Project team
Last week Foodlinks held its third face-to-face project meeting in Tirrenia on the west coast of Italy. This was quite an important meeting since the project is almost half over and we have struggled quite a bit with finding a clear focus for the activities in the communities of practice. The main aim of this meeting was to agree on activities and tasks that will interest people enough to engage actively in the online period.
Interestingly, online activities increased considerably a few weeks before the meeting as CoP facilitators and CoP members were discussing and preparing this meeting. Activities needed to allow for the knowledge brokerage process to take place as well as to have a clear content focus to make the exchanges meaningful in the first place. The groups chose different methodological approaches including group model building, peer review, speed storytelling, “the wheel”, ritual assent/dissent which they later in the week discussed for its usefulness before sharing their findings with the other CoPs. A speed networking session also allowed for some cross interaction on the final day of the meeting as this had been quite limited as the CoPs split up early in the week. During the next meeting in the Basque, CoPs will exchange more so that we can discover more commonalities and linkages between the different subjects.
speed networking
tool training
Although the CoPs followed their own process, they more or less came up with a similar output such as an evidence document to support decision making on short food supply chains or a ‘Tirrenia charter’ on public procurement. Working on a collaborative document can be quite challenging especially with people from different backgrounds, with different needs and ideas so this promises to be an interesting process. More information on what these documents are about and how you can contribute can soon be found on the Knowledge Hub which is also open for external people to join.
To simplify online collaboration, we organised two evenings for tool training. These were attended by those members who had a specific question on some of the online tools used (‘how do I add a document to the intranet’? or ‘how can I export my mindmap and insert it into the wiki’? and so on) or just wanted to experiment and learn to work on the new Knowledge Hub platform.
On Friday I shared some results of the monitoring data we had collected so far, especially the results of the social network analysis we undertook which allows us to see whether our knowledge brokerage activities are effective; whether we are able to create more interactions between different actor groups and if these new connections are used.
Olga and Leo from Purefood, both based at Pisa University, joined the short food supply chain CoP. Click here to watch a short reflection by Leo on his experience last week or watch some more photos.
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