Lessons Group Workplan 2013

1) Problem(s) to be addressed

Provide a short description of the issues / problems that you would like to work on (could be picked from the Wiki issue list, could emerge from the online discussion, or your research interest)

• How to share FMDSS lessons from various sources in ways that are useful to participants current and future work.

2) Objectives / aims to be addressed by the group

Give a short description of the aim of the activities proposed below, so that the success of the measures can be evaluated according to these objectives (e.g. to increase the number of DSS descriptions available on the SMW, to improve the number of members actively involved in the CoP,…..)

• Create structures on the wiki that enable sharing lessons from various sources
• Input lessons and sources from previous Forsys activities
• Better understand how lessons can be useful to participants
• Encourage all members of the CoP to contribute lessons

3) Measures to be taken What? How? With Whom? Duration?

List the measures that you are going to work on during the scheduled next year, describe what you are proposing to do, how you want to do that, whom you would like to involve and what time is needed to finish the task (e.g. develop a screen design for the CoP platform with the members of the workgroup “Technical coordination of the platform” and a private company until end of August,….)

Import Other Existing Lessons to Wiki

Empirical Survey

• Make titles and properties consistent with case lessons
• Other things we need to do?

Country Studies

• Make titles and properties consistent with case lessons
• Other things we need to do?

Lessons from Literature

• Provide methods to input/link to lessons in the literature

Conduct a User Needs Assessment

• To better understand how lessons can be useful to participants
• How could we do this?
  • Recruit sample of users to step through existing wiki pages and comment on their usefulness?

Update Case Lessons

• Many are rather thin, ask contacts to add more information
• Antonio: Some most uncertain (and important) properties are "Has evidence", "Has consequences", Has recommendation...", which in fact are often still empty (think about our long discussion in Brussels). Maybe something will be more clear after Gordon et al. article publication... Should we provide examples of "well compiled" lessons?

Recruit Interest in Group

• How do we get more people to contribute
• Luc: should we scan recent PhD graduates to contribute their cases? Who would be in a good position to do so?
• Alex: Disseminating lessons: get CoP and others outside CoP to contibute and use it.

Alex: Design a system for evaluating the relevancy of lessons

• Vote per member; display lessons according to votes-> porvide metric of relative importance to users.
• Antonio: most of the lessons have been compiled by authors of cases and/or dss themselves. Sometimes this leads to too hoptimistic comclusions. Could we arrange a sort of cross-checking?

Consider how people will use lessons

• How will people want to access lessons? By actor role, DSS development stage, modeling approach, ?
• Add queries to FAQ to provide access
  • Antonio: for myself, I am still not so able to produce queries, notwithstanding Christian's short course in Umea and all Sean's effort. Could we produce more training material, e.g. a complete query building path (sort of wizard) in form of presentation? (I could provide it, but just when I learn how...)

Consider how this work should be organized and how should we work with the other groups?

• Alex: link lessons to DSS and other topics
• Most of the others are thematically based (the WGs) while cases/lessons are particular products
• What will motivate us to carry on?

4) Benefit / Added Value to be achieved

List the benefits that can be expected (according to the main mission of the CoP) when successfully finishing the tasks

• Better sharing of lessons and more effective FMDSS development

5) Next step to be taken

Give an example of the next step to be taken, in order to make the measures more operational (e.g. skype meeting to be scheduled by …, e-mail announcement made by ….

• Import lessons from survey and country studies
• Luc: I am proposing in Cost Action Orchestra the development of a concept map as basis for semantic wiki on concepts and theoretical perspectives on forest policy. Policy tools and games will be some of these concepts. Hope to relate to the semantic understanding in FORSYS and possible expand the audience for the FORSYS wiki.