Question 4: What actions should now be facilitated by the CIARD Task Forces?

 I believe that Keizer and Kristian have elaborated verey well on what we should do. I am currently attending a Sympsium and General Meeting of African Agricultural Advisory Services (AFAAS) in Accra. These are the issues we have discussed in one of the side events which I chaired. We need to makle pour "stuff" available. We have to start of thinking about the kind of capacity development initiatives to undertake. Whereas the "North" is fast moving with new technologies by the time we in the "South" begin to use them, they are almost becoming obsolete. This is a fact of truth the we shall leave with for long. 

I like the idea of foming different work groups to handle different assignments but we have to be very committed to our cause. I have seen many people who want to be on teams and yet they do not contribute anything.

We shall have to lobby and advocate for increased investment in ICT/M especially in Africa and supporting the use of web 2.0 tools. Hhhumm  the lsit can go on and on..

I have struggled for 4 good hours to get connected to Internet to make sure that I contribute my views which I had already typed. The Internet in this Hotel - Alisa was like a snail.

By the way how do we make sure that farmers also benefit directly without going via advisory service providers. This buffles me.

Yes, we have to work on the entire continuum of stars :-). There will be  situations, in which we still will have to make reality only the first one.  But if whe have in mind the entire program, it helps us to do also the first passes in the right direction.

Regarding the **** and ***** steps, we not only need guidelines.  Generic guidelines exist, i.e at  http://linkeddata.org/, but this is not enough to get to work.

We need precise workprograms for specific areas, we need - and Valeria pointed to this already strongly -  adapted tools that are able to produce and to consume linked data. 

A use of Linked Open Data you can see at   http://www.fao.org/countryprofiles/index.asp?lang=en&ISO3=TCD.   IFPRI data that are published as LOD are integrated automatically into the FAO country profiles.

My presentation at the Brussels LOD event on Tuesday is available at:

http://www.slideshare.net/Keizer/init-lod-brussels20110412

Regarding points 2 (Extensively  using  shared vocabularies and frameworks) and 3 (Creating document repositories using existing data exchange protocols such as OAIPMH) listed in the introductory post, these can be immediate actions for Institutions that have the capacities and tools to do it. But I personally think one of the biggest efforts under CIARD should be that of identifying material and tools that can enable Institutions to do this.
The Pathways are already a useful resource (which should be enlarged), and in the RING portal there is a plan to host more and more in-depth technical tutorials (a step further from the Pathways, which are more synthetic) on how to achieve interoperability. Also the AIMS portal contains a lot of essential information on standards, tools and services.

And one of the key points in my opinion is still what Hugo said in another post in thread n.3:  standards will not be accepted if there are no tools that handle them. I'm convinced that at least a working group in CIARD (the CIARD Content Management Task Force?) should look at the issue of tools and provide guidelines, functional and non-functional requirements, and possibly also a registry / directory of tools that assesses tools against these requirements.

And still on the issue of enabling Institutions to better share information, since CIARD planned to start a "Capacity Development" Task Force since the beginning: do you see capacity development as an important activity under CIARD? And how should this work?

I think we need a) two main fields of capacity building; and b) two levels/ steps of capacity building.

The first field concerns the technical data interoperationality, the second the personal data transfer and if applyable the transformation of selected key information from scientific language into the language of farmers.

While for the first one less experts are needed, for the latter you will need many transmitters.

Therefore for building up capacities the initial point coulg be arranged by CIARD in qualifying regional/ country experts on common standards, who then function as multiplier and contact person for advice.

Yes, it is good to distinguish different aspects of capacity development. In discussions of the Content Management Task Force some years ago it appeared that all participants - including those commonly considered as technical 'wizards' -  indicated that most of what they did is capacity development. Developing applicationsand solving technicalo issues takes less time than explaining things and getting people to work with applications. I assume you mean that sort of cpacity building with "field 1". I agree that field 2 (in my words repackiging information in forms approporiate for communication with different audiences) should get more attention. In my view there is a third field: developing institutional readiness, getting thins organised. 

I am glad to hear that CIARD plans to commence a Capacity Development Taskforce. This would be a good starting point.

I strongly believe that Capacity Development is an important activity under CIARD. This could work in the following ways:

1. An analysis of the capacity gap needs in the area of agricultural information, communication, knowledge sharing and management
2. Promotion & Awareness (through advocacy on the importance of capacity development) of ongoing capacity development initiatives such as the MSc Agricultural Information & Communication Management academic degree whose aim is to build capacities of agricultural professionals to fully and effectively manage agricultural knowledge in the knowledge era. This MSc AICM has a modular approach in its structure - practitioners could take specific modules that apply to their fields of interest. Simplified additional self led training courses could also be developed from these modules
3. Support for strategic people towards building their capacities
4. Linkages and partnerships with organisations involved in capacity development
5. We also need to assess technical capacity gaps - partner with others globally to improve our own capacities.

CIARD Taskforce should:

• Support initiatives towards the standardization of data/information formats
• Facilitate foresighting / forcasting studies to guide the direction for sharing agricultural information effectively
• Advocacy for the prioritization of capacity building for agricultural professionals to be proficient in the use of emerging ICTs to improve agricultural information communication, sharing and management.A number of initiatives exist in Africa to build the capacities of Agricultural Professionals in the field of AICM (Agricultural Information and Communication Management).

I want to start the last day of this consultation with an announcement about 3 releases by the AIMS team in FAO that we consider of some importance for the future work on information sharing in our community. If you go to http://aims.fao.org   you will find