I had the opportunity during the summer to go to Beijing for the 2nd YPARD China Conference. It was a weeklong trip, got to see some tourist sites (although I`m not really the touristy type), meet some great people and reconnect with others.
I gave a few speeches, had meetings with a few Heads of CAAS (the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences). But the best part of my trip wasn`t either of these. It was the social media training that I was asked to give to the YPARD China team.
There are a few differences between what social media means in China and what does it mean in the rest of the world. If you can`t connect through a VPN, you don`t have access to major networks like Facebook for example. But similarities exist and I did my best to find and explain them properly. Add it goes on
I read almost on a daily basis how great LinkedIn is: in connecting people, in getting you that next job or giving you the information that you need through groups.
But, as always, not all things are good.
I first joined LinkedIn in October 2006 and I used to simply search for jobs. This was in my early social media years (if you don`t take Hi5 into account) before I received my Bachelor and before learning how to use social media properly. Continue reading “What @LinkedIn does NOT have!”→
Twenty-four technical online communicators (aka ‘web geeks’), representing 12 of the 15 centres of the CGIAR Consortium and 5 CGIAR partner organizations, along with a dozen or so experts in various technical web-related matters, recently participated in a five-day workshop at Bioversity International, a CGIAR centre based in Maccarese, outside Rome. This was the first such meeting of CGIAR (and partner organization) staff who, just a few years ago, would probably have been called ‘webmasters’, in the sense of technicians who design or maintain websites.
TOCS Group photo
Group picture of the participants, resource experts and facilitator (Peter Casier, middle of back row, both hands raised) of the first CGIAR Technical Online Communicators Workshop, 27–31 May 2013, Rome.
That designation has changed, however, splintering into dozens of specialities in recent years with the on-going explosion of social media and other online tools, vehicles and platforms. So ours was a motley group of people serving variously (and singly or in combinations) as ‘web developers’, ‘web designers’ or ‘web [or server] administrators’; as ‘social media coordinators’ or ‘content managers’; as ‘knowledge sharers’ or ‘workflow coordinators’. Some were more on the IT side, some more focused on user engagement; some were most interested in ensuring security, some in ensuring open access; some started as content designers, some as content writers; some are now specializing in web analytics, some in social learning. Interestingly, fully a third of the group still work mostly on originating online content (content still king?), while others now focus on ‘spinning’ the content through various social media channels (a task becoming a job on its own).
Dealing with epilepsy 
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