Forum: "Building the CIARD Framework for Data and Information Sharing" April, 2011
Question 4: What actions should now be facilitated by the CIARD Task Forces?
29/03/2011
There are immediate actions and strategic interventions.
Immediate actions:
- Registering services at the CIARD RING: the CIARD RING is a platform on which information systems and data sets can be registered and technical details about them can be provided together with instructions on how to use these sources, making their "interfaces" (parameters, formats etc.) transparent for others.
- Extensively using shared vocabularies and frameworks: well known common
vocabularies are already available for the description of data. Generic vocabularies like "Dublin Core" or "FOAF" and specific vocabularies like AGROVOC and the Library of Congress Subject Headings are accessible openly on the web. The use of concepts from those common vocabularies will enormously facilitate the future production of linked data. Statistical data finds a coalition of international partners in the SDMX initiative. GIS standards such as OGC continue to lead the pack in sheer production quantity of interoperable data points. - Creating document repositories using existing data exchange protocols such as OAIPMH.
- Documenting and reporting successful examples of interoperability.
Strategic interventions:
- A blueprint is needed for a global infrastructure for data exchange in agricultural
research for development. This blueprint should be also the basis for mobilizing financial resources. - Ad hoc working groups could be established for specific areas.
- A series of events could be organized for advocacy and capacity development.
Good morning everybody,
Important activities are already noted in the background document.
I would suggest, that we change the order: Priority at the moment, should have strategic actions, respectively to elaborate a clear-cut strategy, then intermediate actions may follow.
Framing the content and target groups has started, but needs to be finalized. Building up on that requirement on content and techniques can be listed. We should find out, which larger organizations would contribute data sets - if we want to benefit from those, we may have to take into account legal requirements as well, before we think about technical details.
I think in this period, it would be helpful if CIARD could carry out the coordination.
In terms of working groups - I think, it turned out during the last days, that we have experts in different fields, which could be brought together. Important are the interlinks between the working groups and sometimes it might be good to directly ask if organization could provide certains experts (e.g. IT-experts, legal advisors).
On long-term, I think could play an important role to find sponsors for the necessary infrastructure for the information sharing. Certainly, organization can provide experts and data and so on, but to involve rural stakeholders/ farmers externally financed capacity building will be necessary.
Yesterday I participated here in Brussels in an event "Open Government in Practice - Tapping the potential of Linked Open Data". Richard Cyganiak from DERI (this is the guy whe "invented" the Linked Open Data cloud cited in his presentation the 5 star rules given recently in a talk by Tim Berners Lee:
"
★ make your stuff available on the web (whatever format) ★★ make it available as structured data (e.g. excel instead of image scan of a table) ★★★ non-proprietary format (e.g. csv instead of excel) ★★★★ use URLs to identify things, so that people can point at your stuff★★★★★
link your data to other people’s data to provide context
this is wonderfully summarized, what we have to do for efficient data sharing! Before that is the institutional and personal will to do so. Beyond this is the technology to use the data.
I presented at the event AGROVOC published as Linked Open Data. We all agreed that standard vocabularies (on entities, metadata and content) are an important element for data sharing in an LOD environment.
As one follow of this meeting we are considering a workshop on LOD vocabularies in September organized by the EC (DIGIT-SEMIC.EU), FAO (AIMS) and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative together with DC2011 in September in Den Hague. A very exciting prospective
Many of CIARD stakeholders who may be joinig the discussions after the final reminder has been sent to them might be asking themselves... okay, so what do I do with all this discussion now...
This section of the discussion is also aiming at that same question - what processes do the CIARD Task Forces have to facilitate for us to move the agenda forward? The categorisation of immediate actions and strategic actions 'immediately' makes one ask the question - 'Shouldn't there be something in between?' - at least that was my reaction; and I guess this discussion is about sharing our reactions to the questions!
