Dear Michael

Thanks for voting for us. To try to reduce even the 0.2% doubt that you have, please consider the following:
in several places in the world, farmers indeed see each other as competitors and do not easily want to share their knowledge. In other areas they are simply not used to doing so: farmers in our project in Brazil talk with each other about soccer, but not about their coffee; when asked why, they could not mention a clear reason apart from that this is the way it is.

We try to change this attitude of small scale producers: firstly by grouping them (voluntarily: no farmer has to participate in our project) and getting them to start to learn together in what we call Farmer Field Schools. Secondly by having them sell their produce in a collective way (not necessarily through cooperatives, could be more loose groups, like the 'Depot committees' in our project in Uganda where farmers simply bring their produce together and get a better price because of less transport costs by the buyer that before had to visit each individual farmer). In this way, they start to see each other more as colleagues than as competitors. This is enhanced when we get the groups of farmers Utz Kapeh certified (see www.utzkapeh.org), where larger number of farmers in a group reduce average certification costs per farmer. To get certified and be able to get the corresponding premium price, they have to organize an 'Internal Control System' where group-members check each other to see whether they comply with the requirements of the code. Since there is an incentive (the premium), which is lost to all if some do not comply, people that join voluntarily (and can drop out whenever they whish) are becoming more open to sharing their way of working with each other. This still does not mean that each and everybody is (socially or otherwise) forced to work in the same way: the learning process we want to stimulate takes into account the differences in situation that each producer is in (e.g. whether there is a lot of family labour available per unit cultivated area, whether there are other sources of income that facilitate investments in the crop, costs of transport of inputs and outputs, etcetera).

Now this holds for coffee, but also for fruit and vegetables and in fact for any other produce where grouping of small scale producers (be it farmers or micro-entrepreneurs in other types of activities) may have positive effects in market access and price received;

Friendly greetings
Don

Dear David,
we appreciate very much your support and the reasons for doing so mentioned in your explanation why you voted for which projects.
Good luck with your nomination
Friendly greetings
Don

Access to telecoms is often very difficult for low income individuals and groups in developing countries. Therefore it is indeed very necesssary to work on low cost and useable technology. We will be more than willing to work together with you on helping you to not only provide access, but also content. I'll contact you via e-mail to see whether we could meet when I am in Peru to visit our project.
Friendly greetings and thanks for your comments
Don

Dear Siegfried
The excel-based tool comprises two general files and a specific file per field; the first general file contains an initial menu plus a large number of macros to make pop-up menus and to do the calculations and graphing for the analysis. The second general file contains the texts for the menus (in various languages) plus general information, such as NPK content of fertilizers, the different types of field and processing activities that are recognized etc.
Te specific files contain chronological lists of activities and inputs used, output produced per field.

A problem with the Macro based tools is that we need to install/register some specific DLL and OCX and that causes some confusion and problems because of the different librariy versions that are available and installed. This is one reason why we want to get away from the Excel tool.

If you are interesting in the tool, I could e-mail it to you, but I can not guarantee that it will work on your computer.

Friendly greetings
Don

Dear Erin

Most farmers we deal with currently have no cell phone yet; often there is only limited or no access to mobile networks in the areas we work yet. This will change and it can and will change fast. So yes, we are definitely thinking about how to make access easier and using handhelds / cell phones. Probably not in the first release, but it is high on the list of things to add on later.

Regarding sliders: this is something we did not think of, but looks like a good idea; I'll take it up with the user group (will have a skype meeting on the software in about 10 minutes from now...).

Thanks for your comments and friendly words about the proposal

 Friendly greetings

Don

Dear Sandra

 Thanks for your interest in our Farmer 2 Farmer Learning idea. Yes indeed, the underlying idea of both our ideas is that there is a wealth of information and knowledge in practicioners communities to be mined and put to better use. The approach followed in F2F Learning is a more traditional one than you do in SELearninggames, which to a large extend reflects the differences in 'clients' and 'products' you and we deal with.

In our case, we generally deal with farmers that are not (yet) very much used to act as entrepreneurs, which have to make quantitative evaluations of options to invest, consider risk, respond to (changing) requests of customers. Some initiatives work on the market side of this by providing tools to access market information (such as done by e-Choupal and IICD), but ours is the first my colleagues and I know of to do this from the investment side, where investment includes use of (family) labor.  Most of the farmers we work with make decisions based on gut feelings and are generally unaware how much they earn from their work. At the start of our project in Vietnam, only some of the 250 farmers were able to come up with a financial picture with costs of inputs and gross income from selling their produce: all of them were shop-owners.

