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The Water Network app for Android and IPhone!

The Water Network has launched an app for Android and IPhone to access global water experts, knowledge and breaking news. With the app you can among others: 

  • Discover professionals with expertise of interest to you
  • Meet attendees at Singapore International Water Week and other water events
  • Access a global Q&A knowledge bank
  • Breaking water news, filterable by category
​To get started, you need to first download the app and login.
In this presentation you can see how it works.
Problems downloading or installing the app? Contact: support@tallyfox.com
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Platforms used by IRC

Over the last year and a half IRC has been going through an intensive process of brand and identity renewal.

Why? Basically because we’ve changed substantially in the last few years and our identity needs to reflect that change. Since 2007 we’ve been strengthening our belief – through large-scale research and evidence gathering – that the only solution to the crisis in water and sanitation for over two billion people is the development of sustainable services. In partnership with many WASH sector players and with major investors we’ve been mapping the complex processes and approaches required to do this. To walk the talk, we’ve opened country offices in Ghana, Burkina Faso and Uganda, and become part of long-term sector change processes in those countries with a growing network of partners. Continue reading Dr. Patrick Moriarty, CEO IRC welcomes you to IRC’s new site….

Crucial to the WASH information Consortium group is knowing what links and synergies can be found  through the different platforms that Consortium organisations are involved in.

This post provides an overview of IRC’s digital platforms as updated in April 2014.

Main IRC website: http://www.ircwash.org/

IRC blogs:

IRC Facebook pages:

IRC Twitter:

In addition, IRC uses the following other social media channels: Slide Share, YouTube and Linkedin.

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Lessons learnt from the implementation of ICT applications to support the water sector

The paper looks at specific case studies in attempt to broaden understanding of how ICT can be used to strengthen monitoring, to discuss the different drivers that shape stakeholders’ adoption of better monitoring. It goes on to suggest how to go about designing new systems in order to have maximum impact and shares lessons from South Africa, Tanzania and Mozambique.

The final recommendations focus on issues such as: user-centric design; change management; how to assess and harness incentive structures and ways to sustain progress over the long-term.

Source: SeeSaw newsletter, 12.5.2014

Click to download the paper:

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Content Curation Metrics that Matter

Most content marketers rely on analytics such as page traffic, visitors, and shares – the same metrics they’d use for any other online marketing campaign. Content curation is a little different. It influences third-party content from other sources.

In these two key places (websites and newsletters)  you may present curated content, as well as the metrics that are especially relevant to these channels.

Site Analytics: A brand’s own website is perhaps the most obvious place to publish curated content. This might be a blog that showcases a mix of original and curated content or it could be a branded web portal.

Email Newsletters: Email is a great way to distribute curated content, because it serves as a push mechanism to get people to keep coming back to your site long after they visited. Popular curated newsletters include those from FierceMarkets and SmartBrief. Email open rates can be misleading (for instance, if someone has images disabled), so focus on these metrics instead.

By Pawan Deshpande, founder and CEO of Curata

Visit the “What’s next blog”  for examples of Site Analytics and E-mail Newsletters

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How is social media shaping academia

“All the disciplines have become more and more specialized and more and more quantitative, making them less and less accessible to the general public,” notes Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton and now the president of the New America Foundation.

Nick Kristof got a big response this weekend to his appeal for more academic to act   like public intellectuals. In this post you will find more about his worries on Twitter.

Related, the student policy review at Georgetown interviewed me a couple of weeks ago, which you might say helps bolster Kristof’s point. This is my answer to, “What would you say this new era of technology has brought to development economics and academia?”

I think research papers are finding a much wider audience. Let’s say you like to follow stories on women’s empowerment or international development, previously you would’ve had to wait for The Economist to cover an article, or you would’ve had to go out and search for it yourself…

Click for reading the rest of the article:

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Guide to Monitoring and Evaluating Knowledge Management in Global Health Programs

Ohkubo, S., Sullivan, T. M., Harlan, S. V., Timmons, B. T., & Strachan, M. (2013). Guide to monitoring and evaluating knowledge management in global health programs. Baltimore, MD: Center for Communication Programs, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The Guide to Monitoring and Evaluating Knowledge Management in Global Health Programs introduces standardized practices to evaluate whether KM projects, activities, and tools are effective at supporting global health and development efforts. The Guide describes the cycle of knowledge assessment, capture, generation, synthesis, and sharing, as well as how to evaluate a range of KM products, services, and tools.

