Comments on: Bridge seminars: Boosting cooperation across research areas

By: Ewen Le Borgne

Ewen Le Borgne — Fri, 15 May 2015 11:11:26 +0000

(Late comment from Addis team)
Many times seminars are attended by staff within the program or project presenting the seminars. They lack participation from other programs and projects within ILRI and across the centers. As the idea here is to integrate through seminars on a regular basis a platform like the virtual IPM would be ideal to bring in inputs from people from across Africa and the regions.
It will also be good to pick up the points that have come out of this IPM, for example like the Sustainable Intensification that have come up across LSE & ASSP – although the programs are approaching Sustainable Intensification from different angles. We need some kind of a concerted approach to deal with such kind of issues.

By: Shirley Tarawali

Shirley Tarawali — Thu, 14 May 2015 11:09:24 +0000

This sounds rather akin to the community of practice discussions mentioned in other ideas and in comments yesterday. Its sort of one of the implementation means to facilitate those (but other things here too I guess)

By: Addis

Addis — Thu, 14 May 2015 08:06:53 +0000

Comments from Addis:
– Having a virtual forum for comments would help to collect additional feedback / comments.
– A virtual component would be necessary on top of having a physical (face-to-face) seminar.
– It might work better if we use this type of model where have a series of presentations from the different perspectives and people can comment on them – and then on that basis the different presenters could get together and look at implications etc.
– Sustainable intensification would be a great topic for one of these

By: eleborgne

eleborgne — Thu, 14 May 2015 07:53:45 +0000

Ben, yes will remove the Addis vote, sorry – will do so for other ideas.
Lance, good point and let’s build this up with program leaders. If it’s only related to effective projects it may slow things down, but good to remember this. On the other hand, this mechanism could also be a way to generate future project ideas…

By: Annet Mulema

Annet Mulema — Thu, 14 May 2015 07:21:27 +0000

In reply to Lance. Right. We'll need support from program leaders. Its a great idea.

By: Lance

Lance — Wed, 13 May 2015 13:15:28 +0000

Gaps in communication, cooperation, collaboration across our programs and teams certainly needs to be addressed. But existing opportunities to learn what other teams are doing are usually ignored by us (much to Jimmy’s chagrin at every other town hall where he gently complains, rightly so, about the lack of a science culture). But organizing bridge seminars from the top is likely to be similarly ignored. We all have so much pressure on our time. Even this IPM seems to be getting mediocre levels of participation.

In a top down meets bottom up approach maybe the approach could be to encourage (force?) program leaders to organize at least one such bridge seminar with one or more other programs per year, but leave it to them to do so based on practical, tangible opportunities for collaboration.

If I receive a generic invitation to a seminar from one of the other teams I’m not likely to attend. If I get an invitation to a seminar between my team and one other team I am only slightly more likely to attend. But if Polly tells me, “Lance we’re thinking of a new project with Team XYZ, so please be at this bridge seminar that will help us think about the collaboration,” then I’ll come.

By: Bernhard Hack

Bernhard Hack — Tue, 12 May 2015 18:21:38 +0000

Could ‘Addis’ please withdraw their vote? The idea is really one person one vote here and the group account would skew that. Thanks.