Learning and sharing in communication
for rural development

While I was in Rome, Marzia and I worked on the FCCM website and CCcomdev platform questions that emerged from our conversations in Wageningen. Of particular question for us was how to use the FCCM groups to best effect, and what are the FCCM groups for?  We came up with the following. Please do let us know if there are any questions/concerns/discussion about it.

FCCM Website and CCComDev

The relationship between the CCComDev and FCCM websites:

·         CCComDev hosts the FCCM website.

·         CCComDev has a mandate for capacity building and knowledge sharing, while the focus of the FCCM is more on policy advocacy.

·         This focus will be clarified further through changing some text on each site

How do we use CCComDev and the FCCM pages?

The focus of the CCComDev news feed is general posts related to rural communication: announcements on events & opportunities (e.g. conferences, training workshops, fellowships, calls for papers/proposals) or articles about rural comdev initiatives, projects, good practices (in the section “comdev stories”). So far, these have been created and maintained by Los Banos. Any contributions to the blog postings are certainly welcome, and would be content that Los Banos could add to the general CCComDev news. For instance, this would be a good space for student contributions and for all universities to share activities that are not under the FCCM umbrella.

The FCCM blog (here articles are signed by the author and can be commented) is for news and postings related only to the FCCM. For instance, we will hopefully have a blog posting up about meeting in Wageningen, and my visit to FAO. The blog can also feature thematic posts addressing specifically the nexus b/w comdev, community media, ICTs and family farming. It is only for issues related to the FCCM activities.

People can join the CCComDev platform, and use all of the tools and resources on the site without being engaged with FCCM. So far, the reports from the website tell us that it is being used by a lot of practitioners and students, which is excellent.

For the FCCM discussion group pages, for now, they will remain closed to the general public, and serve as private groups where participants in the FCCM can coordinate their activities and have internal discussions. The general public can participate through the blog. When specific outputs from the FCCM are produced – like our research project – we will hold a special discussion (as per the agreement on the research project). A separate, open discussion will be created for that public discussion.

So, for us, please feel free to write blog posts about our activities, press releases, any of that sort of thing for the FCCM blog.

In the FCCM discussion boards, there are a number of discussion groups. These are to share messages and documents related to specific FCCM mandates/themes. There is one for all members of the working group, and one for us as academic institutions. Marzia, as super user, controls who can join the groups, so it will only be relevant people.

The discussion groups are meant to be spaces for us to share messages and documents – much like we are already doing via email. When a message is posted, each user will get an email notification about it. We can then reply through the platform. It is possible to use this to share documents amongst us. The hope was that we would use this platform/discussion group to discuss things such as the research project, and academic collaborations (anything we would be emailing about anyhow). The group is closed, and is only open to ourselves (Loes, Rico, Elske, Helen, Sarah, Sam, Cleofe, Stella), platform administrators at Los Banos, Marzia and Mario. Is this a tool that we would like to use in our discussions? There is also a tool to add events, so we can add things like Montreal, the Accra meeting and the Latin American meeting.

We are also members of the general working group, so can share updates on our activities through that forum.

Marzia has already created accounts for each of us on the discussion board. All you need to do is visit the platform, enter your username (which is your name) and you can re-set your password.