I re-read Johannes' contribution and I believe the 5 stars approach, as well as the paragraph that followed are quite important. Let's start with what can and needs to be done at individual and institutional level (making information available so that people can point to it and adding the context) - this can be done at any level (instutional, national, sectoral, regional), but it makes most sense if these information resources can be linked to the CIARD RING.
As far as the other immediate actions mentioned (vocabularies, LOD etc.), even if it feels like it is not immediately feasible, at least, one can start a discusion at institutional level about it - and that could lead to concerted efforts along the lines of the CIARD principles.
Should we see 'tactical actions' being mentioned as the in between activities? Any examples come to mind? I believe that keeping the issue of interoperability, data sharing alive at your workplace is a tactical action which keeps the item on the agenda. Maybe we should share such experiences more often among ourselves, not necessarily at global level, but among our national networks or regional networks, just to keep motivating our peers.
The technology and methods of implementation comes after you have been able to take the first step and got a few colleagues motivated to start this process of sharing information. Should you do it for them? You could, but you could be alone doing it.
As one of our participants at a regional workshop philosophically quoted last year: " if you want to move fast, charge forward alone; if you want to go far, its better to move together with others" - this is particularly relevant in the efforts we are embarking on, because its success depends on collective collaboration.
Having said all that, I am still asking myself, what is the first step? If you haven't done so yet, lets plan to revisit the CIARD RING together and have a conversation about it - perhaps we may be moving alone in our institutions but at least we know that we are not alone in this journey of implementing the CIARD! Is this an activity you think one of the Task Forces should be facilitating?
Krishan
I deeply agree with Krishan post and I would like to contribute to this discussion by pointing out a personal concern.
Embrapa is a great institution with 40 research centers distributed in Brazil. There is a centralized management at Brasilia, DF (Brazil´s Federal Capital) and many decisions have to be taken at that level.
Here in Campinas (State of Sao Paulo), where I work we are concerned to develop IT's tools to help organize and disseminate information. We have several initiatives (some already underway, others still being planned) that will meet the five stars mentioned by Johannes. But we need to complement our skills!
Our role is to develop projects of RD & I to support decision making processes. We participate as counselors members in various Embrapa´s work groups, but strategic and institutional decisions are made by other levels and people.
I think that CIARD initiatives are a great opportunity to formalize formats of collaborative work between Embrapa and foreign partners. However, we must develop a work to facilitate Embrapa´s understandings about the importance of what we are discussing and help the decision to formally participate in this movement.
At this point I think CIARD could organize and help the institutions that are still on the sidelines of this issue to become better involved and to contribute in a future not too distant with their information contents. The first step would be to resolve some legal issues, signing cooperation protocols, e.g.
Dear Ivo,
I think, you are totally right - we all are able to act as person, but before most of us are allowed to act in the of the institute the information sharing project has to be institutionalized or at least have a clear frame - that is why I came with "legal issue" this morning right at the beginning.
Certainly, it would already be great if numerous individuals provide information, but the information (be it publications or expertise) of the staff of numberous institutions would be much better and that will only be possible if the institutions can assign responsibility for the information sharing project to certain actors.
I fully agree with Ivo, we must work hard and fast on the idea of better institutional understanding of CIARD. Indeed there is a mayor role for us international organization to "massage" the message so it becomes easy to understand to those side lined organizations.
Also I strongly believe that we need to put in practice what we preach so the first ones to have CIARD engagement shoud be our own institutions. Otherwise becomes pretty difficult to "sell" the idea to someone if you have not "eat your own dog food".
All the best,
Federico Sancho
Head of the Interamerican Information and Editorial Production Center for Agriculture
IICA
The five-star is a very useful way to explain the various to open up data, "the stuff". Most of CIARD's actions up till now do not concern "the stuff" itself, but the metadata that describes the stuff and makes it possible to discover "the stuff". If this is a new stage for CIARD, dealing with the stuff itself rather than its discovery and accssibility, this should be communicated in a clear way. Are all stakeholders for this new phase on board?
