"Sanitation Updates" - One of the IRC blogs

If you use WASH as a noun, rather than a verb, you gotta be working in the humanitarian field. WASH stands for “WAter, Sanitation and Hygiene”, one of the key sectors in the field of aid and development.

As with any nonprofit area, advocacy, information dissemination and project discussions are key to the WASH sector, so it was to no surprise I recently came across a whole bunch of WASH-related blogs (see bottom).
Now, it’s not the first time I stumble upon a series of interconnected blogs around a common theme. Often these blog projects start with a lot of enthusiasm, migrating into a general frustration about the amount of time it takes to update all of them.
They often end up in the waste bin labelled “Abandoned Blogs”.
Not so with the WASH blogs-“family”, which have been updated regularly since the past three years.

That stirred my interest, and I took the opportunity to have a chat with the man behind the WASH blog initiative: Cor Dietvorst, the editor of Source Weekly at the IRC (International Water and Sanitation Centre).

Blogtips: Cor, a social media professional, it seems?
Cor: (laughs) Well, I am an information specialist at IRC in Holland, where I have worked for over 25 years. I originally studied chemical engineering but my interest soon shifted via information management to providing news services.
At IRC I am also a member of the South Asia regional team and the Transparency and Accountability thematic group, with a special interest in the “right to information”.
Recently I also facilitated a workshop on social media and web writing in Nepal.

Blogtips: “IRC” – Not the International Refugee Committee, as I know it, but International Water and Sanitation Centre… What is the IRC?
Cor: We are an independent knowledge centre dedicated to the field of water supply, sanitation, hygiene and integrated water resources management. We focus on improving  livelihoods for the poorest since 1968.
IRC has three main programmes: a core programme funded by Dutch development aid focusing on innovation and information services, and two large multi-country research/learning programmes funded by the Gates Foundation – WASHCost on life-cycle costs and Triples-S on sustainable water services.
We have over 60 staff mostly based in The Hague, and probably about the same number contracted in-country for programmes and projects. Our focus countries are Ghana, Burkina Faso, Uganda, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and Honduras

Blogtips: Where does social media fit within the work you do?
Cor: We work with a wide network of partners, so blogs are an easy way to keep everyone involved, and to dispatch information.
The more so as one of the key purposes of our organisation is to ensure water hygiene and sanitation services are not only delivered, but also maintained with the necessary skills. Thus training and capacity building is a key element for our long-term sustainability strategy. And once again, blogs are an easy way to assemble this information, stimulate discussions, and disseminate the information we collect. Better than a dusty library in The Hague! (laughs).

Blogtips: It is always interesting to find out how social media came into an organisation. In the IRC, was that a conscious policy decision?
Cor: Well, staff from the Information and Communication Section started using blogs for workshops and meetings in 2007. That caught on immediately, so we started the WASH News blogs –the once you discovered- soon after that.
Last year IRC also collaborated with other partners to set up the “Water Cube” channel on Blip.tv for the Stockholm Water Week.
We have other tools like a Twitter hashtag #wash4dev and Zotero for reference sharing we use on experimental basis.

Blogtips: It seems most started as an experiment, no?
Cor: Yep, as many nonprofit organisations, IRC has no system-wide social media strategy as such. We started it, it clearly served a purpose, and we continue to expand it.

The man behind the IRC blogs: Cor Dietvorst

Blogtips: When I first came across the series of WASH blogs, I thought: “Gosh, some blogger got really enthusiastic here”.
Cor: The WASH News blogs were set up in 2007 as part of the Source Water and Sanitation News Service. For my key job as editor of the English Source Weekly newsletter and web site, I already collect a lot of news. Only 10-20% of that information, I can process into the Source newsletter. The rest remained well, … on my computer. I thought “what a pity… All of this information remaining unused, unpublished”… Many people are interested in this data (smiles). So,… blogs were a natural way to share the information I had collected anyways.
Sanitation Updates has already been set up by Dan Campbell in 2007 in Blogger in support of the 2008 International Year of Sanitation. I asked if I could join and transferred it to WordPress. The WASH Vacancies blog I have opened to other sector agencies, so that it can more or less run by itself.
But indeed, after a while the blogs took up too much time for me to handle on my own, so a few other colleagues help me out.

Blogtips: That’s how it started: you used blogs to publish previously collected information. Why blogs? You had a corporate website also, no?
Cor: The main benefit from the blogs is that we can now provide a more up-to-date news service for sector professionals in the WASH sector. It is easier to publish information on blogs than on a corporate website.

Blogtips: Was there any integration between the blogs and your corporate website?
Cor: We have a natural integration as we publish different regional and thematic news feeds from the blogs on the corporate site. Even though, to be honest, we haven’t really examined if this leads to more page views on our website.

