Strategic communication: from technologies transferred to empowered farmers

According to Phouttasin Phimmachanh of the Laos NAFES, adoption of strategic communication approaches has helped transform the effectiveness of research and extension in Laos.

He started by explaining how agriculture in Laos is generally moving from a subsistence to a market led environment, and that this poses information and decision making challenges for everyone involved in the sector - farmers, extension and research, and policy makers.

The main focus of his presentation was on strategic communication processes they recently adopted.

Two of the key reasons they adopted this approach:

First, communictaion materials were often developed in a top down way - "to meet the needs of the boss or the needs of the project", rather than to meet the needs of farmers. Second, these materials were often promotionsal rather that educational.

He characterized this past experience as "just producing without knowing where it goes and whats the impact of it."

He characterized the new approach: "so now we try to produce differently and to better communicate with farmers." This new approach is systematic, strategic, it draws in multidisciplinary research-extension-farmer teams, is designed and tested with target users, and involves better M&E.

One of the key lessons: "the communications process is not any more about transferring technologies, it is about empowering farmers to make their own choices"

See his presentation:

VERCON and mobile devices for agricultural communication

VERCON is a ground breaking programme from the Knowledge Management team at FAO. It is based on a model which aims to enhance interaction among agricultural research, extension, farmers and the other stakeholders of agriculture and rural development using Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and creating opportunities for collaborative work.

Sophie Treinen has been managing the programme since its inception in 2000. Over the past 18 months, FAO has been reviewing the work and synthesising lessons learnt. At the 2010 IAALD Congress in Montpelier, Sophie gave a well attended presentation about the programme, the underlying model and how it has progressed in that time.

FAO has worked with local partners across the globe. I reviewed the programme in 2007, and it is striking to see the basic approach has been adapted in a wide range variety of locations. The FAO team are excited about the recent collaboration between the programme in Costa Rica and Bhutan, which has enabled the partners in Bhutan to learn directly from another Southern programme while the Costa Rican partners have taken back an especially good rice strain for experimentation locally.

Recently, CTA has explored how mobile devices can impact agriculture (see the 2009 Mobile Observatory. VERCON has yet to successfully integrate mobiles use into any current programmes. In this interview Sophie talks about some of the plans they have for later phases.

Pete Cranston, Euforic Services

Read an article on VERCON

Capturing and sharing learning from the fields

Speaking today in the IAALD world congress, Jorge Jorge Chavez-Tapur explained why and how ILEIA promotes better documentation of agricultural practices and learning.

His starting points: despite the recognition of the importance of agriculture and calls for us to avoid 'business as usual' - most of the 'unusual' and innovative practices already happening are hardly visible.

"If we go to the field, we see millions of these interesting learning experiences, but hardly any of them are captured and shared"

Hence, ILEIA promotes and supports efforts to identify, document and share these experiences. (More ...)

A key issue, one that is not usually acknowledged, is the issue of ownership - 'too much' ownership by an individual or an organization is one of the many reasons why these experiences are not openly shared.

New IAALD executive installed in Montpellier

On Tuesday 27 April, IAALD held its general assembly of members.

Peter Ballantyne and Toni Greider reported on activities and progress 2005-2010. Thereafter, members elected a new committee to lead the association.

View the presentation.

Barbara Hutchinson of the University of Arizona was elected as the new President, under the new governance system, to serve for a one year term (2010-2011). See the list of IAALD officers elected as part of this transition period between the previous and new governance systems.

Barbarah Hutchinson introduces her plans:

Agricultural Information Worldwide – Online and Open

In 2008, IAALD re-launched its professional journal under the title ‘Agricultural Information Worldwide’ – Aginfo Worldwide.

From April 2010, AgInfo Worldwide is published ‘web-only’ using the open journals system (OJS).

http://journals.sfu.ca/iaald/

The web-only edition allows IAALD to continue providing a high-quality professional journal, with lower cost and greater accessibility.

We also aim to make the full-text archive of the IAALD Quarterly Bulletin available on the web.

The April 2010 issue contains the following articles:

Agricultural Information and Knowledge Sharing: Promising Opportunities for Agricultural Information Specialists

La información agrícola y el intercambio de conocimientos: Oportunidades promisorias para los especialistas en información agraria

Benchmarking CGIAR research outputs for availability and accessibility

Learning to Swim: How IFPRI Uses Multiple Web Channels to Communicate Research Outputs

AGRIS - From a bibliographic database to a semantic data service on agricultural research information

Disponibilidad, accesibilidad y aplicabilidad de los resultados de investigación de los Centros del Grupo Consultivo para la Investigación Agrícola Internacional (CGIAR)

VERCON – the Virtual Extension and Research Communication Network

Mobile Services in a Wireless World: The CTA 2009 ICT Observatory Meeting

InfoAccess Marketplace: How to make agricultural research information available and accessible

On Monday 26 April, in the run-up to the IAALD 2010 Congress in Montpellier, an InfoAccess Marketplace was held by the partners in the the CIARD initiative.

