Entries from May 2007
A future story written by Simone
May 20, 2007 · Leave a Comment
Monday, June 18
The group gathers in the Knowledge Expedition meeting room. Chairs are organized in a circle. Victoria, a storytelling specialist and the facilitator of this workshop welcomes the entering participants. The room seems ready for an event where multimedia has a role to play. It looks like there will be video and sound recording going on. Mary, a photographer is ready to take some shots and Camilo will take notes for the written documentation. Beverly is sitting on a chair with a laptop. She tells me that she is in charge of the documentation of this session which will be videotaped, and podcasted: “After the workshop, we will work virtually together to design, and develop knowledge sharing training modules”, she says. “The KM4Dev community has the project to pool its knowledge and make it available to a larger community”. Simone is coming in. She is one of the Knowledge Expedition workshop coordinators. I ask her to tell me more: “This project is a complementary track to the KM/KS4Dev curriculum project which is upon to start in the room next door. While they will work on basic KS training modules, we will be collecting practitioner’s experiences through stories, that will illustrate the modules”, she says. “The groups will interact as much as possible during the workshop in order to take into account new ideas that emerge at both ends.”
When everybody is ready, Victoria introduces Mukishi, a development worker from Tanzania. Mukishi will share a story with the group about her work on the development of market opportunities through the application of innovative knowledge sharing approaches. It is CARE that brought Mukishi to the workshop. “We are very interested in setting up training programs on knowledge sharing and management”, says Mare, KS advisor at CARE.
Victoria explains the process of this workshop: Victoria will interview Mukishi and the group will then engage in conversations that turn around Mukishi’s story, and the participants related experiences.
During the next hour and a half, I discover what a storytelling specialist is able to do: Victoria engages Mikushi in a fascinating dialogue that turns around her experience in the field. Victoria manages to keep the conversation focused on the people, what difference the KS approaches made to the collaboration and the results of the projects. A big junk of the session is about Mukishi’s experience with knowledge fairs as a way to engage farmers.
After the break, Victoria opens the floor to the whole group of 15 participants. Mukishi s experience remains the focal point around which the discussion unfolds. Ruff, who sits beside me, mentions that the process is almost like a peer assist, and he seems very excited about the process. At the end of the session Victoria invites for a last round of short comments. Mukishi thanks the group for the opportunity to tell her story and the fruitful discussion. “It was interesting to share with people who know a lot about participatory processes. I have the feeling I could give some of my field experience and that this was useful to the group”.
Day one is over. I go to see Mukishi to thank her for sharing her experience. I ask Beverly how it went: “We got so much material to work with! I think we captured a lot of good stuff. The people from the curriculum group saw some excerpts and got very excited about the possible links between both approaches” I ask Allison how she sees the knowledge expeditions to develop further: “This is a first small, but important step,” she says. Through the knowledge expeditions, and experiences like the one Mukishi shared with us, we would like to engage with interested development practitioners in a long-term inquiry process, where we would work in a perpetual learning loop – meeting, learning, going out and testing, coming back to share and so on.” Allison invites Adrian to add something. Adrian works for SDC, who co-funded this project. “SDC was present when the knowledge expedition concept emerged, and we wanted to support this pilot initiative. For the SDC it is important to contribute to strengthen the network of KS practitioners of international development organizations, and to contribute to capacity building efforts in the area of knowledge sharing.
Tomorrow is the next round of the workshop. This time Jonas will share his experience. It is on Headquarter-regional relationships in development organization, a more institutional issue. The knowledge expedition team calls this theme “the fire of the field”. I am looking forward to it.
Categories: Stories
