#sfrome: Daily Corriere - Share Fair daily newspaper

Inspired by the Addis Share Fair, the organizers of the Second Global AgriKnowledge Share Fair committed to have a daily newspaper -- which we called the Daily Corriere. Here are the four issues - for those who may have missed them! Enjoy reading and let's keep the spirit of #sfrome alive! Thanks everyone for your participation, contribution, for sharing and your friendship! Hasta la vista!

Daily Corriere: The Second Global AgriKnowledge Share Fair daily newspaper

View more documents from IFAD International Fund for Agricultural Development

Daily Corriere - issue no. 2 - Global AgriKnowledge Share Fair daily newspaper

View more documents from IFAD International Fund for Agricultural Development

Daily Corriere issue number 3 - The Share Fair newsletter

View more documents from IFAD International Fund for Agricultural Development

Daily Corriere issue number 4 - Share Fair Daily newspaper

View more documents from IFAD International Fund for Agricultural Development

View Share Fair photos on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/groups/sharefair09/ or on IFAD's Facebook Page: http://on.fb.me/qYNt4R. Check out all related blogpost at http://ifad-un.blogspot.com/search/label/sfrome and http://blog.sharefair.net/search/label/sfrome

What does it take to make the ShareFair happen? Don’t ask ‘what’, ask ‘who’!

by Johannes Schunter


When walking through the IFAD corridors this warm Italian September week one cannot help but be amazed by the buzzing, vibrant energy that is felt in every part of the building. People chat in corners, engage in up to 15 parallel group sessions, share their thoughts with someone with a video camera or sit in the hallway with their laptop on their lap, communicating one of their many impressions through email, Twitter or a blog. Over 600 participants, 160 projects, 200+ scheduled group or plenary sessions, and one is left with an immediate question: How on earth did they pull this off? After all, there is no professional event management company involved here that pulls the strings. This event is done by the sponsoring organizations themselves, with a surprisingly low budget and mostly with staff who – if they are not helping plan and implement knowledge fairs – have other jobs to do.

I talked to some of the organizers to get a small glimpse of the machinery that made this event happen behind the scenes. Planning for this ShareFair started already in January 2011, with a one-day facilitated brainstorming workshop where the Rome-based stakeholders ( Bioversity International, CGIAR ICT-KM programme, FAO, IFAD and WFP) got together to determine the general direction and approach they wanted to take with this event, building on the first event that took place at FAO in 2009. After that a Steering Committee was established in February to plan the event.

As there is no general existing budget for Rome ShareFairs, the team members from the different host organizations had to raise funds for the significant logistical and programmatic requirements (which include necessities such as security, ambulance, infrastructure and communication expenses) as well as to fund travel expenses for proposals from participants who otherwise could not come to the fair and share their learnings. Yet, I was surprised to learn that this entire event is realized with notably less than $200,000 (actual and in-kind) accumulated resources overall.

Talking about proposals: roughly 300 proposals were submitted after the Steering Committee publicly announced the ShareFair through their website in May 2011. The submissions were reviewed and filtered down to about 160, the maximum capacity of content sessions that the IFAD building can accommodate during the three main days of the fair with up to 15 parallel sessions at a given time slot.

These sessions, however, are rarely self runners. If the thematic expert is not by chance also a communication professional, a facilitator is needed to help the presenter avoiding tiring PowerPoint slides and instead turn the presentation into an engaging, participatory learning session using knowledge sharing approaches. But where to get those versed facilitators from? Luckily, Knowledge Management staff in Rome are well connected with the Knowledge Management for Development Network (KM4Dev), a community of KM practitioners working in development. Additionally, a call was placed also within each of the participating organizations for facilitators. By calling on about 50+ volunteer facilitators, the ShareFair organizers were able to provide professional facilitation for almost all project presentations, drawing on a range of creative and participatory facilitation methodologies which were introduced in a pre-conference training day for participants interested in these tools.

The training sessions of this so-called “Training and Learning Day” included not only facilitation techniques, but also introductory sessions into a range of social media tools for knowledge exchange and communication, such as Twitter, Facebook, Photos, Blogs or Podcasts. That those sessions were not just theoretical exercises was demonstrated during the entire week by the social reporting team, a group of about 30+ social media enthusiasts who committed to report live from event sessions and interactions in between sessions through the full range of social media tools. This way, the immediate audience of a few hundred on-site participants could be extended to many thousands of interested practitioners that followed the event online, by reading blogs, viewing video interviews or responding to tweets posted during the event.


