201307_ScienceMeeting_AAR

Alan Duncan, Simon Langan, Philippe Lemperrière, Doug Merrey, An Notenbaert, Don Peden, Belay Yazew and Ewen Le Borgne.
 * Contributing to the NBDC 2013 Science Meeting after action review (AAR)**:


 * Simon**: 12 institutions, more or less everyone stayed until the end, feedback forms seem we have hit the 3 perspectives.

Lack of integrated approach beyond RWM. 3 watersheds chosen originally by the people involved in their selection to have quite some balance. In practice they were not that different.
 * Philippe**: Papers were good quality.

Discussion sessions were too much Q&A focused.
 * An:** Good idea to have side stories as a natural extension.

Chairmen should give more space for other speakers - we heard the same people several times. But chairs did an excellent time management job. Lacking: Synthesis across these (by teams) to source patterns, integration (across papers) to discuss gaps, identifying next steps from teams themselves / where is One NBDC? I should have involved myself to help design this a bit better. Someone should also have been around at the end of the meeting to collect everything, answer questions etc. But excellent to have posters and papers coming out of this. In hindsight, it might have been good to have a 3rd day as an interactive workshop to bring all of this together along the lines of One NBDC, opening to participants who want to join hands.
 * Ewen**: Not enough interaction? Perhaps more parallel sessions?

Our list of invitees is a mess è Simon / Yemisrach to organize an Excel table with all people (as rows), all events as columns and to see who came to what.
 * Belay**: Few development practitioners, more researchers.

Not clear to what extent there is a Community of Practice in the making from this group. How much of this networking will be carried forward?
 * Don**: Our landscape approach was a bit weak (same as on messages) and we have to do some work on this.


 * Doug**: We have a firmer idea about our research now. Some interesting ideas coming to the fore e.g. public-private goods. Some papers could be combined e.g. on water productivity.

Good for the new (e.g. IWMI) staff to be exposed. Cornell University were more engaged than they have been in past events. We’ve got all these students and we have the problem of quality supervision time… Difficult to spend time to build capacities…
 * Alan**: One of the key benefits of this meeting was to marshal this information to bring to papers and we have achieved that.

**Emerging trends coming out of the NBDC work**
Gaps that we need to address: ACTION: SL, DM, AD, DP to look at possible papers and what to propose (book?) and share ideas on the wiki (publication pipeline).
 * Biomass production and management (termites, SLP);
 * Water productivity;
 * Capacity and self-assessment (KAP survey etc.);
 * Research adoption and adaptation / planning (opportunities and constraints);
 * Sthg to say about onsite/offsite work.
 * DA’s and incentives is another important oversight to bring back in our work.
 * How NBDC fits into other Nile projects.
 * How NBDC fits into CPWF.

50 or so templates about NBDC bits of research in site xyz… We could develop this list into a sortable table… The IWMI interns might been working on this. Randall and Beth should look at what should be the next steps with this… ACTION: AD to ask about Beth & Randall about next steps with One NBDC and possibly inject next steps as proposed e.g. sortable table ACTION: Ewen to ask KMIS for ideas about companies that could do this.