euforic blog

Join in and experiment with us - First KM4Dev Online Open Space

noreply@blogger.com (Pier Andrea Pirani) — 2017年6月06日 12:34:00 +0000

As is often the case, the recent face to face gatherings in Seattle and Geneva have rippled onto the KM4Dev list, bringing a lot of energy and discussions.

One conversation in particular generated a lot of interest, on the value and constraints of bringing people together to share and learn from each other. Between the need to reduce travel related meetings to limit our carbon footprint, decreasing budgets to organize and attend conferences and events, and a general ‘business’ that doesn’t always allow us to engage, "to what extent is convening a conversation still considered a luxury?"

One of the (many) ideas that emerged was to try and organize a KM4Dev online open space - so we offered to facilitate the process to make it happen.

So you are invited to join us and experiment in the first KM4Dev Online Open Space on 14th June, from 02:00 London time (01:00 GMT) to 19:30 London time (18:30 GMT). We will be using Adobe Connect for the meetings and Google docs for the Market Place and for notes.

Suggested process

We’re proposing to run approximately two-hour long sessions, with a 30 min break between them. In total, we have up to 8 sessions scheduled, so all timezones should be well covered.

The suggested outline for each session is as below - but of course these are first thoughts and we welcome comments:

Hellos, including people logging in, 15m
Introduction to Open Space - principles, how we’ll work, 10m
Marketplace - looking at any suggestions already collected during the registration, inviting new topics, and then the process of agreeing which topics will be led by whom, followed by people selecting which one to join and allocating people to the different online breakout rooms, 30m
Conversations of about 30 - 45m
Feedback, about 15m
Goodbyes, 5m

Who else is coming?

Some 15 people have already registered, and we’re already covering the whole globe, from Manila in the Philippines to Seattle in the US.

But as you can see in the illustration above by fellow km4dever Tina Hetzel, your piece is still missing. So why not joining us? You can register here and join the list with the other volunteers that have come forward to make this happening.

Come experiment with us, travelling with the sunshine over our planet!

Dialogue for impact - preparing the ground

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — 2017年4月28日 14:14:00 +0000

In the first blog in this series we shared some of the creative challenges in co-designing CARIAA’s research program annual learning review (ALR), which is taking place in Nepal on 3-6 May. The Collaborative Adaptation Research Initiative in Africa and Asia (CARIAA) aims to build the resilience of poor people to climate change by supporting a network of four consortia to conduct high caliber research and policy engagement in four ‘hotspots’ in Africa and Asia.

Collaboration and conversation

Collaboration and learning together is the life blood of CARIAA and so dialogue and conversation is at the core of this year’s ALR. In this blog we share what we’ve been doing to prepare the ground for the conversations to come, experiences that will enrich our next Oxford FacilitationAnywhere training workshop in June.

‘Conversation’ is right there in the purpose of the ALR, which is about understanding how the research emerging out of CARIAA can bring the SDGs ‘into conversation’ with national planning processes. Hearing some of the research finding so far has been exciting and moving - we have a vivid sense of the huge potential to really impact the lives of the people who are most vulnerable to climate change.

Dialogue is all about tuning into this sense of potential and bringing different perspectives together for what William Isaacs calls a ‘living experience of inquiry within and between people', but without actually knowing what will emerge. In practical terms, what will this look like? How do we shape up an agenda and create processes to literally ‘bring into conversation’ the needs of researchers, who want to hear more from each other about the science, and the other element of CARIAA’s purpose - to influence policy.Here is where the story goes. Try to enter a link like this so that it opens in a new window.

In the remainder of the original post on FacilitationAnywhere.net we describe how the agenda is shaping up, and the preparatory sessions we've designed to maximise the chances of success in what is turning out to be a complex process, as befits a complex programme!

Learning events and the privilege of being facilitators

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — 2017年4月06日 14:05:00 +0000

Designing a Research Program Annual Learning Review

Sometimes we have assignments that involve working with people and being present at events so interesting and impressive that we'd pay to attend as participants! We're facilitating the third Annual Learning Review (ALR3) of the Collaborative Adaptation Research Initiative in Africa and Asia (CARIAA) program in Nepal this May.

We've been working with CARIAA in one form or another for most of its' five year life, beginning with the set up of a collaborative KM platform based in the Google Apps for Work for their CARIAA research programme - and some subsequent work to create an M&E dashboard using the same technology. During 2017 we also worked to support Knowledge Management and Learning processes across the program, including the facilitation of the second Annual Learning Review.

This is the first blog in a series where we will share our experience of co-creating the event design and facilitating the four-day programme, partly as a lead-in to the next FacilitationAnywhere training workshop in June. In this post we briefly describe what makes CARIAA such a remarkable initiative and some of the immediate challenges in putting together an agenda with the potential to enable participants meet its ambitious goals.

Hot-spots and collaboration

The combination or scale and depth is one of the things I find so impressive about CARIAA. The program, "aims to build the resilience of poor people to climate change by supporting a network of four consortia to conduct high-calibre research and policy engagement" in what it calls hot spots, in Africa and Asia. The program focuses on three types of hot spots in Africa and South Asia: semi-arid regions; deltas; and glacier and snow-pack dependent river basins in South Asia. Each of these hot spots combine vulnerability to the extreme effects of climate change as well as a large concentration of poor populations. Hot spots are seen as a lens for research on common challenges across different contexts.

The West-Vigne glacier is a headwater of the Indus © Ahmad Abdul Karim

Pause for a moment and unpack, 'snow-pack dependent river basins in South Asia'. "The Hindu Kush Himalayan (HKH) region, the source of ten large river systems of Asia, provides water and other ecosystem services to more than 210 million people living in the mountains and over 1.3 billion living in the plains" The HI-AWARE consortium, who are hosting ALR3, is therefore working across Pakistan, India, Nepal and Bangladesh, undertaking original research and seeking to find common threads and original solutions across that enormous region. The other three consortium are similarly engaged in attempting to both synthesise research findings across their own huge focus areas, and with HI-AWARE also to find common threads that can be shared globally. There are other similar programs, including larger ones like BRACED, but it's this determination to do more than simply share results and hold joint events that makes CARIAA different: it's such an ambitious undertaking, and in a seven-year program.

Research on climate change adaptation demands collaboration. So the different consortia bring together researchers and practitioners, from the North and the South, with different backgrounds and expertise, to create and share knowledge. This consortium-based model is itself innovative and not yet seen as mainstream in research for development. It emphasises collaborating and learning within both within and between the consortia involved in the Program, as well as with other initiatives. So another striking feature of the Program is the embedded mechanisms in place for knowledge exchange across the four consortia, aiming for syntheses of emerging research findings, and a structured learning process over time.

In the remainder of this blog on FacilitationAnywhere.net we explain more about the concepts behind the third Annual Learning Review, and some our our early thinking on the agenda as we joined the planning process.

Dimensions of learning and knowledge sharing

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — 2017年1月27日 17:39:00 +0000

This is the second blog cross-posted from WaterAid UK, where we've been supporting a Knowledge and Learning Review and a follow-up programme involving four countries. The aim there is to explore ways in which individuals, teams and leaders can embed improved learning and knowledge sharing into their everyday rhythm of business. In this blog we introduce that programme and focus on some practical ways forward for strengthening learning and (KM).

Training Female Community Health Volunteers (FCHVs) of Parasi Municipality, Nepal.
© Regina Faul-Doyle/ CLTS Knowledge Hub

Individuals, teams and leaders

Synthesising findings from the review, it became clear to us that a practical way forward in which WaterAid could learn from good practice was to focus at three levels:

Individuals: sustainable change starts at the level of personal attitudes and actions, with individuals changing the way that they behave and act with other people. We consistently came across WaterAid staff, at all levels, who were models for their colleagues in, for example, how they consistently sought to question; to seek learning about what works well and not so well; to engage with others collaboratively in addressing challenges and embedding learning; and to respond enthusiastically and voluntarily to requests for ideas and support.

Personal capacities, skills, learning and communication preferences, and work patterns, all influence how an individual engages with their work context. The work culture in each location influences hugely how effective individual efforts in learning and knowledge sharing can be, especially in terms of staff motivation. And, of course, commitment of resources and leadership from the top is necessary to support a minimum standard in communication and other competencies relevant to learning.

But a range of daily choices are down to individuals, for example:

What to prioritise
How much to question assumptions and current practices – be critically reflective
Whether to seek learning from outside the immediate context
Whether to make the effort to share ideas, innovations and lessons more widely

Six main themes emerged:

Curation – selecting and filtering, and sharing information relevant to particular projects
Communicating effectively with others
Critical reflection on current practice
Networking and connecting
Learning

Competencies describing good practice in these areas can be used as a checklist, or for staff development.

Teams: people work in teams, whether organised by projects or programmes or by organisational structures. Presenting a vision of how the best teams in the organisation work can provide a yardstick for comparison. In this section, five themes emerged from the study:

Learning is at the centre of team plans and activities
Knowledge-sharing practice caters for individual learning preferences, enriching the global programme while capturing learning from elsewhere
Communication facilitates the flow of information and knowledge across the organisation
Partnership and networking
Knowledge capture

Leaders: "management is always encouraging and often facilitates learning activities," – WaterAid Bangladesh staff. "The management is extremely supportive to reflect, learn and share," – WaterAid Madagascar staff.

These two quotes are typical of staff interviewed in the KM review. They illustrate the central and unsurprising finding – that senior leadership drive and support is essential to establish and nourish a supportive learning and knowledge-sharing culture.

A further output from the review was a simple KM culture review tool for management teams to use with their staff to understand current perceptions of how the culture supports effective knowledge sharing and learning. The output can form a baseline against which progress can be measured.

Knowledge and learning accelerator project

This 18-month project gives us WaterAid staff and teams an opportunity to strengthen learning and KM in selected projects in four country programmes. The accelerator project aims to enable teams and staff to become more efficient and systematic in how they reflect on progress and share learning. It began with the appraisal and identified gaps which will feed into the action plan.

We will continue to blog from the project as we explore how to learn from the findings of the appraisal tool, and how best to take the recommendations forward to strengthen learning and KM in the daily rhythm of business.

Converging on common ground - or not

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — 2016年11月21日 16:52:00 +0000

As a facilitator of meetings and gatherings, it’s a great feeling when it’s going well and awful when you run into the sand. There’s nothing quite like the first stirrings of unease as you realise a session isn’t going to plan. And speaking personally, that reaction stirs a prickling of sweat glands, a stirring in the stomach, natural components of the fear response.

The FacilitationAnywhere wiki links to sample workshop methods for each phase

Reflecting on the process of coming to agreement, which is the next ‘phase’ of our loose six part model of ‘typical’ events, brought me to remember how often tensions are raised in these sessions. The process of prioritising, selecting and re-prioritising, means some people will have to give way on ideas they value. It is also the key exit route from the ‘messy middle’ which is another way of visualising Sam Kaner’s ‘groan zone, which we described in our earlier post on this phase.

Keep Calm and Carry On

25/10 Crowd Sourcing is one of those creative methods from the Liberating Structures people, designed to both stimulate new thinking within a group – using a form of quick brainstorming - and help a consensus form about the most promising ideas. It’s a curious method, almost algorithmic in the way it tries to use a rapid process to bypass deeper reflection and questioning that can slow down, or interrupt a group’s convergence on what is common.