Finally, as a participant of the Fair, besides noticing some of the more visible faces of the fair that give announcements and introduce sessions, you will most likely run into one of the many volunteers who are supporting the logistics behind the scene at any given moment: as registration desk volunteers, as information focal points and helpful guides on each floor, behind the technology that provides meeting room infrastructure, WLAN access and live webcast, or as runners who help fixing the many little and bigger emergencies that we mostly don’t even notice as participants.

So again, what does it take to make such a ShareFair happen? It takes all those people, seen and unseen, and I think they deserve a collective tipping of hats for the astounding work they do. Or you just walk up to the next one you see and give that person a ‘thank you’. And if you bring them a cup of coffee they might even reward you with more interesting details on life behind the scenes of the ShareFair!

GENESYS at #sfrome (71)

by Silvia Lambiase 
On Tuesday 27 September, for the second day of this fantastic Share Fair, Adriana Alercia, Jessica Raneri and Ana Laura Cerutti, from Bioversity International (also on behalf of Michael Mackay who unfortunately couldnít attend the meeting) gave us a great and interesting presentation on GENESYS Gateway to Genetic Resources.

There couldn't be a better start to show efficiently what this incredible tool is: a video which stressed the importance and value of recording data and sharing it as a benefit for the whole world.

Genesys, with the financial support of the Global Crop Diversity Trust and through strong partnerships with the CGIR centres and the International Treaty for Plant Genetic Resources, aims (and succeeds) at serve as a better tool for plant genetic resources (PGR), climate change and food security experts and breeders, with its 24 million records of crops and their respective characterization, evaluation and environmental data.

At the moment, Genesys includes detailed information on 22 crops belonging to the Annex 1 of the International Treaty, but very soon Adriana &co. will provide us with data on crops of Neglected and Underutilised Species (NUS)!

Bioversity Standards, which were developed together with FAO and EURISCO, are becoming more and more important worldwide, to the point that theyíre now considered the international standards.
We've seen the value of recording data said Adriana, but how can we make sure that all people all over the world can store all the information in one place? Are the characteristics contained in GENESYS important for breeders and PGR users to improve varieties to face climate change?

She said the quality of information is obviously very important. There is a number of portals where you can find characteristics and passport data, but GENESYS is unique because it contains all the information breeders are looking for to face climate change: it contains passport data from 500 countries all over the world, besides environmental data so that users can find and locate the specific crop they are looking for, for example that is particularly resistant to a specific pest or disease.

As the video showed, it is also crucial for breeders in Africa (and anywhere else in the World) who are concerned about the uncertainty of rainfall and are struggling to feed their family: GENESYS is unbelievably useful since it allows them to find crops that are particularly suitable to the environment they live in! It tries to provide quick solutions for these people facing climate change.

Jessica Raneri gave us a very efficient explanation on how user-friendly this portal is, and gave us great examples on how simple it is to use it. Users can make specific trait queries and even narrow their search, for example by typing annual precipitation, average temperature and protein content. Breeders can even have, if they wish, a sample deliverd by genebanks. A GIS map is also available and you can download the information into google earth in order to better locate the crops, download the whole crop information into a pdf file which will immediately be saved on your computer, summarising all the crop's characteristics, besides the country/institute which holds it and number of accessions.

Adriana concluded her presentation by telling us what the lessons learnt from the GENESYS project are:

• Researchers desperately want access to all available programme information
• There is a huge demand for interoperability with other information systems, such as genetic and molecular data
• There is a requirement for broader PGR and research communityís involvement in future development

Lastly, the lessons learnt from the Standards used in GENESYS are:

• There is a huge demand of standards for additional crops and subjects
• Researchers participate eagerly to their development
• The global participation of researchers to standards development has granted the international status within the PGR community.

For sure, what we have learnt from this amazing and catchy presentation is that, since we all know and agree with Adriana when she says that because of climate change, we will have to do more with less, finally we have an incredibly useful tool that will help breeders find quicker solutions and cope with these threats!

After the presentation, Adriana, Jessica and Ana Laura answered to questions.

Question: Why can you only download 5 mega bytes?
Answer: Since it's not our information, we need to make sure that people can download all at once, and we havenít reached an agreement yet with who provides the information

Q: What's the total number of accessions and what percentage of that has latitude and longetude (location) information?
A: 2 million, and all of them have location information even though there could be some mistakes but GENESYS is trying to correct them. Adriana then pointed out that the information contained in GENESYS is equivaelent to 11 million of phenotype characteristic and that they have 24 million records on passport information.

