Dear Elisabeth:

I think it would be an excellent idea for the USAID Water Team to become a SuSanA partner. Let me bring this up with USAID and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

Best regards,
Dan

Dear Amber,
Could you tell us more about your work on the launch of the African Water Association's KMS platform (KMS = knowledge management sharing, I assume)? Sounds interesting. Also how you got from your university in the U.S. to the African Water Association? Perhaps it has something to do with the BMGF grant "Reinforcing Capacity of African Sanitation Operators on non-sewer and FSM Systems through peer-to-peer learning Partnerships (RASOP-Africa)"?
Let's start a new thread on this!

Dear Dan,
Thanks for these explanations which make it a lot clearer. Sure, we can write a blog post about SuSanA for your blog: globalwaters.org/blog . Are people able to subscribe to this blog? We can talk more offline what this blog post should entail.

It occurred to me that perhaps now is also a good time for USAID to become a SuSanA partner? Has this been discussed in the past? It would be a nice way to show the intended collaboration. I had a look at SuSanA's partner database (www.susana.org/en/partner) and found that your blog "Sanitation Updates" is a SuSanA partner which is kind of odd as it's not actually an organization. This might have historic reasons, do you remember?
For those who don't know what Sanitation Updates is (I can highly recommend subscribing to it):

Sanitation Updaptes is a news feed on sanitation that is maintained by the IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre and by USAID’s Environmental Health knowledge management activity and the Hygiene Improvement Project. It was originally set up to promote the 2008 International Year of Sanitation and continues to provide news, information and resources in support of achieving the goal of sanitation for all.

Regards,
Elisabeth

Dear Kris and Elisabeth:

Many thanks for your comments and for reviewing the USAID Globalwaters.org website. As we are still in the beta phase, feedback from others who have experience developing and building a website audience is extremely valuable to us.

The use of the "Water for Health" and "Water for Food" categories reflect the categories of USAID's Water and Development Strategy , and the subcategories reflect the components of the agency's objectives. So not excluding things such as wastewater, but don't currently plan to have extensive sub-categories. As the agency develops a new strategy, this structure will be revisited.

The Library on the Globalwaters website currently features primarily USAID publications, and while we do plan to include material from others working in the water sector, our goal is not to develop a library as comprehensive as that of SuSnA,so there should not be that much duplication with the SuSanA library. Currently the "Suggest new content" is the only option for recommending content, and appreciate your feedback about this.

We do plan to feature the SuSanA website on the Globalwaters website as we refine our pages. As we build up the site and topic pages, will build in more options for highlighting other resources.,

You will have seen that we feature a blog on our main page, and we would welcome a blog post about SuSanA for the website and can discuss specifics about this if of interest, and how to focus the post.

We know that USAID is collaborating with SusSanA and the World Bank on some webinars, and we could discuss at some point how to collaborate on webinars in the future beyond this series, or at least make sure we cross post about the other's events.

Maybe we can also discuss SuSanA and USAID collaboration on a SuSanA discussion forum in the near future. The discussion forums are always interesting and useful.

Sincerely,

Dan

Potential cooperation between KMS (knowledge management and sharing) platforms is where it is at! I know it might be logistically difficult, especially after working on the launch of the African Water Association's KMS platform. However, I think these cooperations and integrations are really helpful to users to improve locating content and also helpful to creators because we do not have to create as much content.

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Note by moderators: This post was made by a former user with the login name aeschrum who is no longer a member of this discussion forum.

Thanks everyone for the comments, we sure do appreciate it.
Our communications team will meet to discuss the points you raised.

Dan

Hi Kris,
They have a page called "suggest new content", see here: globalwaters.org/content/suggest-content-0
That's probably the place where people can share stuff? But only indirectly, I guess.

I have a question for Dan as well: it's a nice looking website, covering a huge range of topics. It's interesting that you have placed sanitation under "water for health", rather than giving it its own slot. Do you include wastewater treatment as part of "water for health"?

Secondly, I am wondering if there is any scope to integrate the sanitation parts with the SuSanA website somehow. I have no clear picture how this could be done but if you at USAID call for "suggest new content", and we at SuSanA also say to people "what new content would you like to see in the SuSanA library?" then perhaps we can somehow join forces to avoid too much dublication. Integrating two different libraries is likely to be difficult but perhaps we can come up with something simple so that people can contribute to or search both places at once.

Regards,
Elisabeth

Some nice resources and I included your blog feed into my RSS news aggregator

However:

this site is about sharing knowledge and ideas to solve global water and sanitation challenges

I can't really find a place to share knowledge on that site. It all seems "top down" with no place to participate actively...

Thank you Mr Dan. This sounds so great. As an individual dedicated to finding solutions to social problems especially water, I will like to have an opportunity to bring some of my solutions/thoughts through the site...

Introducing Globalwaters.org , a global knowledge resource for partners, USAID staff, and the broader community working in the international development water sector.

Supported by the USAID Water Office, this site aims to connect people to the right resources and ideas to help solve global water and sanitation challenges, as USAID and its partners work toward a healthier and more secure future for all.

Please check out the site and read our companion article that provides an overview of the website’s features.

We welcome your feedback .

We are always looking for new material to post on Globalwaters.org and would be happy to promote your water-related content, including events, blogs, reports, toolkits, and webinars. Feel free to reach out and suggest new material .

The Water CKM Team