Open knowledge sharing supporting learning in agricultural and livestock research for development

projects

Peter Ballantyne

Food Security and Nutrition Network East Africa

Regional Knowledge Sharing Meeting, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 11-12 June 2012

What’s your main problem

FeedI’ll go find

some technology

What feed technologies

have you got?Planted forage

Urea treated strawBypass protein

OK, let’s try those

“If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll

get what you always got.” Mark Twain

“Feed ‘promotion’ and intervention under

business as usual not too promising”Alan Duncan

Topics

ILRI and more effective development

Why share and learn – starting points for knowledge management?

Ways to share and learn – approaches we use at ILRI

Three ILRI roles in learning

ILRI as a ‘knowledge’ partner – in development projects Learning, M&E, impact assessment Knowledge, expertise, facilitation, CD Evidence, validation, …

ILRI as R4D ‘solution-finder’ with partners Participatory, multi-stakeholder … Explicit learning/knowledge focus …

ILRI ‘open’ research, knowledge and learning approach [local to global]

We also do serious ‘upstream’ science!

Some starting points

Together - researchers, communities, and development partners - know so much … How do we create, document and share this

knowledge? How do we support learning, and share the

results? How do we enrich these processes of

documenting, learning, and sharing? Can we do R4D better?

To increase the effectiveness of R4D!

Some ‘answers’

1. Co-create and co-learn in multi-stakeholder platforms

2. Document and mobilize knowledge from the (un)usual people

3. Design, facilitate and document projects and events to capture and communicate knowledge and learning

4. Make research knowledge, processes and platforms ‘open’

5. Engage, engage, engage …

1. Innovation platforms

spaces for diverse actors to engage in dialogue, and to jointly identify, learn about and address issues

Innovating with communities

2. Documenting (un)usual voices Community

perspectives Funder voices Beyond reports

Listen and learn

Participatory video

Documenting (un)usual voices

Most Significant Changes

Discussion support tools

Rapid value chain assessment

Participatory feed assessment with communities

Technology prioritization with farmers

Discussion support toolsResults: Promising feed

interventions that might work

Better understanding why usual suspects often don’t work

Learning from communities

32%

22%

20%

14%

6%

6%

Contribution of livelihood activities to household income (as a percentage)

Agriculture

Livestock

Remmitance

Labour

Others

Business

Solutions suggested by farmers Crops at backyard, around

fence, farm side Reducing the herd size Improving the utilization of

straws of different food crops Providing farmers with

continuous training

3. Document and share Facilitate

workshop processes

Design to involve, learn and interact

Document with multi-media

Publish and cherish

4. Open the knowledge

Open research

‘Working out loud’

Open planning

‘Open’ events

Open project workspace

Open sharing – of lessons and gaps

Full text reports

Open presentations

Open photos

Open repository

Books on Google

Open for feedback

Working out loud!

“bringing activities out of closed repositories and applications [and events and processes], and pulling them into the open increases the likelihood of learning information earlier.”- Stowe Boyd: http://blog.podio.com/2011/08/01/working-

out-loud-make-work-open-to-make-it-better

WOL = Observable Work + Narrating Your Work Narrating Your Work: journaling what you are doing

in an open way for others to follow Observable Work: creating / modifying / storing

your work where others can see it, follow it and contribute to it, before it is final

5. Engage over time

Partners, collaborators

Relationships

Feedback

Open mindsets

Social learning

Social media

Challenges

Process versus products

Getting to open

Finding ‘facilitation’ and process expertise

Fear of new ‘tools’; fear of ‘overload’

Making time to learn and share

Contacts

KM and KS @ ILRI: Peter Ballantyne (p.ballantyne@cgiar.org)

Participatory video: Beth Cullen (b.cullen@cgiar.org)

Innovation platforms: Alan Duncan (a.duncan@cgiar.org)

http://infoilri.wordpress.com

International Livestock Research InstituteBetter lives through livestock

Animal agriculture to reduce poverty, hunger and environmental degradation in developing countries

ILRI  http://www.ilri.org