Development Blogs.com

At last week’s workshop to discuss how improved communication can help maximize the impact of agricultural research in Africa, we caught up with Nadia Manning-Thomas of the CGIAR.She leads the ICT-KM 'Knowledge Sharing in Research Project' that aims to integrate knowledge-sharing approaches into the different phases of the research cycle - instead of seeing it as an optional 'add-on': Click To Play She explains that the approach is based on improving the impact of research along the whole cycle. It shows how undertaking knowledge-sharing can help to achieve other research objectives, such as enhanced relevance; multi-stakeholder engagement; collaboration along the cycle, dissemination and uptake, and M&E:...

IFPRI's Pete Shelton shares three lessons from IFPRI efforts to get its researchers to use web 2.0 tools:1. Focus on the job, not the tool. 2. Researchers like hearing from other researchers.3. Don’t assume you know what researchers need - go out and ask them!The full posting explains the stories behind the lessons...

CTA recently announced a new service for development practitioners. NewsforDev employs RSS and e-mail news technology to bring together knowledge and information for development practitioners. It cleverly tracks 600 plus newsfeed to create a number of thematic dossiers on topics like:ACP-EU relations;Agriculture;Biodiversity;Biofuels;CTA;Climate change;Development;ICTs;Science and technology;TradeEach dossier presents recent content from a number of sources; A nice featire is that you can also subscribe to feeds and updates on each dossier or feed.A very nice example of the way that information specialists can 'mash' together existing information services in an accessible...

In the 'web tastings' blog, IFPRI's Pete Shelton explains the potential of social bookmarking tools like del.icio.us. Seems he forgot, then re-discovered it!He explains several ways it can help our day to day information management, pointing to its use by Euforic and IAALD.It's funny how related stories seem to appear at the same time - the ICT-KM blog also has an interesting posting to the use of del.icio.us in...

Sometimes you find an excellent new blog on aginfo and related issues and wonder how it didn't come across your radar before... Anyway, Web Tastings is by IFPRI's Pete Shelton and Stephan Dohrn - writing in their personal capacities. The idea is to "reflect on the usefulness and impact of the social web and its tools and approaches on development cooperation."A recent osting that caught the eye looks at measuring impact on the web - and some experiences from...