Crowdsourcing the KS Toolkit: 40 volunteers updated 66 pages in 2 days
Nov 19th, 2012 | By Simone Staiger | Category: Tools & Methods
On Thursday, 15 and Friday, 16 November, 2012 we celebrated KS Toolkit Update Days. Suggested by CIAT’s Capacity Initiative, It was a great way to connect with members and friends
of the Knowledge Management for Development Community (KM4Dev) while helping to improve the Knowledge Sharing Toolkit. The 2 day crowd sourcing event gathered some 40 volunteers who gave their time to work on a total of 420 updates of 66 pages, half of those in English, 20 pages in French and 10 in Spanish. This wiki which has over 100 knowledge sharing tools and methods, fact sheets, close to 540 members, and an average of 10,000 visits per month.
About the Toolkit http://www.kstoolkit.org/
This toolkit has been developed by the ICT-KM Program, a former Program of the of the CGIAR, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). It is a living knowledge repository about knowledge sharing. We created it to be a resource both for KS workshops and as an ongoing place to learn about, improve upon and generally share our knowledge sharing practices. There are other KS toolkits out in the world – many of them listed in our acknowledgments. Most of them, however, are static – not updated. We wanted to provide a place where we can share our practices in an on-going manner. So we invite you to improve upon any of the entries, leave your name and contact information if you can be a resource on a tool or method, and share stories (both success and “uh-oh – failure” types) of these methods and tools in use. Let’s help each other.
The toolkit has three main pieces. Two “libraries” one for methods (group processes that people can use to interact with each other, online or offline) and one for tools (web based software and offline physical tools) that can be used for knowledge sharing, and a set of perspectives and guidance that can help you choose tools and methods for your needs and contexts. This “choosing bit” is an experiment. We are hoping that many people will help identify what is useful to them and from that, develop some patterns that help in the choosing process.
We are creating a number of different ways to view the tools and methods according to your needs and contexts. These views are informed partly from some established frameworks in development, and the rest will come from you, the users of the toolkit. Our intent is to create this flexible framework that can grow as we use the toolkit. To begin, please go to our first iteration – What is Your Context?
