Webinar Workshop: Takeaways and Tools for Knowledge Management and Agriculture

This article is cross-posted from USAID's Agrlinks website.

On September 9, representatives from 11 different food security and agricultural development groups came together to talk about using webinars as a tool for knowledge sharing (see this blog post to learn more about these groups and their missions). As webinars have become an increasingly popular way to reach a global audience over the past few years, Zachary Baquet of USAID's Bureau for Food Security sought to bring this group together. Agrilinks has been disseminating the Ag Sector Council Seminar series as a webinar since January 2010 and had learned many lessons over the years. For groups just starting out, the workshop provided an opportunity to learn from one another and to help improve webinar practice for agriculture and food security groups overall. 

The workshop began with presentations on planning for your webinar by Soma Goshal of NetHope and Adrian Gaskin & Okey Nwoke of IRG/Engility. Soma presented a planning checklist used to produce webinars for the Health Communication Capacity Collaborative, while Adrian and Okey discussed the technical requirements of webinars and many of the processes you need to think through before broadcasting your webinar. PDFs from both of their presentations can be found here. The room was particularly interested in learning from Liz Caselli-Mechael of Feed the Future Partnering for Innovation on social media metrics to determine who (and how) the audeience is engaging with the content. Following the presentations, Julie MacCartee of USAID/BFS led an open discussion on best practices in online facilitation, and Zachary Baquet closed out the workshop with a call for the group to remain in regular contact, possibly through a regular schedule of quarterly workshops and/or the development of a common set of webinar indicators. To see a video of some of the workshop participants takeaways, check out the video below.

Webinars are just one of many tools utilized by knowledge management practitioners working for agricultural development. As part of an ongoing survey, below is a table that shows the tools being used by some of the other key KM for agricultural development groups. The field is rapidly evolving (for instance, FTF FEEDBACK is currently creating a groups page on Agrilinks which will include a resource library) so consider this a snapshot. This table is meant to provide a quick overview of who is out there and what tools they are using to share knowledge. For a peek at the missions and parent programs of each of these sites, check out the companion blog post to be published shortly.