Social media tips for agricultural research

Social media is online content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. - wikipedia

Meena Arivananthan of the CGIAR ICT-KM Program recently published 10 blog posts introducing different social media and how she and her ICT-KM colleagues are using them.

Here's the full set:

10. Put it out there! Tools for photo, video and slideshow sharing

9. Newsfeeds: delivering the latest news to your virtual doorstep; and ways to share it!

8. Are newsletters a dying breed?

7. Wikis, sites, docs and pads: the many flavours of collaborative writing

6. Social Bookmarking: storm-a-brewing

5. Social Media: Are You Listening?

4. Social Networks: friend or foe?

3. Social Media: how do you know it’s working?

2. Blogging for impact

1. Microblogging

More IAALD blog postings on social media

ICT-KM knowledge sharing toolkit

ICCO - Euforic web2 toolkit (en français

Blogging web 2.0 and KM for agriculture and rural development

Sometimes you find an excellent new blog on aginfo and related issues and wonder how it didn't come across your radar before... Anyway, Web Tastings is by IFPRI's Pete Shelton and Stephan Dohrn - writing in their personal capacities. The idea is to "reflect on the usefulness and impact of the social web and its tools and approaches on development cooperation."

A recent post that caught the eye looks at measuring impact on the web - and some experiences from IFPRI.

Communicating social research with video

One of the opportunities provided by 'new' social media or web 2.0 tools is to help bring research messages to audiences usually not reached. Pathways South Asia, a research and policy NGO in Bangladesh, is using video to communicate research on the empowerment of women.

Maheen Sultan of BRAC introduces the project:



See more postings on video

CGIAR on Web 2.0 for Dev conference

Blogs, wikis, del.icio.us, Bebo, feeds, tags, RSS…Is this a new language?
It sure is — it is the new and ever changing vocabulary of Web 2.0!

Well exactly. I hadn’t heard of it either until I attended the Web2forDev conference held 24-27 September 2007 at FAO in Rome. This unusual conference- first of its kind- was devoted to exploring the ways in which international development stakeholders can take advantage of the tec hnical and organizational opportunities provided by Web 2.0 methods, approaches and applications.

Nadia Manning (pdf format) captures some of the action from Rome and explains what it might mean for the CGIAR. There's more in the ICT-KM Blog.

Tags: agricultural information cgiar web2fordev

Web 2.0 for participatory development: Notes from Rome

This three day conference at FAO from 25-27 September provided an opportunity for participants to share experiences in the use of social networking technologies (i.e. blogs, wikis, feeds, mash-ups etc.) to build collaborative knowledge organizations (www.web2fordev.net).

With a focus on support for rural community information needs, the conference attendees also explored issues of the digital divide, local ownership,linguistic challenges, illiteracy, privacy, capacity building, information overload, and potential delivery mechanisms such as mobile phones and email alerts.

Selected presentations included a demonstration of RSS feed technology used by the Global Forest Information Service (GFIS) gateway; the use of semantic wikis at ICRISAT to build a repository of re-usable information objects; IFPRI’s experiments with improving both internal and external communication using blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, and social bookmarking (see also the china conference web site); and Oxfam's MySpace community engagement.

The experiences of BROSDI, a Ugandan NGO, were striking. It works to improve rural livelihoods through the use of ICTs and knowledge sharing. The BROSDI website provides farmers with weather information, concise FAQs,and access to open source tools for text-messaging. Village knowledge brokers are trained to facilitate two-way communication and to build ICT capacity among all village members, including school children.

For more Web2forDev conference details, go to the conference blog or visit this posting on .

contributed by Barbara Hutchinson

Tags: agricultural information web2fordev

AgInfo communities gather in Rome

This coming last week of September promises to be hectic as hundreds of people working with agricultural information, knowledge, ICTs, and the web gather in Rome.

The centerpiece of e-agriculture week is the web2forDevelopment conference. Originally conceived by CTA, Web2ForDev 2007 is the first conference devoted to ways in web 2.0 can be used to support networking, collaboration and knowledge exchange in agriculture and rural development.

The programme has a mouth-watering array of speakers and experiences - Agricultural Market Information Systems 2.0; Web 2.0 for Rural Communities; Drylands Resources Knowledge and Practice Network; Village to Village Knowledge Sharing; Climate Change Mashups; GFAR 2.0; E-agriculture 2.0 in the Pacific; Rural community 2.0 in Uganda; GFIS Forest Informaiton Gateway; IFPRI 2.0; and more ....

As is perhaps appropriate with web 2.0, all kinds of other events and groups are buiilding their own applications around the Web2ForDev platform. The CGIAR information management and information technology managers with hold a meeting just before; also meeting in advance are a group of experts reviewing ongoing developments of semantic standards as well as participants in the 2nd Expert Consultation on International Information Systems for Agricultural Science and Technology.

On the 25th, the 'E-Agriculture Working Group' continues its discussions of post-WSIS actions. The 26th sees a get together of partners in the Global Forum on Agricultural Research community. The IAALD Board meets on the 27th.

Finally, the 28th sees two quite different discussions. The CGIAR convenes an open face to face session [invitation]as part of its discussion on 'Opening Access to CGIAR Research and Knowledge.' On the same day, PROLINNOVA hold a smaller event to investigate 'Farmer-led documentation: Local knowledge sharing in an agricultural context.'

It all promises to be a jam-packed week. We aim to cover some of the discussions through this blog. The Web2ForDev blog is already active in the run up to the discussions and will contain reports from all the presentations. A good way to see some of the resources mobilised is through the 'web2fordev' tag on delicious.

Tags: agricultural information web2.0 iaald