Monday, November 2, 2009

Follow-up event to Share Fair: ‘Knowledge Sharing: Getting Together to Do It Better’.


On October 29, the KM4DEV Rome group organize a one-day event, hosted in IDLO near Vatican, called ‘Knowledge Sharing: Getting Together to Do it Better’. The sessions were organized around common issues related to Knowledge Management and Knowledge Sharing in international organizations, in this case, the Rome-based ones (CGIAR, FAO, IDLO, IFAD and WFP).

It was a day of brainstorming, problem solving and creative thinking sessions to address specific challenges we've come across in our knowledge management projects:
how can we grow a community of practice?
  • how do we get colleagues on board of innovative ways of working?
  • how do we communicate the benefits to our prospective stakeholders (participants, adopters, beneficiaries, users)?
  • are the tools we are using the right ones for the job at hand?
WHY THIS EVENT?
The event was organized:
  • to reflect and find creative solutions to specific issues we encounter in our KM/KS projects, and particularly in the areas of fostering collaboration, nurturing communities of practice, spreading a culture of participation and sharing, selecting effective and efficient tools for geographically-distributed working groups, and ensuring buy-in and adoption.
  • to practice knowledge sharing among the Rome-based international organizations.
  • to mobilize attention towards innovative and efficient ways of working.
WHY A JOINT KM4DEV/SHARE FAIR EVENT?
In the spirit of KM4Dev and the Share Fair, we got together to share and learn from each other's experience with the goal of improving the impact of our work within our organizations.

KM4DEV is a community of international development practitioners who are interested in knowledge management and knowledge sharing issues and approaches. From this international community, a local group has been created known as KM4DEV Rome.

The Share Fair event took place in January 2009 in FAO and aimed to be an interactive event, providing the possibility for people to showcase their experiences in knowledge sharing and, at the same, time learning from each other.

WHO WERE THE PARTICIPANTS?
Around 35 participants (practitioners, information managers, project managers, facilitators and everybody involved in projects with knowledge management and knowledge sharing components) from the following organizations took part in the event.
Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR),
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO),
International Development Law Organization (IDLO),
International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and
World Food Programme (WFP).

MORE INFORMATION
You can find more information about the event on our Wiki.