Dear KM4Devers,

We just had our “African Community Week” last week!  It was a worthwhile trial and wonderful experience. It is our solemn belief that sharing our experience with the wider KM4Dev community will be useful for other community members to build up on our experience for better integration and to inform similar future initiatives in this regard, not least the continuation of the African KM4Dev community exchange through other means.

We officially started the preparation for the event about a month and half ago with the objective of bringing together the diversity of African KM4Dev networks to unite, share and learn about each other’s dynamics and exchange insights in enhancing the contribution of KM4Dev community to Africa’s development. We wanted to find out how we could make KM4Dev a more useful community of practice for all its African and Africa-focused members. In total, 27 volunteering participants stepped up across the African KM4Dev networks and were encouraged to ‘buddy up’ with someone else from another African KM4Dev network, initiate a conversation on topics they both saw as relevant and document key insights in the process. This buddying phase went for almost 20 days and really took off during the actual Community Week. It peaked with the 3-hour online event on March 28. For that synchronous conversation, we used a web conferencing facility called Blackboard Collaborate/Elluminate so as to facilitate discussions between 15 online participants from 10 countries across Africa.

Important insights and experiences from that online event were also captured and recorded from participants. They concerned the following points:

• How to make KM4Dev a more helpful community of practitioners
• Day-to-day KM challenges faced by African KM4Dev members
• Organizing a KM4Dev event in Africa (who and how?)
• Development of simple & accessible knowledge sharing tools for better integration of KM4Dev community

We are currently processing all these results and will make them all available on: http://wiki.km4dev.org/African_KM4Dev_Community_Week

We really hope that the whole process of the event can provide useful insights and used as a spring board for organizing future similar initiatives and to learn lessons for continued interaction. What most participants at the online event felt is that it was a good first experience and it has awaken our thirst for more interactions across African KM4Dev networks and members (and beyond) and for more events like this one.

We would like to extend our gratitude to IFAD and Helvetas, in the name of the whole family of African KM4Dev networks, for believing in the importance of the event and funding (and in the case of Helvetas, administering) the project.

Elias Damtew and Metadel Lemma