Blogtips: Blogs make it easier to publish information, good, but any other advantages for the blogs?
Cor: Oh yeah..! The blogs attract many more comments than the news on our corporate website. This rarily leads to a real discussion, but it is a good way to build some kind community. The interactivity of blogs is definitively a plus.
But there is more: blogs have also increased our visibility. We are reaching a larger and broader public.

Blogtips: How much traffic do you get on the blogs, then?
Cor: The blogs got nearly 300,000 page views in 2009. That is 30% more than our English newsletter on the corporate site. We recently got a request from a large NGO to start a Spanish language version of Sanitation Updates.

Blogtips: All of the WASH blogs are on WordPress.com using a simple theme. Was that a conscientious choice?
Cor: We started with Blogger in 2007, but colleagues in and outside IRC convinced us that WordPress.com offered more functionality. At that time (2008), I found the plain Cutline theme, the most appropriate. It had all the functionality we wanted. It was not too flashy neither but the custom-header option provided a nice way of giving every blog its own “face”.
The choice for different regional and thematic blogs was chosen to mirror the different headings of our newsletter.

Blogtips: You must have a lot of content to generate, with 20-odd blogs. Do you cross-post, or does each have entirely different content?
Cor: Of course, I do cross-post. But not so much out of “lack of material”: as the subjects of the different blogs overlap, so does the content. The most active blog feeds some contents to the regional to thematic blogs.

Blogtips: Which is the most active blog, then?
Cor: “Sanitation Updates”, which I  co-manage with my colleague Dan Campbell, Web Manager at Environmental Health at USAID.

Blogtips: The blogs are 2 to 3 years old now, would you have done anything different, given what platforms were available back then?
Cor: Maybe I would have concentrated on a limited number of regions and themes, or from the start made a bigger effort to involve more contributors.

Blogtips: If today, you had 1 month, and 10,000$, what would you do differently.
Cor: Well, as they say, the “future is now”. I am happy to say we actually have a designer and a programmer working with us now, looking how the blogs can be better integrated into a new Source news page on our corporate website.
What I would like to do in the future is to set up a network of local blog-correspondents: “WASH sector staff armed with smart-phones sending in field reports”, that is my dream!

Blogtips: Wishing you the best for the future, Cor. Your blogs are an excellent example of how to use blogs for nonprofit. Thanks for sharing this with us.
Cor: Welcome!

Here is the full list of Cor’s WASH blogs:

An interesting slide set by social media guru Beth Kanter, showing how social media can be used as a marketing tool – specifically for non-profit organisations.

Some of the slides contain details you will only see when watching the slide show in full screen (click on the menu icon – Choose “Full screen”)..

Blogging: You Are No Longer Alone

In my tutorial series “Blogging 101 – Starting a blog from scratch” I have already covered the basic question many nonprofit organisations ask themselves: “Does my organisation need a blog?”

There was one issue I did not highlight, though: Blogging is a kind of crowd sourced knowledge management.

What do I mean by that? An example:

When I worked at the ecology lab at the University back in the 80’s, we did research on the foraging habits of migrating geese (exciting stuff, I know!). Twice a year, we published an article in a magazine. That involved a lot of to-and-fro’s between us and the publishing house, about the topic, the depth of the article, the wording, drafts, corrections. Eventually the article was published. It took weeks before it got physically distributed, and then the article resided in libraries waiting for ’someone to consult it’. It took weeks and months before we got reactions, feedback on research finished almost a year earlier. Not too much we could do with the feedback at that point.
If all went well, other authors would make a reference to our article in theirs. Sometimes years later.

Think how the Internet changed all of that. Websites democratized the publishing power, even though it was still pretty sturdy going. Standard CMS-es (Content Management Systems) governing websites are not always the easiest of mediums to publish things. Easier than printed material, but nothing compared to blogs.

Nowadays, researchers can write about any aspect of  their (ongoing) research on the fly, on their blog. Hit the “Publish” button and there it goes off in the ether. Within seconds people will start reading it, within minutes comments will come in, and a dialogue will start. Within hours search engines will have indexed the article and people all over the world, interested in the subject, can find the article and can get involved.

I might sound like ranting, but have you ever thought of the sheer raw power “blogs” give to your fingertips, people? Have you ever really considered the way blogging can, and should, change the way nonprofit research is done? –And here I explicitly use the term “nonprofit” as “profit” research is often still covered under a veil of secrecy. God forgive if a commercial researchers would blog about their efforts to make the iPhone speech-enabled, or on the newest LCD density techniques. No, nonprofit is different. The data, the process and the outcome of nonprofit research is public property. The benevolent donors paid for it, after all.

