FAO Knowledge Management Work
The following are some of my major-impacting activities during 11 years with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations as senior officer, industrial crops in Rome (retired April 2006).
Following retirement I have worked as a consultant for WHO on a monograph on the anti-malarial Artemisia annua and for FAO on bio-fuel species and their ecologies and industrial crops in general.
Knowledge management
This is one of my major contributions; delivering applicable plant knowledge to those in need. The major instrument used for this is the EcoPort protected knowledge commons. Another very popular site is Ecocrop;crop environmental requirements. Each is reverse-linked to the other where appropriate.
EcoPort
I began working with EcoPort’s data base predecessor in April 1998; introduced by the system’s creator Tonie Putter. Since then I have been a supervisor and the gatekeeper for plant records. It was re-launched in 2004 using open source software and techniques and now uses a combination of Linux, Apache, MySQL and mod_perl, a system commonly referred to as LAMP. The main front page sponsors are Nelson Mandela, Ed Wilson and FAO’s Director General Jacques Diouf.
The EcoPort splash page.
As all the information in EcoPort is assembled as the sum of the individual contributions of many authors, the data are collectively owned and maintained by a global community of scientists who share their expertise and experience. Individuals adopt entities (usually database records), in their specialties and enter state-of-knowledge information about them. Any one contributor, or reader, has access to the sum of all similar contributions and the sum of all information constitutes the EcoPort public “knowledge commons”.
The Founders of EcoPort share a belief in knowledge as a global public good, for reasons amply illustrated in the philosophy of Thomas Jefferson: “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me”.
FAO views the attainment of food security as a moral imperative – an outcome that is heavily dependent on harnessing knowledge more effectively. A central FAO strategy is to work through strategic alliances and towards this end FAO’s Office of the Director General signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the EcoPort Foundation in August 2005.
It is EcoPort’s Mission and Pledge to:
- Establish and sustain a “Knowledge Commons” where individuals and communities can work and learn together to develop sustainable ways to manage the Earth’s natural resources;
- Facilitate access to information through a public service that will enable participants to own and update the knowledge created by their collective effort through application of EcoPort’s procedures;
- Promote the availability and use of EcoPort’s information and procedures as a Global Public Good to provide education to communities and individuals engaged in natural resources management and conservation; and to
- Make provision to ensure data quality through peer review and to preserve and display individual ownership of shared information.
Ecocrop
Ecocrop matches plants to environment and concomitantly searches by plant uses and growth habit. At the moment there are over 2200 species in the database. It will shortly undergo a development phase to:
- Introduce an open source platform and direct CD-ROM down-load facility
- Provide a map function providing data on climate and soil conditions with plant potential distribution maps
- Identify plants for a defined farming system
- Add 300 new species
Work on Ecocrop is with the major inputs of Per Diemer, FAO consultant.
The Ecocrop home page
With Ecocrop you can presently:
- Identify a suitable crop for a specified environment. Select Search: Enter information about your local climate and soil conditions, such as temperature, rainfall, light, soil texture, depth, pH, salinity and fertility. Ecocrop then identifies plant species with key climate and soil requirements that match the data you have entered.
- Identify a crop with a specific habit of growth. Select Search: Specify one or more characteristic of a plant, such as life form and span, growth habit, crop category and form of cultivation. Ecocrop then identifies plant species that match your data.
- Identify crop for a defined use. Select Search: Specify one or more use(s) and Ecocrop identifies according to your choice plant species for food, fodder or pasture, green manure, energy, fibre, timber, paper pulp, shelter and shade, industrial purposes, erosion control, ornamentals and many other uses.
- Look up the environmental requirements and uses of a given crop. Select Find plant: Specify the plant species of you interest and use Ecocrop as a checklist or library to look up its climate and soil requirements and uses.
- Learn to use Ecocrop with the Tutorial: Open a new window with a tutorial that teaches the basics of using Ecocrop.