"First, every participant writes on an index card his or her bold idea and first step. Then people mill around and cards are passed from person to person to quickly review. When the bell rings, people stop passing cards and pair up to exchange thoughts on the cards in their hands. Then participants individually rate the idea/step on their card with a score of 1 to 5 (1 for low and 5 for high) and write it on the back of the card. When the bell rings, cards are passed around a second time until the bell rings and the scoring cycle repeats. This is done for a total of five scoring rounds. At the end of cycle five, participants add the five scores on the back of the last card they are holding. Finally, the ideas with the top ten scores are identified and shared with the whole group"

I’d had warnings from that ace facilitator, Ewen Le Borgne - about how easily the process can go wrong. Ewen’s response to most things is to laugh, which is a great way to deal with problems and stay in touch with other people in the room. The problem with the 25/10 method seems to be that the apparently straightforward sorting process is unusual: it’s mix of allowing people to talk about an idea, and then asking them to simply score the rest on a rapid appraisal. There is some movement too and music is meant to help. But when the process broke down during a large event we were working on last month, it suddenly made it all worse. There was too much noise and even more confusion about when the music should be on or off. So there we were, meant to be starting round two of the five scoring rounds and some of the ideas cards already had three or four scores on them. Uneasy looks, prickling of the skin: we had to laugh, and my first reaction – scratch out all the scores and start again – was quickly corrected by the group to the more logical and easier start the scoring again on the other side of the card. Dunh!

And like magic, a quietly-spoken participant, not at all one of the most vocal during the earlier three days, started making sensible suggestions during the rest of the process, but talking very softly, almost into my ear (confession: I tend to panic over numbers and counting, early educational trauma!). It was both an intensely practical way to help the group, via helping me, and also very calming for me. As a result we ended up with a series of ideas that the group in general found the most interesting – the method does work!

[More reflections and examples of methods and approaches to dealing with the 'messy middle' are included in the remainder of this post on the FacilitationAnywhere blog]

Social Learning and sense-making in events

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — 2016年11月01日 16:31:00 +0000

"One day a woman went hoeing in the field. Before she started hoeing she put her baby under the shade of a tree. Whilst she was working in the field some baboons came and stole her baby." The constantly original and creative Charles Dhewa grabbed instantly our attention during a session at the 2011 IFAD ShareFair as he told one of the Bantu narratives he describes in his powerful paper, "Traducture and Sensemaking: Experiences from Southern Africa". We were working together in a session exploring sense-making as a process, and the stories were triggers for us to reflect on how different people take different meanings from a single prompt.

Dhewa developed the sense-making framework illustrated above that embraces the complexity of this process, especially when working with people from different cultures and with widely varied experience. The paper explores the dimensions illustrated above and it's a good introduction thinking about the role of a facilitator in working with large and small groups of people as they sense together and shape ideas and new meanings from their discussions.

As we described in our first blog on sense-making and emergence, the process of collective learning and making sense of what is emerging is probably the most complex part of a workshop. Several popular and well-tested facilitation techniques can be used to support these processes, including:
World Cafe, where participants have rounds of conversations on linked sets of questions, with 'hosts' at tables recording the progressively richer exchanges.

The wide range of variations in storytelling methods
The different approaches to Appreciative Inquiry, with their emphasis on seeking the affirmative and positive as the basis for considering future actions
Future Backwards or Backcasting - taking people out to a future they construct, either or both ideal or nightmare and then considering how they will or did get to that future, as the basis for thinking about what they might do next

[Information about FacilitationAnywhere courses (next one likely to be in April 2017), the associated wiki of resources, and further examples of methods to encourage sense-making can be found in the remainder of this blog on the FacilitationAnywhere site]

Knowledge Management in organisations: admitting success

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — 2016年10月26日 16:18:00 +0000

British organisations, like the British more generally, tend to shrug off compliments. Ask a member of staff at an international development NGO to describe what’s wrong with x or y in the organisation and make sure you have a comfortable seat, because people will usually provide a huge list, speaking at length and without notes.

In contrast, explain to those same people that actually their organisation, like most, does a lot of things very well, that they are ‘good enough’ and typical of the sector, and you can watch the eyes glaze. If, more radically, you suggest that identifying and building on good practice instead of addressing an endless list of faults generates more sustainable and less disruptive organisational change, then you get back, even from the polite British, grimaces and grunts of disbelief.

Inclusive WASH planning © Regina Faul-Doyle/ CLTS Knowledge Hub

We've been supporting a Knowledge and Learning Review in WaterAid UK. In this summary of a blog, cross-posted from the WaterAid site we explain how we created positive conversations when reviewing WaterAid's practice around learning and knowledge management. We shared some of the examples from WaterAid of good and excellent practice in learning and knowledge management. From reactions to our sharing of these stories at the 2016 Water, Engineering and Development Centre (WEDC) conference, we believe these examples are also useful for other organisations facing the same challenges.

Appreciative inquiry

The knowledge management review used ‘appreciative inquiry’ (illustrated by the diagram below). We chose this method to create a positive conversation and practical footing. It involved:

Moving away from the deficit model, characterised by long lists of faults in the organisation.
The art and practice of asking questions that strengthen an organisation’s capacity to identify, anticipate and enhance the potential of its processes.

The review investigated two WaterAid country programmes that are well regarded for learning and knowledge sharing, and also two cross-organisational areas of work that demonstrate good knowledge management. The resulting four case studies described the context, common principles, and examples of good practice found across all the studies.

As we worked our way through the investigation, common themes emerged from the project and the country programme case studies. For example:

The crucial role of consistent leadership and management support, at all levels.
A shared commitment among teams to: talking; sharing experiences, challenges and learning; noting down formally or informally the process, conclusions and recommendations, and revisiting those notes to review progress; and to embedding this culture in regular project processes.

Equity and inclusion – the 'Rolls Royce' of projects

For example, one of the areas chosen was WaterAid’s Equity and Inclusion project (E&I). We referred to this as the ‘Rolls Royce’ of projects, as it was well designed and well resourced. It ran over several years and aimed to improve the way WaterAid integrated and adapted its work to the needs of all its stakeholders, paying particular attention to specific needs of, for example, disabled people.

We considered it as a model for how organisations can change fundamentally and how they do business at all levels. Key points of interest are:

The project was supported strongly at all levels of management, from senior leaders at the global and the country levels through to middle management and staff at the country level.
The project was well resourced. Support staff were available and money was set aside for global face-to-face meetings. It also involved partnering with WEDC and others to develop custom materials.
The project embodied good practice in ‘learning by doing’. The team constantly reviewed and reflected on their progress, adapting the project over time.
The project built a powerful network of country E&I champions, but the pace and scale of its achievements owe a lot to the team at its centre, led by Louisa Gosling, who networked and communicated well and placed partnership at the centre.

The story of how WaterAid developed its work on menstrual hygiene management (MHM) is equally powerful, and very different. The MHM case study, which we described in an earlier blog here emphasised that the combination of active listening, communication, and critical reflection is an important aspect of learning and innovation. Another major highlight from the various interviews was that networking and partnership play important roles in strengthening knowledge management.

We processed and discussed these findings across WaterAid UK, and will describe some of the follow up activities in a later blog.

Ideas that spark and take life

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — 2016年10月25日 15:29:00 +0000

This is the third blog of this current series describing some of our experience in meeting and event facilitation. We're focusing on how to foster and encourage those spaces and times when groups find their creativity together, spark off each other and generate ideas that are entirely new or re-visions of current thinking. It seems such an obvious and straightforward process, and there are gazillions of relevant approaches and methods in resources like the KS toolkit. We suggested some ideas of our own when we first blogged about this phase in an event. But all too often the post-it notes are written up (or photos shared) only for the energy to dissipate and the promising ideas to wither in the storm of everyday pressures. The challenge is to create an environment that provides the best chance for the most realistic or promising ideas to take life beyond the event.

Time, time, time - just give me a little more time

The challenge can be envisaged in three parts. The first is the process of engaging and energising participants in creative ideas generation. Many of us find we do our best thinking and reflection in the moments when there's nothing much going on - in the shower, out walking or on a long journey. One of the reasons that generating ideas is a relatively easy task is that meetings and events are a luxury in most people's lives, especially if they have a facilitator 'holding' the process. Once people find that time is allocated to simply thinking and being creative with other smart and committed people, they usually relish the opportunity.

Climate Change and Social Learning project workshop on evidence gathering

We get energy and inspiration when the question or issue has heart and meaning. The Human Centred Design approach starts with an exploring situation and issue through the experience of the people most affected, and through this clarifying the critical question. Asking ' how might we ... ' becomes the launch pad to generate tons of ideas - 'ideation', in short - when nothing's ruled out. At this stage, the facilitator's role is to create a creative positive space, and provide a simple structure for ideas to emerge. You'll also be managing the materials, displays and documentation, and perhaps providing examples from elsewhere. Ideo have a fantastic resource, with lots of ideas. Note that facilitators are the default provider of simple or fancy stationary so we all have our standard travel kit, like this one.

[Graphic Facilitation, as well as examples illustrating other ways to encourage and support idea generation are described in the remainder of this blog from the FacilitationAnywhere site]

Posters, presentations and speed geeking: finding out what we know

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — 2016年10月12日 13:31:00 +0000

The seven openings to events that we described in our last blog are a first step in 'bringing people’s voices and their different experiences into the room, in a spirit of curiosity and learning'. We used that phrasing when we first blogged about our Facilitation Practice last year to describe what happens as you move from openings to a logical next phase in gatherings: 'finding out what we know'. The Tagging and Human Spectrogram exercises we described in our last blog get people curious and interested, and lead naturally into richer conversations in which people find out about each other.

What shall we do about Presentations?

Presentations have a bad press among a lot of development people exhausted by the round of conferences and workshops and generally also among facilitators. The issue here is one of framing and organisation:"what if we re-imagine conferences and meetings as gatherings where people can connect, learn and have the conversations that really matter", was a blog response here to Duncan Green's rant about awful events. We described a simple but effective approach to sharing, a variant on speed-networking. Three-minute snapshot presentations from people of what was inspiring about their work meant that in less than an hour everyone knew the best of what was happening across a range of projects.

Presentations become engaging and energising when people are limited to a fixed time or number of slides, or by using a timer approach like Pecha Kucha. This also offers a compromise for those who value the security or ease of powerpoint. When there is a lot of detail to present, doing it this way allows for different approaches to communication and learning. For example, in a recent annual meeting of the CARIAA program, which involves four large, complex research syndicates in detailed and current climate change research, each syndicate gave a 10-minute introductory presentation very early in the three-day event. A bit like a TED talk, it meant that each of the senior scientists and their teams produced rich, engaging and dynamic communication that set the scene and sparked off a range of questions and follow-up conversations.

Posters and Galleries

In both those events the presentations were followed by a ‘market place’, with posters and other information for more in-depth discussions. The Building Demand for Sanitation (BDS) program, on the other hand, started with the posters.

: Prof. Bilqis Hoque talks about women leaders in local Government at a BDS convening

Seven Openings to facilitated events

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — 2016年10月05日 05:56:00 +0000

Almost everyone’s arrived. Some are already sitting down, others are standing around and chatting. A couple of people are late, but time-keeping matters. It’s time to get started.

Suddenly you find yourself in front of a group of people – 15, or 33, or 65, or 128 of them, or more, most of whom don’t know you. You’re the facilitator and the people in the room are putting their trust in you to help them achieve something concrete by the end of the event. You want to seize the moment so that the participants come into the physical and mental space for the gathering as quickly and smoothly as possible. Then you can make a start on doing what needs to be done, letting the locus of control move between you and them.

Openings are about coming fully into the present and connecting with self, others and the purpose for the gathering. They enable people to ‘arrive’ in body and mind, relax into what’s happening, ready to engage with the work to be done. People need to be able to meet each other as quickly and easily as possible, to form as a group and create the ground for collaboration. Each group is new, formed in that time and place, meeting for a specific reason, and shaping its own particular identity.

In our recent blog on the FacilitationAnywhere site we describe seven ways to open, engage and connect...