On my personal blog, I did an experiment to test how fast search engines picked up on original content and how content got propagated through the Internet-ether. It is a simple example, but think of the applicability to your own work:

Since I installed Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, I had a weird problem: every 30 minutes or so, my /temp directory filled up with Gigabytes of AdAxxx.tmp files. I googled like nuts to find the solution, the ICT helpdesk too. It was only when I googled in different languages, I found a trace of someone with the same problem, and its solution. The person posted it on an Italian discussion forum. If it was not for that obscure post in an obscure discussion forum, I would never have found the solution. And my life would still have been miserable. Someone found a similar problem like mine, and had posted it on the Internet…. Simple as that.

So, I decided to unleash the powers of a blog. While I was laying in my hammock, in the back garden, with my laptop on my knees, I wrote a blogpost describing the problem and its solution. I hit “Publish”, and tweeted the post on my personal Twitter account and this blog’s Twitter account, @BloggerTip.

Literally one hour after I finished the post, Google had indexed it, and it returned as a top hit for the search “AdAxxx.tmp problem”:

From my hammock to the world, in less than an hour. But what was not the only thing, look at the full search result:

Google is clever: not only had it indexed my original post, but on top of that, they also found the Twitter entry, even though the tweet itself was not related to the AdAxxx problem:

RT @TheRoadTo You know what I like about blogging? It is really crowd sourced knowledge management http://bit.ly/dgzdfM

So while crawling Twitter, Google had also crawled the bit.ly link to the original post, and indexed it with the content of that link.

But there is more:

As BlogTips also displays my latest tweets  in the side column, Google found the entry, as content of this blog, and indexed it.

In short: Within one hour after publishing a blogpost, and tweeting the link, Google indexed both the post, the tweet and the blog on which the tweet was republished. Pretty groovy, no?

As I said, it is a simple example, but “Think People, Think!”. Imagine what this can mean to your nonprofit work: There you are, experimenting with a solution to a locust problem, or working with innovative ways to drill wells in Southern Sudan, or struggling to find a crop with the same nutritional value as the traditional barley a tribe used to cultivate, or just (Eureka) found a simple way to solve a complicated medical condition for one of your patients. These are all things either others can help you with, or where you can help others.

How? Blog about it, dummy!

Picture courtesy Starts with a Bang

The new Blogger Dashboard - Notice anything different?

Last night, Blogger announced their online template designer.

Go to your Blogger dashboard, click on “Design”, and you get a split screen:

Blogger template designer

The new template designer lets you change and tweak your blog to your heart’s content, from the basic layout (one-two-three column, mixed columns), to the background images, fonts and colours. In the bottom screen, you can see a preview of the changes to your actual blog.

I have to say, I am impressed. It seems Blogger is definitively moving into the 21st century

Beware of two things though:

1. if you added manual customizations to your template file, like meta data or the Google Analytics code, these customizations will not be taken into your new template. Before changing anything, make a backup of your ‘old’ template. Once done, manually paste the customizations into your new template.
   And remember, each time you change your new template, your customizations will go ‘Poof’. Really wished Google would make a widget where you can easily add often used code. I mean who does NOT run the Google Analytics code on their blog?
2. Once you change the template of your blog, loads of things, other than the pure layout might change: Changing the width of your posts will have text wrap around pictures differently. Your tables, blockquotes, picture framing,… will all look differently.
   This might make changing a Blogger template more tricky than just a few clicks. Check out the pains I had to go through when changing the template for one of my blogs.

Want to see how you can play with the new Blogger Template? I changed the layout of one of my blogs -The Non-Profit Press- in 3 minutes flat.

More and more people browse blogs from their mobile devices. While you can view any website from your iPhone or Blackberry, the pages will appear with a very small font, and the whole thing will look very cramped, unless if the website supports a mobile theme. Only then, the site will appear suitable for easy mobile browsing.

Mobile browsing will increase in popularity: Few mobile phones are sold anymore without a browser functionality.  The price of 3G mobile network access is going down, and WiFi hotspots spreading like wild fire.  So if you think about expanding the functionality of your blog, think “Mobile Themes”.

A mobile theme enabled website will either automatically detect the visitor uses a mobile device, or at worse, the user can use a dedicated URL like mobile.yoursite.org, m.yoursite.com or mob.yoursite.com to access the mobile version of your website.

