Doris Marquardt
| Organization type | Government/Bilateral Organization |
|---|---|
| Country | Germany |
This member participated in the following Forums
Forum 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?
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.
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.
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.
Question 2: What are the prospects for interoperability in the future?
Indeed, the triangle is pivotal no matter how the final system for information sharing finally looks like. Going through the contributions it becomes obvious that many expect more than passive sharing of information, but are thinking on active networking.
In fact there is a gradient coining the interaction/ the processes: starting from nearly solely technical characteristics with nearly no personal component ending with multilateral face-to-face-communication.
The first one might be efficient, the latter is generally more effective, particularly if you are thinking on "new knowledge" (see Hugo's contribution), because personal communication in a group is said to lead to greates creativity. Furthermore, personal communication makes a network more sustainable, because closer contacts and trust are established.
On the gradient in between these two poles, there are communication forms, like e-mail, skype conversations, bilateral meetings ...
Meaning, establishing a network for sharing information seems to be most promissing if it includes the different communication forms
Information exchange and networking is most effective if it is coined by reciprocity. - Also farmers' contributions might be of importance for researchers. That implies - independent from the finally chosen technical solution, farmers or other stakeholders should be motivated to reply, meaning to comment on a report may not be a disincentive. Therefore it should be thought about right from the beginning if it will be possible to establish "regional data transformation centres". Certainly, such an solution might raise the costs for running the information network, but it might be worth thinking about.
Question 1: What are we sharing and what needs to be shared?
It is true, that interdisciplinarity might be challenging on the one hand, but mostly very fruitful on the other hand.
From the perspective of integrated rural devevelopment, which follows an horizontal approach, it is no novelty and evaluation results show resulting synergies if applied at regional level.
Nevertheless it has proved difficult to bring the different stakeholder together and make them successfully communicating, both, at local and national/ international level. Examples for the latter are for instance EU driven National Rural Networks across Europe.
In my opinion "Target" is a key word for answering this question.
What kind of information we share depends first of all on the overaal goal of information sharing - should it facilitate the work of scientists or should relevant infirmation/ the information platform also rais the interest of other stakeholders like policy makers etc
If the latter, the information base has to address certain target groups which will easily loose their interest in the djungle of research papers, directly, has to index less scientific-like sources and has on long-term to provide meta-data, in that sense that research results are summarized for non-scientists.
Furthermore, target-oriented search, is crucial for scienists as well - compared to the internet, the data base has to provide a guide through the landscape of information potentially available. - If the information base only meets the challenge to register the links of all Libraries with specific ARD relevance, 95% of internationally published journals in this field and further open sources, a considerable step has been done and technical refinements, which may indeed be relevant like indexing may follow.
Such an initial situation could be an incentive (beside those already mentioned by other participants in this forum) not only to use the data base but also to contribute to the data base, keep their interest and to care it.
Another will be as already mentioned in another context to make tacit knowledge from stakeholders who should benefit from ARD, accessable, which is particularly relevant for socio-, politically, and economically research. From personal experience, I would say for this an additional data base on experts ordered to region and topics might be most helpful.