How are development organizations using Google Analytics?

noreply@blogger.com (Pier Andrea Pirani) — 2016年8月30日 09:28:00 +0000

In the previous post, I described the importance of having a digital analytics measurement plan and I presented some essential elements for correct and efficient use of Google Analytics (GA). However, recent work I’ve conducted make me wonder how advanced (or not) the use of digital analytics - and GA specifically - is amongst development organizations. My recent experience was limited to 6 organizations (different in size, resources and capacities) so the sample is clearly limited. But some trends are probably more common than not.

Google Analytics is not always used to its full potential

In reviewing how different websites use GA, I discovered huge differences. For some organizations, the setup of Analytics is far from optimal. For example, one organization didn’t have a great understanding of the differences between GA account, profile and property, which resulted in unstructured proliferation of accounts.

The use of different reporting views, as well as filters and advanced segments is also not very common. This means that Analytics data are just analysed in aggregate, without telling you much about the specific audience you intend to reach. For example, if your website is targeting users in North Africa and the Middle East, you need to be able and single out traffic from these regions, to better analyze your target audience.

Tracking goals and ‘conversions’ is not always common practice. Goals can be set up in various ways in GA to track users’ interaction with the website - when they scroll on the page, click a link, decide to print a page, comment or spend a certain amount of time on the page. This can provide a great deal of information to website managers and editors, to improve the way information is presented and webpages are organized, as well to increase users’ engagement.

Only one out of 6 organizations stood out in using an advanced configuration of Google Analytics to create different reporting views, filter data, track goals and conversions.

Google Analytics too often stands alone

I have highlighted before the importance of a digital analytics and measurement plan - and how Google Analytics may eventually just be a part (even if the most important) of your data collection and analysis system. On the contrary, I didn’t find a lot of this in the websites I’ve recently reviewed.

On the one hand, while Analytics is the default tool to track digital analytics, in most cases is also the only monitoring tool. On the other hand, when digital analytics are collected from different sources, (e.g. website, newsletter, RSS feeds, social media, etc), more often than not they are not presented and analysed in aggregate. Finally, not all organizations are regularly producing actionable reports on the basis of their analytics, to inform future actions and improvements on the website.

Only one organization presented a more advanced understanding of its’ digital analytics process, with multiple data collection points (e.g. website, newsletter, RSS feeds, social media, etc) that fed into a dashboard spreadsheet, using formulas and calculations to avoid double counting and over-reporting of metrics. Even if there was no document describing a strategy, this is already a great step towards more efficient use of digital analytics.

What can be done?

I think a lot could be achieved through the availability of more specific content for international development and the open exchange of experiences around digital analytics for the development sector.

The majority of information and guidance available online, while comprehensive, in general tends to focus on e-commerce and more business oriented websites. Other sources such as the Digital Analytics Programme (DAP) provides a good example of guidance and best practices, training and support in digital analytics. However, the target audience is also very specific, DAP being designed for US Government government agencies that provide information to the public. Eventually, there is not much available that focuses specifically on digital analytics for development - and information and knowledge services specifically.

Secondly, I think website administrators and managers should be more open about how they do digital analytics, as ODI has been doing by sharing their M&E dashboard. Knowledge sharing and learning opportunities should be created for users to exchange notes and learn from each other, to identify good practices and examples that can be replicated. Ideally, I believe that web managers should also be open about the actual number of their website stats. Especially for publicly-funded websites, this would mean more transparency and the possibility to compare and benchmark different websites.

Finally, I think donors should play their part in fostering better use of digital analytics in projects and programs they fund. Besides acting as convenor for peer learning initiatives around good use of digital analytics, donors should provide stronger guidance and support in this area, to make uniform data tracking and collection across different projects. Ideally, for donors’ funded websites and knowledge services, there should not just be the mention of few, poorly selected web metrics in the project logframe. A digital analytics and measurement plan should be developed as part of the project inception phase.

In the next post in this series, I’ll look specifically at what metrics and indicators could be most useful, amongst the dozens available, for development websites and knowledge services.

Understanding digital analytics

noreply@blogger.com (Pier Andrea Pirani) — 2016年8月22日 08:58:00 +0000

In the past few months, two different projects gave me the opportunity to spend quite some time working on Google Analytics. The projects were different in scope: in the first, I was asked to review the use of Google Analytics as part of the monitoring and learning system of a think tank; the second project was part of a larger evaluation of development information services, to understand the reach and use of different websites. Overall, I was able to review how 6 different development organizations are currently making use of Google Analytics to track web traffic and users’ interaction.

This is the first post in a three post series where I’ll share some of the learning from this recent work. I’ll start with some key points for efficient use of Google Analytics (GA). Then in the second post I’ll present examples of how different organizations are using GA. Finally, in the third and final post in the series I’ll zoom in more into Google Analytics metrics - and measuring what matters to you.

Google Analytics - from basic to advanced use

GA has developed a rich and sophisticated toolset over the years. It is now one of the most commonly used tools to monitor website traffic and engagement. It’s probably the industry standard for web analytics across different business domains, such as e-commerce, government, education, and development, too. While some have questioned the accuracy of Google Analytics and there’s no shortage of alternatives tools out there, in my opinion Google Analytics remains one of the most powerful tools (for everyday use, especially in smaller organisations). One of the aspects I like most about Analytics (besides the fact that it’s free...) is its continuous improvement - in terms of its own features and functionality as well as integration with third party tools (such as Supermetrics), and integration with Google Sheets add-ons.

Help!

I recognize GA features can be overwhelming: with all the information GA can track it’s easy to drown in a sea of data. Luckily, a simple search in Google will return a lot of results pointing you to tutorials, guides and training videos that will allow you to go well beyond a basic knowledge of Analytics. If you’re new to Google Analytics, or want to take it to the next level, I suggest you take a look at these resources:

Google Analytics Academy - with dozens of video lessons covering from basic Analytics to mobile Apps Analytics.
Google Analytics checklist for new projects - a quick but comprehensive guide on how to set up Analytics to track a new website.

As a minimum requirement, your correct installation of Analytics should include:

A clear and well organized set of Analytics properties, profiles and views.
Custom filters and segments that you can apply to split data and focus on your key audiences.
A set of website goals and events that will allow to understand better actions and behaviours of your site visitors.

Analytics measurement plan

It’s relatively straightforward to get your Analytics set up properly and tracking data. But this is just a small part of the job. In fact, even before you get going with Google Analytics (or any other web analytics software), what you need is a measurement plan.

A measurement plan is a document that:

Defines your business objectives and outcomes you want to see;
Presents the strategies and tactics to reach these outcomes;
Illustrates the metrics you need to monitor and the tools and processes to collect data; and
Includes goals and targets for your selected measures.

In this sense, Google Analytics is only one of the different tools that you have to measure your objectives and outcomes. If you’re active on Facebook and Twitter or publish video on YouTube, these should also find a place in your measurement plan.

There’s a lot of good resources out there on digital analytics and measurement planning. You can check Google’s own guides or this post from analytics specialist Avinash Kaushik. Finally this guide presents a great intro for non-techie on how to create a measurement plan for Google Analytics.

So as essential as a measurement plan may seem, my recent work experience tells me that this is probably more the exception than the norm in development organizations. I’ll discuss more about this in my next blog post. In the meantime, how would you consider your current use of Analytics? Are you using it to its full potential? Do you have a digital measurement plan? Let me know in the comments below!

Building a knowledge portal through Open Data

noreply@blogger.com (Pier Andrea Pirani) — 2016年7月21日 08:56:00 +0000

The Open Knowledge Hub (OKHub) is a collaborative initiative led by IDS to make good quality research accessible in an original way.

In its essence the OKHub is a "database of open-licensed metadata (bibliographic data and links) about research documents, organisations, and other materials." Around 20 knowledge partners such as Eldis and 3iE contribute their content to the platform, including titles, URLs, abstracts and summaries, keywords, etc, of the research publications in their catalogues. To date, the OKHub contains over 20767 documents. You can browse and search this wealth of information by different criteria (e.g. themes, languages, regions and countries, etc.) on the Content Explorer.

But collecting, aggregating and organizing this global content is only half of what the OKHub offers. In fact, the OKHub uses the same open infrastructure and technology to allow you to use its content to set up your own knowledge services. Services such as BRIDGE and the Gender Hub are integrating OKHub contents to expand their online collections.

Earlier this year I supported the development of a prototype website that makes use of the OKHub dataset and functionality to presents selected research on Challenges to Development in the Arab World.

Setting up the prototype

The OKHub offers functionality for developers and site ‘builders’ to re-use its content. You can use a simple HTML widget to display selected resources from the OKHub catalogue. Alternatively, if your website is built on Wordpress or Drupal, you can use a plugin to seamlessly import selected contents from the Hub into your own site.

For the Challenges to Development prototype, we experimented both with solutions. Eventually, as the site is build on Wordpress, we downloaded and installed the OKHub plugin to import around 140 free Open Licensed content items relevant for the 10 key issues covered by the prototype. These contents are aggregated on the resources page and presented separately on each thematic page.

Together with this open content imported from the OKHub, the proof of concept also provides two spaces for content creation and curation: a section to present featured publications and a blogging space to share relevant highlights from the MENA region.

This project was rather short and straightforward, but there are three key lessons that I think it’s worth sharing.

A business case for the OKHub initiative and platform

Actually, two. On the one hand, as knowledge producer or intermediary, you can make use of the OKHub technology and infrastructure to contribute the content of your organization, thus increasing its visibility, availability and accessibility. On the other hand, The WP plugin has huge potential, as it allows non programmers to easily import content and augment their own knowledge service, or create a new one.

The human factor

Open content and automation alone are clearly not enough. If you want to maximise the chance of research uptake, the human factor is key. This means using a moderator with the required regional or thematic knowledge for quality control purposes and to tailor imported content to specific stakeholders. But it also means having resources to create your own original content, to curate and repackage existing content, to build and animate a community around your service, to ensure users are interested and engaged.

Tech for the (non-)techie

The HTML widget and WP plugin enable less technical people, with a basic knowledge of HTML and CMS, to "plug-and-play" and build applications which meet their needs. However, you may still need some programming skills, to be able to fully integrate OKHub content on your own site. In my case, there was a conflict between the WP plugin and the site theme, resulting in individual records not fully displaying, or altering the site layout. Thanks to our colleague Tony Murray for stepping in and getting well beyond where my technical knowledge ends!

Overall, the prototype offers a good proof of concept for the idea that open knowledge and collaborative approaches can help extend outreach and uptake of research knowledge.

Do you know other examples on initiative of knowledge services based on Open Data to sharing and use development research content? Let us know in the comments below!

Audit your Google Apps with GAT

noreply@blogger.com (Pier Andrea Pirani) — 2016年7月18日 06:38:00 +0000

For a couple of years, we’ve been supporting the deployment and adoption of a KM platform for the Collaborative Adaptation Research Initiative in Africa and Asia (CARIAA). As the programme has evolved and matured, so has the platform, with almost 500 user accounts, and anecdotal evidence of its usefulness to support knowledge sharing.

But besides counting the user accounts created, what is really happening on the platform? Can we learn more about the users? What are they contributing? Is there any champion emerging? What Apps are most used?

Go beyond Admin Reports

Google provides its own reporting functionality through the admin panel. If you have a domain admin account, you can access Reports and track Apps usage, security, accounts activity, etc. The reporting features are rather rich and are a perfect fit for ongoing monitoring of the platform. However, Google Reports allows you only to look at data for the previous 6 months period - which is probably not enough if you want a comprehensive picture of how the platform has evolved over time, and what users have been doing with it.

For this purpose, the best solution we could find is the General Audit Tool (GAT).