Theme-ing a site for mobile users is not for those faint of heart or for the bloggers with two left hands when it comes to the technical side of blogging. Theme-ing a site requires quite some skills. Luckily if you don’t host your blog on your own server, but use your blogservice to host it, all the work is done for you. That’s right: you don’t have to do anything, mobile themes come with the package.
On Tumblr, Posterous and WordPress.com that is. Blogger, as with many features, stays behind once again.

1. Mobile themes on Posterous

I wrote before about the new Posterous mobile phone theme, which automatically detects when a visitor uses a mobile device. Just like many features of Posterous, the theme is simple, clean but also really “plain vanilla”: apart from browsing the different posts, there are not many bells and whistles one would expect.

Posterous on an iPhone

Goodies like commenting, subscribing a Posterous blog, or a blog search are not included.

2. Mobile themes on Tumblr

Tumblr, the competing vanilla blog platform, already featured an automatic iPhone theme since a while. Mind you, that is “iPhone” and not “any mobile device”.

I use Tumblr quite extensively for a series of simple blogs aggregating content from other sources: check out AidNews, BloggingToday and NonProfitBlogs. It is also my preferred tool to collect my webclips: check out TheHorizon. Let’s have a look how these show on the iPhone:

A simple Tumblr mobile themed blog: AidNews

Yep, indeed, AidNews does not feature any pictures, so that looks a bit ‘too’ plain vanilla, right? How about this for a taste:

Browsing posts on Blogging Today

Nice, no? You just swipe from post to post. If you click on one, then this is how single posts look like:

A single post on AidBlogs Mobile

Still too plain vanilla for your taste? Well, since a month or so, Tumblr allows you to customize this mobile theme, so you can add features, such as comments, and a blog search to your heart’s delight.

3. Mobile themes on WordPress.com

Remember there are two flavours of WordPress: WordPress.org and WordPress.com. As I covered in my primer “Which blog software to use“, the first is the self-hosted version and on the second, your blog is hosted by WordPress itself.

WordPress.com features the most complete and sophisticated automatic mobile theme-ing of all blogplatforms.

While you will get a mobile version of your WordPress.com blog on any mobile device, the full bells and whistles will only show on phones with a “rich” web browser, like the iPhone and Android. The end result is truly impressive:  not only do you get access to the posts, pages, and archives, but you can also comment and search the blog. This is how it looks like:

Multiple posts on WordPress.com mobile

Now, that is what I call a “mobile theme”! Each post shows a summary with the date, author, categories and the number of comments

Expanding a post on WordPress.com mobile

When you tap the “down arrow”, you get a preview of the post.

Viewing a single post on WordPress.com mobile

And that is how a single post looks like.

Viewing the pages on WordPress.com mobile

Tapping the “down arrow” next to the banner, shows the pages, archives and a search bar.

Viewing search results on WordPress.com mobile

And that is how search results show up. Each can be previewed by tapping the “down arrow”, or shown in full by tapping the post itself.

Commenting on Wordpress.com mobile

… and commenting could not be easier.

4. Mobile themes on Blogger

After all of that WordPress splendour comes the anti-climax. Blogger.. Aaah, unfortunately, Blogger once more leaves its users high and dry: mobile theme-ing is not supported, unless if you exchange your blog template with a mobile template…. which would mean that “normal browsers” would see the mobile template too. And that is not what we want.

A pity that one of the most popular blogplatforms features… well, …so few features.

Cartoon courtesy Geek and Poke

For anyone taking blogging seriously, “SEO” or “Search Engine Optimization” is serious stuff. SEO is the craftmanship involved in improving the volume and quality of traffic search engines generate to your website or blog.
As I described in my “Understanding the traffic on your blog” primer, a large part of your visitors stumble upon your blog by accident, through a search engine. In my case study, about 40% of new visitors to be precise. Serious business.

And for anyone interested in SEO-stuff, Matt Cutts is a serious man. He works at Google, and goes to great length in assisting webmasters making their sites more accessible, crawable and searchable for search engines.

I am republishing the video above, as it gives some really down to earth hints on common SEO problems and pitfalls, sometimes too obvious for us to consider. Watch it, it is an hour well spent.

Video courtesy Matt Cutts

If Vesalius were a blogger...

After the latest spree of hacks on thousands of websites, it is time to look at some of the commonalities and ways to security our sites better. Given that the security holes are clearly at the level of the website hosting companies, and it is their duty to close those holes, nothing stops us from securing our own sites better. That is what our next series will be about: how to secure our self hosted blogs.

