Full Circle Associates

One of my jobs a few weeks ago was to facilitate sessions at the Rome Share Fair. This included making sure there was some sort of blog post or notes from each session. Well, I fell behind after one session. I got my blog post up on the Graphic Facilitation workshop, and convinced Sophie Alvarez to blog about the Communities of Practice Clinic Etienne and I did, but then there were FOUR more! Mamma mia. Here is one… from the session on New Technologies and Innovative Approaches in Rural Family Poultry. (Slides below)

Antonio Rota (IFAD) and Olaf Thieme (FAO) have been working on an approach to small scale poultry farming in rural areas that offers a glimpse into the factors that help farmers succeed in putting food on their table and making  living for their families. We joked that this session could have been called “how to make a development project that works” or, riffing off of Rob Burnet’s talk on Tuesday where he talked about an attention getting technique they used, the “Chicken of Change!” (Graphic recording I did of Rob’s talk is here.)

First, a bit about the session. We kicked things off with a human spectrogram (http://www.kstoolkit.org/Human+Spectrogram) to learn  more about the 20 people who came to the session. The group was diverse; some with a lot of experience with poultry and others with less experience but plenty of interest.

While there may be more interest in the stars of livestock, cows, I’ve learned that it is poultry, goats and other small animals that are accessible to the very poor and very rural. Chickens can produce eggs and meat for high nutrition, and selling eggs and chickens brings in income.  These little chicks offer financial empowerment for women. But poultry just isn’t on the radar screen and there are not many statistics to help shine a light on chickens and ducks for development. Poultry production can contribute to the MDGs around poverty, hunger, education, gender empowerment, health, and even reduction in HIV/AIDS. Super chickens!

I realized as I listened there is a ton of common sense in our work, but what matters is listening and acting on that common sense.

Antonio and Olaf shared a story about a village poultry project that, while scientifically sound, ran into some practical problems, like the challenge of finding high volumes of local varieties of chickens well suited to a free-ranging lifestyle, and reasonable ways to get eggs hatched. (Just a side note: in our preparation, Antonio mentioned that some people talked about “free ranging” chickens as “scavenging livestock.” Hm, interesting how language might shape  our perceptions, eh?)

I was amazed how fascinating all the elements were as Antonio and Olaf told engaging stories. There were issues of vaccine distribution for Newcastle disease. Access to vaccines varies by distance from cities and the creation of vaccine networks is critical.. Poultry raising practices in general vary by distance from cities, with more intense production in peri urban and urban settings where there are more resources and capital. In the very rural areas, women have to make due with what they find locally.  And all these things need to mesh with local customs and practices. So is the big pattern emerging? Yes, context! Local knowledge and adaptation matter.

Innovation does not have to mean rocket science. 90-95% of poultry loss is from disease and then second greatest loss is predators, including humans. Villagers developed a simple basket cage to protect their chicks out a wide varieties of material. Breed choices focus on runners who can evade predators and forage in the rural areas, not a slow broiler. In the cities, you can build hen houses for more intense production.

To grow more chickens you need more birds. Brood hens only work for small production. So villagers have created simple incubators that can be built in remote locations. Think about it. If you are targeting 10,000 women with 10 hens each…where do you find 100,000 local breed chickens? Large scale breeders offer “Ferrari” birds that require a lot of feed. Then woman have to decide, “feed the birds or feed my children?” These past dilemmas have caused evaluators to say “Chickens don’t work.” But they can.

Oil lamp incubators were developed by women in Bangladesh. This and related methods are adaptable to different contexts informed by the women’s’ experiences. For example, in the past, telling women to turn the eggs every hour, around the clock was downright impractical. Sponsors provided a lot of training, but people abandoned the work after training. One woman however was successful, but not willing to turn the eggs every hour. She turned twice a day and still the eggs hatched successfully. Voila! Local adaptation.

The training was also adapted, moving from two full sequential days, to 28 days of working with the women in doing the work, solving the little problems. This reflected the hatching cycle. This is where the idea of the buffer zone of sand for the oil lamp hatchery was identified and which greatly increased success. Now new village industry is building on local breeds with locally done genetic improvement through cross breeding for village conditions. This is an important remote option of poultry breeds for the poor, rural farmers and populations.

Few institutions are focusing on poultry. There apparently is little focused research. No one is doing extensive training. So we need more networking for exchange of information on poultry production. And information that is locally and contextually adapted.

