Contribute to shaping the design of the Agrifood System Technologies & Innovations Outlook (ATIO) Knowledge Base
Discussing a prototype and a Draft Concept Note of ATIO Knowledge Base
The Office of Innovation at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is organizing this consultation to understand use cases and users’ preferences to guide the current design of the Agrifood systems Technologies and Innovations Outlook (ATIO) Knowledge Base (KB).
The ATIO KB is conceived as a qualitative-information catalog of agrifood-systems technologies and innovations developed by actors across the full spectrum of stakeholders, including grassroots innovations. Its coverage is going to be global and span the whole innovation life cycle and all relevant use cases in the agrifood system. It will be neutral, partnership-driven, participatory, and open access. The content will be both federated from trustworthy relevant sources (and when necessary curated), and crowdsourced, with intensive but controlled use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enrich and categorize the records. Its objective is to assist policy makers and other agrifood systems stakeholders in making informed decisions to support the prioritization and upscaling of technologies and innovations to accelerate agrifood systems transformation.
At this early stage, when we are developing a design document and have an early prototype, it is the right time to consult potential users. We follow a participatory approach: we want our design to be co-developed, shared and widely endorsed.
DRAFT CONCEPT NOTE AND QUESTIONS TO GUIDE THIS E-CONSULTATION
This consultation seeks suggestions and input from diverse actors: policy makers, investors, farmers’ representatives, agripreneurs, researchers, extension agents.
You can read the Draft Concept Note and consider the prototype1, and the Questions below will guide you provide your recommendations and share your experiences. You can choose which question you want to answer.
Please also note that FAO’s Office of Innovation has held a similar discussion on the Digital Agri Hub platform in December 2024. The first question is a continuation of the conversation, but the other questions are new. You can read a summary on the outputs here.
The relevant inputs received in this consultation will become part of the ATIO KB design document, and some of the recommendations will have been implemented ideally by July 2025 and others planned for later. In addition, we will be glad to invite participants who are particularly interested and involved to take part in an expert consultation that should take place in February 2025.
The first version of the platform will be published in July 2025. Proceedings of the contributions received will be made publicly available on this consultation webpage.
| 1. | Given the description of the ATIO KB, how do you think it can help you and users like you? Describe one or more specific use cases that you wish the KB would address, like “I imagine I would be able to find innovative products that support farmers with access to credit and insurance specifically for one country, and I would be able to see information on their readiness and how they fare against adoptability criteria” or “I would like to use statistics to show a correlation between level of inclusivity / co-design of the solutions and their levels of adoption”. |
| 2. | What do you make of concepts like policy innovation and social innovation? Can you think of examples? Is it useful for you to be able to find such content? In which form do you expect to find them? How would you use them? |
| 3. | How important is it to feature grassroots innovations? Looking at some records of grassroots innovations in the prototype, what would you like to see in the descriptions that you don’t see? Which dimension should we capture? What is most useful for grassroots use/application of innovations? |
| 4. | How do you think branded commercial products should be featured on the ATIO KB? Data sources of technology-related information often feature individual models of technologies (for instance, different models of solar-powered irrigation pumps). Should the ATIO KB feature models? What is the “innovation” unit you expect to find? |
| 5. | Here are two of the main taxonomies used in the prototype: types of innovations and use cases. Considering that there is no agreed standard for these categorizations, and that we are aligning them to those used in similar projects, are these “good enough” to start? Which major problems do you see? Please suggest changes or volunteer to help us improve them in the next months. Other taxonomies are here. |
| 6. | We are developing a chatbot-like search capability. Do you prefer the classic filter-based search or the chatbot search? Or the possibility of choosing either? Tell us how we can improve the search experience. |
| 7. | We use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enrich and automatically categorize the records: you will see an AI stamp at the end of descriptions that have been generated by AI: how good is the text generated? Is AI enriching the records in a meaningful way? |
This consultation is open until 10 February 2025.
Alternatively, you can also share your views on the design of the ATIO KB by taking part in a short survey here: https://forms.office.com/e/9S1wF98yMT.
We thank in advance all the contributors for reading, commenting and providing feedback on this draft concept note and guiding questions, and look forward to a productive consultation.
Co-facilitator:
Valeria Pesce, Agricultural Science and Innovation Data Specialist, Office of Innovation (OIN), FAO
Athira Aji, Innovation analyst, OIN, FAO
Martina Miracapillo, Support to agrifood systems technologies and Innovations Outlook, OIN, FAO
REFERENCES
FAO. 2022. Introducing the Agrifood Systems Technologies and Innovations Outlook. Rome. https://doi.org/10.4060/cc2506en
Please note that the prototype is not to be considered a FAO official product; it demonstrates the basic functionalities and contains only sample records.
How to take part in the e-consultation
To take part in this consultation, please register to the FSN Forum, if you are not yet a member, or “sign in” to your account. Please read the draft Concept Note of ATIO KB and respond to the relevant guiding questions in the box “Post your contribution” on this webpage. For any technical support, please send an email to [email protected].
تم إغلاق هذا النشاط الآن. لمزيد من المعلومات، يُرجى التواصل معنا على : [email protected] .