Launched in 2010, GAT is primarily an auditing and it monitoring tool. It allows you to audit or report on over 250+ separate items for users, documents, email, calendars, sites, groups, etc. Additionally, it counts users’ collaboration activities and calculates a ‘collaboration index’ across your domain, using multiple indicators such as file shares and file visits. Finally, you can set up alerts to get notified if domain policies are not followed - for example, when documents are shared outside the domain. The animated video below provides some more background information on GAT and what it is good for.

GAT comes with a cost, depending on the number of active Google Accounts you have on your domain. However, it also offers a full features trial. If you are using Google Apps, I recommend you test it out and find what it can do for you.

How we used GAT

GAT helped us to extract a large amount of specific information on users, the frequency they interact with the Apps, and how they work with other users.

We run several daily GAT scans over a period of two weeks and exported several datasets from the Apps and metrics we had decided to include on our analysis. We then loaded this data into Tableau, to be able to aggregate it, segment it, analyze it and make sense of it through charts and tables.

You can read below here some highlights from our analysis:

The growth of and demand for new accounts has been steady and well beyond the initial expectations.
The majority of users are active, with 75% of them that logged onto the platform at least once in the past 6 months, and over half of them in the first quarter of this year.

Date last login
The use of the platform has been increasing over time. However, this use is unevenly distributed, with some users clearly emerging as platform champions.
Google Drive is by far the largest app is terms of usage and the most frequently accessed by users, followed by Calendars and Hangouts. Drive currently hosts over 23K files and folders. The primary function of Drive appears to be to store and archive documents; the creation of new content is secondary. About 50% of all files on shared Drive have been created elsewhere and then uploaded onto Drive.
An increasing number of users are viewing and editing documents on Drive, confirming the adoption of the tool. However, collaboration appears to be limited to a small number of documents, while the great majority see a small number of ‘actions’ (views or edits) performed by an equally small number of users.

Docs overview: number of users, edits and visits per quarter
In several instances, users are contributing to the CARIAA platform with their personal Google account instead of their CARIAA account. This has potential negative implications in terms of sharing settings, document management and overall platform M&E.

This is very much a work in progress, we’re learning as we go and constantly testing out new options. What’s good about our progress so far is that we’re generating the kind of longer-term, trend data that really helps us provide support and the client to adapt to evidence about pattern use. And once it has been set-up it is not too time-consuming.

Of course a lot of these features are available in those expensive all-in-one packages used by commercial organisations and the deeper-pocketed big NGOs. But it’s hard work keeping up with trends and providing accurate, useful, timely data on a smaller budget, one more typical of the mass of Development players. So help us - what tools and approaches have you found useful and can share? And are your clients or service users listening to you and the data and changing how they work?

Making change happen - KM in a WSH team

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — 2016年7月06日 17:47:00 +0000

It is cheaper and easier to change information flows than it is to change structure.

Donella Meadows

Identifying what causes change in organizations and attempting to identify the impact of specific projects is the kind of conundrum that keeps consultants and academics in profitable and engaging work. To borrow from Outcome Mapping language, it’s a major step to be able to identify whether those people or organizations directly connected to a project, within its’ potential sphere of influence, change their behavior and work differently in ways that could at least be linked to the activities in the project.

Donella Meadows’ seminal work, "Leverage Points – Places to Intervene in a System", in particular her description of the role of information and feedback loops, was one of the framing ideas for a review workshop of the KM project in the Building Demand for Sanitation (BDS) portfolio. Meadows’ work explores systems, their complexity, and the enormous effort and time required to achieve lasting change. Meadows’ work highlights the importance of power and paradigms, reinforcing the central importance of leadership, a point we’ve made consistently in this series of blogs.

The WSH team of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation organized the two-day workshop in September 2015. Its’ purpose was to review 18 months of KM initiatives by the BDS team, as well as Foundation-wide KM experiences, and consider activities for the WSH team as a whole that would lead to stronger networks among foundation and grantees, improve availability and access to specific knowledge, and strengthen the organizational culture, improving the flow of knowledge.

The whole WSH team was involved in the workshop. The BDS KM team shared summary findings from a grantee survey, giving responses on elements of the BDS KM program they valued and whether or how it had affected their work. This graphic below illustrates the relative valued add of program activities, according to grantees.

(click on the graphic for a larger view)

And although 18 months is a short time in which to achieve the more fundamental changes in behavior that are the basis of sustainable change, there were clear indications that grantees believed the BDS KM activities were helping them integrate more effective KM into their work. For example, from the pre-program survey in 2014 we identified grantee KM priorities and in general, in the concluding survey, grantees rated the project’s impact positively.

(click on the graphic for a larger view)

Mainstreaming KM into the Rhythm of Business

Everyone in the WSH team had ideas and experiences to share, so much so that when it came to prioritize proposals, a senior member of the team responded that he felt almost promiscuous because there was so much that turned him on. It’s hard to summarize such a free-flowing, well-informed and thoughtful conversation but the remarkable graphic facilitation of Nancy White at least conveys some of the richness.

The main theme that emerged was the necessity of integrating KM in the normal ‘Rhythm of Business’ (RoB). There was a consensus that KM has to be ‘mainstreamed’, not seen as something discrete, made up of specific periodic activities. The most fundamental recommendation was that the WSH Director would ask WSH team members to put KM activities into individual goals on basis of common team goals to be developed by management, based on a menu of Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to choose from. This would be supported by including KM in the job description for the then-about-to-be-appointed Deputy Director for Strategy, Planning and Management.

The team agreed also to determine how best to incorporate KM into the grant management cycle, and include it as a standard item on regular ‘Feedback to Action’ meetings. For example, two members of the team planned a pilot of a peer-assist format for part of an upcoming meeting, and they agreed to communicate lessons learned back at the next meeting. Finally, the team planned to institute regular meta-analysis of grant results, one or two times per year, which would feed into the planning process.

Active curation of information and widening access to resources behind paywalls was another theme. The team agreed to put resources towards a service or function that replicated the ‘Curated Updates’ experiment run throughout the BDS KM project. There was also a commitment to exploring how grantees could benefit from Foundation access to publications.

As ever, the longer-term impact of the workshop, and the KM project more generally, will probably be more influenced by the ‘normalization‘ of the concepts through the commitment of so much time to discussion, and the personal engagement of staff in the issue, very much led from the top. The WSH team have committed to reviewing their progress on improving KM, so expect some more blogs in due course.

Meanwhile, what about long-term behavior change in organizations that has demonstrably improved knowledge flows, learning and information management: do you have any examples or ideas?

Learning about Learning - KM in a Gates Foundation WASH portfolio

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — 2016年6月03日 12:03:00 +0000

'O this learning, what a thing it is! '

(William Shakespeare, the Taming of the Shrew)

It all seems so obvious

Pippa Scott blogged about a conversation with IRC’s Erick Baetings who was convinced he had learnt a lot during the week-long 2015 convening of the Building Demand for Sanitation (BDS) portfolio of grants. But when, with a colleague, he tried to write down what they had learnt – it all seemed rather obvious: ‘we need to think about smarter subsidies‘; ‘we need to work outside our silos.’ Erick said that it took them some time to really work through some of the statements to filter out the real-take home messages (which form an excellent blog here).

Nancy White has played a ‘critical friend’ role with us on the BDS Knowledge Management (KM) project. Nancy and I have worked in KM for more years than we care to (or can) remember. So when we spent some time reflecting what we have learned about learning during the 18 months, a lot of what came up seemed so obvious. But then, we too rarely write down what we know we know, which often means that learning isn’t passed on. That insight came from a shocking moment at the Hanoi convening when it became clear that the same organization had repeated the same errors in different countries over several years, a story told in a previous blog.

The challenges that KM is trying to address don’t change, which is one of the reasons why suggested solutions often sound so obvious: they have probably been tried before, with varying degrees of success. So in this blog we are reflecting on what we have learnt from BDS KM around three themes, identifying what stands out as things that might help improve KM in all our work.

Listening not hearing, observing not seeing

What shakes us out of our comfort zones, makes us challenge our assumptions, makes us recognize that what is in front of us isn’t explained by our current intellectual frameworks? In other words, when and how do we learn?

There are endless quotes on the importance of failure to learning – because failure publicly demonstrates that our assumptions and plans were wrong or inaccurate, and the bigger the failure the harder it is to learn and adjust. Disasters and emergencies have similar, distressing impact on our learning. Merizow suggests transformational learning only happens because of such ‘disorienting dilemmas’.

We can’t wait for failures or disasters to trigger our learning yet often busyness means we miss the obvious and important. The story of how Menstrual Hygiene Management was taken up as an issue by WaterAid GB provides a stark illustration. MHM has emerged as a key concern on WASH agendas in the last 10 years, as the scale, complexity and seriousness of the problems attendant on inadequate menstrual hygiene became clear. Mahon and Fernandes in their seminal 2010 paper, "Menstrual hygiene in South Asia" recount how it started:

"In January 2007, during a project visit to a village in Sehore district of Madhya Pradesh State, an adolescent girl told WaterAid staff that her mother did not allow her to use the household’s toilet during menstruation, because she is impure. During another visit to a village in Sheopur district, a woman casually mentioned in discussion that during menstruation she has used the same set of cloths for the last four years. These two small incidents brought to light another dimension of hygiene, and WaterAid realised that this is an area which has to be addressed"

Enormous kudos to WaterAid for picking up the issue and building momentum in the sector. But what is striking to me as a newcomer to the WASH sector, a man with a daughter, is that such a serious issue emerged so recently. Had the stories told by the two women to WaterAid project officers never been told before, or was it simply that the implications and impact of similar stories hadn’t been noticed? What must we do to ensure we hear and see what is in front of us? And the challenge is greater within projects and organizations, which quickly develop a way of seeing and doing that tends to be reinforced by internal processes driven by the need to meet deadlines, targets or budgets.

Of course sanitation as a sector has the powerful model of Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) illustrating how people can be brought to a different way of seeing. And although far less dramatic, consultants, reviewers and evaluators can similarly hold up a mirror to an organisation or project. A similar engagement with outsiders comes from exchange and field visits too, as we discussed in an earlier blog. Both the visitors and the ‘subjects’ challenge each other, stimulate reflection and discussion. Visits to new places and contexts also caters for the random, chaotic, free flowing, emergent nature of many learning processes. Visits trigger experiences and memories that can take participants conceptually to a different point, and are especially powerful if groups or teams are involved.

What have we learnt about learning inside organisations?

But what about internal processes? Somehow teams and projects have to bring the outsider, the ‘other’ into their conversations and reviews, whether literally or through how they approach learning. Someone has to take on the outsider role, be a ‘critical friend’, challenge norms, assumptions and, ‘the way we do things around here’.

It’s obvious that leaders play a crucial role. For example, in the MHM case, the two WaterAid field workers were listened to by their manager, who agreed to take the issue up and invest. In the same way, other managers championed and invested in MHM research and programing within the organization. In the same way, managers and leaders have can profile and model learning, as Jan Willem Rosenboom has done in BDS KM and as did the Directors of the WSH team in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in setting up a two day discussion in Seattle to consider how the BDS KM experiment could inform their plans (the outcome of which we’ll be describing in the next, and final, blog in this series).

Part of that modeling is being open about not knowing, admitting ignorance. By asking genuine questions and sharing their own mistakes and failures leaders can help other people unfreeze, as this great example from a USAID project illustrates.

Nancy described this as "othering." She suggested that an element of othering is the experience and power closeness or distance between the person sharing a learning and the listener. The closer people are in experience and/or power, the easier it is to share those daily, little things that often matter. The risk is low. Trust is probably high. Reputation is not an issue. Sharing with someone with more power or experience (like a boss, expert or funder), while requiring more courage (or trust), may shine a broader light on an issue that the practitioner may have thought was unremarkable, but the expert discerned its larger importance. So this idea that we need to share knowledge with different kinds of others emerged in our observations. It can also affect mentoring, another knowledge sharing vector.

