Welcome to InfoSpring!
InfoSpring is an online question and answer tool designed to help practitioners, especially those working in the field, share critical knowledge. This site offers personalized collaboration tools designed to support practitioners to find, share and distribute information about the important work they do.
InfoSpring is easy to navigate, allowing easy filtering of information, and can be translated to over 60 languages. It is designed as a peer review mechanism, allowing all users to post questions, answers, and vote-up the contributions of fellow practitioners. Users accumulate Reputation Points, giving them more abilities on the site and enabling the community to identify sources of true expertise. To learn more please visit our welcome page where you will find some instructional videos from our team. Below you will find blog postings about InfoSpring, please feel free to comment or ask question.
Our diverse global membership brings together people from the integrated field of sustainable development, with a focus on the key issues of natural resource management, sustainable agriculture, climate change, and food security. InfoSpring is a place where you and your colleagues can find practical solutions to real-world development problems.
12 | 10
By: Tony Barclay
Our December newsletter is the final one to be published by the Development Practitioners Forum. Earlier this year, acknowledging the very difficult fund raising environment, the Forum’s board of directors concluded that the initiatives that we have launched over the past two years could best be sustained on different organizational platforms.
We are very pleased to announce that our community Q&A site, InfoSpring, has a new home at the Earth Institute at Columbia University. The Earth Institute and Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) are the hub for the innovative Master’s in Development Practice (MDP) program, a practice-orientated development degree supported by the MacArthur Foundation. With its interdisciplinary focus and global network of institutions, faculty and students at 22 universities around the world, the MDP program will be able to expand and enrich the InfoSpring community. Read about it here: Forum Final Newsletter
This devprac.org site will continue to post blogs from development practitioners who are committed to the principles of peer-to-peer learning and more efficient knowledge exchange on the front lines. You’ll find posts from practitioner meetups across rural Liberia on the Liberia Network page. A second practitioner network is taking shape in Kenya, and preliminary reports from the team who are leading it appear on the Kenya Network page.
| DevPrac
07 | 10
By: David
Tony Barclay visited Kenya in July and hosted an InfoSpring reception meet with some of our users who together have made Kenya a major hub of InfoSpring activity.
Approximately 50 guests attended representing development practitioners from a number of cross-cutting fields. During the reception members discussed InfoSpring and how it can better serve the development community. Recommendations centered on quality assurance of information exchange, formulation of development friendly policies, use of technical language and user friendliness of the site and it’s tools. The Forum was delighted to have such positive and constructive feedback and will use the information to better inform InfoSpring members as well as help make InfoSpring a stronger tool for practitioners.
Those in attendance posed several questions for the Forum staff and below are a summary of our responses:
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Kenya, Nairobi, Tony Barclay | InfoSpring
06 | 10
By: David
We are delighted that InfoSpring now has over 500 members and the number of questions being asked is rapidly growing. However we have many members that have yet to join in the conversation. To encourage their participation we have written a brief guide on what makes a good question on InfoSpring. The ultimate aim of posting a question is to get an answer from fellow practitioners and this guide will ensure you maximize your chances of of receiving a relevant and practical response. Click the link below to open the guide.
What makes a Good Question on InfoSpring?
Questions | InfoSpring
05 | 10
By: David
Over recent weeks we have seen very encouraging growth on InfoSpring, both in terms of the number of members and the amount of content. At the end of the first quarter we had an active but relatively modest community of 150 members. Six weeks later we have passed through 425 and are approaching 500 well ahead of our projections.
Much of this growth is occurring in the field, with a lot of activity coming from Kenya, the Philippines, and more recently Malaysia, Cameroon and South Africa. I would like to give a special mention to Kareen Oloroso, who spent much of the last month advocating for InfoSpring as she travelled around the Philippines as part of her normal job. As a result we now have over 30 users in the country. You can see Kareen’s InfoSpring profile by clicking here. read more ->
membership | InfoSpring
04 | 10
By: David
We have heard from some users that the limitations for doing certain activities based on reputation points have been a barrier to entry. Some users have wanted to add comments or vote questions up before they are ready to dive in and start asking and answering questions. We understand this issue – not everyone wants to post questions immediately.
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Reputation Points, Voting | InfoSpring
03 | 10
By: Jennifer Schappert
Development practitioners are a heterogeneous community. We work in many countries, speak hundreds of languages, and focus on topics spanning biodiversity to conflict mitigation. During the planning phases of InfoSpring, we envisioned a forum where this diverse and rich knowledge is shared openly and globally. While the idea of a representative and far reaching Q&A site encompassing a global community of development practitioners is great in theory, the real challenge is applying it to practice. Where does one even start?
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Online community, social media | InfoSpring
03 | 10
By: Leland
Earlier this month, I attended the Online Community Unconference East (OCUE) in New York. Put on by Forum One Communications, the “unconference” was a chance for social networking platform professionals to talk about their businesses, share best practices and learn some new things about a rapidly growing sector.
First things first – what’s an unconference?? It’s a user-structured event in which the attendees decide what they want to talk about and then lead the sessions themselves. In this case, attendees wrote down session topics on sheets of paper and stuck them in a room and time slot on a giant grid on the wall. Once the grid was full, we split up and started talking. I’ve heard mixed reviews of the format in the past, but in this case, I’d say it worked out very well. The sessions I attended were lively and generally well-run, with just a couple duds.
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Online community, social media | InfoSpring
By: David
It turns out the transition from a concept to a functional knowledge-sharing mechanism was far from simple. Admittedly, InfoSpring today is still in its infancy, but to get even this far took a whole year of discovery and experimentation. From the beginning, we felt we understood the problem (see our problem statement). The vast experience of those involved with the Forum, especially Tony Barclay’s 40 years in development, provided a unique insight, confirmed through conversations with practitioners around the world. These conversations easily led to a conceptual understanding of the solution – the creation of knowledge networks for frontline practitioners that enable horizontal, person to person communication and sharing of ideas, amplifying the voice of practitioners, and unlocking their expertise.
The difficulty was not so much “what?” but “how?” – how do we best harness the growth of internet use and web 2.0 applications? Initially we focused on what currently existed and what we did not want to be. We found many loose discussion forums and online information libraries; some of these do a good job at meeting their objectives and can be very useful. However, as either lofty policy discussions or passive information-hosting sites, they do not respond to the problem we identified. We were then introduced to targeted Q&A sites that exist for the sole purpose of peer-to-peer knowledge sharing and practical problem solving. These have become hugely popular among IT programmers, gadget nerds and a range of other niches. If this works elsewhere why not within the development community?
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History, Tony Barclay | InfoSpring