Godaddy published more background information on their blog:

This is a complex attack with many components. Here is a high-level overview of how they occur:

1. The attacker is coordinating attacks against three different hosting providers for this to work.
   • At Hosting Provider ‘A’ – A malicious file is placed on hosting accounts at this provider. No two files have the same name.
   • At Hosting Provider ‘B’ – A file is uploaded listing the infected domain names and unique file names from provider ‘A.’
   • At Hosting Provider ‘C’ – A malicious “scareware” site is placed on compromised accounts
2. After the attackers put their files in place, they use Hosting Provider ‘B’ to trigger the malicious files on Hosting Provider ‘A.’ When triggered, the malicious file:
   • Scans the hosting account for any php file
   • Injects malicious content, installing malware that directs to Hosting Provider ‘C’
   • Removes any trace of itself from ‘Hosting Provider B’
3. The attack is complete when an infected website receives a visitor. The visitor, if not adequately protected, will have malware installed on their machine.
4. The malware will alert the infected computer to purchase fake anti-virus software, located at Hosting Provider ‘C.’

The common factors of all the recent hacks are:

1. The affected sites were all .PHP based CMS’s (Content Management Systems): WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, phpBB…
2. A .php file was put on the root directory of the website, executed a few hours later, and then deleted (more).
3. While executing, the .php file inserted malicious code in all .php files of your site which redirected visitors to a site which infected the visitor’s computer with a virus. (more)

So the basic questions are:

1. How can we avoid .php file being dropped on our site?
2. If a .php file is dropped through a hosting provider’s security hole, how can we detect it fast, before it executes?
3. If our .php files are infected, how do we cure them easily?

Again, while we can not close the security hole of the hosting providers, we sure can take some measures to either tighten the hole ourselves, or at least monitor the changes happening on our sites?

Some solutions:
In this post, I suggest a solution to monitor for file changes and uploads on your selfhosted WordPress blog.
In this post, I described how to cure infested files.
Here, I describe how to protect login information being read from our WordPress blog.

Safe blogging!

Picture courtesy WikiMedia

With the help several people, I spend a lot of time collecting and updating my list of nonprofit blogs, which I publish on my Delicious list. Over the past months, this list grew to 549 blogs.

As quantity, but also quality is important, I use strict selection criteria:

1. I only accept blogs, not mere websites
2. The blogs have to be at least 3 months old, and have regular updates
3. Blogs without updates for six months are deleted
4. The subject has to revolve around the nonprofit sector: advocacy, fundraising, charity, development, aid, humanitarian relief…

I aggregate the latest posts via RSS feeds, and republish summaries of these blogs on The NonProfit Blogs and the NonProfit Blogs section of Humanitarian News. Both now collect a total of about 490 RSS feeds. The updates are automatically twittered via @nonprofitblogs.

As time went by, this must have become the largest single collection of nonprofit blogs you can find on the Web.

The reason why I collect these blogs:

1. They give me, at a glance, an overview of what is going on in the nonprofit world
2. Storing summaries of these blogs, gives me (and you) a searchable historic overview of what people write about in the nonprofit sector
3. Going over the bloglist allows me to analyse statistics on the blogs, as I did in this post
4. And most importantly, I collect them to learn from others: scanning through the list, and looking at the blogs, gives me a good impression what tools others use, what the common failures and successes are, the common pitfalls. It allows me to pick up basic lessons, as I described in this post on “blog real estate”.

I hope you find some inspiration for your own blog, using this nonprofit blogs list. Enjoy!

Cartoon courtesy We Blog Cartoons

Yahoo Pipes is a free Internet service by Yahoo, which allows you to aggregate and manipulate RSS feeds. I use them extensively for several of my aggregation sites like Humanitarian News and AidNews, to name a few.

Recently, Yahoo Pipes silently went from “Beta” to “Production”, a migration which was only noticed as the word “Beta” disappeared from their logo.

Let me correct that statement: when they went from “Beta” to “Production”, the only thing the users could notice was that their service became unreliable. Since about four weeks, users have been complaining on the Pipes discussion forum about problems saving and running their “pipes”.

Several Pipes staff are monitoring the discussion forum, and have been putting out messages in the gist of “we had a problem, but all is fixed now”, but other than that, there has been silence.

Which makes me think: how far have we, the Internet community, become reliant on free services like Pipes, or Google Apps, Google Gmail, Blogger, Flickr, Picasa, etc.. And how far do we have a say on “our rights as a consumer”?

It is not because an Internet giant like Yahoo puts out a service free for all to use, that the service is to be taken “as is”. Where are our not a “consumers’ rights” in all of this? Are we not lured into the free services, because the services are free, and when we become reliant and dependent on them, understaffed as they might be, we just “cope” with the down time? Have we, as consumers, become reluctant to demand our rights? And what is the forum of to do that?

