Services to Develop the Producer Technology Uptake Program Community of Practice Resources

This project is aimed at identifying and where required (and within the available budget and timeframe) developing content, tools and resources for an online Community of Practice (CoP) to support farmers, fishers and foresters participating in the AgriFutures Producer Technology Uptake Program to adopt AgTech solutions in their businesses.

Communities of Practice and networks are important ways to develop, capture, curate and share knowledge, especially by building on the collective knowledge of members. CoPs are often described as an assembly of individuals who share a common interest and interact regularly to learn from each other to advance their work.

Though there are several approaches and case studies on how to conceptualise and apply CoPs by organisations involved in the development community, what seems to be essential, particularly in agriculture and rural development is for the community to build and nurture a common knowledge base to enable knowledge sharing and uptake for innovations around key projects and programmes. This CoP is about constructing a holistic and inclusive approach, developing actionable knowledge for innovations in agriculture.

To ensure the building and nurturing of a common knowledge base is commenced and not just ideas and thoughts from consultants that are one step removed from day to day practices, the project will engage with the 20 farmers, fishers and foresters participating in the parallel operating AgriFutures Producer Technology Update Program aimed at adopting AgTech. The information gaps, the information generated and the lessons learnt will all feed into identifying existing (and required new) material for hosting within an online CoP.

The outputs of this project will be the establishment of a CoP on the extensionAUS website. The establishment (Stage 1) will provide a minimum viable working model, that can be added to in future stages.