CTLab:Questions

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What questions or challenges would you like us to consider during the CTLab?

  • How to find a system that is at once attractive, easy to use, secure and low cost for global CoPs with staff in multiple locations of same organisation
  • How people disseminate knowledge in electronic formats
  • Use of video conferencing
  • Am keen on learning about technology stewardship
  • How have people used technology once they’ve got it?
  • How do others promote a culture of sharing and collaboration......so that good practices are not just stuck in one place?
  • How to cope with institutional environments that set serious constraints around technology (and access)
  • Hoping to learn from others who have more experience of alternative tools beyond our 'normal' infrastructure.
  • Important to distinguish between different kinds of CoPs. Different technologies and approaches will be appropriate for different purposes.
  • How can email-based software such as the one we use for Dgroups can be improved? How we can make it even more accessible to the maximum numbers of people in peripheral rural areas in LMICs? For example, is there a potential for integrating outputs from people without any direct internet access, perhaps by SMS?, into email and/or web-based forums? Are people already looking into this?
  • How can web-based tools can be made more accessible to those working with low bandwidth. This includes the continuing improvement of the web element of the Dgroups platform, as well as other tools that are primarily web-based.
  • What can be done to reduce duplication and fragmentation, and to promote better communication among groups with same agenda?
  • New thinking and approaches was the main driver for me to register me in this new adventure to collect new insights and views and perhaps make a valuable contribution.
  • I'm hoping this conversation will attract people who will want to help support KM4Dev's own technologies, which are in need of technology stewardship. Those who were doing the job - always informally - have either moved on or some of us are simply burnt out. So we need revitalizing.
  • The challenges: KM demand driven, not supply driven and getting those that have a lot to offer but are not interested in ICT on board!
  • Looking for experiences from community KM experiences that worked in agriculture or civic education for examples that can be transferred to the flow of community data and the reporting back from the central collection point.
  • How to create the buy in to persuade leaders in organisation to shift their paradigm on the lack of a common technology platform that would allou us to bridge between Group office, regional offices and subsidiaries around the world. The possible challenge would be amount of money involved.
  • How does a "mature" community deal with the technology choices it made along the way, with whatever needs, capacity and tools were available at specific times? How can a volunteer-driven community best do this stewarding, without any earmarked funds?
  • How can we ensure that the focus remains on the purpose/needs/activities of a community and not on jumping on the next cool tool that pops up? I am wary of putting the technological cart before the community horse. I am also incredibly wary of the potential for tech discussions turning into holy software wars (e.g. "Drupal is better! No, Joomla!").
  • Interested to develop tech stewardship for KM4dev bearing in mind that the email group remains far and away our most important obviously KM4Dev channel, but many of overlapping smaller groups of people in KM4Dev interact in a host of other platforms. I am interested in whether that can be in some way connected, not necessarily technically, but less randomly than happens now. And like Lucie I am worried about operating online without funds. I don't believe we are a strong enough network to ensure that our identity and activity will sustain itself without that support, however much I like to believe it might simply emerge from our normal processes of work and interaction
  • How do our systems need to include information about people and development.
  • Emerging collaboration and sharing tools
  • How do others use technology to support collaboration
  • What does "technology stewardship" mean?
  • By sharing examples of good and bad practices we can help each other to overcome the confusion that originates from the redundancy of tools available out there
  • Interested in exploring the intersection of new tech and local-to-global community building
  • Best practices and experiences from others with building and managing online communities.
  • People participate in so many different and overlapping networks, how do we justify adding "just one more" tool or space to engage in? Or rather, what do we need to consider when setting up one more tool or space in people's already busy lives?
  • What kind of support structure is needed when an organization - or communities and networks - are using multiple spaces for getting together (often in different languages)? What are the social and practical considerations (including security, privacy, resources)?
  • What are different community roles that we should be cultivating to support the multiple spaces e.g. brokers, filters, summarizers, "ambassadors" (as well as technology stewards)
  • How to better integrate mobile technologies and apps into the mix.
  • How to support multilingualism across a single forum (or how to maintain interconnections across multiple parallel forums in different languages)
  • approaches/strategies for engaging users in an online community
  • elegant and easy to administer platforms to support community knowledge capture and exchange
  • why start a new community in a standalone platform when users already have accounts elsewhere? -- or strategies for convincing organizations to use platforms such as LinkedIn or Yammer or Ning instead of starting from scratch
  • activities and ideas to sustain and engage communities
  • assessment -- metrics and methods for measuring value and assessing impact of communities
  • How are others managing the use of technology, especially in the context of different competing approaches and interest groups within an organization and how to harmonize or reconcile these (such as we have in the UN)?
  • How to deal with differing levels of technological readiness and skills within an organization when choosing and managing IT tools for knowledge sharing.
  • How to overcome the lack of integration between differing web 2.0 tools? The need to log-on and log-off again and again for every step, switching between wiki, blog etc is a problem.
  • How to pick tools to use when ICT department will not align with existing commercial solutions? Key reason given is “control over data” but I don’t know if this is only a data-ownership issue (such as we commonly see with facebook or google), or other security concern, or e.g. dislike for Ning for other social reasons.
  • Help in 'understanding technology choices' that support online communities - partly because it is a challenge to keep up with the range of options available, partly because decisions are increasingly made by those of us who aren’t technologists and partly because invariably one can only make an informed opinion about any given platform once you’ve learned its strengths and weaknesses in practice (i.e. after you’ve elected to use it!).
  • Keen to explore possibilities for strengthening the interoperability between different technologies, so that instead of the main driver being ‘for everyone to use the same tool i.e. Facebook’ we can support a thriving eco-system of interactive locations and efficiently signpost the interesting things that happen across that landscape. Could there be opportunities to open up sources of funding to co-develop such tools, to build capacity of project teams to make use of them and to enhance the experience of the people who make use of the opportunities we provide them?
  • How to better use technology to host and mobilize this community of social innovators, entrepreneurs and explorers, now that we have part of the community in the HUB Bogotá physical space and many others connected around the country?
  • Part of my work is facilitation of a Ning community. Getting members to share is a challenge and I have used phone calls, skype and facebook to get responses. If I can learn more on this it will be very valuable in my work.
  • How to overcome challenges of literacy and internet connectivity to enable virtual sharing? In one case, we tried using mobile phones to connect people but community members could not read text messages. I am looking for experiences and examples which have addressed such challenges.



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