Think of it. How many organisations, if not companies, use free Internet services provided by the “Giants”. What is our say when these services go down? What are our rights? How much longer will we cope with their downtime by saying “oh… but it is for free, so we have no right to complain?”.

Nothing is for free in this world. If a company decides to provide a certain service “for free”, than there is a certain reason for it. Either because they want our contents, they want us to develop applications based on their platforms,… But it does not mean because services are for free they should be unreliable.

This is the time to demand to these companies a certain acceptable level of service. We need to demand the right to be informed.

Yahoo Pipes: your service sucks at this moment. Get your act together!

Once upon a time, wandering through the forest of nonprofit blogs, I stumbled upon a blog, managed by a team based here in Rome. Over the past years, I got to know most of the people involved, as a bunch of great individuals, driven by enthusiasm and passion about their cause: the ICT-KM team at the CGIAR – the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.

The ICTKM team at CGIAR

The ICT-KM team recently revamped their blog, and merged it with their website. The outcome was a sparkling new blog. I wanted to know more. Time for a talk with two of the ICT-KM members: Antonella Pastore and Enrica Porcari. An interview which touched on many issues dear to our heart: “What are the benefits of social media to nonprofit organisations?”, “What motivates people to blog?”, “Migrating a blog from one platform to another”, “the difference between blogs and traditional Content Management Systems”, “Blog traffic and the importance of good content”…

Blogtips: CGIAR is not particularly a household name in the nonprofit sector. What is your work all about?
Enrica: Familiar with the Green revolution? With the work of Norman Borlaug? With the research behind vitamin A improved rice that helped prevent blindness of millions of children in developing countries…? Well, then you know about our work, even if you may not be familiar with the acronym. The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) was established in 1971. It is now a partnership of 64 members: countries, foundations, philanthropic organizations that support 15 international research centers spread across the globe.

Blogtips: Sounds like “Monsanto for the Poor”
Enrica: We work with hundreds of governments and civil society organizations as well as private businesses around the world to carry out scientific research for sustainable agricultural growth so that the poor can have access to more and better food.
Each center has a specific mandate. Many research on crops, such as potatoes, rice, wheat,.. while others work on water, livestock, fishery. We basically cover the whole array of a food basket, and do policy work as well.
Our work is for a nonprofit cause: all of our research, our findings, are put in the public domain, they are free for anybody to access. Our mission is to enhance the lives of poor in developing countries. For example we do research to improve the production or the nutritional value of crops, commodities we refer to as the ‘neglected’ crops. These are areas the giants, such as Monsanto, may not be interested in, as they are of little commercial interest in the countries of the north. However, this forms the basis for the well-being of many families in the developing countries. It is for them we work.

Blogtips: Aha.. Now, your team “ICT-KM” is not doing actual agricultural research, right? How do you guys fit into all of this?
Enrica: Our 15 research centers are autonomous entities, and at the central level, there are a number of so-called “System Units” that work with and for the Centers in specific functional areas.
Ours, the ICT-KM Program, is one of them. We promote and support the use of innovative ICT tools and knowledge management practices to improve the effectiveness of the CGIAR System. If you consider the CGIAR employs almost 8,000 people working in over 200 locations, many very remote, this is not a small feat.

Our team is distributed among many centers, some of us are at Bioversity International, near Rome, others at CIAT Colombia, at WorldFish Malaysia, and we are growing…

At the moment, we work in three broad areas: support and development of research project information systems, technical support and coaching in the use of online collaboration tools that we identify for the broader CG community, coordination of cost saving agreements on IT and software licensing.

Blogtips: And social media like Twitter, blogs, Flickr are some of these tools?
Antonella: That’s right! This is where our blog comes in.

ICTKM's original blog

Blogtips: How did you guys start blogging?
Antonella: The blog started in the summer of 2007. It was an initiative of the two knowledge sharing project coordinators, Simone Staiger-Rivas and Nadia Manning. They initiated it as a way of ‘walking the talk’: We always advocated improved, more effective sharing of information, the involvements of our partners, and transparency. While these are all tenets of the work the research centers carry out, we wanted to apply these principles also to our team’s work.

We used to have a regular email newsletter to keep people informed of our activities, we kicked off our blog mainly as a way to document the meetings, our own initiatives, the pilot projects spread over different locations. Pretty soon, the blog proved to be a much more efficient and timely way to communicate.

Blogtips: And it replaced the newsletter?
Antonella: No, the two still exist today. Over time the blog has become the main place to publish project updates from the project, trainings and meetings we attend. We also used it for tutorials and guides on the tools we support. The newsletter is a short summary of these, pointing to articles we publish on the blog. So the two became complementary.