Q: With regards to NUS (Neglected and Under-utilised species), how many of them can we access through Genesys?
A: That's our next step, this is what we've been requested to do: more crops in addition to the ones in annex 1. Our plan is also to develop pedigree data.

Q: Do you already use this portal?
A: The project is managed by Michael, so for this type of information you should ask him.

Q: Do u have any analisys on queries?
A: Yes, we have access to this information, for example from which countries users are logging in and what crop theyíre looking for, and we can keep a database on that. We warmly invite you to check out GENESYS on www.genesys-pgr.org! If you want to ask any questions or send your suggestions to the GENESYS team, you can contact GENESYS directly from the website (contact). If you wish to be a data provider you have to agree with a protocol. At the moment, until the 15th of November, you can complete a survey which is available on the website, to collect information and impressions, to address the process of improvement of GENESYS to meet the userís needs.

'Neglected no more: traditional crops for sustainable livelihoods'

Thousands of neglected and underutilized species (NUS) of crops offer tremendous opportunities for food and nutritional security and have the potential to improve rural people’s livelihoods. When we refer to NUS, we are often told that if these species are underutilized, there must be a reason why. And indeed there is. The trouble is that the reasons are often not good ones: they are often based on misconceptions; production or marketing bottlenecks that can sometimes be easily surmounted; lack of information on the cultural, nutritional and environmental properties of these species etc.

This event was organized by 4 organizations, namely Bioversity International, the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (FAO), Oxfam Italia and the IFAD. We chose the TED talk format, with Stefano Padulosi from Bioversity International telling us stories from rural communities from all over the world to understand the importance of NUS. The main protagonist was a cake, made out of quinoa (an Andean grain) and sold in La Paz’s version of “Starbucks” – a place called Alexander Coffee. This very special cake is the result of a 10 year project funded by IFAD that involved hundreds of people from poor communities across Bolivia. Being able to enjoy this cake in Alexander Coffee means that we have been successful in conserving NUS and making them competitive on the market and attractive to all those who go to there.

Quinoa has been cultivated for centuries in the Andean region. It is very nutritious as an important source of protein and iron. the Incas considered it a sacred crop, and the emperor would traditionally sow the first seeds of the season using implements made of gold. But now it has become a NUS and is considered 'poor people's food'.

A fundamental problem with quinoa is that its preparation is painful. Quinoa seeds are coated with a layer of saponine, a bitter and toxic alkaloid. To get rid of this layer, women first toasted the seeds on a metal tray over a fire. Then the hot seeds are tipped into a stone basin and the women tread them with their bare feet, causing blisters and chronic lower back pain. Moreover, this process can take 6 hours to process 12 kg of quinoa. The project provided the target group with a machine to remove the saponine and what previously took hours now was done in just 7 minutes.

NUS are often also important as medicinal and aromatic plants – for example wild fennel. In the Errachidea province in Morocco, the value of this herb is currently neglected and consequently its exploitation is underutilized. New generations are slowly forgetting the knowledge and traditional use of these plants. However, these plants can be an important income opportunity for poor rural communities. In the case of wild fennel, its cultivation (instead of colleting it directly as spontaneous plant) in one year may improve the average household income by 75%. Thanks to a project by Oxfam Italy, 33 families in the villages of Sidi Boukil and Gourama are now learning how to promote these herbs in the markets thus improving their livelihoods.

Creating an enabling policy environment – both at national and international level – is necessary to deploy the economic potential of NUS for the poor. Thus, the role of the FAO International Treaty for Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture is pivotal for supporting NUS, in terms of more sustainable conservation and a wider use of agrobiodiversity. Several Grants have been awarded by the Treaty to organizations around the world, via its Benefit Sharing Fund. This is a great contribution towards the creation of a more secure food basket for the world. In sum, NUS have a great potential: they can increase incomes, enhance nutrition and preserve the culinary and cultural traditions of indigenous communities. Moreover, these crops are often better adapted to grow in marginal areas, with little need for irrigation, pesticides and fertilizers. In many instances these species are the only crops that can cope with harsh environments unfit for other crops. And they can also play an important role in boosting responsible and sustainable tourism.

How can we make agriculture more attractive to young people in Africa?

by Anna Spiteri

Rob Burnet very aptly entertained the audience at the Fair Share this morning by weaving a well told story about the characters he helped create in the ever popular comic series in Kenya.

