Developing and supporting your dgroup
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Presentation by Lucie Lamoureux (KM4D Associates) at the second Dgroups Communities Webinar - 22 April 2015
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Developing and supporting your dgroup
- 1. DEVELOPING AND SUPPORTING YOUR DGROUP DCommunities webinar series ECDPM and 22 April 2015
- 2. Meet the facilitation team Lucie Lamoureux KM4D Associates Pier Andrea Pirani Euforic Services – Dgroups Coordination Support Ivan Kulis ECDPM
- 3. Why a DCommunities webinar series? • Response to Dgroups partners request • Engaging members requires care, skills and time • Pilot - 3 free webinars to learn • Dgroups platform • Developing and supporting your Dgroup • Facilitation tips and tricks
- 4. Webinar outline – 90 minutes • Topics: Community challenges and enablers Importance of purpose and planning Strategic drivers for communities Specific examples of strategic applications Importance of facilitation Specific facilitation tasks Facilitation techniques Facilitation practice Planning your interventions
- 5. Webinar set-up • Format: Three 15-minute blocks of content, each followed by interaction • Interaction: During the pauses, use the “Raise Hand” emoticon on the top left to ask questions During the presentation, type your questions in the Chat box and Ivan will collect them • Technical problems: Type in the Chat box and Pier will help you
- 6. Community challenges and enablers Common challenges • Access and connectivity • Participation and motivation • Trust and cultural factors Enablers • Accessible interaction platform (Dgroups) • Common purpose or goals • Relevance: topics /activities that resonate • Regular engagement • Facilitation
- 7. Purpose, purpose, purpose! • Purpose drives the design and planning of your community • Your community has to add value to the work of the members • Has to be clear and articulated • To avoid misunderstanding with members, share your intent! • Successful communities explicitly state and reiterate their purpose to members through various channels
- 8. Purpose checklist: Community Design Aid • Prepared by FAO for their knowledge networks • A 3-page checklist with in- depth questions • Useful when starting a community or as a planning tool for an existing one • May make you reconsider creating a new community Source: http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/knowledge/docs/ FAO-NC-DesignAid.docx
- 9. Relevance: topics/activities that resonate • What makes your community special or pertinent? • The more relevant the topics and activities are to members’ work, the more likely they will participate • Needs assessments, member surveys, etc. are key to relevance • Use member suggestions, engage them, build buy-in
- 10. Pause - Interaction time So far, do you have any questions? Questions for you: • Do you encounter any other challenges in your community or Dgroup? • Can you clearly describe the purpose of your network? Your target audience? • Can you articulate the benefits of participating in your Dgroup to members?
- 11. Strategic drivers for communities • Knowledge sharing: • Share your knowledge or experience • Find knowledge from a network of experts • Publish explicit knowledge (papers, articles, etc.) • Get exposure for you/your organization's thinking and work
- 12. Strategic applications – Knowledge sharing
- 13. Strategic drivers for communities • Learn: • Grow beyond your own "knowledge boundaries" • Seek answers to your questions from other practitioners and answer others' questions • Learn something specific in order to improve certain capacities • Be up-to-date of the latest in your area of interest and work
- 14. Strategic applications – Learn
- 15. Strategic drivers for communities • Connect: • Connect and build relationships with fellow practitioners • Discover and connect with new partners from similar and different settings • Find out who knows what • Help newcomers to the field • Establish your reputation and identity as a practitioner
- 16. Strategic applications - Connect
- 17. Strategic drivers for communities • Create: • Create new knowledge by cooperating with others • Build a knowledge base • Collaborate on projects or research with others towards shared goals • Contribute to policy development • Catalyze action
- 18. Strategic applications - Create
- 19. Strategic applications - Create
- 20. Pause - Interaction time So far, do you have any questions? Some questions for you: • What are some of the strategic applications of your Dgroups? • What do you want to accomplish with your online interactions?