We also observed it is essential to be explicit and intentional about reflective, learning processes. There are myriad formal processes, for example, evaluations and donor reviews. But in many cases a simpler, basic approach is required in standard meetings, mirroring what happens when disorienting dilemmas or emergencies cause us to stop; to think, "what did I actually learn"; "what’s new"; "what do I know more about now" or "how can I apply this new knowledge"? We have to watch for and catch ourselves and each other in our learning, and be mindful of the larger learning journey of which such smaller exchanges and events are a part. It’s that process we included in the learning exchange program, through our skype calls and email- learning-journals.

But to make that happen, space needs to be set aside. Anywhere we have worked people have complained about not having enough time to stop, think and record their learning.

Of course people do make time informally: we have almost as many stories of the informal ways that people make time to talk, and hence to share and learn – whether it’s the Friday afternoon kick-back, with beer or strong, sweet tea; the long, dusty drive back in the land-cruiser; or the small hours overnight on planes; or the bars or clubs in most CGIAR centers that serve the same crucial social and knowledge exchange function as, for example, the livestock fairs in Zimbabwe that Charles Dhewa and his team are recording. But to take that learning from individual and small group up to the level of teams, projects and organizations requires planning and commitment of resources to regular, formal Learning Reviews, which focus on observation and reflection, adaptation and change.

However, as a respondent noted during a recent organizational KM review, being asked to identify what has been learned at the end of a period tends to generate disconnected, random items, that hover between the operationally detailed and the strategic. Some organizations or program units are addressing this by requiring strategic units to develop learning plans or agendas. Catholic Relief Services, for example, as part of their rich learning program, recently instituted procedures requiring country programs to identify annual learning agendas. The aim is to develop a light-touch frame for the year, areas where the teams expect to know more about, questions that are being explored.

Learning how to learn, learning how to connect.

Pippa Scott highlighted this issue in her blogs for the KM project post the 2015 BDS convening, asking:

"Do people know how to learn in their daily work?
Is it part of their commonly used skills set?
Is there a need to build capacity around learning and sharing within the community?
And do projects and teams take account of people’s learning preferences and styles?

Learning how to learn can mean on a very practical level, ensuring and supporting community members to know how to use webinar/blog or other online technology. On a more conceptual level, learning how to learn can be to ensure community members know how to slow down and take the time to observe, reflect and learn, as in the 'focused conversation' examples from the 2015 BDS convening. This can also be incorporated into learning events, such as reviews and workshops, where organizers schedule a time at the start of the session to set some ground rules and even learn or practice communication skills, before jumping into the content. For example, during the 2015 convening one group realized that participants needed to tell stories rather than simply throw out all their information at each other. It came to light that one of the participants (Joep Verhagen, WSP) had followed storytelling training. The facilitation team liked this and tweaked a session the next day to include the skill of telling stories rather than simply talking at to each other.

Once we had introduced storytelling as a communication technique, and throughout the rest of the workshop, Pippa Scott noticed that participants would prompt each other into better communication, by asking ‘what is the punchline (of your story)?‘ ‘What do I need to learn from this?’ It was fascinating and especially useful in teasing the golden nuggets of learning from the sheer volume of information. It is often also a more pleasurable experience and people may listen better. "

What works for you? What’s your best example of a project, team or organization that took learning seriously, tracked it, and ensured it fed through into program adaptation and development?

What did we learn about connecting people more closely into a global community of practice?

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — 2016年5月24日 10:28:00 +0000

"Any fool can know. The point is to understand."

(Albert Enstein)

So think of any large, fun event you’ve ever been part of organizing. You know the ingredients: a good mix of people; good things to eat and drink; some activities – often but not always based around music; a space to gather, preferably one that has lots of different areas, and corners; and you – the hosts, the MC, the facilitators, who watch what’s going on, connecting people who have something in common, who start things moving, mark time and schedule events. And you know when it’s working by the buzz, a mix of different conversations, and the way that people are mixing fluidly.

For managing online communication replace the food and drink with content that people want to consume and the metaphor transfers almost completely.

The ‘connect’ work-stream was central to the Knowledge Management (KM) project we ran during 2014 and 2015 for the Building Demand for Sanitation (BDS) portfolio of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation WSH grants. The aims were to:

strengthen grantees sense of collective identity, of belonging to a group who could provide support and inspiration;
provide ‘safe’ places to encourage conversation and experiments;
deepen conversations, encouraging double or triple loop learning.

We’ll use in this blog the components listed above that contribute to successful parties and events as a frame for describing our experiments in strengthening connections between grantees.

Hosting, curating and facilitating – content focused community building

The best party hosts combine social skills with insider knowledge, and enjoy a laugh!. They know who and, often more importantly, who not to introduce to each other. We were lucky to engage Pippa Scott to lead the Connect work-stream, for one day per week over one year. Pippa is a WASH specialist with experience and expertise in facilitating online communities of practice – a rare combination - and has all the social skills of a party host. So Pippa was able to add the role of curator to that of facilitator. As well as seeding and nurturing conversations and connecting different conversation spaces Pippa was able to identify and comment on key content areas, know who to engage on any particular subject, and generate meaningful, specialist content for members of the portfolio to share and discuss. Much of the material in this blog comes from Pippa’s reflective pieces about BDS KM published internally during the project.

Gathering conversations

Targeted and deliberate curation and facilitation contributed significantly to improving peer-to-peer connections within the grantees and fostering a community spirit to enable better knowledge sharing and learning. An indicator is how conversations evolved over time, with face to face meetings spinning off exchanges, which in turn were picked up at the following convening. The BDS community collected a number of conversations, notably:

The Demand-Supply-Finance triangle
Behaviour change, community norms and habit formation
Working at scale – crossing the valley of death from ‘pilot’ to ‘scale’
Learning about learning
The (changing) role of the Gates Foundation

We’ve already blogged about the importance of leadership in modelling effective KM. In the context of BDS KM connect activities, a crucial success factor was having both management and thought leaders prepared to spark the conversations, maintain a strategic perspective and frame ‘knotty problems’ in ways that engage others. Leadership of that kind sets the tone, affirms that not knowing and failing are pre-requisites for learning.

Multiple spaces and interfaces for exchanges

There is no one size fits all when it comes to learning. Everybody learns in different ways and has different learning styles and skills. Some relish a written debate (on email or a forum for example) where others will need more direct or personal engagement. Some are happy to debate in a public space whereas others are not. So it’s crucial to ensure the conversations take place across a number of platforms where each conversation creates an interface or opportunity for the community’s connections to be reinforced.

As described in an earlier blog, face to face, voice and email are the communication preferences for BDS grantees –which our experience elsewhere confirms is typical of the Development sector. Our challenge was to link and build connections between the face-to-face events, such as the the BDS annual convenings and the round of WASH conferences, workshops and events in which grantees otherwise crossed over. So we used a mix of online platforms, illustrated below:

An email list as the primary communication channel (using Dgroups.org);
A private blogging space (using wordpress.com) to help the community protect their learning space, and where we shared other information about projects and grantees
Social media, particularly Twitter.com, to link with the small but growing band of digitally-active grantees
Webinars, both private to the portfolio and public, via Susana.org.

BDSKM.net

Unsurprisingly, the email list was the most heavily used. But there was also moderate and growing use of the private space, particularly the blogs, as the conversations described above rippled across the platforms. A key web indicator is average length of time users spend on a page. The vast majority of web pages score under 10 or 20 seconds, so the two-minute average for the BDS sites was encouraging. The blogs also had a lower bounce rate (people who leave the site after visiting only one page).

Activities and Learning events

The currency of online communication is content and events. So we planned a series of activities including targeted questions, reflections and reports from exchange visits, and webinars following up from the face-to-face events. We anticipated that each would attract overlapping but different audiences. We maintained deliberately a low-level of regular communication, with the curated updates service as a steady drip of targeted content to maintain and grow interest.

We wanted to identify the hottest topics for grantees, what people are grappling with daily, what issues had the greatest potential for exchange. The open agenda calls initiated by Jan Willem Rosenboom, the BDS portfolio lead, were described in the second blog in this series. Their purpose was to provide a forum to connect outside of the annual face to face meetings and share sector updates, not just issues relating directly to the BDS portfolio. The evolution of conversations within and around those calls illustrates the role of small connect investments. The first round of calls was rather functional, where several organizations voiced an area of interest where they could offer or would appreciated some peer support or insights from others experience. The calls were evidently beneficial to grantees and sparked several one-to-one offline conversations for peer-to-peer exchange immediately after.

The topics raised during this first round of calls (financing vs. demand, learning about learning and monitoring platforms) informed the early conversations within the BDS KM activities and these broad themes have since flourished (having been nurtured with support of a series of KM learning events and activities) into an informed and quality discourse. The content of the second round call was more focused on sharing learning, with grantees identifying possible synergies of their work (as opposed to general assistance requests) with a deeper quality dialogue than the first round of calls 7 months earlier. In general, the conversations amongst BDS grantees became much more focused and nuanced in their discourse over the program year. Pippa Scott’s view is that it is through allowing these conversations to flow, through the community, picking up different aspects but maintaining a steady and focused flow through different platforms and gaining insights from different people (professionals, practitioners, academics) that such a rich "collection of conversations" emerged within the BDS network in a relatively short space of time.

Consumable content

Following the 2015 face to face Sanitation Partners meeting in Hanoi, the reflections of Gates Foundation staff and the BDS KM team were that the annual BDS face-to-face convenings really do provide a forum for state of the art discourse to be voiced and shared. Where others in the sector may be waking up to potential synergies of programs, the BDS Sanitation Partners forum actively brought partners working at the forefront of rural sanitation together to exchange and learn from each other.

The challenge for the BDS KM team was to try and maintain some focus and quality to these conversations outside the face-to-face events. As such, the BDS KM team, responding to the feedback of participants, attempted to channel and foster the conversations through a series of online learning events and resources. The most notable of which were: blogs following up from Hanoi, thematic webinars on issues raised by BDS grantees (recorded and shared within BDSKM.net), the learning exchange visits described in the previous blog (shared with grantees on email and in summary blogs on BDSKM.net) and in certain cases one to one exchanges of BDS KM staff with BDS grantees.

The right people

Samoan Circle discussion at 2015 BDS Convening

The potential for useful exchange and learning within such a diverse group as BDS grantees was a key driver for the program, especially since our surveys showed that grantees under-valued themselves as a source of knowledge and learning, even though the portfolio brings together many of the leading organizations in Sanitation, including acknowledged thought leaders.

Does the BDS buzz represent a positive return on investment?

Too much communication becomes noise, too little and the level of communication between face-to-face events drops to near zero, as was the case in BDS before the KM project. As we’ve described above, we aimed to provide just-enough communication, initiate activities that would attract grantees because they were interesting and relevant, while weaving content and conversation between different channels and face-to-face meetings. And, within the narrow bounds of this 18 month experimental project, our review showed that there was indeed some change in behavior, as illustrated below.

Fig 1 How grantees communicate between annual meetings

The overall level of investment in the connect activities, including both Pippa Scott’s one day per week and contributions from other BDS KM team members, was approx. 30% of an FTE. We would argue the level of engagement and changes in behavior among grantees represents a positive return.

Do you have other examples of similar targeted KM investments in programs bringing a range of organizations together in a relatively loose association such as in the BDS?

