What is the value of knowledge sharing in research

							Blogging for Impact – Lessons from the ASB Partnership for the Tropical Forest Margins
                                www.asb.cgiar.org/blog/

            Vanessa Meadu, Communications and Project Officer, 27 February 2009

What is the value of knowledge sharing in research?

I want to share with you some things we've done in the ASB Partnership for the Tropical Forest
Margins.

Why we did it
One of the challenges we were facing was fairly low traffic on our webpage, coupled with
confusion about when to update news stories and what really counted as news.

We also ran an email listserv where we would occasionally post items like new publications,
calls for proposals, or stories from the media related to our work.

We decided to renew our strategy a little bit after our global steering group suggested that we
send out all the emails in one monthly package rather than sporadically. With a new mandate to
develop an email newsletter we had to rethink what our website was for and how it would relate
to our e-news.

We decided to rework the site as a blog to make posting and searching stories more easy. the
blog also allows people to make comments and it is easy to see when somebody else has linked
to your page - it's automatically tracked.

our strategy was this: take advantage of the 1200 person listserve which we've been
building for many years, and use it as an opportunity to bring people to the website, while
also dissemminating news.

So that's what we did. on a regular basis throughout the month we post stories to the blog that are
closely linked to our research agenda. We try at least monthly to also post an opinion piece by
one of our scientists or at least share some reactions to something going on in the science or
policy world. Then come end of month we simply harvest the best stories and send it out as a
newsletter. The newsletter provides a sample of the story but if you want to read the full story
you have to click through to the website. it works. in the week that we send out our newsletter
our hits go up dramatically from about 250 views per week to 400+. Last month the ICRAF
webmaster asked me if i knew why hits to the ICRAF server had suddenly peaked -- it was
because of the ASB e-news.

In fact, since we've launched the newsletter and news blog, overall visit to the website have gone
up from about 4000 per month before the blog launch to an average of 6000 visits per month.

But the impact doesn't stop there. The ASB website now comes up more commonly in web
searches for terms like “REDD potential Africa” “World Forests 2009” “CDM forest africa” and
“redd unfccc countries positions” , i.e. our current research agenda. That's because we are
posting lots of stories on these topics.

People find our research more easily.

As well, all this increased traffic to our website has had some unplanned postive benefits. In
2008 the number of downloaded publications increased from 7,171 to 12,852, a 71% increase
in one year. It wasn't just new publications that we had released and publicized, but also
downloads of publications from 2005 and 2006, which we hadn't actively publicized. Because of
our blog and our increased web activity, our research is getting more hits and is reaching more
people than ever before. all at a fairly marginal cost. all of the technologies and tools we use are
free.

There's more to the story -- behind the scenes we've developed some processes to help simplify
tracking and collecting news stories, and facilitate more participatory news sharing. We do this
with a news aggregator and via social bookmarking (two technologies i'm happy to talk more
about at another session). This not only provides us with a constant flow of news but is also
keeping us on top of all the latest research and policy development in the fast-moving field of
climate change. We benefit by staying current, and we help our partners by digesting this
information to them.

That leads me to another point. Many of our partners are based in developing countries where
connections may be slow and expensive and not readily available. By collecting and digesting
news for them, we can save them time and effort and give them the key information. The
newsletter also acts as a bridge towards engaging with the more interactive components of the
blog. If people choose to comment or link back to us, great! if they would rather not, they're still
recieving a useful service. A few months ago communications people including myself, Sulafa
from G&D Award, Anne from CIMMYT and Humphrey from ICRAF library put together a
proposal about the importance of e-news in the African context, which was accepted at an FAO
conference on knowledge sharing for agricultural development. I ended up going and presenting
that perspective in Rome last month.

Lessons learned

   •   A tool isn’t worth using unless you have a purpose, process and strategy
   •   Keep it simple, be aware of your context and your target audience needs
   •   There are good resources to support you in your blogging adventure

Resources

   •   Knowledge Sharing Toolkit
          – Brought to you by the FAO and CGIAR ICT-KM. a library of KS tools and
              methods www.kstoolkit.org
   •   Building a community of practise at ICRAF campus and in Nairobi
          – Email v.meadu@cgiar.org to get on the list
   •   Technical sessions over lunch? Express your interest