- 21. Importance of facilitation • To be effective, communities need to have a shared sense of purpose and be relevant to members • Online spaces do not guarantee that people will contribute or collaborate • Facilitation adds structure and process to accomplish objectives and achieve the community’s purpose • Facilitation also helps to ensure good community dynamics
- 22. Specific facilitator tasks • Clarify and reinforce the purpose • Welcome new members • Assess member needs • Provide and manage a “structure” by developing a plan for interactions • Keep the discussion focused, ask questions, provide resources • Engage members in back channels • Manage conflicts and acknowledge differences • Help to build relationships between members • Help to ensure understanding and encourage trust
- 23. Facilitation techniques • The principal facilitation techniques are: 1. Listening/reading • What is said, not said and interpreting silence 2. Composing and editing messages • Clear, concise, to the point 3. Asking and answering questions • Open ended or closed, or to clarify 4. Summarizing and synthesizing • Also paraphrasing, restating 5. Clarifying • Using some, or a combination of the above, illustrating with examples
- 24. Facilitation practice in a nutshell (1) • Focusing purpose: remind regularly • Connect: get people to introduce themselves, find others who share interests or can help each other on a particular issue • Integrate: help newcomers learn about the community • Being proactive: ask questions, clarify, provide relevant links, seek opportunities for action
- 25. Facilitation practice in a nutshell (2) • Guide the interactions: facilitating discussions includes mediation in times of conflict, establish norms and agreements when needed • Technology stewardship: helping people technically with Dgroups and noticing when technical issues come up • Cybrarianship: curating or managing content
- 26. Planning your interventions • All of this takes time: decide where to focus and when • If starting out, put more time in “Connecting” • Plan around community-relevant events, for e.g. a discussion to feed into a face-to-face meeting • Look for opportunities, for e.g. providing input to a policy process • Map out your action plan for a year
- 27. Pause - Interaction time Do you have any questions on facilitation? Some questions for you: • What are some of your facilitation challenges? • What are you doing to meet/solve them?
- 28. Furthermore… • This webinar was developed using the following resources: • The IMARK module “Knowledge Sharing for Development”: http://www.imarkgroup.org/#/imark/en/course/K • The IMARK module “Building Electronic Communities and Networks”: http://www.imarkgroup.org/#/imark/en/course/C • FAO Design Aid: http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/knowledge/do cs/FAO-NC-DesignAid.docx • Ask us about the practical webinar on facilitation tips and tricks!
Editor's Notes
- My name is Lucie Lamoureux and I’m very happy to be your webinar host today. Together with me in the facilitation team are Pier Andrea Pirani and Ivan Kulis. Pier will be our technical host for the session and Ivan will be managing the chat and interaction periods.
- Why are we doing this pilot webinar series? This is in response to Dgroups partners demand to support their admins and users to use the platform at his full potential. Setting up a community is easy but engaging members requires care, skills and time. Together with ECDPM, we’ve planned this pilot series of 3 webinars that to help users to understand the ins and outs of the Dgroups platform (this was webinar no.1 from last month), learn the basics for online community building, from planning to design to facilitation (this webinar), and finally an upcoming webinar on facilitation troubleshooting will provide tips and tricks for online facilitation.
- So over the next 90 minutes, we will cover the following topics. We will go over key community challenges and their potential enablers, as well as look at the importance of purpose and planning for your community. We will also look at the main four strategic drivers for building communities and provide some specific examples of communities using Dgroups. We’ll discuss the importance of facilitation to sustain your Dgroup and explore specific facilitation tasks, as well as some of the facilitation techniques. Finally, we’ll look at what facilitation practice entails more concretely and look at how to plan your community interventions.
- Before we jump into the content, this is how we have set-up this webinar. First, the format will consist of 3 blocks of approximately 15 minutes. After each of these, there will be roughly 15 minutes for interaction. To manage the interaction portion, we’ll ask you to use the “Raise Hand” emoticon on the top left. But if you think of questions during the presentation, please type them into the Chat box and Ivan will collect them and we’ll get to them in the pause. If ever you encounter technical issues, please type in the Chat box asking for help and Pier will take care of you. If you drop out, try coming back in by clicking the link to re-enter the room.
- Chances are, you have already encountered some challenges in developing and supporting your Dgroup. Here are a few that are quite common to communities everywhere. First, a basic one : if your community members are located in countries where there are access and connectivity issues, it is important to have a platform which makes it as easy as possible for them to participate. Dgroups was created with these people in mind and is probably your best bet to reach out to as many people as possible. One of the most prevalent challenge in developing communities is how to keep participation going and members motivated. There is also often a “build it and they will come” fallacy, where some community leaders think that creating a Dgroup is sufficient to attract people. People are busy and finding time out of their days to participate in communities can be difficult. To mitigate these challenges, there are a couple of things that can be done, like ensuring that the purpose of your community is focused on shared or common goals. The actual interaction topics or activities should also be relevant and resonate with members and be done on a regular basis in order to engage members. We will be looking into these community enablers in the next few slides. Another important community challenge relates to building trust in the group and dealing with cultural diversity issues. Online interactions have their own sets of issues, bringing out challenging behaviour from members. Some may come forward as rude and overbearing, which can have a terrible effect on the environment your are trying to build in the group. Gender, hierarchy and other cultural factors can also affect the nature of the interactions in your community. Later we will look at how facilitation can alleviate these factors and help to create stronger communities.