Learning exchanges and journeys in BDS KM

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — 2016年5月17日 09:54:00 +0000

"Knowledge can only be volunteered, it cannot be conscripted

We only know what we know when we need to know it

The way we know things is not the way we report we know things

We always know more than we can say, and we always say more than we can write down"

‘The essence of the Knowledge Management (KM) proposition was that better outputs in terms of products and learning are generated by strengthening learning and knowledge sharing amongst grantees, which can be influenced by low level investment in:

Strengthening links, and increasing conversations between grantees
Focusing on learning and reflection processes
Making specialist content more accessible

In the next two blogs in this series on the Knowledge Management (KM) activities developed in support of a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation WSH portfolio of grants we focus on ‘connections’ and ‘learning’ activities. This blog describes how we integrated reflection and communication into a series of learning exchange visits between grantees. Dave Snowden is an academic and KM practitioner (not to be confused with Edward Snowden, the former CIA contractor!). The quotes above from Snowden, the KM practitioner, frame well the complexity of the learning process and why exchange visits have a special place in the KM toolkit.

Investing in what works

Like a well-used family recipe, exchange visits keep on delivering. From farmer field schools to government level exchanges, Development organisations continue to invest in exchanges because they work. "I’d had emails about the new products but it was only when I visited the site that I recognised the significance of what they were doing", reported an experienced grantee. And "staff visiting ... ask questions and force us to think", said a project team member.

Learning is emergent, chaotic, subversive, individual as well as social, and people learn what they want and need to learn, which is (only) sometimes what the designer of the process would like them to be learning. Face to face conversations at meetings, convenings, exchange visits and study tours provide that necessarily random stimulus, the wide spectrum of experience that encourages reflection and fresh thinking. To paraphrase Snowden, we learn when we arrive at a point where our current models don’t match what we are seeing and we are required to investigate and reflect. And whatever digital enthusiasts like me say about the value, fun and power of social media and online conversations, people consistently rate face-to-face exchanges much more positively. For example, to choose just one from the constantly refreshed, rich collection of documented experience, the Challenge Program for Water and Food implemented a very wide range of KM style learning and Research for Development tools throughout the 10 year-long project. In their end of project surveying, "the three tools that received a positive rating of over 80%, i.e. rated as useful learning mechanism or very effective mechanism, were Study Tours, E-mails, and Annual Reflection meetings"

Development Tourism or learning journeys?

There’s lots of common-sensical advice within the literature on how to maximise the benefit from the investment in exchange visits. So our process for the Building Demand for Sanitation portfolio (BDS) of the Gates Foundation emphasised the importance of clear learning aims, at both a personal, team and WSH grant portfolio level - one of our selection criteria was the likely relevance of the content to other grantees. Our particular interest was in combining the connecting and learning aims listed above, intensifying reflection, learning and sharing. So we borrowed from reflective journaling and action learning processes as we constructed the format for the exchanges. We therefore required applicants to choose how they would communicate and engage with us in the KM team and the wider portfolio before, during and after the visits. The BDS KM mailing list (constructed on Dgroups.org) and the BDS blog were the two main communication channels, while any grantee who already used other channels like Twitter or Facebook were encouraged to comment as the visits progressed. As well as generating shareable content we hoped that the reflective journaling would help participants consolidate their learning, as summarising and communicating with others often does.

We ring-fenced finance for the learning exchange visits, waiting until the latter part of the project until connections strengthened between grantees and opportunities for mutual learning became clearer. We advertised the opportunity among grantees, stressing the two-tier nature of the exchanges:

A content exchange, where specialists would engage with other specialists on specific WSH issues and challenges. This is the meat and drink of most exchange visits. And although our specific interest was in learning and communication we recognised that most learning would take place internally to the participants, and much would surface much later, as people realised ‘what they knew when they needed to know it’. Participants were required to produce short outputs, visual or written, to share insights and reflections about the specialist content with other grantees.
A learning journey, where the participants would be reflecting as they travelled – and we all know the best ideas often come when staring through windows on a trip – having the kind of conversations based on direct observation and contact stakeholders that are the backbone of adaptive project management. And they would be recording those processes in some kind of learning journal. For example, one exchange participant tweeted regularly, another emailed us daily, another group agreed to a Skype conversation mid-visit. Pippa Scott, leading the 'connecting' strand of the BDS KM project, used the content to construct blogs and emails for sharing with the portfolio. We also followed up with participants at the end of the exchange, discussing reactions, identifying specific pieces of learning and how that might impact the program.

Figure 2 East Meets West Skype with KM team during their visit to India

The communication in turn triggered some responses from grantees, some in the public spaces and some directly to the participants. Final products included a report, Local Women Centered Institution for Sustainable Rural Sanitation and Hygiene? A Learning Discussion’; a reflective paper on, Developing Markets for Sanitation and a video narrative of a visit focusing on low – cost sanitation product manufacture.

Taking it wider

Maintaining the two levels of exchanges, content and learning, captured in a variety of communication products, of course, opens possibilities for the learning to ripple out beyond the narrow context from which it originates. For example, in Tanzania, Ghana and Burkina Faso the Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security Programme (CCAFS) ran a project called ‘Farms of the Future’. CCAFS wanted to explore study exchanges between farmers organized around climate modelling (a climate analogue tool). Participatory video was used in the process to support farmer (and wider stakeholder) learning – the participants filmed the visit themselves and fed back to their wider community on return. The CCAFS teams were already working on participatory action research in the host communities so there were opportunities to support follow up after the visitors returned home. They videos and supporting documentation are publicly available

Other helpful resources:

The World Bank’s, ‘The Art of Knowledge Exchange is a particularly useful resource (http://wbi.worldbank.org/sske/art-knowledge-exchange).
John Roux wrote a couple of handbooks on Learning Journeys for the Water Information Network in South Africa (WINSA) in 2007 – one for organisers and facilitators and a summary version for sponsors, hosts and participants – the latter is on the WINSA website www.win-sa.org.za

Bigger databases or personal, curated collections - Mendeley and BDS KM

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — 2016年5月05日 16:16:00 +0000

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"¹

That quote used to be trotted out a lot in the early days of computers, as people worried about the impact of digital technology on learning and collaboration. It seems more relevant now as we struggle to keep our heads above water in the swollen rivers of information and communication swirling around us. We’ve moved very quickly from a situation where information was scarce to one where we have a surplus, a glut of information.

Part of the original brief for the Building Demand for Sanitation (BDS) Knowledge Management (K)M project was to, ‘improve knowledge and information management of, and access to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s WSH information (by)
planning and designing a system to organize and annotate WSH resources and to make these resources readily available to grantees as well as to the public". However, two key changes were made to the proposal following consultations with the grantees:

Grantees were clear they didn’t need or want another mega-depository: the key issue for them was overload, an insupportable signal to noise ratio. They wanted to be able to know about new stuff (which led to the Curated Updates work described in the previous post) and be able to access the most useful as and when they needed it.
While the Gates Foundation WSH material is important, grantees also wanted material from elsewhere to be included.

So the task was refined to, "provide a working prototype of a curated database of core WSH digital content, comprising both Gates Foundation and other information", with the audience as Gates Foundation staff and grantees who would like easier and more organized access to useful information. In our research we drew on the deep WASH experience of Peter Feldman, whose notes and comment inform much of this blog, and Jaap Pels, a KM specialist with 11 years WASH experience in IRC.

On and offline – Agriknowledge and TEEAL lead the field

The first task was to review other information management libraries to assess their range of content and capabilities. Internally, the Gates Foundation’s Agriculture program emerged as a leader in this area. Agriculture has established two library systems – an online digital library ("Agriknowledge"), and an offline library designed for use in developing country contexts (The Essential Electronic Agricultural Library or TEEAL). The online Agriknowledge library, built and managed by Cornell University, is primarily devoted to Gates Foundation-generated content, though they have recently started acquiring documents from Gates Foundation partners’ libraries as well. Agriknowledge can be searched by theme, country, language, and type of document. Currently there are about 600 documents in the repository. It is still evolving, and its managers anticipate instituting major platform changes in the future in terms of its administrative interface and other features.

TEEAL, in contrast, was developed to bring a wide range of agricultural and related science information to users who lack fast and reliable internet access. The library itself is a sealed hard drive unit which can be accessed from a subscriber’s computer. The ‘basic collection’ includes content from more than 275 research journals from 1993 to the present, and is updated (by flash drive) every year.

Mutiplying repositories

The Gates Foundation WSH program’s Transformative Technologies portfolio is currently using the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance (SuSanA.org) website as a place to store and share its' own and partner research outputs. Currently there appear to be around 100 documents in this online platform, which is searchable by key words and sortable by title, publication year, and partner organization. These documents also can be accessed from the main SuSanA library, and it is possible to link to related discussions in the SuSanA forums area. In 2014 the main SuSanA library had over 1,700 documents. SuSanA continues to update various parts of its website, with funding support from the Gates Foundation.

Other prominent WASH sector organizations maintain online libraries, generally accessed through navigation from their home page. Examples include those of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC), the World Bank Water and Sanitation Program (WSP), UNICEF, WHO, the International Water and Sanitation Centre (IRC), Akvopedia, the Community Led Total Sanitation Knowledge Hub, the CLTS Foundation, the USAID-supported WASHplus project, and others (mainly regionally or country-focused).

Each of these existing resource libraries has strengths and weaknesses. WSP’s site offers only content from its own projects (though it has over 1000 documents). WSSCC’s library has a wide range of content, and it is relatively easy to search its 1,800+ documents. SuSanA and CLTS Knowledge Hub have ‘deep’ content focused on a narrower range of subjects. Finding information in the WSH sector therefore may require visiting a number of sites and dealing with a range of different search platforms (summarized in the table below).

WASH Resource Location	Resource Type	Principal Subject Categories	Curated?
Akvopedia Sanitation Portal	Wiki articles and links to references.	Sanitation technologies. Note that this is a Wiki, and not a library of published documents.	Yes[1]
CLTSKnow-ledge Hub	Mainly grey literature on CLTS, plus journal articles. >700 items.	CLTS is main focus, plus hand washing and some health-related topics. No sorted category on evaluations, notably.	Yes. There also is an automatic function that brings up ‘more like this’.
SuSanA	Mainly GIZ and SEI documents focused on sanitation technology.	- Case Studies; - Research; - Training Materials; - Conference Materials	Yes (material is selected & organized by Susana managers)
UNICEF	UNICEF publications	Water, sanitation & hygiene. Can also access the "Evaluation and Research Database" and search by country, region, theme, or date. "Theme" only goes to WASH level.	No
WHO - IRIS[2]	Wide range of WHO and other UN body documents	Very detailed, covering over 5000 topics in the library (all of health sector).	No
WSP	WSP and WB documents only	- Financing the Sector - Rural water supply and sanitation - Sanitation and hygiene - Strategic communications - Urban water supply and sanitation - Rural sanitation and hygiene - Domestic private sector participation - Poor-inclusive sector reform - Urban poor and small towns - Climate change impacts - Fragile states	No
WSSCC	Wide range of resource types; >1800 items.	3-level Sorting: - By resource type: E.g., Publications, Networks, Advocacy, People’s stories, etc. - Within these, by Language, Year, Region, Country, and Topic. - Within Topics (>30) are CLTS, San. Financing, Hand washing, and various others.	Yes (to some extent)

A searchable Dropbox

Grantees had strongly urged that WSH resource databases should

Provide offline access to WSH resources, for two reasons:

There are still large areas and numbers of people who work in development who do not have reliable, affordable Internet access, both at home and at work.
Development people travel, go to workshops and visit projects: having access to a portable, searchable offline repository of relevant material is a key resource. Dropbox is a widely used solution but its contents can only be searched by filename.

Build on an existing platform

Feldman’s work had shown the importance of classifying or tagging the material to enable rapid searching and sorting. We wanted to find ways to make the repository a living document, one with which grantees could interact, able to rate, edit, tag (classify) and add to the collection.

Mendeley.com

Jaap Pels led the investigation into platforms suitable for the trial information repository. Based on this research and input from our Advisory Group members, the Mendeley reference manager/social network rose to the top of the list.