Blogtips: Two years ago, “Taraaa… a blog..”!
Enrica: As all new blogs with a niche audience, it started slowly, back then in 2007. But from the start, the traffic and content kept growing. A year later was a turning point. I called a team meeting and we decided it was time to “get really serious about blogging”. Every team member was going to blog! More people got involved..
Antonella: …we even got ‘guest bloggers’!
Enrica: Gradually, we all became more confident and familiar with the medium. The content was extended with “live blogging” from events, opinion pieces, tutorials and guides.
Antonella: And this is where we are today: a mix of time-sensitive content and more “stable” pieces.

Blogtips: As the content was extended, did you reach more people?
Antonella: Oh yes! Starting from zero traffic and nil visibility, our blog’s traffic and visibility increased. 2009 was really the breakthrough.
Enrica: You published a piece about that, didn’t you?
Antonella: Yes, I compiled the statistics a few months ago. It clearly showed “Content is King!”: as more of us started blogging, the diversity of subjects and the depth of the topics expanded. That attracted more people: the content became more interesting. Better content, more traffic.
Enrica: We also got better at social promotion of our contents, both purely in linking what we were doing to published stories, interviews. We cross-linked posts linking events covered to tutorials on the blog. We got more experienced at how “to drive” people to discover what we do.

Blogtips: The blog was a tool for your overall Program. How important a tool has it become?
Antonella: I think there are two keywords that explain what the blog has done for us. One is ‘ease’, the other one is ‘credibility’.
It became easy to document and share, to release the occasional announcement, to post pictures and videos, to have non-technical people participate in sharing information.
It has helped us building credibility. As a lot of what we do requires consensus within the CGIAR, so demonstrating benefits and gains is an important leverage. With all the emphasis on collaboration, sharing and communications, the blog has been the right way for the team to do what they were preaching about. Plus, being such a small…
Enrica: but hyperactive!
Antonella: (laughs) Yes,… as we are a small but hyperactive group of people, we always strive to get visibility for the diverse activities we carry out for the Program. The blog taught us a lot about how to communicate and relate to the different communities we belong to.
A blog is based on personal voices and passions, they are just natural ingredients of this medium. As a principle, in our projects we have always tried to give space to individual interests and voices. Simone has her soothing way, Nadia her own scientific approach, Tania is practical and factual, Mary has a great journalistic touch, Meena has this old-style elegance in writing about technology, Enrica is the queen of crystal-clear, Michael is the voice of the geek…
The blog is a reflection of that: it is the place where the diverse areas of work, and individual passions have found a stage. In fact, if you notice, there’s hardly any technology talk on our blog, but a lot of “knowledge sharing”, our favourite flavour of knowledge management.

Blogtips: While the blog was started by two people, your whole team got involved. What was their motivation to start blogging?
Antonella: It was different for each of us. As far as I’m concerned, it’s been really hard for me to get into blogging until everyday’s work got aligned with writing about it. As long as I was working on big corporate system development projects, I felt there was hardly an audience for that. But as the Program got more and more into online collaboration and social media, we started finding out that there were more and more people in our networks that were working on similar things.
At that point, curating the social media tools series, or writing about traffic analysis or social reporting practices at an international congress, just started to make sense. It all got in sync with the things I was doing.
Enrica: That’s right! Also, being the knowledge sharing and public goods fanatics we are, writing about what we do is an effective way to take a distance, make it objective, turn experience into a piece of knowledge that others may find useful and reuse.

ICTKM's "old" website

Blogtips: That brings us to a few months ago. You decided to revamp the blog. Why?
Antonella: As more of us started blogging, the blog was getting more traffic and comments. Our old blog was running on WordPress.com, which became too limiting for us.
Blogtips: How so?
Antonella: Our blog had become “this long slab of text” which was no longer representing the richness and breadth of the topics we were writing about. People had no space to shine. The template was too hard to tweak with a proper navigation. We couldn’t add widgets from the other media we use, like pictures and videos.
Blogtips: Interesting. This is one of the areas I covered in my series “How to select the right blog platform“. But you did not just move the blog from one platform to the other.
Enrica: No, we also had the ICT-KM website, which was just pure static HTML coded by hand. That site had all the background information, and institutional reports, and the newsletter archive. So we decided to merge it all: the institutional site, the newsletter, and the old blog. The new blog was to become the central part of our Web presence. The choice for WordPress.org was quite a natural decision.
Antonella: The institutional site needed a good cleanup: many of the projects have closed in 2008-2009 so the information needed updating. We were presenting the projects in the context of the Investment Plans, which was at the time the planning tool for the Program activities. That was out-of-date, so instead of fixing static pages with hard-coded links, we thought we’d better put the updated information in a different architecture that would represent the state of the Program more realistically.
Enrica: The main reason for merging the site and the blog was to have ONE site that would cross-link background information, blog posts and publications more effectively, and with some automation in the background. So for example, we put a lot of attention in designing the side bars, and using categories to aggregate related posts in the project pages.

