary to avoid narrow approaches.
The initial set-up of this blog is made by Maaike van der Steenhoven. She is a student at Utrecht University and about to finish her Master education: ‘ New media and digital culture.’ For her internship at PSO she visited several Dutch NGO’s and asked them about their experiences, in order to give an overview of what is currently happening in the field of e-collaboration and the problems people encounter. This blog will start with these stories, but will be kept up to date by the members of the D-group.
Contributions to this blog, sharing your own stories or placing comments, are highly appreciated. If you would like to contribute your own experience, please contact Sibrenne Wagenaar at Wagenaar@pso.nl
Hopefully these stories will inspire and motivate you to get e-collaborative!
This blog belongs to the members of the learning community "E-collaboration” members work in development organisations based in the Netherlands. The purpose of this blog is to share stories about experiences with working over the internet. If you are interested to join the Dgroup, you can go to http://www.dgroups.org/groups/
ecollaboration/ and join the group.
What happened?
Is the forum the only option for interactivity? “We are currently looking for a chat application, which we can integrate into the CMS. We want to use an open source application, but the problem so far is that for most of the chat application to work, people have to download big files. But we want to keep the tools which support the online learning as light as possible. Downloading big files doesn’t fit into keeping the use of the system accessible for people with slow internet connections. So we are still looking.”
The next interview took place at September 5, 2006 with Maarten Boers from ICCO.
It’s a pity that the students don’t make more use of the application. I think this is partly due to the bugs. Students upload their portfolio, but other activity is very low. We’re working on integrating Claroline with our website. We will then make use of the more recent version of Claroline and hopefully the bugs will be resolved by then.” So the forum is closed, but are there any more options for information exchange or communication? Like a chat-room feature? “There is an option to chat, now you mention it, but I’ve never tried it before. Let’s try it out right now. There is a message there already, but it only shows the time and there’s no date. I guess somebody has wanted to try it out before. As an administrator I can delete the message. Let’s make a new one as a normal user. The text I type is displayed nicely and there is also an option to save the conversation. Oh, that’s nice: A document with what I just have been typing appears in my document section. We’ll have to remember this.”
