Question 1: What are we sharing and what needs to be shared?

I agree that the fear of sharing datasets is an obstacle. But the quality and relevance of data and information is another problem. What always come to my mind, which also was emphasized in the 2010 meetings with the prepared Road Map , is the relevance of the research work to poor farmers. This off course should be reflected into the information to be shared. The problem which I feel important is how to ensure that the published research information has considered the needs of poor farmers and approved by farmers and other partners within the innovation system. This would remain as a missing link in the whole process, especially in many of the developing countries, even if emphasis is to be made in the future in the shifting of the research into more people-centered. Now, is it wise to think of "what are the proper mechanisms/standards that could help articulate, document and publish quality and relevant information or research outcomes?". Or How can ICTs enable a more pluralistic, networked approach to information sharing? The outcomes of the discussions could be some agreed guidelines to be useful to NARS and Regional Foras for further improvements in this regard.

Being a research institution in China, CAAS have huge amount of research information and data both published formally or informally. Such valuable research outcomes needs to be shared among each other in China and with users abroad for a developemnt of agriculture.  To share or federate our publications' metadata with others can be the first step.  We believe that all agri libraries or information centers would like to share their information with others and this is the mutual goal for us for years.  However,  proper mechanisms and pathways are very much needed and necessary to do so. Now, CIARD is a significant starting point to reach the goal.  We  hope that through the platform of CIARD RING, we may realize the expected dream of information sharing globally.

I really like Pan Shuchun's point. Finding proper mechanisms and pathways to trigger the sharing process to happen is very important because no one wants to give first and for free.

Maybe, even in Africa there are lot of informations that can contribute in the development of science. Lot of indigeneous knowledge is still hidden by groups of minority because of lack of win-win mechanisms.

Reading some of the posts here and always finding out something new that I didn't know about what other Institutions are sharing and in which form, maybe there is one thing we have to add to the list of what we need to share: we need to share information on what we are sharing :-)

Seriously, we usually find out about interesting information services because we know who is managing them, because maybe there is a short email campaign publicizing them, because other websites link to them, but when we are looking for information sources of a specific type (RSS, OAI providers...) because we want to build an added value service or just aggregate information in our RSS reader, we may not find everything that exists and we may even miss the best sources.

This was indeed the main reason behind the idea of creating the RING (http://ring.ciard.net) under the CIARD initiative: a directory of information sources in agriculture, described and classified, especially with regard to technical features that are relevant to interoperability.

(Of course, at a higher level of complexity, also some techniques for "auto-discovery" could be used, adopting XML / RDF descriptions of sources: already the RSS channel metadata and the OAI-PMH Identify verb go in this direction).

Valeria wrote "we need to share information on what we are sharing :-)"

Absolutely. 

The CIARD RING can certainly be a good mechanism for discovering what information can be shared and I've actually been looking at it pretty closely recently so I have a good sense on how well the RING (as it exists right now) is accomplishing that task.  

I have been playing around with a Drupal OAI-PMH harvester module and have been able to harvest content from numerous services that have indicated that they are functioning as an OAI Provider.  Currently, there are 47 services in the RING which have indicated that "OAI Provider" is the service type.  I couldn't find any of them that had specified the base URI (something that I could append ?verb=Identify) to obtain more information about what they are sharing.  That's simply because when an organization provides information about the services they provide we are not asking for that base URI.  I suspect the we'd see a similar pattern for services that expose information using an RSS feed.   

I've got a development site that I've used to test harvesting OAI-PMH information and created a "OAI Provider" content type.  It has a field for entering in the base uri, then I used a couple of computed_fields to construct urls and obtain the metadataformats and sets that the oai provider has exposed.  It's pretty simple, but without the base uri readily available I had to search a couple of OAI registries to find out what that uri was.  

Sometimes asking a simple question for a simple answer can be all it takes to determine what kind of information is being shared.

Krishan Bheenick here, with some experience in the countries of the SADC region over the past five years. I have enjoyed all the posts so far and I see we are enriching the discussion with the diversity of target audiences and their perspectives.

I see that we have not only different categories of stakeholders, but also stakeholders who differ in terms of the resources and skills to tap the information being shared. Researchers and Information Managers in the developing world will surely understand and appreciate the potential of the visions we have of how these tools can help us in our work, but these are far from their reality (sepecially in terms of connectivity and the tools). At times,  we may have programmes/projects that come in with funds to start off the process and then fade out, leaving the user alone with the tool which might rely on a more sophisticated connectivity option than the institution can no longer afford. Connectivity is often one of the major problems, but we also have high turnover of staff in such institutions. So how do we cope with the situation where the person who benefited from skills development during a programme or project moves on, leaving a newcomer to take up the challenge?

In the field of ARD, we could now move from the traditional triangular Research-Extension-Farmer linkage model to one with  four categories of stakeholders: the researcher, the extension agent, the information manager and the farmer. In this case, the 'Information Manager' sits in the middle of the triangle and has to play the role of the linkages among the three other stakeholders. This may not necessarily mean that we have a new breed of ARD worker, but we first need to define the role of that 'Information Manager' and the interfaces that they facilitate. We can then decide whether in the local context, we need a new person to play that role or its a collective responsibility of these traditional stakeholder groups.Would it help to define the functional role of such a position? Is that role, the key to the implementation of the CIARD framework at a local level?

