The document provides an overview of the program and sessions at the Second Global Agricultural Knowledge Sharefair held from 29 September to 1 October 2011 in Rome, Italy. It includes: - The schedule of sessions on topics like the role of social media in development, knowledge sharing, and closing ceremonies. - Summaries of keynote speeches discussing partnerships between public and private sectors and lessons from facilitating information flow using technology. - Descriptions of organization involvement like Bioversity International highlighting the importance of knowledge sharing and learning from others. - An overview of the logistics required to plan and implement the Sharefair with over 600 participants, 160 projects, and 200 sessions on a relatively small budget, primarily through volunteer efforts.

1. 29 September 2011 – Issue number 4
HIGHLIGHTS of 29
SEPTEMBER
Angels, geeks, sex, money,
marriage and community 09:00 in Oval Room – How good an ally
are social media tools for 21st century
development workers?
On Wednesday at
around 12:20, this little 10:30 in the Oval Room – Use of
tweet appeared on the technology to facilitate information flow
#sfrome stream. and collaboration
You can imagine the 10:30 in Room C300 – Surprised that the
joy and pride of the social media junkies and the social reporters at the famous Popeye is giving up eating spinach
Share Fair. We broke yet another record! but still able to hit Bluto, his eternal rival in
loving olive? Attend this session to find out
Many people have contributed to more aboutm “Milk and Milk issues”
the success of the #sfrome and
we’ll celebrate them today. A 14:00 in the Dining Room – Building
special thanks to our keynote knowledge-sharing out of friendship – the
speakers: Etienne, Rob and Mark. KM4DEV experience
Part of the success of #sfrome 16:00 in the Italian Conference Room –
twitter stream on Wednesday was Closing ceremony
Mark Davies’ keynote address. Friday 30 September 9:00– KM4DEV
Johannes Schunter captured all the tweets from this session and has made annual meeting in the Italian Conference
them available at: http://storify.com/jschunter/sharefair-2011. Room
Reflecting on his experience developing products over the last fifteen
years on three continents, PROGRAMME CHANGE
Mark pointed out how Approaches for strengthening stakeholders
partnerships are key to abilities to generate, adapt and share
success. In the US case, it was experiences (23) will take place in the tent
geeks and suits, mixing ideas Livestock revolving development fund
with money, and executing on (195) and Promoting use of ICT for market
prolonged/periodic bursts of information exchange among women
innovation. Mark sees the producers in Cameroon, Revolutionary
same thing happening in history of Livestock and Pasture
ICT4D, being driving Development Project in Morocco (236) will
primarily by better not take place
connectivity, ubiquitous technology, targeted financing, and perhaps most
importantly, a class of high tech sophisticated entrepreneurs ready to New session
engage. But as much as it is exciting, it’s also confusing, referring to the 11:30 in room B100: Conservation
confusion over what’s out there, what works, who builds it and who pays agriculture in Syria
for it. Esoko has experimented over the last few years and learned a few
lessons along the way, showing how distribution channels are
converging, content is converging, mobile operators are getting excited,
and how transparency can positively impact marriages. In the end, all
these initiatives require a partnership of sorts, and where social and
financial objectives meet, then the public and private sectors are uniquely
matched, but he ended on a warning that many public institutions are still
struggling with the philosophical and operational challenges around PPPs
and nothing will happen until an honest and visionary approach is
adopted.

2. His wake call for the development world was: Private sector is strategic
partner and plays a crucial role, and development community should
understand that they cannot do it all by themselves. And he concluded
that for private and public sector to work together we need to have a clear
ticulated strategy and legal and operational frameworks to engage.
Bioversity International at
#sfrome
by Bioversity communications colleagues
What has really impressed the Director General and staff at Bioversity
International who are attending the Second Global Agricultural
Knowledge Sharefair is that wherever you turn, people are talking about
what they are learning.
Whether you are at a debate about the future of rural development, in a
training workshop about how to use ICT tools more effectively or just
standing in the coffee shop queue, someone wants to talk to you about the
latest ideas.
And the buzz has spread online. Thanks to the great work of the
#SFROME social reporting team, people from all over the world are
also participating in sessions and talking about what they have learnt.
During his remarks at the inaugural session, Bioversity’s Director
General, Emile Frison, referred to the importance of international
partnerships of and collaboration. Sharing knowledge and experiences is
what adds value to these partnerships and makes innovation possible on
the ground.
We are an international research organization which exists to help poor
smallholder farming communities to make better use of and to conserve
biodiversity in agriculture. We believe that biodiversity can bring
substantial livelihood and nutrition benefits to these communities, while
enhancing the sustainability of agriculture in developing countries.
With around 350 staff in 18 locations around the world, and a partner
network spanning over 100 countries, knowledge sharing is a real
challenge.
This is why the Share Fair is so important to our work. It is not only
giving us the chance to talk about our own experiences and share our own
knowledge, but equally importantly, a chance to learn from others about
ways we can do it better.
And we wanted to share that with you.

3. Les club d’ecoute
par Ambrosio Barros
Entourée d’Ali Abdoulaye, Coordonnateur d’un projet au Niger et de
Yannick De Mol, Expert en information et communication, Eliane
Najros, Coordinatrice générale du Projet FAO-Dimitra - Genre,
information et communication en milieu rural, a présenté ce matin l’une
des initiatives phares mis en place par Dimitra dans ses zones
d’interventions : les clubs d’écoute.
Il s’agit d’un « groupe de femmes et d’hommes engagés qui s’appuient
sur l’écoute et la participation à des émissions radios pour s’impliquer
dans la vie sociale et contribuer au développement local. Ces clubs sont
des groupements citoyens permettant aux membres de partager leurs
préoccupations, leurs besoins, d’obtenir certaines informations autrement
inaccessibles et d’entreprendre des actions constructives ensemble. De
manière générale, la création des clubs d’écoute communautaires vise
l’autonomisation des populations rurales, en particulier des femmes, et le
renforcement du leadership de ces dernières ». La présentation de ce
matin a permis de mieux cerner ce concept et les activités connexes de
ces clubs d’écoute (leurs membres bénéficient ainsi de formations et de
cours d’alphabétisation).
A travers les premiers résultats et impacts obtenus, ces clubs contribuent
aussi à la constitution d’un noyau de paix et d’un terrain d’entente qui
s’adapte au contexte des communautés dans lesquelles ils sont mis en
place. Ainsi, au Niger ou encore en RDC, dans la mesure où les femmes
sont de plus en plus nombreuses dans les organisations paysannes, elles
s’impliquent davantage dans les clubs d’écoute ; les hommes de leur côté
monopolisent de moins en moins la parole, et les femmes voient leur
influence s’accroître dans la prise de décision au sein des organisations
paysannes. Se reposant sur la parole et les moyens de communication
adéquats par rapport aux zones d’intervention tels que les radio et
téléphones à batterie solaire, ce processus a l’ambition de s’étendre
géographiquement.
What does it take to make the
Share Fair 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

4. 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!