Yes Hugo, perhaps the CIARD Initiative has actually matured to now start addressing 'the stuff' itself. Definitely, the metadata phase was and still is important. It also seemed to be a strategy not to fall into the trap of institutions spending time debating on whether they can actually share their information or not, but rather to meanwhile describe what it holds as information. The issue of sharing could come when the requests were coming in... So, for some of us, we are now having to cross this bridge, while for others (many others, like in Sub-Saharan Africa) we are yet to start the journey.
So, strategically, we need to continue with the efforts on the metadata phase, but in parallel start addressing the issue of information sharing with 'the stuff'. Hopefully, with such efforts on the latter, we will also be able to showcase how actions on the initial phase of describing 'the stuff' can eventually bring us closer to the long-term vision.
So, I would say that some of the stakeholders are ready to come on board, while others are still in need on mentoring (i will raise this issue of mentoring elsewhere)
The ranking system is a useful reminder that a lot of capacity still needs to be built in the 1-3 star range before many stakeholders can move on to address stars 4 and 5. I suggest that the strategy should include training and mentoring activities to help organisations at this level progress- eg. those that are just taking their first steps in web publishing or setting up their first OAI repository.
Regarding groups ready to tackle more advanced issues such as LOD/RDF, it would be useful to develop documentation to guide people that are developing for or implementing these technologies. For example:
* Real world case studies of LOD/RDF/vocabulary usage in agricultural information systems / an agricultural context.
* Practical guidelines on LOD/RDF/vocabulary implementation and consumption in an agricultural information systems / an agricultural context.
The Open Archives Initiative did a great job with its OAIPMH implementation guidelines, it would be great to have similar guidance available for these too.
NACA: " I suggest that the strategy should include training and mentoring activities to help organisations at this level progress- eg. those that are just taking their first steps in web publishing or setting up their first OAI repository"
I fully agree, especially on the 'mentoring' aspect. Capacity-building is fine to upgrade our understanding and skills, but is it enough to bring the 'capacitated institution' to action? This is where we need to learn from our colleagues in Advisory Services and Extension, because we are aiming for change in behaviour. This is a process that has to be spread over time and factored for in the capacity-development programming.
I am wondering to what extent we could describe the process of embarking on the first steps to actually being fully involved in CIARD-recommended practices in a series of phases. Once we have done that (albeit a rough scale), could we then identify mentors at each level who will coach someone else who has been at a 'lower' level? For those who have trained, you will appreciate that the best way to learn about what you do is to teach someone else how to do it - so the principle proposed here is the same - get those who have been able to go through one of the steps, to help someone else do it and so on. We could even organise it as a series of 'cohorts' or 'informal courses' that a few 'volunteers' would run for others. The only way you pay back for the skills you have acquired is that you need to demonstrate that you have been able to help someone else.
Have we ever tried to quantify the number of people the CIARD should be touching directly and indirectly? Are the numbers from the regional consultations an good indication? Can we make a good estimate so it helps us quantify the amount of resources we need (or we have to source ourselves) to acheive our goals? Such an exercise may be helpful in attracting funds for our activities.
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:
- An analysis of the capacity gap needs in the area of agricultural information, communication, knowledge sharing and management
- 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
- Support for strategic people towards building their capacities
- Linkages and partnerships with organisations involved in capacity development
- 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
Agrotagger 2.0 Released 14/04/2011 - 17:46 VocBench 1.1 Released 14/04/2011 - 16:52 AGROVOC Thesaurus released as Linked Open Data 14/04/2011 - 16:26 With the release of AGROVOC as linked open data we have made the thesaurus available for easy re-use in a linked open data infrastucture. It contains already 20,000 outlinks and 2,000 inlinks after being available for 2 weeks now. The release of the VocBench 1.1 gives an editing environment for SKOS based vocabularies that in this way is unique, because it embraces the community character of maintaining a vocabulary. Agrotagger as published by our partner MIMOS in Malaysia is the first step to a create a service that discovers subjects and entitities in prior not indexed information and links them to a global infrastructure. This is only a first step, but we want to show the direction. Read more at http://aims.fao.orgThe PhilAgriNet database uses FAO tools to share agricultural knowledge to possible users. We use WebAGRIS, Agrovoc, and the new tool: AgroTagger. The latter has been intorduced to our members and they are one in saying that AgroTagger would be very useful in subject indexing of Philippine agricultural literature.