The days of projects with blanket design for rural poultry are finished at IFAD and FAO. From now on they will be specifically tailored around social, economic and location specific conditions. Marginal areas need local breeds, local knowledge and resources used for food security. Closer to urban and peri urban centers we can look more at market based systems.

We need to listen to farmers and local knowledge about what is possible and use a comprehensive approach, with motivation, training for success as well as technical advice.Antonio and Olaf offered a word of advice to the new player, BMGF. “If they only invest in one of the many technical factors they will fail. We have learned from our mistakes. We know we need a holistic approach. We want to share what we learned.”

PoultryPublication

Carl Jackson of Westhill Knowledge Group (formerly at IDS – Institute of Development Studies), colleague at KM4Dev, friend and all around smart and funny guy took 20 minutes to share some of his experiences supporting and participating in online communities in international development. He has worked with a number of IDS’s Eldis communities, including Africa Adapt. While you can peruse the communities’ websites, nothing replaces hearing about the practice of stewarding and participating IN the community.

Click below for a listen — it’s about 18 minutes packed full of practical advice.

Carl Jackson on Online Communities in Development

Here are some of the nuggets I extracted:

• People are seeing  online communities and networks as core instruments of how we work.We can now cheaply create broad based activist networks. For example, Africa Adapt – with participatory researchers, policy makers, community advocates around climate adaptation. In 1.5 years built a sense of community, and has organized F2F events at a continental level. Used to be much harder to get off the ground. Now people prepared to give it a go or at least a benefit of a doubt.
• Focus, focus, focus: Carl reinforced the importance of subject specific focus… this then attracts a specific kind of people
• Some groups are harder to attract than others. On the whole, the one group where it has been harder to get awarness and buy in is with is the scientists in climate science community. In international development there is quite a strong divide between the natural scientists and social scientists. They have different networks and ways of sharing knowledge.
• Policy makers CAN be attracted with focused offerings. Within Eldis communities had a debate between experts on food security and gender, convened by BRIDGE at IDS. Researchers and policy makers from a range of organizations.
• Preparation for events matters. With a focused, short time frame event, they did substantial bilateral engagement w/ potential participants 3-4 weeks leading up to the date. A lot of work went into brainstorming themes they could focus on in the discussion, and in gathering and synthesizing brief bios of participants. They noticed in other discussions of this type a lot of initial energy gets soaked up in introductions, getting comfortable.
• Open conversations with less clear focus are still important. People are looking for more increasing awareness of the landscape, who the actors are, events are, values and languages. For that kind of orientation, open discussions are still really valuable. They allow you to discover things. In time delimited, you drill down, but not much discovery.
• Why has ELDIS community succeeded? Primary value of ELDIS communities: be in there for the long haul. When the communities  were set up there were other spaces like that, but the level of demand for ELDIS communities and level of initial participation was quite low. When you have short term performance requirements — could have bombed quickly. But the grant makers that work w/ IDS have a longer strategic vision about the value of collaboration, bringing in diverse and little heard voices – commitment was there. Seedbed for initiatives.
• Reputation still matters: IDS has been able to – because it has established reputation for research and training beyond its online work gives a certail level of brand recognition and associated knowledge resources on the broader Eldis portal. Quality and back up that can be hooked into community spaces. Drawing on the resource guides.
• Individually driven spaces require less support.  The largest number on ELDIS are set up by members for a blog or event, sharing documentation or share videos.  They are doing stuff in a very unsupported way beyond the provision of technical support and troubleshooting advice for things like setting up profiles and adding functionality to their personal spaces.
• Events benefit from strong staffing and preparation. The Food security and gender event was part of a wider programmatic effort around that subject, purpose of gathering knowledge for publication. 3 people working on the preparation for 2 day event with a 2 month lead time. Carl estimates that  total time of individuals that went into prep and facilitation, follow up was 30 person days. Consider the value of convening 30 experts internationally to have a very detailed cutting edge discussion. If you’d have looked at how else, the costs of convening that kind of group logistically in a physical space – order of 5-10 x cost.
• Design as if you are in their shoes. In thinking about design, especially new group coming together, it is important to try and think your way into where they are coming from, scenarios they might consider participating in. That’s a way of designing a process that leads to an online collaboration with as little logistical friction, anticipates some of the interests and needs they may have. Policy makers want a tractable output of feedback to policy. Researchers want highlights of current research or gather ideas for new research topics. Put yourself into the shoes of the participants and construct a process that is useful for both participants and commissioners of the event.
• Light facilitation rules the day. Now that people are much more comfortable participating in online spaces, the facilitation needs to be when it is live needs to be much more light touch. People don’t need so much hand holding. Facilitation should not be acting as chair of discussion– neither necessary or helpful. More about holding the space, backchannel matchmaking/connecting, draw out the quite – pastoral care behind the scenes. Then the energy the participants bring to the discussion doesn’t get blocked. I don’t think you can lead discussions online, you can only nudge them
• Any other advice? It’s important – when the community does come together in a good way, has a powerful discussion, important to translate that something as quick as possible into something tangible. There are often good intentions of producing outputs, but the wheels grind slowly, nice polished in 3 months. You have to be prepared to quickly synthesize and publish some kind of project. Rough and quick is better than polished and slow. They can immediately get the extra value.