It offers a list of 42 indicators that program managers and evaluators can use to track the progress of their own KM activities, and instruments to measure the contribution of KM activities to health policy and program outputs and outcomes. The Guide also discusses why monitoring and evaluation of KM approaches and activities is important and provides a series of recommended techniques and tools.

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Nonprofit Communications Trends Report!

To get your message to stand out from disorder you need to communicate more often key messages in visual format – particularly infographics. This report, the Nonprofit Communications Trends Report (Infographic), is a compilation and analysis from answers from 2 100 people and nonprofit professionals who completed the annual communication trends survey.

 

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ImplementIng effectIve knowledge management in emergencies: a case study from Somalia WASH cluster

Somalia1_2013Year of publication: 2013

This learning paper captures the experience of the Somalia WASH Cluster and draws lessons on how an effective knowledge management system can be developed and implemented. The paper aims to provide an example framework of a successful knowledge management system that can be adapted by other national WASH Clusters to support a predictable, effective, timely and coherent WASH emergency preparedness and response.

The paper will first outline the concept of knowledge management before featuring the key aspects of the knowledge management system in Somalia: basic components; challenges and actions; knowledge flow; backbones of the system; and feedback from the system users.

Lastly, it will highlight lessons learned from this experience.

The experience of the Somalia WASH Cluster demonstrates the importance of knowledge management in ensuring greater predictability and accountability in humanitarian response, while at the same time strengthening partnerships. Continue reading →

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Why sharing data can save services

An interesting article from the Dan Jellinek of the The Guardian I would like to share with you…

Sharing data could help drive down down costs. So how can the government make better use of information?

In the information age, the public sector – as provider of thousands of services to millions of people – handles more information than most. And with increasing amounts of collaboration between public bodies in order to cut costs and improve services, plus sharing with private-sector contractors and partners, there is a growing need to share this often sensitive information or data in a timely, secure and auditable way.

These issues are being tackled head on by the new multi-agency safeguarding hubs, or “Mash”, which bring together police, children’s and adult social care teams, health services and others to collect and share information on vulnerable children, families and adults.

But there are serious blockages to progress. A survey of data sharing of 33,000 public servants, published this month by the Guardian and specialist public sector information management solutions firm Objective, found that while 90% of respondents had a business requirement to share files, 71% were restricted from doing so.

read more http://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders-network/2013/jan/23/public-sector-sharing-data

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The WASH information Consortium’s platforms: connecting people, sharing knowledge, increasing transparency

The WASH Information Consortium initiative has been created to optimise knowledge and information dissemination in the Water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector globally while promoting information literacy in developing countries. Through a shared approach and working together, with a consortium of institutions, networks and organisations, it aims to develop and deliver joint services, through resource sharing. This presentation made by SuSanA and Avko, both organisations members of the WASH information Consortium, provides an overview of involved institutions’online platforms for increasing access to open data and share best practices. (“All logos and hyperlinked text in blue, can be clicked on…”.“Navigate back by clicking on the bigger middle circles…”).

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Platforms used by the Water Integrity Network (WIN)

1.       WIN website: www.waterintegritynetwork.net

2.       WIN tools and resources platform: http://www.waterintegritynetwork.net/integrityspace

3.       WIN Membership platform: http://www.waterintegritynetwork.net/become-a-member/membership

4.       Water Integrity forum: http://www.waterintegrityforum.com/

5.       WIN on twitter: @WaterIntegrityN

6.       WIN on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WaterIntegrityNetwork

7.       WIN on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/waterintegritynetwork/

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Platforms used by Avko

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Platforms used by WASH-Resource Centre Network Nepal (WASH-RCNN)

The WASH-RCNN has been using following platforms for learning and sharing on WASH issues.

