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Moderated conference on impact assessment of agricultural research: May 2014

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Mon, 26 May 2014 18:05:07 +0200
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This is Ed Garrett, previous Fulbright Fellow at Hungarian Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (Messages 4, 29 and 37), in response to Message 72 by Matthieu Stigler and colleagues on the use of Social Network Analysis (SNA).



There are several people at the University of California, Davis who are working on the use of SNA as a tool for epIA.  When I combine the questions, comments, and concerns of Matthieu and colleagues in Message 72 with education models, there seem to be some methods to manage complexity and cost. One that seems most promising is the development of electronic forums for dissemination of research and extension work.



Properly developed and staffed, the electronic forum is not going to be available to all whom you may want to study, but is more likely to capture your key players or node centers. Monitoring traffic (comments, questions, suggestions, improvement, drift, and partial implementation of innovations or research findings) can be followed and polls taken either through study of the forum traffic or through actually sending an invitation to those on the network.



Some caveats is that this type of tool, the electronic forum, would need to be developed within the cultural and practical context of the users. As one can see from this FAO e-conference "forum", there is a major portion of the population that consumes information and a relatively small portion that actively participates. Digital Green has had some success with increasing participation by turning most of the production and development of contents for forums over to members of the study or learning group with only minor influence from the monitors. In places where electronic access or where literacy is low, special care needs to be taken to develop tools and interfaces that encourage participation. These can be graphics and animations instead of text or speech, and establishing multiple local kiosks to provide the ability to participate to those without their own access. This is drawing from multiple disciplines, education, information and communication technology (ICT), International Development, Agricultural Development, Extension Services, and so on.



The above comments are offered to address the two issues of SNA being "static" and cost to identify key individuals as an ongoing electronic forum provides a clear picture of who is passing knowledge, their understanding of the knowledge, and an ability to monitor changes to the innovation network over time.



To make best use of a forum to provide for epIA, it should be a part of the original method of interacting with researchers, participating farmers, and others. This then puts the need for design of evaluation, communication, and documentation into the pre-project development cycle rather than an ad hoc event at the end. In some settings though it should be possible to establish post-hoc communities of practice that could allow SNA to produced valuable data. Self-selection will be an issue as will be aligning data on or in any "web" with those who may not have access.



Ed Garrett

37858 Russell Blvd. 

Davis, CA, 

USA

e-mail: ed.garrett (at) fulbrightmail.org



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