sdclan

By Adrian Gnägi
Social reporting is a new approach  in reporting about events. Its purpose is to overcome some of the well-known knowledge management shortcomings of normal reporting:

• After an event, participants usually go back to their busy routine and, even though they might have planned to do otherwise, end up writing their reports with considerable delay.
• When the reports finally are distributed, the event has somewhat faded away already and interest is often rather low. Reports frequently are not taken account of.
• Reports typically come in the form of texts. Busy people increasingly are reluctant or unable to take up written information. Reports often end up unread in files or archives.
• Reports are often one-sided. They are written by organizers, moderators, or individual participants, but the full flavor of different perspectives, insights, and judgments present during the event is missing.

With social reporting, reports are being 

• produced during the event,
• by different authors, 
• published immediately on the web, and
• using many different reporting formats like interviews, video testimonials, blog posts, pictures, audio recordings, power point presentations etc. – including of course texts.

Social reporting can be used whenever there is an interest by a broad audience to get information about the event. (more…)

By Michèle Marin
By now, a series of the SDC networks have come up with their first international f2f meetings. Their experiences reveal a few recurrent lessons to be learned, and trigger questions on how to best manage an f2f event. The SDC Learning & Networking team reflects upon them in a loose series of blog posts. This third post looks into a number of questions with logistical implications, such as country and venue, translation modalities, presence of participants and side events. (more…)

By Manuel Flury
The Knowledge and Learning Processes Division of SDC intends to award a prize for “good learning” to collaborators of the organisation. For that matter we launched a debate in the km4dev community seeking examples of “good learning practices”. Besides of many proposals, documented learning from failures was proposed.
After visiting colleagues at their work place and getting to understand how they learn in their daily practice we became aware of the importance of self-initiative, of the key role of superiors to let them do what they intend to do and of the transformative power of such individual initiatives for the whole organisation.
Good learning combines ”doing things better” and  “transforming the way, things are being done”, i.e. the individual and the institutional aspect of learning.

The original query to the km4dev community: What is “good learning”?

(more…)

In our new series “11 Questions for…” we ask people from in and around SDC and the KM world the same 11 questions. Our goal is to offer insights into different working methods, different ways of looking at individual and institutional learning, and different ideas and opinions on how to make organisations more efficient… And, along the way, to hear interesting stories and experiences our interviewees have in store.

Our first interviewee is Roland Anhorn, Senior Advisor at the Africa Division of SDC’s Humanitarian Aid and SHA Directorate. This interview is not only the series’ premiere, it is also the first ever article on our blog in french, paying tribute to the multilingual nature of our organisation and the global environment we work in. To our english-only-speaking readers: don’t worry, we will continue to post the vast majority of our articles in english, but for interviews we like to leave the choice of language to the interviewees. To our french-speaking readers: enjoy! (more…)

An Interview with Simon Zbinden and Marylaure Crettaz

Interview: Manuel Flury

The SDC Agriculture and Rural Development (ARD) Network held its first face-to-face event in mid July 2010 in Cochabamba, Bolivia. 19 network participants from five continents participated in this workshop that has been organised with the support from the regional knowledge-sharing platform ASOCAM.
In addition to conventional presentations, Storytelling, Open Spaces, Knowledge Fairs and World Café made the exchange particularly fruitful. The event is entirely documented on the web.

Simon Zbinden, the Focal Point of the ARD Network and Marylaure Crettaz, a member of the core group talk about lessons to be learnt for others that are planning face-to-face events. (more…)