Practical examples: the community of practice of ICT4D trainers

IICD in collaboration with its Itrainonline partners did a community readiness assessment for ICT4D trainers. In July, a first meeting was organized for a group of interested trainers in Zambia. My colleague, Saskia Harmsen, was one of the organisers. She answered the question:

What advice would you give to someone who was going to organise a first community of practice meeting?

Her response is, organise for getting to know eachother by means of storytelling exercises and facilitate peer assists in small groups. This can set the scene for what can be done with the community of practice in terms of knowledge sharing. The trainers really appreciated this 'facilitated' approach rather than a train-the-trainer approach.

A challenge is how to translate the practice-based experiences and make it available to others who were not present at the event. In this case, people were asked to write summaries in a wiki, but felt that limited the free-flowing knowledge sharing process.