Congratulations to FAO for the exciting news about AGROVOC, VocBench, and Agrotagger!
As defined in the "five-star" approach, the fourth star is about making your resources "citable" by identifying them with URLs, and fifth star -- the summit of the Linked Data mountain -- is about "linking your data to other people's data to provide context".
As I see it, linking your data to others' data is about embedding your data into a rich web of cross-references -- pathways by which people can discover your data.
Some of those pathways may connect your resources with other resources -- "this research report is the basis for that article", or "this news item summarizes that conference paper". Other pathways connect people to resources -- "Hugo wrote this report" or "Sanjay recommends that blog". Others connect resources to "topics", as in "this research report is about maize (http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_12332)".
Focusing on simple connections suggests a way forward:
1) Ask: what Resources, People, and Topics are important enough to be linked to or cited? Then aim at providing guidance on how to give those things URLs.
2) Then ask: What are the most important ways to link those things? One could perhaps boil this down to a few types of statements such as those listed above. Then aim at providing guidance on publishing simple metadata to make those connections. The guidance would describe how to extract basic information from existing data.
3) Then ask: How can we pull these links together and make them searchable? Some of these goals are already implicit in the CIARD Pathways to Research Uptake (http://www.ciard.net/pathways), just with a tighter focus on harvesting and querying the linked data.
A colleague of mine experienced in "selling" linked data approaches to organizations tells me that the single most convincing demonstration of the utility of the new approach is when people see their own data linked and discoverable in a new context.
Wow. There have been lots of really good discussions on all of the questions so far and it's good to see that we're still going strong when addressing this final question.
I'd like to start by considering who *is* CIARD anyway? To me, CIARD is a community of practictioners. The criteria for becoming part of the community, or more officially, a CIARD Partner, it essentially boils down to an agreement to follow a set of fairly simple principles. Organizations can also be included in the CIARD RING and describe the services they provide in terms of subject areas, geographic location, the technologies they employ, etc. Although there are CIARD Task forces, but even though I've been an active participant of the CIARD Content Management Task Force I'm not sure I could name all of the member of the CMTF as it exists today. Clearly there are some communication issues even in our own house.
So what can CIARD do? One area is to facilitate communication between those in the CIARD community. As a technical contributor (with admin rights) to the RING itself I have seen a few limitations in how the RING can be used, as Valeria put it, for "Sharing information on what we are sharing and how". For those that have registered their organizations with the RING and have added a service you've probably notice that "we" ask a lot of questions. However, even when an organization fills out all the "required" fields there is still a lot of information about the information being shared that is not being captured.
For example, if one looks at the "How To" section on the RING there is an "instructions" link which provides a view of all of the instructions that an organization provided about how to use their services. In most cases, a boilerplate answer was provide regarding who could contribute to and/or consume information from their service. That's probably not as useful as the base uri for the OAI-PMH provider an organization might support.
On the front page of the site you'll find a map of services that have been registered in the RING. However, when I looked at the complete list of services awhile back a significant number of them did not provide the location information and thus their services do not appear on the map.
In both of these examples, an organization initiates communication with the RING, the site captures some information, then the communication stops. I don't have a formal solution but some mechanism where a working group could be established that would followup submissions to the RING to maintain communtication beyond a "Thank you for submitting your information" response. For example, if a service indicates that they provide an RSS feed or indicates that they are an OAI Provider, a followup email asking for the appropriate URLs, and capturing that information such that it's easily accessible by other RING partners would help improve the "How To" section.
