“How do your organize a workshop whose objective is to collect what those participating ‘know’ about a particular subject?” A colleague of mine once asked me during a workshop planning session. “The same way we organize all other workshops” I must have answered without much thought. It was soon after a five day workshop entitled ‘harvesting knowledge and experiences in content generation and adaptation’ that we realized how important the question was. That was almost threes ago. Since then I have organized and attended very sussceful ‘knowledge harvesting’ workshop/events; one being the most recent ICT@Innovation organized by Inwent and FOSSFA. As far as the workshop program was concerned this was a three day workshop. Or was it? Like in many training sessions, there comes a time when you feel you are doing the right thing. Often and sadly this is usually at the last minute when the opportunity is almost lost. So what was it that I observed?
 
Workshop
The extent to which workshop organizer go to in order to guarantee success is often sobering. Understandably, harvesting knowledge is not an easy task because we know more than we can say or write. Perhaps that’s why experience comes in. Yes experience is one critical component. But there are other factors such as environment, facilitation etc. Bringing all this elements together require creative skills and foresight. The C3 workshop organizers had plenty of that. And they must be counting their a--89hhsue8939dksdd