Why invest in knowledge sharing about beekeeping ?

1. Why invest in knowledge sharing about beekeeping? Ghent 29/05/2007

2. Assumptions • Networkscontribute to research for development (not only among universities, but also research institutes and NGO's which use field data for policy advisory research) ; • Networks offer tertiary education institutes in agriculture practical ways to promote a sustained endogenously driven knowledge sharing and innovation in agriculture and natural resources management.

3. Honey Care Africa is an innovative, rapidly expanding Kenyan social enterprise established expressly to increase the income of rural farmers. • The organization was started back in 1998 by Wilson Mwangi and Samson Kago. They initiated the project after looking unsuccessfully for jobs soon after their university education. Their membership has increased steadily over the years to ten members in total. Honey Care Africa, was named the top small-to medium-sized business in Africa on 20 October 2005. • To date, Honey Care has doubled the income of several thousand small scale farmers through its "Money for Honey" program, which trains them in commercial beekeeping and then buys their honey at a guaranteed price. Honey Care then packages and sells the highest quality African honey. • http://www.honeycareafrica.com/

4. Prior to commencement of any beekeeping project, Honey Care conducts a preliminary site evaluation of the proposed project site to assess the viability of financing each venture

5. Honey Care has established a number of very successful bee keeping projects, working closely with a number of carefully selected and Non-Governmental and International Organizations to promote small holder bee keeping and honey production in various regions of the country. • All hives are provided either on a loan or cost-sharing basis.

6. Who is involved in the knowledge sharing ?

7. Impediments and innovations for knowledge sharing between : • Rural and urban honey producers • NGOs • Researchers: biologists • Researchers: social scientists • Government officials • Aid agencies • Local, regional, and national merchants • International/multinational companies

8. Knowledge gaps and the need for an integrated development approachRural and urban honey producers

9. NGOs

10. Researchers: biologists

11. Researchers: social scientists

12. Government officials

13. Aid agencies

14. Local, regional, and national merchants

15. International/multinational companies

16. Poor communication and networking between honey producers and other stakeholders persists. Constraints to sharing knowledge about beekeeping are numerous, and comprise the lack of global vision of the sector, key knowledge gaps, geographical distance, infrastructure and budgetary considerations, as well as socio-cultural barriers to knowledge sharing between organizations. Some findings

17. So what ? • Effective knowledge sharing in the beekeeping and honey production sector would encourage the application of extant knowledge about the resource and generate new knowledge through the cross-fertilization of ideas. • In turn, this would favour the optimal development and long-term sustainability of this key nutritional and economic resource.

18. How can ICT improve KS? • Effective knowledge sharing in the beekeeping and honey production sector can be encouraged through the use of collaborative communication tools • There are a number of innovative ways in which ICT can augment collaborative work. • One of them is the use of a wiki

19. What is a wiki ?

20. Wiki features • Easy to create websites • Project development with peer review • Group authoring • Track a group project • Using a wiki “pulls” the group members together to build and edit the document on a wiki page, which strengthens the community within the group, • Allows group members with overlapping or similar ideas to see and collaboratively build on each other’s work. • Allows all group members immediate, equal access to the most recent version of the document.

21. Yes but can I learn to use it? You can learn to use a wiki in 30-60 min. There are several free sources for wikis.

22. What’s important about a wiki? • Collaboration • Hyperlinks

23. Wikis as Information Sources What do you know about Wikipedia?

24. Wikipedia Wikipedia is: • A free encyclopedia • Multilingual • Web-based • Written collaboratively by volunteers • Most articles can be changed by anyone.

26. Wikipedia • The service now totals 6 million articles in 200 languages, 150 times the size of any print equivalent and all for free. (but only 350 articles have been posted by the 17.5 million people in the world that speak Amharic). • It thrives, because "nobody knows everything but everyone knows something." • The read-write Internet is possible because of four elements in the wikipedia equation: software, community, neutrality and freedom.

27. Closing remarks • Wikis need • Community • Planning and management • Wikis suit information that • needs continual irregular updates by many users • cannot usefully be arranged into a strong hierarchy • requires consensus

28. Blogs wikis and podcasts: good luck!