Several organizations took part in the event, showcasing different tools and approaches to make agricultural information more accessible.

According to Stephen Rudgard: "research information is often 'locked away' and is not truly accessible." CIARD - Coherence in Information for Agricultural Research for Development - is a global movement that is working to make public domain research information truly accessible to all. The CIARD agenda has been developed over the past two years with the involvement of different stakeholders and partners; the IAALD Congress represents an ideal occasion to share the CIARD agenda with wider public of information professionals in the agricultural sector so that they can understand and promote this initiative.

Specifically, the CIARD initiative comprises a Manifesto, a set of values, as well as a checklist and a series of pathways to achieve the checklist items. The pathways are quite complex, and the idea of the Marketplace is to bring together different service providers from across the world who can help people with information and research to share them more effectively and make them truly accessible.

Stephen Rudgard explains the CIARD initiative:




One of the most interesting tools presented at the Marketplace was Mendeley, a social academic software for researchers to manage and share their research papers. It also a research network to manage research papers online and, more important, to discover research trends and build connections to other researchers. Online for 15 months now, Mendeley already has 300,000 users, most from top universities such as MIT and Cambridge.

Jan Reichelt introduces Mendeley:




Another interesting project was Organic Edunet, presented by GRNET, the Greek Research and Technology Network. Organic Edunet is an EU-unded project that aims at making content on organic agriculture publicly available and accessible. It comprises a multilingual online federation of learning repositories, populated with quality content from various content producers.

Nikos Palavitsinis explains more about this project:

Post by Pier Andrea Pirani, EUFORIC Services

CGIAR centers join with Google Books to extend reach

In Montpellier today, CGIAR centers attending the IAALD Congress announced a new colaboration with Google Books.

CGBooks (http://books.cgiar.org), a collaborative effort involving CGIAR Information Managers, Web Managers and Google staff, has effectively expanded the reach of CGIAR research, simply by making publications instantly searchable over the Internet.

IAALD blog reaches 1000 postings

We started this IAALD blog in June 2005 - just after the IAALD World Congress in Kentucky. The aim was to report on developments worldwide concerning agricultural information, knowledge, ICTs, libraries, extension, and communication.

Almost 5 years later, we published blog posting number 1000 - CIAT dives into social media and blogging.

In April 2008 we posted some information on the blog and its metrics. How does it now look?

Using Google analytics data for the past 15 months, we can see that blog visits came from: the Americas (39.64%), Europe (30.96%), Asia (17.94%), Africa (9.93%), and
Oceania (1.31%).

The top countries, in terms of vists were:

United States: 15.52%
India: 8.17%
Netherlands: 5.83%
Chile: 5.06%
France: 4.18%
United Kingdom: 3.84%
Italy: 3.35%
Croatia: 3.05%
Spain: 2.84%
Colombia: 2.59%

The top 10 blog postings in the same period were:

1. What roles for the agricultural library of the future?
   
2. Combining Twitter with a live discussion on agricultural knowledge sharing
   
3. The Agricultural Library of the Future: Points from the Rome discussion
   
4. IFLA 2010 AgLibraries group: Current Trends in Agricultural Information Services for Farmers
   
5. Promising opportunities for agricultural information specialists
   
6. Scientific and technical information and rural development: Highlights of innovative practices
   
7. Communicating a new research output: IFPRI strategies
   
8. How accessible is your agricultural information?
   
9. Lifelong learning with farmers in Madurai, South India
   
10. Social media for agricultural science?

IAALD papers in the Global Agricultural Research Archive

IAALD is one of the first institutional partners to contribute full text content to the 'Global Agricultural Research Archive' of CAB International. The pilot database currently contains over 2,700 full text records.

The archive contains the full text of papers presented at the IAALD 2008 World Congress in Japan. IN the near future, we plan to add papers from the 2010 congress and perhaps the digital archives of the IAALD Quarterly Bulletin.

Outgoing IAALD President Peter Ballantyne is "really pleased that IAALD is part of this new initiative. It is a concrete demonstration of our commitment to CIARD and the principle of making our information openly accessible."

View the archive / more on CIARD / posts on open access / open access RSS feed

M-agriculture session at IAALD Congress

Next week in Montpellier, CTA's Kevin Painting will organise a session entitled: 'm-agriculture: how mobile devices transform information and communication.'

• How do you use mobile phones in your work with agricultural communities?
  
• What are the most significant new developments in services and technologies in this, the fastest changing sector of ICTs?
  