From my perspective, the CIARD framework has to cater for the whole range of ARD stakeholders for it to remain relevant at a global level - its a daunting task, a bit like a Prime Minister trying to form a government after tight (democratic) elections - trying to satisfy everyone and finding the right balance to get started. In a way, that's what this forum is attempting to conceptualise. I guess many of us have also been in such a position where we finally decide that we have tried to have as much consultation with the parties involved and its time to start somewhere, with a proposed strategy, and then do our best to keep an open mind, consult on regular basis to adjust the strategies. This approach will require collective efforts such as devolving responsibilities (rather: assuming distributed responsibilities), coordination and collaboration.

Having said that, we have to acknowledge that the CIARD framework will not be able to give us the solutions, but instead give us the guidelines, 'practices that worked well elsewhere', an insight into the new development and tools/technology in the sector, such that it helps us make the right decisions that match our context.  Therefore, we will need to see how the information needs that we are asked to satisfy by our local stakeholders, also fits in the global framework, and document the process we are going through so that we can facilitate the process of harmonising our procedures, formats etc.

So when it comes to sharing information - we are currently sharing what we 'perceive' to be what is required of us by our stakeholders while what we should be sharing is what is 'required' by our stakeholders. Now the key is how do we know what our stakeholders expect from us - and what are the dynamics of our stakeholders needs! I will come back to a tool that we have been trying in the SADC region as a matrix for information needs assessment with our stakeholders and as a platform for capturing the changing needs (already mentioned by Sanjay)

What I miss here is the perspective of the categories of end-users vis-a-vis required types of input.

If we assume that all consumers of agriculture related information, raw data or data sets use a handheld device (GSM, smart phone, tablet, netbook  or other device) or use a notebook or other computer to request, access or send data, we must have a grip on generic ICT system variables that define the user and his enabling ICT technologies.

The formatting of data sets, raw data and the way these are stored, requested and retrieved from repositories, and the applications driving the exchange, interchange and transmission of data must be shielded as much as possible from the end-user.

This inevitably leads to requirements of semantics, aggregators and logical data definition, storage, retrieval, and the applications that aggregate user requested content to combine mature semantic web technologies and open access, open repository standards for the widest range of user generated digital content possible.

Visualization of end user categories in their untilization environments and their enabling technologies would give us a baseline for defining what types of information need to be shared.

And in this context it is important to define the public domain (open access) versus private domains (subscriber access) defined by online publishers of content which already have widespread use or acceptance, whether they be online publishers of journals, social networking sites, news repositories, data sets, or raw data from remote sensors and input devices.

I was just wondering.. that we could come up with answers for what are we sharing and what needs to be shared...

Would this also fit in: Are we sharing enough..

I was just thinking about a paper published recently (can't recall the name) which says that the SADC region is quite poor in research..

I believe it's not that we do not do sufficient research.. but rather.. most of our findings remain in drawers and not shared with stakeholders..

Make no mistake.. even institutions doing the research do not publish the results etc.. on their websites.. if this action could be considered as a minimum, then the remaining pathways of sharing seem to be a too far scenario..

Sanjay

If the forum will indulge me I would like to open a somewhat different tangent to the discussion. It seem that most of the discussion is relative to sharing information between the different research science program or perhaps even the extension programs. I would like to suggest that a critical concern is how useful it is to the end user which I think is the smallholder producers in the developing world.

The question is not do they have the knowledge or can obtain the knowledge, but do they have the means to take what was developed through small plot research and extension demonstration and extend it to their total farm, or whatever portion they need to. The underlying concern here it the basic premisis that has guided or perhaps misguided the development effort for some 40 years. Basically that the farmers were not effectively using the resources available and that substantial economic development could be done with education and motivation, the operational resources were already available. http://lamar.colostate.edu/~rtinsley/BasicPremise.htm

I am going to question this and suggest the labor and the other operational resources needed to manage the land are the most limited aspect of smallholder agriculture and this results in prolonged time to accomplish most agronomic task until the biotechnical information being effectively shared and extended is render ineffective.

Perhaps the easiest way to get at this is to look at the calorie energy balance for smallholders. Why it is trite to say that a hungry person cannot be expected to work very hard, that is percisely what we have been expecting for the last 40 years. Also, we can claim that smallholder only provide enough food for 6 months, but do we factor that into field work we expect to be undertaken to releive their poverty.

As I can best see this the basic fact are it requires 2000 kcal/day to meet basic matabolism requirements for a sedimentary person such as someone confined to a refugee in a camp. To this must be added around 300 kcal per hr of agronomic field work. For a full 10 hr day it will take some 4000 to 5000 kcals depending on the work being done. In contrast farmers and laborer may only have access to some 2000 kcal/day just enough to meet basic matabolism requirement with little if anything left for work. An interesting example would be the Millinneum Village Projects in East Africa that allocate some 1.1 t of maize per family of 5.7 people. This quickly convert to 192 g/per/day which converts to some 1930 kcals. Again enough to survive but not do any strenous work. The result is that the agriculture work day may be restricted to 3 or 4 hrs and those stero-typical men loafing around the village in the afternoon maybe more hungry and exhausted than lazy needing a swift kick to the posterier. If this is all the a person can be expected to work in a day, how long will it take for them to undertake the 300 hr needed for manual land preparation of a hectare, and what will that to all the swcience being shared. http://lamar.colostate.edu/~rtinsley/CalorieEnergyBalance.htm

Thank you,

Dick Tinsley

From the contributions that I have read up to now the elements of the diagram in the introduction to the questions seem to be confirmed:

•  data
•  formal and informal publications
•  discussions and interactions that becomes manifest on the web
•  resources

Is there something we left out?  Do we can prioritize?