- The first community enabler we’ll look into in more detail is purpose. It should be driving the design and planning of your community. Your community needs to add value to the work of its members, they need to know why they are there, how they can contribute, and what they can expect from the community. So the purpose not only needs to be clear but articulated and shared with members. And successful communities state and restate their purpose through different ways, for e.g. they clearly state the purpose of the online community on the Dgroup; they articulate the ways in which the discussions, resources, activities, etc. of the community will serve the overall purpose of the community; they highlight unique ways in which participation in the community will inform practice.
- In order to get clarity on purpose, there is a tool prepared by FAO called the Community Design Aid. This works as a purpose checklist, with 3 pages of in-depth questions. It can be very useful when starting a new community but it can also be used to reassess or plan for an existing one. Filling it out may also make you reconsider whether you should create a new community or not. It will definitely make you think about what a community entails. An example: a FAO staff member was tasked back in 2006 to create a community on food security. She started using the Design Aid and ended up going through three different iterations before actually settling on what the purpose should be, what type of members should participate, what they would get out of it, etc. This is now one of the most active of the network created by FAO, the FSN Forum.
- Another community enabler is how relevance. The more relevant the topics and activities are to members’ work, the more likely they will participate regularly. Smart communities are attuned to members needs. Using member assessments and surveys can ensure that the community remains relevant. But most important is to actually use those suggestions, which shows that the community is responsive. It’s always a good idea to engage members, to give them roles if they are interested, which builds buy-in and commitment.
- Let’s take a break here at this time to see if there are any questions regarding what has been covered so far. Ivan, were there any questions in the Chat box? If any of you have questions, please use the Raised Hand icon.
- Communities are developed for different reasons, to achieve different purposes. What are some of the strategic drivers for communities? What is motivating you or your organization to develop a community on Dgroup? Let’s look at 4 of the drivers that can provide impulse or motivation. The first one is knowledge sharing, quite simply, sharing your experience with others. It can also be to find knowledge from a group of peers or experts. Depending on the type of work you are doing, a Dgroup might be a strategic tool to publish papers, articles, or any other explicit knowledge and also to provide exposure for your work. The top two are highlighted in blue because these motivations are at the heart of the following example, the KM4dev community.
- KM4dev was created back in 2000. It is a community of international development practitioners who are interested in knowledge management and knowledge sharing approaches, and who seek to share ideas and experiences in this domain. So knowledge sharing about knowledge sharing, really! The Dgroup mailing list is at the centre with over 2000 members. Other than the Dgroup, there is also a website and a Facebook page. Members also tweet using #km4dev.
- A second driver is wanting to create communities that are focused on enabling learning, which comes when going outside of your own "knowledge boundaries“. The conversations that can take place within communities bring experiences and knowledge to the surface. One of the best ways to surface these experiences is through asking questions and answering others questions, this is often the motor of community discussions. This allows you to be up-to-date in your field and even perhaps learn specific things that improve not just your knowledge but your capacities as well.
- The blue highlight was for “Being up-to-date of the latest in your area of interest and work”. This is central to the Web2ForDev discussion group, which came out of a conference in 2007. The community focuses on Web 2.0 and Social Media used in the context of development cooperation. They also use a variety of social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) but the English language Dgroup discussion has over 4000 members.
- Another potential community driver is “connecting”, building relationships with your fellow practitioners or peers, discovering new partners from similar or different settings, with whom you have shared interest. Often just finding out who knows what in your field can be useful and communities can also be helpful to ensure newcomers find their way within the field. Being active in a community can also help to establish your reputation in the field or identity as a practitioner, so on a personal level, communities can provide a strategic advantage as well.
- PAEPARD is an EU project which is trying to connect farmer organizations, civil society groups, research institutes and education institutes, private companies and policy networks in Africa. Their purpose is to build partnerships and strengthen capacity. They have a variety of sub-communities around specific topics that their stakeholders are interested in.
- The fourth driver is “Creating” new knowledge by cooperating with others, which can take very different forms according to each type of community. Some communities develop their own knowledge base, a repository for their collective knowledge. Others work collaboratively on projects or research, and can also work collectively on contributions to inform policy development. While some communities focus on creating outputs, some are focused on catalyzing action or creating change.
- HIFA 2015 is a global campaign has been focused on catalyzing action to improve the availability and use of healthcare information in developing countries since 2006. They have more than 12,000 members who interact via 5 Dgroup email discussion forums in 3 languages. Their knowledge base, HIFA Voices, is made up of short, verbatim extracts — "HIFA Quotations" — from HIFA discussions. It has been instrumental in helping to inform WHO policy guidelines.
