Workshop on Knowledge Management and ‘Capitalisation’ for the entire CREPA network
Updated - Monday 19 March 2007
Documentation and dissemination of lessons learnt
Five knowledge management plans for the CREPA network in West Africa were the major outcome of a one-week workshop on Knowledge Management and ‘Capitalisation’ for the entire CREPA network in December 2006. Two IRC staff members facilitated the workshop, which brought together 25 people from ten countries from the region.
The first day comprised interactive exercises (River of life, geographic positioning) that put all participants in a good mood and a relaxed atmosphere. This was also a moment to focus briefly on knowledge management at personal level.
The general presentation on KM on the second day set the scene for the workshop and got the group to focus on KM at organisational level of the individual CREPA centres. Groups of two to three people came up with a KM plan for each Représentation Nationale, based on the KM plan methodology from earlier WIS6 and KM Learn@WELL workshops.
Documentation and dissemination of lessons learnt
Work on the third day focused on the organisational plans for KM at network level, with two explicit objectives to work on: capitalisation (systematic and ongoing project documentation and dissemination of lessons learnt, based on improved writing skills) and the use of CREPA’s Intranet. We organised a ‘world café’ (rebaptised Maquis mondial) and buzz groups to add flesh to five key questions around these two network ambitions. The groups worked on these objectives for the rest of the day.
The last day, all participants worked further on their objectives and proceeded with presentations in plenary. The results were quite good and revived the concept of ‘capitalisation’, which apparently had felt like a drag to all staff until then. We closed the workshop with some final (overwhelmingly positive) impressions of participants and the speech of a supportive general director to his network.
Main achievements
- Five KM plans for the network (3 on capitalisation, 2 on intranet) supported by the network.
- The concept of capitalisation is revitalised and all participants are happy to work on processes as opposed to their familiar WASH implementation work.
- More trust created within the network as all kinds of staff from the Siège and the RNs took part in this workshop.
- The webmaster is able to operate the CMS back end of the portal up to standard.
- A clean portal which will be ready for launch soon.
- Blue pages of the CREPA network including staff.
- A content plan and good start of the CREPA Intranet.
- Buy in from CREPA network partners to start contributing to the portal and keep each other better informed.
Work on portal
Since the Internet connection is average to good (on a scale none, bad, average, good, excellent) we took the opportunity to clean, revamp and populate the CREPA website and Intranet in the week before the workshop. In discussion the content structure was much simplified while explaining the back end interface and portal logic. An Intranet was made by CREPA and accessed in discussion.
The (new) portal was shown to the workshop participants and all workshop materials were published soonest on the (new) Intranet. Content from the old website was converted to the new CMS structure.
For the logistics on content delivery a Google group was set up. All RNs staff will be member and communicate with e-mail through the Google group. This way the webmaster has an archive of to be published content and all RNs staff will be notified by e-mail of new content that might be interesting.
For fun a Blog was set up for CREPA. Their webmaster will research its possibilities for the organisation. Much buy in was experienced to prioritise average to good Internet connections for all RNs to enable information to flow.
Resource Centre Development
We organised a brief information session on resource centre development (RCD) to get the RCD contact persons more informed about the RCD concept and key phases. This included presentations about ‘the ideal Resource Centre’ and the typical phases of RCD. A short discussion followed. The participants were the RCD contact persons of the 6 countries where the programme has started as well as the person that could take that role in the other countries. The RCD initiatives have been launched in Togo and Senegal, where a network is already being formed and has gathered lots of interest. Progress is much slower in other regions.
CREPA agreed to prepare a case study, facilitate a discussion and prepare a synthesis of the discussion and the RCD issue of institutionalising RCD and knowledge management within the network.
Regionalization of the Sources Nouvelles newsletter as from 2008 was also discussed. The three-person CREPA team is ready to have a bigger role, they will propose changes in the composition of the newsletter, they suggested more promotion in the region, a better spread of the printed bulletins, looking for joint funds, including news from Northern Africa
Follow-up
A follow-up workshop is scheduled for April 2007 to address the network objective of ‘capitalisation’. This will be a very practical workshop for many members of the CREPA network and will be followed by a three-day workshop on RCD to get other RCD contact persons up to speed with the concept and the first activities.