Mendeley is a desktop and web program for collaborating online, managing and sharing research papers. It combines

Mendeley Desktop, a PDF and a reference management application (cross-platform on personal computers as well as phones and tablets)
Mendeley Web, an online social network for researchers.

Though aimed at a research audience and requiring a subscription, the platform showed good promise for several reasons:

It can be used online or offline (desktop version can automatically synch with the online library);
It's accessible from pads and smart phones;
It has Public or Private Groups. This feature means that a specific sub-set of ‘high value materials’ can uploaded and shared with a group of users, either public or only for an invited set of users, such as BDS grantees, as shown below. In practice this then becomes a shared library, as well as a platform for developing and maintaining social contacts

Meta-data from uploaded documents is automatically captured (although it generally requires some editing);
It's easily searchable by user-created tags, key words or other attributes;
Users also can access and search the entire Mendeley document database[4].
There are limited social functions, enabling people to find others with similar interests and interact

BDS grantees were very interested in the prototype and several are experimenting with it.

1 TS Elliot ^↩
2 As a Wiki, this may be a group process ^↩
3 Institutional Repository for Information Sharing.
[4 Mendeley reportedly has about 1.9 million members, and is home to 65 million documents (supposedly covering over 97% of all published research).^↩.

Curated updates: increasing the signal - reducing the noise

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — 2016年4月28日 16:35:00 +0000

"We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas"¹

FOMO – waving or drowning?

We’re drowning in a ‘tsunami of data’ said a group of WSH grantees at the 2014 Building Demand for Sanitation (BDS)² convening. Time was when email was a welcome game-changer and people were in awe of the almost limitless information seeking and sharing opportunities afforded by the Web. But now the relentless and constantly increasing flow of articles, reports, research briefs, books, newsletters that compile all the above for ‘convenience’ threatens to overwhelm anyone trying to keep up with their specialist subject.

And "Fear of Missing Out" (FOMO) - fear of missing trends and key new material is a major contributor to the anxiety caused by being unable to swim easily through the floods of information.

The model

In 2013 Ned Wells started circulating a short monthly update of digital marketing insights and clips that had struck him as useful and interesting. There were five items, in each update, with one short sentence explaining why Ned valued the piece. It took a couple of minutes to scan. I respect Ned as an expert in what he does and there were generally one or two items worthy of a quick click through, and occasional gems that merited a longer read, and a share. Simple, practical and anxiety reducing – ‘at least I’m keeping up with what people are saying, and the clips from Ned, who knows what he does, show that I am still in touch".

BDS Curated updates

To address the vision statement in the second clip above (from another group in the 2014 BDS convening), in the BDS Knowledge Management (KM) project we borrowed the key elements of Ned’s idea: regular, short updates curated by specialists within a bounded subject domain, selected for a specific audience. Economy and efficiency were also key criteria in the design: we were testing whether a useful service could be delivered on minimal resources so that it would be a sustainable option, something that could be taken on by a larger organisation. Our target was that delivering the updates should take two or three days per month each, i.e, approx. 20% of a full-time post. We aimed also to mirror the level of interest demonstrated by Ned Well’s service, described above, recognising that a significant part of the value of such a service is addressing the FOMO. So we aimed for a 20% – 25% success rate in terms of interest.

We were very lucky to engage two excellent curators, respected, assiduous WSH specialists who were well connected to movements in WSH debates and publications. Pier Andrea Pirani has already blogged about our technology choices (a Wordpress blog and Mailchimp for the newsletters) and also about how we measured the progress of the trial service. The curators took on the responsibility of entering updates into the blog platform and the process of sending the newsletter was partially automated, requiring in the end only a couple of hours.

This activity was planned around a "publish, review, adapt, publish" cycle for 12 months. We tweaked and adapted the process, the newsletter and the content after each issue. The number of people signing on to receive the updates more than tripled over the 12 months all by word of mouth. We reviewed the output to-date with grantees at the January 2015 BDS convening. Following feedback, including from the curators about the difficulty of identifying genuinely new or outstanding content when there were disappointingly few recommendations from grantees and others on the list, we reduced the number to four updates a month and the curators sought to cluster the updates thematically.

As shown above, the open rate (% of subscribers that open newsletters) was always above MailChimp’s ‘industry average’ (NfP organisations), and once we had resolved a bug in Mailchimp’s statistics, we could see that the click rate (% of successfully delivered campaigns that registered at least one click) was consistent. The most significant finding is that the open and click rates remained constant even while the number of recipients consistently grew, pretty much in line with our plans.

There were generally positive responses from the grantees in an end-of-programme survey:

a large majority considered that, "on balance, the Curated Updates were very or a bit useful’ in their work
30% considered that approx. four days per month constituted ‘extremely good value for money, while 59% considered it as ‘quite good’ value

And as is shown in the responses above, the updates rippled out across grantee’s own networks.

Less is more – boosting the signal in the signal to noise ratio

Speaking as someone whose digital archives go back over 15 years, who hoards web-links (using delicious.com), and whose digital filing structure is so rich and complex that it is generally quicker to search across the directory tree than attempt to navigate it, I recognise the compulsion to gather material that passes across an e-desk. And there’s clearly a role for organisations in collecting and sharing as much material as they can gather, for sharing with their own networks, for reference and for archiving. However, the demand from this small but important group of WSH specialists was to experiment with ways to amplify the signal to noise ratio of information. The case presented by the Curated Updates experiment is that a small investment in curation can deliver a significant return and deliver value to a targeted, bounded set of Development specialists – from practitioners through to those at the heights of policy and academia.

1 Steve Jobs^↩
2 The BDS portfolio has now merged with another to make up the Measurement, Evaluation and Dissemination, for Scale (MEDS) initiative, whose first annual convening takes place this September ^↩

KM in WSH - leadership and a learning culture

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — 2016年4月21日 14:19:00 +0000

Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other¹

The good news is that it doesn’t take extra time for leaders to influence the culture of an organisation or project so that it is more supportive of learning and knowledge sharing. It’s more about being than doing, which is just as well, since leaders are always (almost) the busiest people in an organisation or project, the ones with the impossible diaries and the crippling email back-logs. It’s how leaders relate to their teams and colleagues that sets a culture. A leader who constantly asks questions, who reflects openly and publicly on their successes and challenges, who uses meeting times for collective reflection and conversations as much as operational agendas – wouldn’t we all want one of those!

The bad news is that it’s hard to write about leadership, Knowledge Management (KM) and culture without banalities and clichés. There is very little that is new: the principles of how leaders can support learning and knowledge sharing show through any study, whether it’s our recent KM review work with WaterAid or this recent piece about a USAID funded project in Uganda. But we’ve some good, practical examples of small changes that influenced behaviour from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Building Demand for Sanitation (BDS)² KM project. Below we discuss project and portfolio identity, describe how we addressed the issue of a learning culture and two ideas that were tested.

A band of projects on one funding line is not an identity!

We were surprised by our initial grantee survey finding that showed how little grantees saw or used each other as sources of information. But of course a Gates Foundation portfolio like the BDS isn’t an organisation, hardly even a coherent programme. It is rather a collection of funded initiatives addressing core development research questions. It is similar to many large collections of funded projects collected together by donors. These collections may be named by the funder and have a coherence in terms of budgets and timescales from the donor point of view. However, from the perspective of the recipient organisations, the funding is a contribution to their own programmes, derived from their own strategies. So there is not necessarily a sense of identity within the grantees, nor a sense that they are a community of practice within they can learn and share knowledge.

Communities of practice take time to develop, generally far longer than the 18 months of the BDS KM project. So from the outset we were clear that we would need to construct a set of activities that could prompt reflection and exchange within the grantees, support those over time and track what happened. And we were mindful of the fact that people talk about what matters to them. Another truism, but necessary to re-state since KM programs sometimes assume that people will talk about KM and how to improve it with the same enthusiasm as KM geeks. Our interest was in bringing to bear on WSH issues the specific collection of experience and capacity represented by the collection of BDS grantees in ways that would enable them to collectively explore and advance their common agenda, defined in the overall BDS framework. In later blogs we’ll describe the network animation, connection activities and ‘learning events’ that formed the core of this effort.

The best of all possible worlds

How the donor representative plays their leadership role in collections of funded programmes defines whether the collection coheres or remains a series of parallel activities. Our BDS KM plans included looking at how the BDS portfolio operated and how internal portfolio management processes could support improved KM. We described previously the activities within the Gates Foundation aimed at improving knowledge flows (KF). The KF team developed a draft of a Future State document listing indicators that would be present within an organisational culture in which Knowledge flowed easily and productively. We used this draft document as the way to structure conversations with Jan Willem Rosenboom, the Senior Project Officer responsible for the BDS portfolio, about internal processes and the role that he might be able to play in supporting the KM effort. The target was to identify areas where changes in practice and behaviour could have impact, knowing that suggestions for extra work would be very difficult to fit into a packed schedule. Jan Willem was an active sponsor of the KM initiative and keen to experiment. Two ideas emerged immediately that are described below and were implemented over the next 15 months. Neither was radical, or involved significant extra time but both sign-posted intention and set a different tone for how people might behave with each other within the portfolio, focusing on learning and exchange rather than simply on the operational business.

Future State indicator: staff members can quickly and easily tap into the experience and expertise of the foundation-wide network.

Given that we needed strong incentives for grantees to begin to discuss and share between each other Jan Willem proposed to ask the group regularly for comments and advice about specific knotty problems that concerned him - using the mailing list we'd set up with Dgroups. As well as being prompts more likely to trigger responses – which they did – this approach has added advantage that operationally preoccupied senior staff have an incentive in the opportunity to discuss issues that interest and concern them.

Future state indicator: learning and knowledge sharing activities are integrated into the regular rhythm of work

Jan Willem determined to build into standard BDS practice a recurring activity that operationalized sharing and learning, such as a meeting, a phone call, webinar, or group phone call, involving groups of grantees, on a regional basis for time-zone reasons. So there were two rounds of ‘open agenda’ calls. The innovation, which caused some questioning initially, was that there was no set agenda, no intention to deliver an output or requirement up-front preparation. The aim was to talk and share, in the same way that people do when they meet face to face over meals, or in coffee breaks.
Sharing during the calls was enhanced hugely by the use of MeetingWords.com for collaborative real-time documentation of the conversation (facilitated by the awesome real-time note-taking skills of the peerless Nancy White). Participants commented and added links during the conversation so the notes evolved along with the discussion

From functional to conversational

It’s hard to describe the impact of these two components in isolation since they were integrated into a group of communication and connection activities that will be covered in a later blog³. Pippa Scott, a WASH specialist who also has experience and skills in online facilitation – a rare and valuable combination - led the connection component of BDS KM. Pippa’s comments on the differences between the two sets of open agenda calls provide one indicator of the changes in behaviour and expectations about learning that accompanied these activities.

"The nature of these first round of calls was rather functional, where several organisations voiced an area of interest where they could offer or would appreciated some peer support or insights from others experience. The calls were evidently beneficial to grantees and sparked several one-to-one offline conversations for peer-to-peer exchange immediately after."
"An interesting benchmark of how the conversations amongst BDS grantees had changed were the open agenda phone calls held in May 2015 where the content of the call was more focused on sharing learning and grantees identifying possible synergies of their work (as opposed to general assistance requests) with a deeper quality dialogue than the first round of calls 6 months earlier."

Learning leaders

BDS convenings have been always been structured to maximise opportunities for learning and knowledge sharing. A key element is the commitment to field visits, which provide a springboard for in-depth conversations both during and after the visits, as well as providing unstructured time – those long minivan journeys for people to simply get to know one another. The 2015 BDS convening in Hanoi was designed to also provide opportunities for grantees to go deeper, get beyond straightforward knowledge and experience exchanges into second and third loop learning. Again, Jan Willem led from the front, as described in a previous blog, setting the tone for the event, and supporting actively the range of facilitation approaches we used, such as the Samoan Circles and Fishbowl methods described in yet another blog.