The other area where I have contributed to is the creation of a couple of tutorials on the RING. I created one which had some boiler plate code for OAI-PMH harvesting and another which explains how to configure the Drupal Feeds module to consume an AgriFeeds RSS feed. However, those are the only tutorials available via the RING. It seems to me that if we could encourage CIARD RING organizations to contribute tutorials on other topics the RING could be a wealth of information on how to interoperate between similar systems. In general, if we can find a way to encourage more CIARD partner created content the system will become much more robust.
A third area that could be explored would be how to capture and share information related to people, and all the related information about a person such as subject expertice, technical expertice, etc. When registering with the RING, the user profile information is pretty limited. VIVO has been mentioned a few times in our discussions and perhaps could be used to manage the user profiles of those that are part of the CIARD community. So, for example, one could ask "who else is using ImpressCMS to disseminate information on Aquaculture" and the RING could provide an answer.
Anyway, that is just a few general ideas to toss out but they all boil down to how CIARD can improve communication to facilitate information sharing.
If we agree that there are multiple levels (stars) of sharing standardization and that we need to facilitate capacity building at all levels, perhaps we also need to recognize that the progress towards capacity will proceed at different rates. Capacity will be greatest amongst the global system participants and lowest at the most local level of system integration.
In order for globally shared data to reach the local level and local data to reach the global level there is a need to focus on the intermediate level as passthrough systems where global standardized data is accessed and locally standardized data is collected and shared. The intermediate level will need to involve IT developers and systems that have sufficient capability to understand and process both ends of the spectrum.
The intermediate, localized data sharers will be a critical link in connecting advances in agriculture with people who can put it into practice. If this is so, perhaps capacity building at the intermediate system level should be the focus in the near term and provide the biggest bang for the buck.
There we are at the end of this two week's discussion. I just estimated more than 200 contributions to the 4 questions. Valeria has done an excellent summary of the first week; I feel encouraged and nearly excited going now through the posts of the second week.
Many are asking the CIARD community to come out with a practical workplan that shows the way to go further
Many are afraid of the technological challenges of implementing something Linked Open data, but many are also enormously interested to implement the solutions that technology now makes possible.
Very many contributions are asking that capacity development is an integral and very important part of any program for better interoperability and data sharing.
We have to follow all these threads. A summary and analysis of the entire discussion will need much more time than that what I have now at this Friday evening. GFAR and FAO, the CIARD partners, which initiated this eConsultation will take care that nothing from the discussions of the eConsultation will get lost. We also will take care that the ideas, concerns and proposals of this eConsultation will be available for the workshop that will take place in June in Beijing.
I am convinced that we have the elements to make a big and ambitious plan - to be implemented with many small steps - to achieve an information infrastructure for our community that makes sharing of information easy. We have started this endeavour now.
I am personally engaged in the CIARD Content Management Taskforce. Since January of this year Krishan Bheenick, Valeria Pesce and I are working on conceptual ideas how to make the work of the CIARD Content Management Taskforce more efficient, participatory and effective. I think this eConsultation was a good step in this direction. But we cannot stop here. I have seen a lot of enthusiasm and experience in this consultation that I want to harvest for the CIARD Content Management Taskforce. Please drop an email to [email protected] if you want to participate in this discussion also after the closure of the eConsultation, if you want to participate in the development of the CIARD content management work plan, if you want to participate in the construction of an information infrastrucuture for our community.
johannes keizer
As some of you may know the CIARD RING site as well as several other AIMS related sites are based on Drupal, specifically version 6 of the Drupal CMS.
Although there has been much more active development with RDF in the Drupal 7 release there is a significant amount of development for Drupal 6. I have a copy of the CIARD ring site on a development machine that I have been using to RDFize the CIARD RING site and have made a considereable amount of progress.