• How are we engaging with the continually increasing numbers of people in agricultural economies who, for the first time, are connected and reachable?
  
• How can we exploit the opportunities and meet the challenges presented by the convergence of technology, media and information services?

Billions of people use mobile phones to communicate and the number of unconnected people is plummeting. This connectivity, the mobile phone economy and the convergence of different media and technologies onto mobile digital devices have transformed the ICT landscape and are transforming the entertainment and information service economies.

m-agriculture refers to refers to agricultural services, technology dissemination, and communication using mobile devices such as mobile phones, laptops, netbooks, PDAs and other wireless enabled devices. Many, including the International Development sector, were surprised by the rapid emergence of connected populations across the globe using mobile devices. Although there are many innovative applications and services being tested and implemented, it is clear that we are only beginning to recognise the tremendous opportunities being presented and the need to reap the benefits of the technology for all.

This is an area which has excited much interest and featured in sessions at previous IAALD events, such as the IAALD/AFITA/WCCA Congress in Tokyo, Japan (2008) and the Second IAALD Africa Chapter Conference in Accra, Ghana (2009). More recently, CTA held its 2009 Observatory on ICTs on mobile services where participants explored issues relating to the development of sustainable mobile-services, how best to engage the commercial sector and how to embed good practice in slow moving government and other agencies. The research paper and report are contained in the Observatory wiki http://observatory2009.cta.int/.

This participatory workshop aims to connect people working in this area with those who wish to learn more and those who wish to increase their use of mobile services. We shall be looking at three areas:

1. What are the features of mobile phones, and their attendant economy, that might have the most transformative impact on agricultural information services?

2. What do we need to change in how we segment, format and deliver information to best exploit the potential of mobile devices?

3. How is the relationship between paid-for and public good changed by this most commercially driven of innovations?

More postings on mobile devices in agriculture

IAALD 2010 Congress

Special E-agriculture issue hits the stands

I4D magazine is producing a special issue on e- agriculture in April in partnership with the e-Agriculture Community of Practice. I4D is published by CSDMS (Centre for Science, Development and Media Studies) in India. This special issue showcases recent advances in agricultural and rural development from around the world through the innovate use of ICT. Access the special issue online.

Articles include:

The Commodity that Survived the Economic Downturn: Mobiles for development

Mobile Telephony in Rural Areas: The Latin American perspective

Smallholder farmers and ICT-KM

Rural farmers’s information network in Mali and Burkina Faso

A Study of Prioritisation of Information Related Needs of Farmers

Virtual Extension and Research Communication Network (VERCON): e-Agriculture in action

Agropedia: Revolutionising Indian agriculture

Indian Council of Agricultural Research journals go open access

ICAR has decided to allow open access to its research journals online for the benefit of students, researchers and farmers for free nationally and internationally.

The journals namely, Indian Journal of Agricultural Sciences and Indian Journal of Animal Sciences are published monthly by ICAR.

The journals are accessible from the ICAR website from March 2010 onwards.

AgriDrupal users meet up in Montpellier on 25 April

In an effort to create a community of Drupal users in the agricultural information community, colleagues from FAO are convening a meeting of interested people on Sunday 25 April.

Immediately before the IAALD congress in Montpellier: more information.

Organic Edunet organizes workshops on ICTs and learning in organic agriculture and ecology

In Hungary in September 2010, the Organic.Edunet project organizes a conference on Learning Methodologies in Agriculture, especially Organic Agriculture and Ecology.

Methodologies and technological Tools to facilitate knowledge dissemination will be presented by experts from a wide scientific spectrum, including fields such as Agriculture, Pedagogy, Learning & Knowledge Management and ICT.

Specific workshops/Autumn schools planned include:

"Enhancing Environmental and Ecological Awareness and Education in Schools: Training Teachers on the Use of Web2.0 tools and Open Educational Resources"

"Preparing the Organic Advisors of Tomorrow: Innovative Agricultural Experts and Extension Officers familiarized with Agro-Ecology Principles, Blended-Learning, and Modern ICT Tools"

More information is at: http://informatics.aua.gr/organic/

Participants can apply for funding since the program is approved by the Grundtvig Program of the European Commission.

Montpellier planning update

The Programme for the Montpellier Congress is online - more than 200 contributions grouped in 5 major themes. We will also have several side sessions and special workshops: The CIARD Info Access Marketplace on Monday 26 April as well as workshops organized by our major partners CTA and FAO. We also look forward to the workshop on biodiversity information organized by EBHL and Bioversity International.

You can join and follow the event on our Ning community. And, just as we did in Japan in 2008, we will publish news and updates from the meeting on this blog, Slideshare, on Twitter, and on Blip TV. Look for the 'aginfo10' tag and subscribe to our RSS Newsfeed.