Searching for ideas in the media space amidst election tensions in the country, he realised that half of the Kenyan population of 39 million, were under 18 years old, and that nobody was reaching these youths. So the story of Boy or DJB evolved...a young man, clever, unemployed..without tertiary education..and living on the peripheral slums in Nairobi... Rob told us that ...DJB did not want to join his friends who left school and eventually turned into gangsters....because he had a secret...in his bedroom he had built an FM radio, called shu jazz. And every evening he broadcasted to other young listeners, all young, young girls and boys determined to make things better for themselves, rather than succumb to ganghood.

So together with DJB other characters were invented and a whole team came together to produce stories with a message in a comic format, 32 pages long on recycled paper...with excerpts appearing in the Daily Nation. The whole team of script writers and graphic artists are all young talented people from 18 to 23 years old, many of them coming from the slums..so they have first hand knowledge of the stories they portray. They also go and test their stories in the field..in spaces where the young people they are portraying actually live...The 10 million comics produced so far are very popular with young kids and are written in the new speak of the Kenyan youth....This success led to the setting up of a dynamic show ...where smses and phone ins and jokes are all part of the show with a record of 97 million contacts since last year and 45000 conversations a day. There are 20 FM stations every day reaching half of Kenya s youth with tens of thousands of sms messages streaming in .....creating this level of illusion in a cyber space where this young man and his friends live... a magical world...carried away with a good story..with a message...

Rob understood that young people are not interested in development talk..they are interested in having fun and making money.....as his encounters with groups of young people in rural spaces taught him...but he found a way...He showed excerpts from the comics where the story ends with a message inserted inside the story.....messages on planting seeds ; or how to vaccinate baby chicks against the Newcastle disease or how important it is to soak your seeds!

His final shot was a Chicken of Change...also a character in a comic ...giving the messge that more attention should be given to livestock..partly aimed at the government to do more about livestock. Rob messages were simple...but very important for anyone who wants to follow in his steps 1. It s not the what..it’s the how.....it s urgent and it needs to happen 2. Push does not work..it has to be Pull.. 3. Research must go all the way to the user 4. Need to communicate, it does not happen by accident...requires professional media people ; and money. One needs to invest to achieve impact.....

Two more days to #sfrome: You can be part of the #sfrome social reporting team. Here is how..

By Gauri Salokhe

As you may already know, we are counting down days to the Second Global AgriKnowledge Share Fair which is scheduled to take place at IFAD from 26-29 September. This event, jointly organized by Bioversity International, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD), Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA), The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and World Food Programme (WFP) brings together colleagues from Rome-based agencies as well as partner organizations to share projects, lessons learned and emerging trends in the areas of food security, price volatility, climate change, ICT4D, social media and green innovations.

The Share Fair promises to deliver a wealth of knowledge featuring over 160 presenters from all over the world who will share their creative and innovative experiences and knowledge. Participants will have an opportunity to learn, share, connect and influence future direction.

Check out the programme highlights and webcasting schedule and make sure you take part in this unique event.

We encourage all participants to use social media channels and report live from the event. Here is how you can engage:

• Tweet and Retweet content from Share Fair:http://sharefair2009.blogspot.com/search/label/sfrome
• Share your own photos and images from the event by joining the Share Fair Group: http://www.flickr.com/groups/sharefair09/
• Presentations will be shared via: http://www.slideshare.net/sharefair09/
• Follow our tweets: http://twitter.com/sharefairs/
• Videos: http://www.youtube.com/user/sharefairs
• Blog from sessions you attend either through your personal blog or by sending your posts to share-fair@cgiar.org

When tweeting, please use the following hashtags:

• #sfrome

The organizational tags are:

• #ifad – Twitter account @ifadnews
• #unfao – Twitter account @faonews
• #wfp – Twitter account @wfp
• #bioversity

The draft agenda for the event is available from: http://t.co/KYK73dqp

For more information, contact us at share-fair [at] cgiar.org.

Originally posted on http://gaurisalokhe.blogspot.com/2011/09/you-can-be-part-of-sfrome-social.html

8 days to Second Global AgriKnowledge Share Fair at #IFAD HQ. The show is on the road #sfrome

Nine months ago, on a chilly January morning, the share fair steering committee and a group of other colleagues, met for a visioning session. At that meeting, we discussed the event's format, themes, audiences and agreed that we would organize an "out-of-the-box" event.

We did our best to live up to this commitment. And hopefully this is reflected in the share fair provisional programme.

Considering that the inaugural session is on the second day, the cocktail is on the third day and it finishes on a Thursday, I guess we can consider the second edition of the share fair an  "out-of-the-box" event!

But all kidding aside, as the saying goes, "the proof is in the pudding", and in 8 days time, we'll see whether we managed to live up to our vision. Rest assured that we put all our energy and passion into it.

