CIARD Workshop in the LAC region, Lima

30 October 2009, Lima, Peru
 
The CIARD workshop was held in the same format as the one held in Accra for the Sub-Saharan Africa (similar to the format used in Cairo, but with the addition of a chat show and a peer assist – not really focussed on the CIARD initiative though).
The participants in the workshop were positive and gave a lot of feedback. There was no impression that people saw it as an initiative coming from the top, from the international organizations. They concentrated on how their activities could benefit from CIARD, and actually illustrated those benefits themselves rather than ask for them.

Highlights from the RIBDA Conference 2009 in Lima

RIBDA Conference

27-29 October 2009, Lima, Peru

 

The theme of the keynote speeches and plenary sessions was mainly Open Access to agricultural research outputs. Interesting speeches were given by Jean-Claude Guédon (University of Montreal), Abel Packer (SciELO) and Peter Ballantyne (IAALD). Also in plenary, Stephen Rudgard gave a presentation on the CIARD initiative.

 

Being very interested in National agricultural information systems, a very interesting part of the Conference for me was the parallel sessions, where agricultural information systems created in different countries were presented.

Highlights from the CIARD CMTF face-to-face meeting in Addis

The CIARD Content Management Task Force met in Addis Ababa from 25 to 27 March 2009 in order to achieve a consolidated work program (what, who, when) for the Task Force till the next plenary CIARD meeting and to discuss the CIARD Checklist and the CIARD Pathways.

The discussion on the Checklist was very productive and the TF was able to produce a revised version to submit to the Advocacy Task Force.

 

The main points on which the TF agreed were:

Too many things at the Share Fair… no time for blogging!

Just a quick blog post to say that I intended to blog in real time about at least a couple of sessions at the Share Fair but there were too many interesting sessions and too many people to talk to, even at coffee, lunch and dinner time… really no time for blogging. Not that I am a good blogger anyway, I usually blog every two months, which probably can’t be even called blogging. But this time I really wanted to. 

A presentation on Agricultural Learning Resources at the 9th AOS workshop at the IAALD-AFITA-WCCA conference

During the 9th Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS) workshop, held on Aug. 26th 2008 during the IAALD-AFITA-WCCA Conference, Gauri Salokhe (FAO) presented the work that FAO, in strict collaboration with the Agricultural University of Athens, is conducting on the management of learning resources. After a first phase in which a survey was made of all the existing metadata sets describing learning resources, a Task Force was created to involve partners in activities and discussions that will hopefully bring to the adoption of a common approach in exchanging information on learning resources.