On Monday Valeria and I will be having a skype call to discuss how to implement the additions that I have made on my dev site into the production CIARD RING site. Once that happens, much of the content in the RING site will be exposed as RDF and it will support a Sparql endpoint for queries on the data contained in the RING.
Moving forward, I have done a bit of investigation into Drupal 7 and specificially any roadblocks that still exist that would prevent a migration form D6 to D7. There are still a few obstacles but once those get resolved and D7 becomes more mature, the use of Drupal 7 as a content delivery mechanism means that all content in the site can be shared as RDF because RDF is built into the core of the system.
Thumbs up to the 5 STARS example and big thanks to Johannes for sharing it in this forum.
The 5 stars is a down to earth and simplified approach to actions required.
Like Krishan already mentioned (and if you have a look on what was written on AICKM in Q1), our actions can start with any star level - It all depends where we evaluate ourselves to be in terms of human, financial & ICT resources.
But the 5 stars are also based on certain assumptions, and therefore we need to be prepared accordingly to reach the 5 stars platform. Let there be no exclusion.. as mentioned in the thread, if we want to go far, let's go together.
Here are therefore a few thoughts:
1. Capacity building
We should look at this holistically. First of all, capacity building will be required to bring institutions to Star 1. It is only then that they can initiate the process. Similarly, there should be capacity building for those on Star 1, 2, 3, & 5 respectively so that they can acquire the necessary knowledge and skills to skip to successive levels. What about Star 5 people: I am sure this is not the limit/ceiling to progress. So the Star 5 people (CIARD's CORE People?) should continue to work on systems communication models so that they can nurtue and guide the other STARS.
As you an see, there is different type of capacity building for different people.
2. A Website for all
We cannot expect contributions from institutions when in 2011 they still do not have an online platform - website?. Take the example of Seychelles Agricultural Agency, until last year they did not have a website, but through capacity building (SADC ICART Project) and help from their SADC colleagues they are now present on a free blog. In Mauritius we have several agricultural institutions that still do not have websites. Examples: Small Planters Welfare Fund, Small Planters Mechanical Pool, Farmers Service Corporation... So to tap all the information, we need to get all of them up on websites. Issue is how? If for financial resources they cannot afford it, then better take the example of Seychelles Ag Agency. Else, could there be a centralised hosting initiated by CIARD? e.g subdomain.worldagriculture.org? CIARD could offer wordpress, joomla, agridrupal, agrioceandspce etc... as flavours (choice... remember!).
3. Web 2.0 compliance
For platforms to communicate, Web 2.0 is essential. As opposed to above, many agri websites are not Web 2.0 compliant. So when you look at Star 1, it is not about putting everything on any web.. but on Web 2.0 enabled web so as to harvest the info. In Mauritius, I know the Food and Agricultural Research Council is currently redesigning its website and want it to be Web 2.0 compliant... but .. the government's portal which is supposed to host this, is not Web 2.0 compliant. In fact, the Mauritius National Computer Board, is still planning on this (Source Euro AFrica ICT FP7 Awareness Workshop, Mauritius, 2010)?. So how do we upggrade existing websites? Easiest would be to get some kind of migration... but many Web 1.0 websites were designed from scratch...! Here I could see CIARD customising CMSs (as always with different flavours), provide a description of their features, and offer them to institutions. What about Hosting? Big problem if finance is limited - again could there be a centralised server?
4. Coordination
I don't know about CIARD's relationship with agricultural institutions, but other than the big ones (FAO, FARA, GFAR...), I doubt its effectiveness in communicating with smaller institutions. Especially in under developed or developing countries where political agendas are too often above other priorities (and also digital divide!). It would therefore perhaps help that CIARD works in close collaboration with regional authorities to push forward the community's philosophy.. e.g in Africa with SADC, COMESA etc... While it might sound dumb, countries affiliated to these institutions respond promptly to resolutions taken.
5. What else?
I believe there might be other issues involved to get to Star 1.
So this is your space to think about it.
