2014 Climate Knowledge Brokers Workshop

The Climate Knowledge Brokers (CKB) Group is an emerging alliance of around 50 of the leading global, regional and national knowledge brokers specialising in climate and development information

3rd Mar 2015
3 min read
0 replies
0 Likes

About the CKB Group

The Climate Knowledge Brokers (CKB) Group is an emerging alliance of around 50 of the leading global, regional and national knowledge brokers specialising in climate and development information. It brings together a diverse set of information players, from international organisations to research institutes, NGOs and good practice networks, and covers the full breadth of climate related themes. The focus is on primarily online initiatives, and those that play an explicit knowledge brokerage role, rather than being simply institutional websites.

CKB Workshop

Last year, 4-5th of October 2014, the CKB group organised its yearly workshop at IDS in Brighton. The overall objective of the workshop was to continue the process of forging stronger collaborative links between climate knowledge brokers working in the climate and development area.

Key Outcomes

During the workshop, many topics in the field of climate knowledge brokering were discussed, especially on how the CKB group can grow as a unit and how the members can better work together and help one another. These are the main points to take away from the meeting:

There is a lot of mutual benefit from shared tools and joint projects within the CKB in order to create a climate knowledge value chain, which all members can benefit from
The CKB Hub was well received as a way to continue the collaborative work within the CKB group. The collaborative and networking aspect of the CKB group is seen as one integral part by all participants, which should grow even stronger
The demand for an effective Climate Knowledge Grid became apparent: so that CKB members’ data, knowledge and expertise can complement each other, gaps can be filled between different focal areas and duplication of efforts can be avoided
The “Climate Tagger” (formerly the Reegle Tagging API) now offers a suite of different tools, all aiming at linking websites and their content together (originally, this joint project was funded by CDKN; additional funding has been received for enhancements including the Climate Tagger Drupal Plugin, CKAN Plugin and thesaurus extensions on the Economics of Adaptation and GHG Emissions in Industry from CTCN)
The Knowledge Navigator was reviewed and its potential success was revisited – an expanded functionality and dissemination of this tool will be pursued further by IDS in collaboration with CDKN and REEEP as well as any CKB members who would like to put forth their use cases
Many CKB members are not only knowledge managers in terms of the integral task of managing on-line portals and their content, they are also at the fore-front of Monitoring and Evaluation for their organizations; the role of knowledge management and knowledge brokering is going hand in hand with the M&E role across many CKB member organizations

There is a strong requirement for end user needs assessments and for the results of this work to be shared among CKB members as most climate relevant portals are focused on donor requirements rather than end user requirements. This inevitably will have less impact in the long run than that required to tackle climate compatible development issues
One of the key questions for managers of on-line platforms to ask themselves when considering a new portal or an enhancement to an existing one, is “What can this solution do that Google cannot already do?”