E-collaboration boekje

I COLLABORATE,E-COLLABORATE,WE COLLABORATE

A collection of stories aboute-collaboration experiences

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Product of PSO, Capacity Building in developing countries, the HagueAndIICD, International Institute for Communication and Development, The HagueFebruary 2007

When you don’t know how to ride a bike,walking is always faster!

Foreword

Have you used Skype or MSN for commu-nicating with others located somewherearound the world? Already experienced anonline conference meeting with a groupcolleagues from different countries?Or watched a video on the web from aninteresting conference you could notattend? International Development hasalways had a global character, but never before have the developments and useof web-technologies changed so rapidly.Within international development, individu-als and organisations have similar experi-ences and similar interests, from differentplaces in the world. Continuous socio-technological developments in the area of communication and ICT make it nowadayspossible to connect with each other glob-ally in new ways, making use of the widerange of innovations created on the web.This offers more and new opportunities for knowledge sharing, collaboration process-es, dialogue, and interaction. The newrange of tools, like for instance skype, donot only make communication cheaper,but have the potential to change thenature of collaboration and relationshipsin international development too. Physicaldistances can be bridged, by making useof new possibilities to communicate. Buthow do people in development organisa-tions learn how to make use of new tools?And which tools are really useful? Andhow can we help them not to drown in thesea of new tools, abbreviations and error messages?

Content overview

Reading suggestion:

This booklet contains 14 stories of organi-sations using e-collaboration in some way.You might read from A to Z. Another sug-gestion is to read those stories that inspireyou, stories about e-tools you are curiousabout, stories closely related to process inyour own work.

• Introduction page 04•Story 01Del.icio.us Sharing interesting websites page 05•Story 02Skype Communication with partnersthrough the internet page 10•Story 03KIC project Sharing knowledge with andbetween counterparts page 12•Story 04TeamSpeak Meeting each other online page 16•Story 05CMS Supporting an online course page 20•Story 06CMS Setting up an online database page 24•Story 07Claroline Using an online learning space page 26•Story 08Intranet The intranet as an information resource page 28•Story 09Moodle Managing courses and projects page 30•Story 10Wiki Creating together online page 32•Story 11Groove Working together acrossdistances page 34•Story 12Dgroups To support and manage people page 36•Story 13Dgroups To discuss or create page 38•Story 14Weblog Sharing your personal views page 40• Findings: what do the stories tell us? Page 43

In this relatively new area various Dutchdevelopment organisations, large andsmall, are undertaking interesting experi-ments and try-outs which are worthwhileto make explicit and share with eachother. This booklet describes 14 storiesof organisations using e-collaboration insome way, varying from using Moodle asan online learning platform to Teamspeakas a software tool for having an onlinemeeting with partners located all over theglobe. We hope to inspire you with theseexperiences, stimulating you to take this

rst step, using your work as a laboratory

for experimenting. The following expres-sion might help you getting started: Whenyou don’t know how to ride a bike, walkingis always faster! We hope you will enjoythe stories!

Sibrenne Wagenaar,facilitator of learning, PSOJoitske Hulsebosch,

ofcer knowledge sharing, IICD

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ForewordContent

Introduction

This booklet is a product of a researchdone in the development sector on e-collaboration experiences. We becameinterested in what organisations are doingwith e-collaboration technologies andwhich questions and problems they come

across. As we dene e-collaboration as

“the process of cooperation and communi-cation among individuals or organisationswith the common goal of knowledge shar-ing and mutual development with the useof e-tools”, what are experiences, insights,

tools people use? With this denition

processes like e-learning, e-facilitating,collaboration, e-coaching, sharing andexchanging knowledge and networkingare all part of e-collaboration.

For nding answers to these questions we

designed a research plan, aimed to getan impression of e-collaboration storiesamong Dutch NGOs, in order to supportand inspire organisations or individualsthrough the experiences of others. Wevisited 12 Dutch NGOs, each with anstory worth sharing, focusing on inspiringinitiatives which formed an example of apossible way to start e-collaborating withpartner organisations or within an organi-sation.