"The way we do things around here"

And so to a learning culture, another topic writing about which has destroyed forests. The ‘way we do things’ quote is attributed to Bower (writing in 1966) and is still a useful shorthand for describing organisational culture. By leading in the way that he has, Jan Willem has defined questioning, sharing, provoking, critically reflecting as ‘the way BDS wants to do things’. And as we shall describe in later blogs, if grantee approval of the KM activities is any guide, then the BDS culture, loose as it is, has been changed, set differently by clear and determined leadership.

What examples do you have of inspiring and effective leadership?

1 John F Kennedy^↩
2 The BDS portfolio has now merged with another to make up the Measurement, Evaluation and Dissemination, for Scale (MEDS) initiative, whose first annual convening takes place this September ^↩
3 Note that we have been blogging throughout the BDS KM project, but mainly on the platform we set up for internal BDS conversation that was kept as invitation-only to encourage freer conversations than might be possible in more public spaces.

Knowledge Management in a portfolio of WSH projects

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — 2016年4月14日 11:17:00 +0000

Learning never exhausts the mind¹

Learning is something we all do personally, more or less effectively. It’s when we work in groups, in organisations, in programmes and projects that we fail at learning and sharing what we know more often than we succeed. And it’s a problem that has been written about for as long as you care to look back, in Business, in Government, in International Development.

Learning comes home to Seattle

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WSH) team recently met to review the progress and outcomes of an 18-month long project that explored how to improve Knowledge Management within the Building Demand for Sanitation portfolio of grants. At the end of a two day process the team committed themselves to a series of actions aimed at improving the way that they do their work of listening, discussing, reflecting on and sharing what they and their grantees are learning from the large and strategic investments made by the Foundation.

This is the first in a series of blogs describing the process leading to that meeting in Seattle. In the final blog we’ll share some of the outcomes of the Seattle WSH team meeting in September 2015. But it’s important to understand first the context, the goals set for the KM project, the activities and outputs and, importantly, what grantees said about the process. In this blog we introduce the BDS portfolio, the conception of KM that underpinned the work, the process by which the KM project was designed and the different work streams. What we did in those workstreams, what happened and what people said about the activities and their impact will be described in later blogs

Building Demand for Sanitation

The Gates Foundation is committed to helping establish sanitation services that work for everyone, especially the poorest. The Building Demand for Sanitation (BDS) portfolio was one of five distinct initiatives within the WSH program. It focused on stimulating demand for improved sanitation in Africa and Asia, where the vast majority of those who lack toilets are living². The core BDS approach includes stimulating demand for sanitation within communities, as well as working to improve the evidence base on effective practices to better influence the policy and regulatory environment, and to help improve the effectiveness of local governments and implementing organizations. The initiative works with a range of partners, including government and private providers, focusing on evidence-based programming, community-level demand creation, development of appropriate technology and service options, etc. The goal is to scale up implementation of effective rural sanitation approaches in order to end open defecation, as well as to help ensure sanitation facilities are safe, hygienic, and used by all – especially the poorest

KM is....?

The term Knowledge Management has always been contested: "you can't manage knowledge — nobody can. What you can do is to manage the environment in which knowledge can be created, discovered, captured, shared, distilled, validated, transferred, adopted, adapted and applied"³. This quote from the venerable Chris Collinson gives a sense of the range of activities that need to be considered in thinking about KM. (Note: Collinson is now working with DfID on improving its KM, following the Amber/Red 2014 assessment of it’s organisational learning by the UK’s Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI) in 2014. DfID is not alone: interest in and a determination to improve Knowledge Management is sadly something that ebbs and flows in a regular cycle in most large organisations).

For the BDS KM work we focused on four activities that would included in most definitions of KM:

Information management: the collection and management of material from one or more sources and making that material accessible to and usable by one or more audiences;
Knowledge sharing: a set of practices that enables people to share what they know with others in the application of their work;
Learning processes: both individual and collective or social, focusing less on the "sending" and more on the "receiving", particularly the processes of sense making, understanding, and being able to act upon the information available.
Communication: in the sense of a meaningful exchange, as a foundational competence for the interactions that are at the center of learning, sharing and managing knowledge

Context is all - participative design

Rather than take a pre-formed template or follow one of the countless KM models we set up a process to engage grantees in a collective project design process. A preparatory survey confirmed that reliable, affordable Internet access remains a problem outside larger, well-resourced organisations for many people across the globe.

We queried grantees’ information and communication seeking and sharing habits. The responses confirmed that the explosion in social and other digital media has had little impact on development actors’ behaviour:

To gather information, grantees asked a colleague first (50%); then either research online or ask other WASH colleagues (outside BDS programme), then contact other Gates grantees, then go to specialist online communities
Grantee preference for sharing ideas, in order:

email individuals they know working in the same area
share ideas face to face
contribute at technical workshops/conferences
phone individuals they know to talk through the idea
publish an article in a specialist magazine or paper in a journal
send an email into a specialist online community or discussion group

During the 2014 BDS annual convening we ran three sessions exploring in more detail the kind of activities that grantees thought would be useful in their contexts. Two primary themes emerged

Connections not collections:

Ask for a definition of KM and sadly often people will fall back on describing the process of recording and documenting ‘knowledge’, storing these ‘content objects’ in databases and disseminating documents and other products. If anyone had any doubts as to the limitations of this definition they’ve only to look at the results of the World Bank’s study of how many of it’s fabulously rich databases of policy document are downloaded. And almost none of the BDS grantees prioritised databases or content repositories in their recommendations. Rather they confirmed the importance of strengthening ties and connecting with each other. From a standard list of KM activities and functions grantees prioritised:

Increasing the signal to noise ratio:

Once upon a time the introduction of email and other Internet services to Development organisations was seen as a wonderful advance. Today people battle, complaining loudly, with unmanageable inboxes. Meanwhile, the range of information sources continues to multiply exponentially. So grantees were keen that the project explore ways to address the problem.

Knowledge Flows in the Gates Foundation

Having synthesised the inception workshop output we discussed the ideas and recommendations with the WSH team in Seattle, seeking also to learn about integrate the project with related Foundation initiatives. The Knowledge Flow initiative was a set of activities investigating and aiming to improve the flow of knowledge within the Gates Foundation. Their simple and elegant conceptualisation of the work provided a framework that mapped onto our emerging proposals (illustrated below) and, we hoped, would enable us to develop our work in alignment with thinking in the Gates Foundation.

In the following blogs we will discuss the main activity streams in turn, turning next to a discussion about KM leadership.

1 Leonardo Da Vinci^↩
2 The BDS portfolio has now merged with another to make up the Measurement, Evaluation and Dissemination, for Scale (MEDS) initiative, whose first annual convening takes place this September ^↩
3 Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell, Learning to Fly - Practical Knowledge Management from Leading and Learning Organizations (2005), Chapter 2, pages 24-25^↩

Facilitation Anywhere: Online and Blended – what’s all the fuss?

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — 2016年1月12日 15:44:00 +0000

"We’re not alone in wanting to explore the opportunities and challenges of holding events online, or blended face-to-face (f2f) and online. Suddenly the web is full of courses and primers on how to do it, like this first in a series of webinars from the deeply experienced Martin Galbraith, or this one on virtual collaboration from Grove. And in our blog on Coming to Agreement in meetings we highlighted the great resource on web meetings just released by the wondrous Nancy White. Everyone's talking digital.

Today was the online introduction to the three-day Facilitation Anywhere course, which begins next week. It was wonderful to meet the participants, after all our preparations, and we're both excited - and properly apprehensive - about next week. After several introduction exercises, increasing the bandwidth as we went along - from text chat to video and audio - we introduced some of the concepts underpinning our design.

Apart from big, all-purpose events, most gatherings engage a group of people with a common purpose. This could be a product they need to develop together, or some planning, or some ideas they need to work through in detail, or a programme they want to share experience and learning on. But of course a whole range of personal, emotional, social and organisational currents operate in and around the formal agenda.

So in the Facilitation Anywhere course we're operating at broadly three levels, and we're proposing three enquiry question for each of those."

For the remainder of this post please go to the Facilitation Anywhere blog

Facilitation Anywhere - Ending and Transition

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — 2016年1月05日 15:40:00 +0000

The year end has got us thinking about the flow of experience from beginnings through to endings and transitions, and how the best of our experience and learning can enliven and enrich the next stage of our lives. So too with gatherings. When a meeting comes to an end, how can we best support people to make that sometimes tricky transition back to the workplace?

: image credit development art.com

In our first blog in this series, focusing on the ‘openings’ of an event, we talked about a key early task for facilitators being to help people ‘arrive’ in every sense of the word. At the start of a gathering we help people transition from the clogged busyness of the everyday so they can focus on their shared purpose and agenda. When a group spends time together, committed to a common agenda and prepared to relax into a more creative frame of mind, together they can make a kind of magic when they find or combine ideas, untangle the knots that block progress, and release energy for joint action.

Meetings and gatherings at their best open up space for focused conversation and exchange, thinking and reflection on the issues and questions that really matter to the people in the room. These are luxuries under normal operational pressures. All the more important then to intentionally create spaces that allow for emergence – that unpredictable and magical thing that happens when ideas and thoughts combine and something else takes shape.

So a good ending really matters. It completes a cycle of learning, energy and engagement so that people can more easily make the transition back into the realities of working and everyday life. Ending is a process, and includes drawing together key learning, deciding on actions and personal commitments, reviewing the event process, saying thank you and good-bye, and bringing everything to a close.

For the remainder of this post please go to the Facilitation Anywhere blog

Facilitation Anywhere - Coming to Agreement

noreply@blogger.com (pete cranston) — 2015年12月15日 15:37:00 +0000

"A group who was deeply committed to their issue had shared a huge amount of experience and there was a real feeling of connection, energy and commitment in the room. And then it got stuck. Round and round we went. Action couldn’t emerge because something fundamental was missing – a signal from the leadership of unequivocal support."

This kind of blockage, a feeling of wading in treacle at a crucial point in an event or process, is something we often face as facilitators. Sam Kaner has been writing and teaching about participatory decision-making processes for over 20 years [1]. Kaner invented the term groan zone, also called, ‘the zone of struggle in the service of integration’, which perhaps sums up the issue more accurately (if less elegantly!). If the emergence and sense-making phase described in our previous blog has gone well then ideas have emerged, new combinations of activities are possible, assumptions have been challenged and fresh groupings of people have formed around agreement and difference. So everyone in the group has to struggle in order to integrate new and different ways of thinking with their own.

Once power and hierarchy, not to mention gender and difference, are layered into the situation .... kaboom! If you don’t learn enough about the power dynamics in the group at the outset and clarify who has the authority to hold (or block) decisions, the process can become unstuck.

Detailed and clear preparation can help groups anticipate and get through the ‘groan zone’. Breaking down the agenda into topics, questions and likely outcomes are part of that preparation and inform the design of the process - and being able to let it go in the moment.

Equally important is the need to be clear about what agreement looks like. Consensus is often thought to mean ‘we all agree’. But as Sam Kaner points out, consensus isn't so much the end point as how you get there - ‘a participatory process in which a group thinks and feels together en route to their decision’. The agreement itself might be unanimity or majority. The process of getting there is all important – hearing objections, exploring resistance, drawing out proposals and possible ways forward, listening for the ‘sense of the room’, testing for agreement until you get there.

For the remainder of this post please go to the Facilitation Anywhere blog

1. Kaner's Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision Making should be on all shelves or e-readers!