Acting on learning and knowledge
In preparing for this event, we took stock of the learnings and experience of the First Global AgriKnowledge Share Fair and the various regional ones. So hopefully, we've built on their strengths and addressed some of the challenges.

One of the lessons learnt from the first edition was that we had to put in place a sound screening process to review the over 250 proposals that we received.

We divided up this task amongst the steering committee. We met regularly over the course of a month to review and discuss the proposals making sure that we were doing the selection in a fair and transparent manner. So kudos to the 160 proposals selected. You guys for sure went through the wringer!

Putting all our learning into action, we agreed that we would not have poster sessions nor booths. For this edition, we've introduced a tent which will have a chill-out corner and the speaker's corner. And we hope that many participants will use the speaker's corner to share their conversational or mainstream ideas, views and aspirations. 

We're looking forward for the chill-out corner to serve as a fertile ground for networking and connecting people.

This edition of the share fair has the luxury of having four keynote speakers. Etienne Wenger, Rob Burnet and Mark Davies will be at the share fair. Michele Payn-Knopfer due to competing commitments will not be able to be with us in person, but will do her session via skype.

Every day from 15:30-16:30 you can meet the keynote speaker of the day at  the chill-out corner.

Taking cue from the Addis share fair market place, we've introduced the show and tell session which will take place on 27 September from 17:00-18:00. This session will give participants an opportunity to showcase special activities and initiatives. If you are interested in this session, make sure you sign-up to secure yourself a slot.

This share fair like all the others, will also have a knowledge tree. You will have an opportunity to adorn the baobab knowledge tree with your pearls of wisdom, ideas, learnings and thoughts. We particularly ask you to share with us what do you think are the value and impact of events such as the share fair.

Share fairs are no powerpoint zone
We love the law or even better the edict of no powerpoints. Share fairs are no powerpoint zones. So, if you are one of the few presenters who are planning to come with your 50 slide shows, better change your plans and adopt a knowledge sharing method or TedTalk/AgTalk format for your session. Discuss this with the facilitator assigned to your session. If you are "self-facilitating" your session and need help, give us a shout and we'll dispatch th rescue team!


What does it take to organize a share fair?
The short answer is commitment, passion, dedication, cooperation, collaboration, coordination, teamwork, preparation, attention to details, empathy, believing in and practicing "the art of possibility"  and no prima-donnas.

And we had them all or almost all.

We were also blessed to have had the endorsement of IFAD management and the full support of our Chief Development Strategist who is also the KM champion.

What has struck me most in this adventure, is what I call the process of natural selection. That is to say, we acknowledged and respected each other's strengths and weaknesses. As a result we ended up taking on tasks that we were good at. And believe me this happened in the most seamless manner without anyone realizing that it was happening. Almost a miracle.

Next time you have to plan and organize a similar event, let the people on the team take on tasks and activities that they are good at. Do not force people to do things they are not good at - that is recipe for failure.

Share fair's web and social media presence
One of the trademarks of the share fair brand is social reporting. The share fair will have a contingent of social reporters who will use social media (Twitter, blog, Facebook, Flickr, Blip.TV, YouTube, podcasting) to report live from the various sessions. The facilitators will be sharing the highlights of their respective sessions via a blogpost. We'll be using #sfrome.

Thanks to social reporting methodology, we  engage with those who are not in the room and are able to share their thoughts, inputs and ideas with those "in the room".

We will be webcasting all the plenary sessions, keynote addresses and all the sessions held in the Italian Conference Room and the Oval room. We've integrated our webcasting with Twitter and Facebook - very much a la LiveStream - or dare I say even better!

An event about YOU and for YOU
Over the course of months we put the logistic machinery in motion. Colleagues have been diligently processing visa requests and we hope that the approved visa requests will get then on time to attend the event.

The last couple of weeks we've had meetings with the session presenters and facilitators, volunteers, administration, ICT and security colleagues. And we've learnt so much in this process. Now we know that for an event of this size, to ensure safety and security of participants and to make sure everything goes smoothly, we need to have extra guards, extra movers, have medical staff on the premises. This is why Willem was asked to "order an ambulance"!

While we've tried to cover all grounds, for sure there will be things that we may have forgotten and there may be some glitches. When you encounter a challenge, please put on your creative thinking hat on, smile and find a way to overcome the challenge.

We look forward to welcoming the participants from more that 70 countries to IFAD headquarters. Please remember registration starts at 8:00am on Monday 26 September and do not forget your identity card and/or passport. See you next week.