Maaike van der Steenhoven,student at the University of Utrecht, researcher and PSO traineeSibrenne Wagenaar,PSO, facilitator Joitske Hulsebosch,IICD, facilitator

Learning community one-collaboration

On November 2nd 2005, PSO, IICD and ICCO conducted a meeting for DutchNGOs about e-collaboration. About 30 people visited this meeting and afterwardsa D-group (E-collaboration among DutchNGOs) was started to encourage theexchange ideas, issues, questions and knowledge. This group has grown into acommunity or network of people inter-ested in e-collaboration. An e-collabora-tion learning community has been born,which is shown by the effort people invest to keep this community alive, as well as inthe meetings, at the D-group and betweenindividual members. The stories present-ed in this booklet come from members of the e-collaboration learning community.These and more stories can be found onthe internet:http://icollaborate.blogspot.com/

STORY 01: Sharing interestingwebsites

Interview with Joitske Hulsebosch from IICD.(http://www.iicd.nl/)

The tool: del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is an online tool. Its potential isdescribed in just 3 words on the website:keep, share and discover. (http://del.icio.us/) Information on the internet can becollected, shared and discovered onlinewith this social bookmarking tool. All theinformation stored on del.icio.us is public,so everybody can see and search all thecollected bookmarks of other people.

What can you do with del.icio.us?

Bookmarks to websites and online PDF-

les can be documented online. The user

can assign so-called tags to these book-marks. A tag according to the website is:“just a word that describes an item savedon del.icio.us.” By assigning different tagsto a bookmark, a description is provided of the information behind the hyperlink.The bookmarks cannot be categorized, asyou would in the ‘favourites’ of your inter-net browser. Instead of assigning catego-ries to the bookmarks, in del.icio.us youcan place the tags used under a heading.These categories and the tags are dis-

played on the rst page of del.icio.us, so

you quickly get a good idea of the owner’s

eld of interest.You can subscribe to other

peoples’ del.icio.us webpage. Their linkswill appear in a separate section of your own del.icio.us webpage. With everyhyperlink added you can see how manypeople have the same page bookmarkedand who they are.

What do you need?

Del.icio.us is online, so you need an inter-net connection, and it is free of charge.

Knowledge sharing andinding people

“I’ve used del.icio.us for while now, sinceJanuary 2006, and I think it is an idealtool to organise all the information that Igather in and around my work. I tried itafter a discussion we had online aboutweb2.0 tools in CPsquare, but started toget enthusiastic when I talked to Peter Ballantyne and his ideas on how to useit to produce a feed with relevant links

on a certain topic. At rst, when I’d just

heard about de.icio.us, I couldn’t really

picture the benets for myself. Because

of Peter’s vision and our experiment withthe possibilities of the tool, I started usingit more intensively and invested time inlearning for instance how to cluster tags.I use del.icio.us to bookmark all interest-ing websites I come across when lookingfor information for work or just to keep up.Besides keeping all the information or-ganised I also use del.icio.us as a searchengine.”Can you tell me anything about the experi-ment you started around del.icio.us andsocial bookmarking? “Around Februaryof this year we (myself and my colleagueNynke Kruidering, Dorine Ruter fromETC and Peter Ballantyne of Euforic)came together and decided to start a littleexperiment with del.icio.us to see whatsocial bookmarking could do for us andhow it could help in our work. We sharedan interest in actually experimenting withweb2.0 tools. Our areas of interest andwork are very similar, we are all interestedin knowledge management and develop-ment cooperation. So we started thinking:“why look for information separately if wecan share?” We could produce a feedwith the links we found by using a uniquetag for resources we want to share withothers. That’s why we chose to make useof a special tag: km4dev_pilot and wemade a habit of using this tag for all our resources related to knowledge manage-ment in development. Del.icio.us offersthe option of an RSS feed for a tag, so it isvery easy to create a list of the bookmarks

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