South African National Broadband Forum

I am getting quite excited about the upcoming South African Broadband Forum next week.  Inspired by the coalition that emerged in the United States to get broadband infrastructure investment on the political agenda in the run-up to the U.S. election, the Association for Progressive Communications, the Shuttleworth Foundation, Sangonet, and the South Africa Connect project [...]

Wanted: Pirates on the High Seas of Agricultural Research

Reprising a role in a previous life at Bellanet.org, I gave a presentation last week in Maputo to the Knowledge Sharing (KS) community within the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).  Actually it started out that way but because the CGIAR’s Annual General Meeting is such a confluence of actors and agendas, the KM [...]

Funding Projects – Group Consensus Facilitation

The Context

The IDRC Acacia team in action

Every year in our team at work, we get together to discuss our research funding budget. Each team at IDRC is responsible for producing a yearly “pipeline” of projected research projects to fund. Our team is pretty spread out, in four offices across the African continent and in [...]