Open knowledge sharing to support 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, 11-13 June 2012

Topics

Why we need learning – ‘business as usual interventions’ don’t work

ILRI and more effective development

Why share and learn – starting points for knowledge management?

Ways to share and learn – approaches we use at ILRI

What’s your main problem

FeedI’ll go find some

technology

Business as usual – Ask the farmers

What feed technologies

have you got?Planted forage

Urea treated strawBypass protein

OK, let’s try those

Business as usual – What’s on the scientists’ shelf

“If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you always got.”

Mark Twain

“Our findings indicate that business as usual feed

‘promotion’ and interventions are not too

promising.”Alan Duncan (ILRI)

ILRI roles in program 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’s ‘open’ research, knowledge and learning approach [local to global]

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

4. 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 Beyond reports

Listen and learn

Participatory video

Most significant changes

Any observable impacts?

Discussion support tools

Farmer focus Rapid value chain

assessment Participatory

‘FEAST’ feed assessment with communities

Technology prioritization with farmers (Techfit)

Discussion support tools

Results in: Promising feed

interventions that might work

Better understand why usual suspects often don’t work

Learning from communities

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

32%

22%

20%

14%

6%

6%

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

Agriculture

Livestock

Remmitance

Labour

Others

Business

3. Open the knowledge

Open research

‘Working out loud’

Open planning – events and thinking

‘Open’ events – all the discussions

Open projects – work in progress

Open sharing – gaps, weaknesses …

Open presentations

Open photos

Open reports and repository

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