Greetings to all members

Case from Thailand Gotoknow.org Gotoknow.org is Thailand's biggest online knowledge sharing platform through blogging service for professionals (mostly over 30 years old), it receives an average of 3 million page views per month. Gotoknow.org is a web blog community with around 30,000 active members with a good fraction of agricultural professionals and IT savvy farmers. There are various self-organized groups of agricultural planets (blog-group) ranging from sustainable organic agriculture, agricultural research all the way to healt-related agriculture issues. Every week thousands of people interested in various agricultural practices will engage with blogging and cross-blog groups commenting. Agricultural knowledge sharing are also in various stages such as experimentation of farming technique using blog as journal and peer review mechanism, policy discussion over sustainable agriculture, basic agricultural knowledge sharing and much more. The members consisted of multi-disciplinary groups from agricultural experts, farmers, health professionals as well as academia. Besides gotoknow.org's value in rapid knowledge distribution, it allows many-to-many interconnection between users from the system based on their own interests. There are continue cases of farmers finding experts and vice versa in order to engage in intensive knowledge sharing and, even more important, knowledge development process such as the case of local farmer getting scientific information from academician in significantly improving their sustainable agriculture method in the Northeast of Thailand. Gotoknow.org is being supported by various groups such as UsableLabs, Knowledge Management Institute of Thailand, TRN Institute and INET (representing public, civil society, academia and private sectors). Key learning from the case of gotoknow.org 1. The use of blogging technology to facilitate bottom-up distributed knowledge sharing. The site allows users to blog themselves on the topics they are interested without major structure (such as in online forum technology). Users use tags (folksonomy) rather than structured taxonomy in categorizing their content, hence, the tags group themselves up base on real users' personal categorization or tagging. The blogging is not moderate by centralized body but rather patrol by user groups themselves. Thus, the users blog what they want, tag it themselves and find things based on their own tag clouds without centralized authority. The creation of agriculture-focused communities also occur spontaneously rather than purposefully. Agriculture is treated more as lifestyle than a structured topic. 2. Fostering virtual community leaders to bring more and more people to share knowledge. The site tried to promote good quality bloggers who share experience in order to provide a role model for others, build their senses of community leadership, thus, providing them with incentive to bring more and more interested individuals into the virtual network. Also this create a stronger sense of ownership of gotoknow.org as online community. 3. Encourage decentralized interconnection among members Members are encourage to get to know, communicate and interact among themselves without intervention or permission from the site owner in order to maximize interconnection of people with shared-interest which would lead to a stronger virtual community and potential partnership among members. 4. Bring in diverse membership Gotoknow.org members are from all professions rather than focusing only on agriculture or knowledge management professionals. Therefore, the agricultural knowledge sharing are from multiple perspectives allowing more fruitful sharing.