Online Peer Assist Experiments

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We are experimenting with doing online Peer Assists for KM4Dev in this group. We will run a couple of experiments, then debrief our learnings. We decided to use the NING group and then report out on the full KM4Dev list. Everyone is welcome to join!

Members: 22
Latest Activity: Dec 14, 2020

Introduction to Our First Peer Assist

Our first peer assist will be with Yennenga. Our guest peer assist facilitators will be Alejandro, Bonnie, Catherine, Ednah, Johannes and Nancy. Our goal is to both offer Yennenga a peer assist, and to consider how to do peer assists online. For more about peer assists, check out this entry in the KS Toolkit: Peer Assists.

We think we will start addressing one question at a time, using the comment wall. So we'll post each question, then ask everyone to ask any clarifying questions on that first question. Then we will offer ideas and experiences on that question. Following, Yennega will post what she learned and will do next. Then we'll move on to the next question. At least that is the plan. Here is Yennenga's situation and questions:

To sum up the situation :

Imagine 6,000 illiterate women living in villages across west Africa (Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal). Some grow crops, others transform agriculture product, others are craftmakers or small sellers. Although they work really hard, they earn very little wage from those activities.

Three years ago, those women gathered into a network; the aim is to strengthen and share their experiences in three main areas : microfinance, environment, and women's empowerment. A team of local facilitators help them. But their facilitation capacities have to be strengthened.

Three months ago, I joined that rural women network, in order to help them better manage the knowledge production and sharing. I would like to start with five actions.

1. To capitalise, map and profile the job of "local facilitator" and then Produce a toolkit for the facilitators (what and how?) Facilitated by: Catherine

2. Identify and train some of the women in KM (success stories recording and telling for example). Facilitated by: Alejandro

3. Identify and train local trainers in agriculture products conservation and transformation techniques. Facilitated by: Bonnie.

4. To set up a monitoring and evaluation tool that will help assess the evolution of the members of the network. Facilitated by:

Can KM4Dev change the lives of those 6, 000 women? How do I help do all that, in a sustainable and profitable way for the network? I have a voice recorder, a digital camera, a laptop and a skype account. How do I do that, to be able to develop their autonomy in KM4dev and make my presence unnecessary after two years?

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Comment by Nancy White on April 26, 2013 at 3:31pm: A bit on card sorting here: http://www.kstoolkit.org/Card+Sorting -- you can also use pens to "vote" but being able to move the ideas around on the floor, see the relationship between the ideas (sometimes this helps develop the taxonomy of the toolkit) and most of all, it provokes interesting discussion in a way different than sitting in a circle. Everyone is up, looking at the cards, moving them. It is active! Good right before or after a tea break!

Comment by J. Yennenga KOMPAORE on April 26, 2013 at 2:11pm: Nancy, Merci ("thank you" in french) for the http://www.kstoolkit.org . I'll also have a closer look on it.

Comment by J. Yennenga KOMPAORE on April 26, 2013 at 2:09pm: Hi Catherine ! I like your new idea of of card sort exercise to prioritise . Can you please elaborate on that before you leave for the keek end!!??

Comment by Catherine Fisher on April 26, 2013 at 1:59pm: sounds like you are already underway with your toolkit! I am going offline for the weekend so am going to share a few ideas before we wind up early next week. Nothing particularly original, i hope others can contribute!

The toolkit is most likely to be useful if the people for whom it is intended shape the content and it includes interesting case studies.

So if there is a going to be a workshop involving the write shop you might think about a process that includes the following elements:

- asking facilitators to share with each other a time when their work went really well (for example using appreciative enquiry approaches) then trying to draw out the factors that contributed to that success - take time to celebrate those successes!

- use this discussion to begin to generate ideas for topics for a toolkit - perhaps through some kind of card sort exercise to prioritise (some of the topics we identified earlier in this discussion may come up!)

- ask people to self organise into groups to begin to share ideas and examples that could form the content of each section of the toolkit.

Use your digital camera and voice recorder to get as much A/V material of the examples and case studies as you can!

Those are my ideas, hope others get a chance to share too. All the best, Catherine

Comment by Nancy White on April 24, 2013 at 5:06pm: Is there anything we learned from the http://www.kstoolkit.org that would be useful here!

Comment by J. Yennenga KOMPAORE on April 24, 2013 at 4:20pm: Bonjour Catherine. Yes, it's the same toolkit we are working on, on this KM4dev ning page.

Comment by Catherine Fisher on April 24, 2013 at 4:14pm: Hi Yennenga, hope the write shop went well. You mentioned you have been working on the facilitators toolkit - is this the same toolkit we are talking about in this strand?

Or do you envisage 2 toolkits, 1 on content (eg topics on environment) and 1 on process (support and inspiration on how to be an effective facilitator)?

I think discussion so far has been more about the process of being a facilitator, how that can be understood and supported. And I'm sure there is loads of experience and ideas that people have to share.

As a reminder, we are 1 1/2 weeks into this process and there are 4 questions to go so I suggest we wind up this discussion on Monday to enable the next topic to start. So please keep those ideas coming now!

Comment by J. Yennenga KOMPAORE on April 23, 2013 at 8:48pm: Yes Nancy. We have just finished. We were at Performances (my lab) for this workshop. We work in french.

Comment by Nancy White on April 23, 2013 at 6:47pm: Cool! As I understand your current process, Yennenga, they are doing this offline, right? Is it in French? English? WOuld it be possible to share here online?

Comment by J. Yennenga KOMPAORE on April 23, 2013 at 3:58pm: Yes Catherine, Writeshops are good options. I'm in a kind of writeshop since yesterday with aliniha new KM 4 members team. We have been defining together the 12 topics content of the "facilitator's toolkit" = Four topic per area (Environnement, women empowerment and social microfinance). Then for each topic, we have : a short presentation of its meaning+ three messages + three bad and good practises reported from the field.