- Another example of a community setting out to create is the Dgroups community “Food for Cities” , which was set up in 2009 . Ithas grown into a community of practice with over 2500 members from 114 countries. One collaboration members worked on together is a discussion paper on “developing a local food system approach”.
- Let’s stop here for our second pause to see if there are any questions regarding what has been covered since the beginning. Ivan, were there any questions in the Chat box? If any of you have questions, please use the Raised Hand icon.
- Now if you recall from the “community challenges” slide, we said that facilitation was an important enabler for communities. We’ve already established that to be most effective, communities need to have a shared sense of purpose. We also know that solely creating an online space like a Dgroup doesn’t mean that people will participate. This is where facilitation comes in by providing structure and process to help accomplish objectives and achieve the community’s purpose. Another important role of facilitation is to make sure that online interactions are done in a respectful way though healthy community dynamics. We’ll take a look at examples of this a bit later.
- So let’s look at some of the specific tasks of an online facilitator. As we’ve already mentioned, making sure everyone is clear on the purpose of the community and occasionally restating it. For e.g., this could be done in a monthly newsletter sent to the group. Greeting new members helps to make them feel welcomed into the community. There are many ways to do this, either in small batches to the whole group (e.g. 3-4 people in one message) or by sending personal message using a specific format. As mentioned earlier, regularly assessing member needs is crucial to keeping your community relevant. A facilitator should also provide a structure or plan for interactions. This can be a loose structure like, “we will do a focused conversation on a specific topic every 2 months and produce a summary”. If you are engaged in discussions, the facilitator makes sure it remains on topic but should also ask questions, send links to resources, etc. Another task is to engage with members offline. For example, a facilitator might want to call or Skype with community champions to ask them to provide input on something which is happening on the Dgroup. This may also be the case if there are conflicts between members, where a facilitator would “take” them offline or in personal emails to try to resolves the issues. On the discussion group, it’s also important to acknowledge that there are differences between members and that those should be respected. This is all in order to build the relationships between members, ensure understanding and create trust.
- So here are the 5 main techniques a facilitator uses: 1) listening/reading: what is said, not said and interpreting silence. This goes beyond the actual “reading” into more “interpreting” what is being said. 2) Composing messages: messages coming from facilitators should always be clear and concise to avoid confusion. Avoid also cramming multiple points or meanings into a single message. 3) Asking questions: asking any type of questions open ended, closed or clarifying ones is a facilitator’s best technique in the toolbox as it engages people. 4) Summarizing and synthesizing: so, summarizing what has been said or paraphrasing, that is, restating in different words. 5) Finally, clarifying, which can be done using a lot of the preceding techniques or illustrating with examples.
- To summarize the facilitation practice: focus members on the purpose and remind them regularly; act as a connector, have people introduce themselves and make connections between the interests of members, see who could help each other; make the integration of new members easier, welcome them, share information about the community. Of course, use the facilitation techniques to be proactive, ask questions, clarify, provide information but also be on the lookout for opportunities for the community (for e.g. events, common project, policy or research, etc.).
- Of course, actually guiding the online interactions, facilitating the discussions which means having to intervene and mediate conflicts and to establish norms or codes of conduct but also to occasionally obtain agreements. You will probably also need to be a technology steward and guide people when Dgroups technology issues arise (hopefully, you participated in Webinar no 1 hosted by Pier! If you didn’t, it was recorded so you can listen to it). Lastly, there may also be an element of cyber-librarianship in your practice, where you need to curate or manage the community content.
- Of course, you are probably thinking, all of this takes time! It just isn’t possible to do everything! This is why having a plan for your facilitating your Dgroup is important. You can decide where to focus and when. For e.g., if you are just starting your community, you may want to put more effort in the “connecting”, getting people to introduce themselves, and brokering relationships. Another idea is to plan interventions around events for e.g. a discussion to feed into a face-to-face meeting of your community. If you think that there might be a lull after an event or towards the end of the year, plan to find an opportunity for collective involvement for e.g. providing input to a policy process. You can broadly map out an action plan over a year that included interventions at different levels, and also engages others.
- So this is our last pause for questions regarding what we covered on facilitation. Ivan, were there any questions in the Chat box? If any of you have questions, please use the Raised Hand icon.
- These are the resources we used to develop the webinar and they are very useful ones to check out! The next webinar will be a more practical clinic based on your real-life community facilitation problems. So sign up for facilitation tips and tricks! Thanks to my colleagues Ivan and Pier and think you all!