Evaluation E-conference Knowledge Management 2004

Summary

Twenty-four out of a total of 149 participants (16.1%) filled in an evaluation form. Of these 24, four respondents were from the organisers (IRC).

Pre-conference phase

Nearly all respondents found the promotion and publicity of the E-conference good to excellent (88%). The most effective publicity channels were: direct invitation by IRC (25%), the IRC web site (21%), and the Nepal offline workshop (12.5%), followed by a promotional mailing sent through the Gender and Water Alliance (GWA) network (8%) and e-mail listservers (8%).

The background and summary papers were well received: they were rated good to excellent by 88% of respondents, although one respondent commented that the background documents had to re-read several times to be fully understood. The pre-conference information was clear according to 75% of participants, though a few participants new to e-conferencing had some initial problems.

E-conference functionality - technical aspects

Since this was the first IRC E-conference hosted on the new IRC portal, some technical difficulties were to be expected but in practice over 70% of the respondents did not encounter any difficulties. The majority (16 = 67%) read contributions by e-mail, 7 (29%) read them both by e-mail and on the web site.

The technical irritations mentioned more than once included the double or unnecessary e-mail notifications and the inability to edit contributions submitted to the web site. Several recommendations were given to improve e-mail notifications including the option to receive digests and making clearer who is sending notifications. Others respondents pointed at more general technical constraints like poor Internet access, reminding us not to forget 

Topics

When asked which of the four topics (constraints; benefits and added values; lessons learned; and scaling-up) was found to be most useful, the scores for each topic were more or less equal (21-29%) while 21% found all topics useful. Lessons learned and scaling-up were considered least useful in 17% and 21% of the cases, compared to 8% and 4% for constraints and benefits/added values respectively.

When the respondents were asked which issues dealt with were most valuable for their work, they mentioned the following more than once: constraints (33%), scaling-up (25%), case studies/lessons learned (21%), KM awareness/awareness raising (12.5%) and networking (8%).

Appreciation

There was a high rate of satisfaction with nearly all aspects of the E-conference, with the highest ratings - 88% good to excellent - for promotion and publicity, support from conference organisers, and background/summary papers. A slightly lower appreciation was given to quality of messages (83%), moderation and web page/forum functionality (76% each) and the amount of messages (71%). The lowest appreciation was given to the quality of the dialogue (63% good to excellent) which was also given the highest “poor” rating (12%).

The majority of respondents were happy with the duration of the E-conference: 79% said one week per topic was about right, and 59% said the total duration (4 weeks) was about right, slightly more (17%) found it too long rather than too short (8%).

Participation

Most of the respondents (62.5%) said they had contributed to the e-conference. Of these 54% had contributed through the website, and 42% by e-mail. The reason mentioned most for not participating was “no time” (4), followed by “no relevant experience to contribute” (2). Mentioned once each were language barrier, technical difficulties, and topics outside field of interest.

A slight majority (67%) of the respondents were relatively new to the subject of KM of whom 81% said they felt that the concept of KM has become clearer to them. The remainder more experienced in KM, all said they gained new insights or otherwise benefited from the E-conference.

Follow-up

All but one respondent indicated they would like to be kept informed about KM developments in the water and sanitation sector. Among the suggestions for follow-up were:

• Holding further e-conferences on more specific issues
• Organising a short e-conference on general topic followed by weekly discussions on specific topics
• Holding concurrent E-conferences in Spanish and French
• Translate E-conference  material into Russian
• Publish results in hard copy
• Give incentives to participate