Daniela and Kerryn from TACP with Francophone blogger team at the IDRC's Acacia Research and Learning Forum, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The month of October was a busy one for The African Commons Project team thanks to two event coverage and documentation jobs in three cities. We’ve certainly had social media on the brain, live blogging on our fingertips and podcasting on our lips as we’ve been harnessing various online media tools to provide creative documentation formats for Sangonet and the IDRC this month.

Hello Dakar
It all started off with an eight-hour flight to a hot and humid Dakar for the IDRC’s Acacia Research and Learning Forum.  This was a meeting for the IDRC’s Acacia-funded projects, which all work in the field of ICT4D in Africa across a broad spectrum of themes – from health, to education, to gender. There was a thoroughly interactive programme that used a variety of techniques to get participants mingling– from the World Café, to Fishbowl, Open Space and chat show methods. This meant that lots of planning was needed to be able to capture information based on the format of the session. You can review all the live coverage produced by the team here. We’ve also created toolkits based on 3 parallel workshops that took place on the last day of the event. These cover the broad themes of Research Methodology, Fundraising and Communication techniques – these might be useful for your work – so please do take a look or pass it on to colleagues or friends.

Another highlight of the event was working with a team of Francophone bloggers from Senegal, Cameroon, Benin and Togo, who were providing French coverage of the event. During an evening meeting before the event we did a short, informal workshop on live blogging using CoveritLive, which the francophone team embraced wholeheartedly and gathered a huge following of live viewers. Apart from live blog, they produced fantastic French coverage of the event, including a host of audio interviews with speakers and attendees; so should you be fluent in French this might be an additional view on the event.

Jozi to the Mother City
We jetted back to Johannesburg to another short live blogging training workshop – this time with the Sangonet staff who would be helping us live blog at their #Sango09 conference held in Johannesburg (15 & 16 October) and Cape Town (20 & 21 October). This event was held to gather South African NGOs around the theme of ICT and social media – from implementation of ICT4D in their fields, to internal and external social media communications, marketing and fundraising strategies. TACP even got involved by doing short presentations on the use of Twitter and Multimedia tools for NGOs, based on the ‘Social Media for NGOs’ course that we present regularly. Coverage of the event can be found on the NGOPulse’s conference website, which includes a very active Twitter stream, live blogs, fantastic photographs, with video coming soon…

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