Website

Resources (Online Library)

Electronic Bulletin

Facebook

Twitter

Youtube

Decentralised Resource Centres

  • Surkhet
  • Pokhara

WordPress Blog

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A taste of Water and Sanitation at the XII Seminar of Environmental Documentation Centres

On the 17th June, The Seminar of Environmental Documentation Centres and protected natural areas devoted part of its annual meeting to water and sanitation. The WASH information Consortium coordinated by IRC was invited by the United Nations Office Support International Decade “Water for Life” to present the Consortium initiative. The UN-Water in Zaragoza, the World Wide Web (W3C) and iAgua showed interest in working with the WASH information Consortium initiative.

At this meeting in Segovia, Spain more than 40 professionals from Resource Centres, and libraries of the United Nations came together to discuss the value of different initiatives and tools for  knowledge management. Water and sanitation have been the focus of several dialogues on water, that are organized as part of the International Decade “Water for Life”, 2005-2015, the inter-agency mechanism for the implementation of the Johannesburg Plan on water-related provisions and the Millennium Development Goals concerning freshwater.

Among the initiatives that were presented were:

  1. “Documentation Centres of United Nations on Water and Sanitation” by Pilar Gonzalez Meyaui of the United Nations Office.  Pilar invited participating organizations to join the group giving them the possibility of displaying on their websites the latest publications of the United Nations system on water and sanitation and have access to Spanish publications.

More than 15 centres showed their interest in becoming collaborative centres. However concern was expressed on the continuity of the initiative after completion of the Decade in 2015. The session also provided an opportunity for the United Nations depository libraries in Spain to introduce their work. Also highlighted was the transformation being observed in users in this new digital age and the increased need for training to improve search capabilities relevant and reliable documentation on the Internet.

2. WASH information Consortium an initiative of the International Water and Sanitation Centre (IRC). (View slideshow)

The presentation of the WASH information Consortium was done by Caridad Machín of IRC. Camacho was especially welcomed by the institutions related to water and sanitation. In the discussion some participants were interested in knowing the effectiveness of the group’s meetings and to what extent member organizations within the group are committed to the objectives of the consortium given the voluntary nature of the partnership. Three organizations expressed interest in working directly with the WASH information Consortium: Office of UN-Water in Zaragoza, the W3C Consortium and iAgua and they will be invited to the next meeting of the group. (To follow the group’s activities visit this blog: https://washinfo2015.wordpress.com/ and for joining the group send a message to camacho@irc.nl). Continue reading →

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Uganda WASH Resource Centre’s platforms

The Social Accountability  blog
The social accountability blog is maintained by the Network for Water and Sanitation Uganda. It documents the story on improving social accountability through empowering communities to use accountability tools to hold the service provide accountability.

The WASH Uganda blog
WASH in Uganda is a blog, calendar, documents, mailing group, social network and Q&A on the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) sector in Uganda. This blog  is maintained by IRC in partnership with many stakeholders in the Uganda WASH Sector including the Uganda WASH Resource Center.

 

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DSpace: a solution for Open digital repositories

20130702_Dspace_diagrameDSpace is the software of choice for academic, non-profit, and commercial organizations building open digital repositories.  It is free and easy to install “out of the box” and completely customizable to fit the needs of any organization.

DSpace preserves and enables easy and open access to all types of digital content including text, images, moving images, mpegs and data sets.  And with an ever-growing community of developers, committed  to continuously expanding and improving the software, each DSpace installation benefits from the next.

Why use DSpace? Top Reasons to Use DSpace

Looks like the ideal content manager allowing delegated management. Really worth looking at!

For more information see video: http://www.dspace.org/introducing/dspace-video

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UN-Water Decade’s platforms and social media

Websites

  • Spanish: Centro de documentación de Naciones Unidas sobre Agua y Saneamiento:

http://www.bibliotecaonuagua.org

  • English: UN-Water Decade Programme on Advocacy and Communication (UNW-DPAC)

http://www.un.org/waterforlifedecade/unwdpac.shtml

  • Spanish: Programa de ONU-Agua para la Promoción y la Comunicación en el marco del Decenio (UNW-DPAC)

http://www.un.org/spanish/waterforlifedecade/unwdpac.shtml

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