Notes from first get-together (26 January 2012)

A small but focused group of 14 of us gathered on that day at the information centre of the ILRI campus to:

- Find out who is part of this group;

- Exchange some ideas about recent work in the area of KM/Comms;

- Explore everyone's expectations regarding this group and how we wish to communicate among ourselves.

- Identify some ideas for the next get-together.

Who is part of this group? Participants to this discussion: Gashaw Kebede, Metadel Lemma, Fanos Mekonnen, Liya Dejene, Zerihun Sewunet, Abenet Abowork, Abeba Desta, Bezuwork Mulat, Tigist Endashaw, Fitsum Tesfaye Habtemariam, Mamusha Lemma, Mintesnot Kasa, Tsehay Gashaw, Ewen Le Borgne.

Exchanging ideas: We briefly shared some feedback on a) the ILRI annual partnership and communication meeting which just finished and b) some feedback about the results of the Web2forDev training which had taken place a few months back.

Exploring what we expect from this group: A short brainstorm session in small groups raised the following expectations:

• Our vision: KM as development and economic driving force for Ethiopia;
• Value expected from this network: better capacity, motivation, shared knowledge, attracting more people to KM;
• Having a group of peers: establish a professional association for KM4Dev; creating links and networking with other orgs that work on KM; bring together more KM experts; a professional network and individual contacts; face-to-face meetings;
• Capacity development:  create capacities to build our own capacity on KM (e.g. use of social media); come up with e-learning facility on specific tools and approaches etc.; Short trainings;
• Knowledge sharing on ideas, tools and approaches: Sharing experiences and innovate ideas; knowledge sharing with other countries from the global KM4Dev community; sharing and learning platform on KM4Dev tools and approaches; share and have a practical experience on social media tools;
• Reach out a wider audience and engage local institutions in KM work;
• Conceptualizing KM for development; 
• Convincing about KM for devevlopment: motivate knowledge sharing; offer a platform for advocacy on KM;
• Activities expected: mentoring, communicating, short trainings, socializing, meetings.
• Products expected: publications, websites, e-learning; discussion forum.

How we wish to communicate among ourselves:

We listed a few tools we could use and indicated which tools we'd like to use to communicate as a group.The result is the picture below.

We agreed to use this Ning group to inform everyone about upcoming meetings/get-togethers and to report results of the discussions. For ongoing discussions between meetings however we will set up (Liya/Ewen) a Facebook group. We also agreed that this group ought to offer opportunities to try out new tools and we will explore other platforms in the future so this might not be the final set of platforms we use.

Tsehay gave the example of Yammer but the  idea that a KM4DevAA group would be hosted on the ILRI Yammer account felt too biased so we discarded it. 

Next meeting: to be defined but end of April

We agreed that a quarterly get-together would be good. The next one is yet to be planned (Ewen) but will happen again at ILRI, before we perhaps rotate the KM4Dev meetings at different locations. 

On the menu for the next meeting: 

• A brief introduction to social media and hands-on session on various social media (Yammer, Twitter, blogs, wikis, delicious, slideshare, FlickR) - Zerihun and Teshay will prepare this);
• A mapping of all ICT and KM projects in Ethiopia (Metadel and Fanos will prepare this);
• A conceptual discussion about 'what is knowledge management for development' which Gashaw will prepare.