Authors: White,N.; Lamoureux,L.; Staiger-Rivas,S.
Produced by: Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (2009)

The Institutional Knowledge Sharing (KS) Project together with CGIAR Center partners has been experimenting with a range of KS tools and methods over the past five years and has recently been assembling these and many others into this toolkit. It is an evolving resource, continually updated, edited, expanded, and critiqued and it's aimed at scientists, research support teams, and administrators working in international development agencies, with a special emphasis on those engaged in agriculture and agricultural research.

The Knowledge Sharing Toolkit has been designed as a wiki - a highly interactive and collaborative website - where registered users can add tools and methods, edit existing pages, insert comments and anecdotes, or even list themselves as contacts if they have had experience with a particular tool or method.

The toolkit is based on first identifying a knowledge sharing need first and then finding the most appropriate tools and methods to meet this need. These needs are divided as follows:

• Relationship building needs For example, improving relations between regional offices, managing
  networks, opening up spaces for open dialogue with stakeholders

• Planning, monitoring and evaluation needs For example, developing a strategic planning process, providing evidence of the difference made by a project or organisation, reflecting on processes and sharing lessons learnt
• Delivery - For example, enhancing demand driven research initiatives, facilitation the adaptation and adoption of research outputs by beneficiaries and stakeholders
• Collaboration For example, facilitating effective collaborative practices, supporting collaboration between wide-spread teams, different approaches to meetings
• Knowledge capture and dissemination For example, how to point to and share digital materials available on
  the internet, dealing with large volumes of materials produced and found on the internet, getting people to share their knowledge face to face and online Users can also search the toolkit or find the best tool or method for them using the key words (tags).

The toolkit is available online on KSToolkit.org Website

Information Provided by Carol Lombard, Department of Social Development Population Website