sdclan

by Adrian Gnägi

SDC has been experimenting with Social Reporting for roughly 2 years now (see two earlier blog posts by Tobias and by Adrian). After the latest experience with the meeting of SDC’s “decentralization and local governance” network (dlgn) in Sarajevo in March 2011, we think we are ready for mainstreaming. Below please find some of our main “lessons to be learned”.

Who should report?

The basic idea behind social reporting is that “all” participants in an event should report, thereby providing for polyphonic narration and democratic representation. While I fully endorse the value position this concept is based on, we found serious practical constraints when trying to implement it. There are attention & time use tensions & trade-offs between “participation” and “reporting”: social reporting turned out to mostly be night work. When disentangling issues, we realized that in using video reporting, voice can be separated from reporting work. Our current thinking therefore is that not everybody should be pushed to report on everything using all reporting media, rather: (more…)

By Tobias Sommer
From March 7 – 11, SDC’s Decentralization & Local Governance Network (DLGN) held a face-to-face event in Sarajevo, with more than 70 network members from all around the world participating to share experiences, learn from each other, discuss and elaborate new recommendations and foster the social cohesion within the network. The event was documented on a social reporting live blog, with a strong emphasis on video as the primary reporting medium. This article is the first of two where we want to share with you the experiences we made with social reporting. I will focus on the video aspect in this post, whereas the next one will be a more general analysis of the concept and economics of social reporting.

From a knowledge management perspective, video is a very promising medium whose full potential we are only slowly starting to fully appreciate and utilize. This reluctant development is mainly due to the fact that most people still think of video as something that only professionals can produce with professional equipment. But since even mobile phones can record high definition movies, and user-friendly and affordable video software is available for every major operating system, most people have all the necessary tools at hand and only need to start learning to use them.

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By Corinne Sprecher, AGRIDEA

Creative Commons as an alternative to the conventional copyright

Nowadays there are incredible resources of knowledge easily accessible for anyone anytime thanks to modern technologies. But are we making full use of their potential? The wonderful thing about knowledge is – compared to other resources – that its value increases if it’s shared, used and if new ideas arise from it. So why protecting it? Here some thoughts on copying, reserving rights and alternatives to the conventional copy right.

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Reto Wieser is the Head of the Knowledge and Learning Processes Division of SDC. He talks about two basic ingredients for learning: Motivation for individual learning and incentives for organisational learning. Project Cycle Management, thematic competencies and the abilities to work in loose forms of collaboration with changing roles are the three fields of learning he would emphasise for SDC:

• What is your own understanding of learning?

Learning is something which happens inside me, a rather complicated set of processes that go on automatically or consciously. I think of this rather as a kind of „black box“ and don’t need to know all details about it. However, what I can very well grasp or even measure is result of what happened, of learning: The third drafting of a credit proposal as per the new guidelines goes much easier as the first did and it takes less time to accomplish this task. Or, my computer skills have improved after refresher training, or in sports I play a better tennis and make less mistakes after taking up regular practice with a good player. These three examples are visible results of intricate internal processes which combine physical and intellectual skills, self-reflection, improvement by repeated practice etc. (more…)

HIGHLIGHT: ADMITTING FAILURE

Learning from our and others’ mistakes is – we know it since our primary school teachers first told us – one of the most effective ways of learning. Admitting failure however is never easy, and it certainly is not in the development cooperation world. Donor agencies are restrained to publicly talk about unsuccessful programmes by fiscal responsibility, political pressure and fear for their international reputation, NGOs do not want to put financial support at risk by admitting something did not work out quite as planned, and even down to the very individuals working in our sector who for career reasons do only reluctantly (and certainly not on record) talk about the less successful parts of their projects, this pattern repeats. Due to this lack of exchange about mistakes, the same mistakes are made over and over again, and innovation does not happen where the foundation for it would have been present for years.

The recently launched website Admitting Failure, conceived and created by the Engineers Without Borders Canada, is an attempt to break with this veil of secrecy. Development workers can submit their “failures” and browse the failures of others in order to benefit from the bad experiences that need not be repeated. (more…)