Many thanks everyone for an interesting set of discussions. I was hardly able to keep up... and I look forward to the reports.
On Stuff, we should not distinguish too much between the 'stuff' and information about the stuff. Both are important and we need to work on both in parallel. In reality, some 'stuff' is easier to make open and accessible than others. I think we must ensure at least that everything an organization produces is described with proper metadata - so we know it exists. We also need the full ‘stuff’! We already have plenty of stuff online, unfortunately not properly described and accessible!
On the stars, I think we should be careful not to see this as a mountain to climb, a sequence of steps to follow, with 5 stars better than 1 star! Should we give 4 stars to an object with a URL, even if it is impermanent, hidden and not described properly?
Instead of seeing the stars as steps to climb, I think there is a multi-track 'continuum' or something of actions and choices we can take, with differing results. I think we should focus on the quality of these actions, or choices, ensuring they lead to the most open result in a given situation.
If we can find a way to rate and present our work as simply as the stars, this would be a good result.
Instead let's focus on choices and support for these ... (see next comment)
Following my earlier comment ... about stuff and stars, this comment suggest that CIARD focus on the choices people make and how to informa and support these:
Each day, we all make choices in how and where we share/publish/communicate what we do. The challenge is therefore to find ways to ensure that these choices are informed and biased towards maximum openness and accessibility.
Thus, as examples: We can choose open or closed/proprietary formats; We can choose simple web uploads or a CMS; we can choose an OAI-compliant repository or a traditional library system, or something home-made; we can choose a tool with or without RSS; we can adopt dublin core or make our own field structure; we can adopt standard vocabularies or make our own; we can build an open system, or a closed one, we can hold a closed meeting with no reporting or we can add virtual, multimedia social reporting; etc.
I recognize that our choices are usually limited by our situations, resources, knowledge, skills, connectivity etc. Often, even if we knew what choices are open to us, we think they are too big, too costly, too difficult, too time-consuming, beyond our skills, etc to be considered ... We choose something else, or to take no action.
Directions for CIARD?
I think:
1. We need to provide more information and support so people realise that there are different options and choices, that a different (more open) pathway is possible. This sounds a bit missionary I'm afraid; we need people to recognize that they have choices, in even the most difficult situations. [awareness]
2. In recognizing that we have choices, we also want an 'open' (or 'more open') outcome to be the 'no-brain' decision ...! But, lets recognize that jumping from 'closed' to 'open' is sometimes a massive leap, so we need to make sure that little steps are also possible, and are seen as good choices. [advocacy]
3. We need to support people to be able to make the 'right' choices - ie to make choices that result in more open and accessible systems, services, and stuff. I think this means bringing the possible tools and approaches and choices within (easy) reach.
This is important. I heard about some interesting ideas and tools on this discussion forum. How do I make the decision for ILRI to use these, instead of doing nothing, continuing as usual, or doing something else? Recalling that I and my team are already running full-speed doing what we have to do! The closer and easier any choices are, the more I am likely to make them.
This seems to be about making the decision as easy as possible - by making a new tool very easy to use and adopt, or widely applicable across platforms, for example; and/or by giving me the confidence, skills and resources to make the change. [mix of innovation to make 'easily-adoptable' choices as well as capacity reinforcement actions for adopters]
4. We should find a way to recognize and reward people who make the 'good' choices. Any decisions leading to 'more open' are better than staying closed. Here I go back to some original ideas in the CIARD founders that this be some kind of 'movement ' as well as an initiative ... something like the open access movement that energizes people to take action, promote action, and point to others who took action. [incentives]
In short, let CIARD:
1.Tell me about some feasible choices
2.Convince me that open choices are better
3.Make it as easy as possible for me to make (and implement) good choices [easy adoption; capacity reinforcement]
4.Reward me for making any choice that leads towards 'more open'
5.and perhaps also identify and devise and document new and emerging 'open' choices that I can consider taking.