Forerunner report

From Web2forDev

Forerunners in the Organization

Report of the Open Space meeting

Participants:

• Susanne Thörnquist, WFP/Fight Hunger
• Armelle Arrou, UNESCO
• Martin Parr, CABI
• Harry Oosterveen, IRC

The Fight Hunger group has created a website with Web2.0 tools, but the other divisions within WFP are not used to these yet. Still, there are many good responses from the audience outside the organization. This is also the result of various promotional activities, such as the CHild Hunger campaign.

It was observed that it is often a generation problem, the early adopters are the younger generation. To others, it often feels as if it is imposed in them. However, one enthusiastic person could make a difference, acting as a driving force and showing how he can benefit.

With respect of promoting a site (or a specific tool), the option of piggy-backing was suggested: promote a service, method on how to do something one is interested in, and in the process use the new service or method. For example, show how to find information on research for development, and do this by using the site you have developed.

Issue: interesting tools are sometimes blocked by the IT staff. Reasons for these are various, for example

• application (social networking/facebook) does not (yet?) fit within the organizational culture
• IT staff trying to avoid extra work for supporting these applications
• IT staff not familiar with security risks
• does not fit with procedures within the organization, e.g., how to distinguish between private/official use of Skype?

Issue: How to handle group e-mail. Often email groups produce many messages, not always that relevant ('Thanks for your contribution... quote quote quote'). The advantage of Development Gateway is that is does not produces a continuous flow of messages, but a regular, not too frequent, update of new contents. A way to handle the large volume of group mails is to filter them to a separate folder, so you can focus on regular mail and look at group mails when you have more time.

A good way to avoid overload of information is a good classification. This is applied both in the Open Training Platform and the DFID research for development repository/service. Classification can be done by subject, as well as by target group. This way, you can receive only the information that is most relevant to you.

Issue: how to involve people that are reluctant to apply new tools. There may be case where it can be enforced, such as where some required approvals can be made dependant on whether they have been submitted using the right tools. Otherwise, the only way seems to be to show how the tool can be applied, and to show that it is easy and actually quite useful.