You can find Carl on his company website, www.wkg.uk.net or on Twitter at @Carl_WKG

This linked set of tweets tells the story about why we don’t have to k now all the different processes we can use in groups, in our work. (This is also a nice Twitter Story which I can point to when we are talking aboutNetworks at CSIR in Pretoria next week!)

We need to focus not on encyclopedic knowledge, but to know

1) how to learn and practice new processes,

2) how to ask the right questions to select processes (alone and with others) and,

3) to tap the wider knowledge of our networks to identify our options.

via Students self-organize their own curriculum – storify.com.

Via a Tweet from John Hagel comes the Enormous forest xylophone plays Bach’s Cantata 147 (Wired UK). A phone handset advert? Yup. But in it beauty, art and music. In our communities and networks, can we use art and music as a way to focus attention, learn and share knowledge? What ideas do you have? Post a comment!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_CDLBTJD4M&feature=player_embedded

Note: I’m working a back log of “draft posts” that have yet to see the light of day. This is one from my trip to the Netherlands in December!)

Just a quick post from the Netherlands where I’ve been working with the fabulous Marc Coenders on an evaluation project for ICCO and it’s ComPart “project.” It has been lovely to work with the Compart team of Maarten Boers, Pier Adrea Pirani and Pete Cranston (the last two from Euforic Services and old KM4Dev pals.) It was a bit like “old home week” to use an American expression. The work has been fascinating, intense and challenging. The key word that keeps coming to me is fractal. Just when we get to one moment of understanding, things tilt just a bit and a new pattern slips in shifting things again. This is great for meaning making, not so great for finishing an evaluation report! It reminds us that we are working in a complex environment and if we are to succeed, we have to work with emergence. (See Peggy Holman’s terrific book, Engaging Emergence). We expect to be able to share the evaluation early in 2011 after the team has had time to absorb the findings!

As a little “side benefit,” Maarten Boers of ICCO hosted a borrel, or gathering for the knowledge sharing/KM/social media types in the area at the end of the day, some from my dear old KM4Dev network. It had been a long and intense day of meetings, plus silly me managed to catch quite a bad cold, complete with fever, etc. So I was really pushing my physical limits.

We planned a Fish Bowl for the borrel focusing on the interplay between organiztional change and technology, springing off of the evaluation work at ICCO with their “ComPart way of working.” I was greatful to be able to mostly listen from the outside of the fish bowl and took copious notes, some of which I’ll put below.

But I have to say, there were a few funny, wonderful moments when we, most of whom were working both in a second language and from a very tired state, misheard things and we created something new (and funny) out of it.

• What about “solo galaxies,” misheard from “solidarity.” Earlier in the day I was taking notes on the flip chart and I thought, hm, what a unique thing. Did that mean someone was really working in isolation, a “one star galaxy?”
• We have the fish bowl method, but what comes to mind when you say “fish bowling?” Who is bowling? Are the fish the pins? My visual imagination went crazy.
• Later during the conversation I brought up the concept of “free riding” in networks and communities and how do we distinguish this from legitimate peripheral participation. Some one wanted to know what writing had to do with it and wasn’t free writing good for getting past writer’s block?

I love this stuff.

Anyway, here are the notes — there are some terrific one-liners. I apologize for not catching who said what, nor for having a list of participants. Not such great network weaving on my part!