Blogtips: Merging a blog, a traditional website and a newsletter. Moving from one blog platform to another. Migrating your content from a blog hosted by the blog service to selfhosting it. Quite a feat!
Antonella: WordPress.org gave us the liberty to choose a new template as a basis for our approach. We gave priority to a layout that would make the typical blog features prominent, like tags, feeds, comments, authors and widgets. We didn’t want the blog to look like an institutional site. So it was mostly the content that influenced the choice of the layout. New categories have been introduced to represent our current interest areas and blog authors have their profile pages and associated feeds, in case one develops a cult following… you never know. (laughs)… Having the blog at the center of the site sort of smoothed out the usual tough decisions about information architecture, like what content we wanted to prioritise, what to put on the home page, etc.

Still, we needed much more flexibility to do all this than WordPress.com was allowing us, so we decided to go for selfhosting. Going from hosted to selfhosting is like going from renting to buying a house. It’s a choice of responsibility, you have to get a mortgage, and learn the condo rules, but then you can model and live your space fully…

Blogtips: Migrating the traditional website itself onto a blog platform. An interesting challenge by itself!
Antonella: At the beginning, it looked like migrating the institutional content to the new site would be just a matter of reshuffling pages under new categories. In reality this required extensive rewriting since most of it was talking about projects in progress, while they are now closed. So, unless it’s a real archive that needs to be migrated as it is, editorial work is required.

Blogtips: Is a blog platform like WordPress.org starting to replace the traditional website Content Management Systems?
Antonella: WordPress.org is more than enough to manage also the stable content on our Web site. We don’t have a deep hierarchy, and page templates were pretty straightforward to implement. After all, we just needed pages.
The only limit we found was with the library page, where we have groups of links to publications, but no information object structured as a publication record. If you need to create and structure an information object and a catalogue, I reckon that takes quite some custom development. As long as a site revolves around a blog and the people who write on the blog, a shallow hierarchy of categories is all you need to house the content. Then, a blog platform such as WordPress.org is more than OK. If you need more structured content, controlled lists and catalogues, I’d look somewhere else.
Enrica: Going for a blog platform is not only a matter of how you decide to manage a site, of course. It’s first of all a communication choice. Blogging implies a certain editorial style, a clear focus on the topics that the bloggers and the audience are interested in. It’s very content centric, somehow, and by itself places the emphasis on conversations, informality and people.

Taraaaa... ICTKM's new blog !

Blogtips: And then you merged your newsletter into your blog?
Enrica: Yes. Migrating the newsletter archive was straightforward but we discovered that moving from a Windows server to a Linux one required rewriting and standardizing lower/uppercase URLs so that the links across the newsletter archive could still work correctly.
Blogtips: Ouch!
Antonella: We have some horror stories about broken links, which affected mainly the static pages. Migrating the blog database from WordPress.com to WordPress.org as a CMS was a breeze, though.
Blogtips: You make it sound all too easy!
Antonella: It sounds easy now that it’s done, believe me… Apart from the link-weeding, setting up the new blog to contain three types of content was challenging. We hired a designer/developer who was very experienced in WordPress. We just didn’t have the skills in-house, design- and coding-wise. Matteo of Webeing/Essere Web gave us quite a few good ideas on information architecture and how to make the most out of WordPress.

Blogtips: And then, two weeks ago, you flipped the switch. How did that go?
Antonella: For reasons still unexplained, we were hit by a spam storm for a couple of days as soon as we switched the domain. Akismet, the comment spam filter in WordPress, got so strict that it would not let “valid” comments go through. So we had to monitor the situation very closely. We changed a couple of comment spam plugins, until the storm calmed down and all went back to normal. All in all, it was a smooth transition.

Enrica Porcari (left) and Antonella Pastore (right): knowledge sharing at heart.

Blogtips: A new phase in the life of a blog. What’s in the future?
Antonella: I’m already seeing that we’re going through a learning process, so for a while we will be adapting and learning a few new things about publishing. For example, now we need to put more attention into the category selection and picture preparation. The choice of the plugins will affect the time we devote to managing the site. As we finally can do proper traffic analysis, using Google Analytics.
Enrica: That will teach us so much more about traffic patterns and search engines than what the basic stats in WordPress.com allowed us. We still have some ways to go!

Enrica and Antonella, we wish you the best of success with your new blog, and all of your efforts!