Your 'clients' are generally already entrepreneurs that understand concepts like cashflows and do their bookkeeping using whatever software is available on the market. We however, have to provide a tool to farmers to be able to do the bookkeeping in a way they understand.

Our idea is that bookkeeping can contribute to learning: first the direct way, when farmers get insight in their own performance, and secondly, by enabling them to compare themselves with their peers. Now, simply knowing that there is someone doing better than you is informative in the sense that you know that you probably could do better; but we also want to have farmers find out what they have to indeed do better. Here we follow two paths:

a. have farmer register their input/output by activity, so that we can analyse which differences between farmers in what activity contributes most to the difference in performance; this gives farmers a notion about the priority in where to spent labour and money for input. Maybe we could rank this under what you consider 'pattern data'.

b. establishing 'learning groups' where farmers discuss the results and interrogate each other on how to improve. Because apart from quantitative information, e.g. on how much time was spent on pruning coffee trees, there is a wealth of qualitative data that is not in the bookkeeping, e.g. how was the pruning done (which twigs to cut, which to leave on the tree). This qualitative information can only be transferred in direct interaction, such as discussion among farmers, visits to each other fields, trainings in proper techniques etc. In Vietnam we gave each participant in such learning groups handouts with tables and figures where each farmer had a (random) number. Each farmer knew his/her own number and after handing out the forms the farmers first started to figure out from each other what number they had and where they stood in performance. After that, the discussion went strongly into the qualitative direction. But this requires that the information can be 'personalized' because only then it becomes clear whose qualitative contributions to the discussion may be more valuable.

We currently manage the privacy issue by asking farmers whether they allow us to use the data for the purposes described, informing them that the data would be made available to others and that keeping them private would be impossible. Farmers participated on a voluntary basis and we had no drop-outs over the four years we did this work, so apparently also those performing relatively badly did not really object to being exposed.

In the proposed tool, we are going to differentiate more uses of data; in addition to the above we want to include a kind of 'self assessment' where farmers can compare their management with requirements for certain certification schemes (like organic farming, Utz Kapeh, Rain forest). We also would like to use the data for certification of groups of farmers, where the registration data could be inspected by certifiers, which could make the certification process more efficient and cheaper since the auditors would have to visit less time consuming farm visits. We then will ask each farmer that puts data into the system for which of the uses he/she wants to give permission.

To safeguard the privacy, we will also differentiate different user-types, with varying rights on inputting data and producing reports and graphs. The decisions about whom to grant which user-type plus corresponding rights will be left to the 'domain' in which the software is used.

By e-mail I will sent you the project proposal, which to some extend describes how we plan to do things; be aware though that agriculture is a rather complex environment which makes data management rather complex.

I think gaming is a nice way for people to learn; I have been contemplating the idea (but never put other efforts into it) of having a game developped where people can take different roles in the coffee chain: producer, trader, roaster, consumer, service provider (e.g. for agricultural extension, financing), with all kind of interactions between the various roles. This could give the different stakeholders in the chain insights in the workings of the chain and in the challenges faced by the other stakeholders. It would be especially nice if different chains could work parallel in one game, e.g. fair trade versus mainstream.

In most games, it is rather clearly defined what the different role-types can and can not do, but I guess that in your game it would be more important to see what would be the effect of the specific form of execution of a certain (set of) actions of one single type of role.  I think that one of the great challenges you will face is the incorporation of qualitative aspects in this type of game. To some extent this may be done by imposing a kind of 'hiearchy' in actions: I have seen my 14 year old son trying to get his SIMS character a girl-friend. This proved only possible if he went through several stages of courting: friendly talks, joking, kissing etc. How well this prepared him for real life is still a question (no girl (or boy)-friend in sight yet). You may want to add a 'virtual discussion room' where players could meet (anonymously?) to discuss the qualitative aspects of the actions they have been doing in the game. You could also consider to include a kind of feedback: registration of what a client has done in order to improve his performance and to what result. But to do so would require you to clearly define what activities, what input/output to consider. A problem would be to get your clients to submit this type of data. 

Regarding the listing of my project in 'Other': yes I have been thinking of putting it in Education, but there is more to it than education. I have seen some project being listed in various listings at the same time; do you know how to do so?

Friendly greetings and thanks for you comments and interest

Don

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you might like to see www.sristi.org www.nifindia.org www.indiainnovates.com and www.gian.org

also see sristi.org/anilg for lot opf papers on thsi concept and action taken

u may also download honey bee magazine and search through biggest data base on farmers innovations

good luck in your very useful work 

anil