From campfire stories to data cuisine: sharing knowledge at CBA11

The Community-Based Adaptation conference (CBA) is well known as a forum for exploring new ways to effectively learn and share knowledge. Innovative formats for conveying information, and “out-of-the-box” sessions push conference participants to engage in sharing and receiving knowledge.

This year’s conference was no different, with four “out-of-the-box” sessions that used games, campfire stories, “data cuisine”, and other active learning methods to engage participants and spark excitement for our collective work on adaptation.

Research and experience tell us that an interested audience is only able to focus on a presentation for about seven minutes before their minds wander off. We also know that audiences have a difficult time remembering more than three key points after a session ends.

In this blog, I’ll share some of the methods facilitated by the BRACED Knowledge Manager and used during CBA11 to maximise the potential for knowledge sharing and enable high-quality interactions.

CAMPFIRE STORIES

The convergence of climate and conflict is a topic that can sometimes feel very removed, especially in a conference setting. To bring the seriousness of the issue to CBA11, and connect to it on a deeper level, the knowledge sharing during the session was facilitated through stories told by practitioners who work in fragile and conflict-affected states.

Why stories? Stories stick – humans have been using oral storytelling for millenia to pass on experience and learning. Our brains are attuned to hearing stories and getting drawn into their reality – that’s why a well-written book can be so hard to put down.

Stories can be illustrative, providing an in-depth example to support a best practice. They can also inspire the audience to derive their own lessons from the experiences shared. Importantly, they can also help presenters think about the information they would like to share and distill it to the most important two or three points, increasing chances attendees will remember it well after the conference is over.

 PERVASIVE GAMES

Games have long been used as instruments to make learning fun and engaging. They often represent simplified versions of reality and allow people to see the consequences of their decisions and adjust them for the best outcome. The CBA11 conference featured a number of games, including on optimising flood resilience as well as on making sense of complex interactions.

However, new to the conference this year was the concept of a pervasive game. Also known as “big games”, “social games” or “alternate reality games”, a pervasive game is played within the context of the conference. It continues ambient while other sessions are ongoing and constantly engages with participants in the midst of the conference. 

At CBA11, the pervasive game “CBAction!” was advanced by extreme weather events that ‘struck’ participants at random intervals throughout the conference, forcing them to seek out other players to build a community with the appropriate types of ecosystem services to absorb the impact of the ‘drought,’ ‘flood’ or ‘heatwave’. This sparked conversations between conference participants, including those who might not have connected otherwise.

DATA CUISINE

Engaging in multi-sensory experiences can make complex or abstract concepts personal, understandable and memorable. This is exactly the idea behind the CBA session on “data cuisine” which combines food and climate data to make technical climate data approachable.

For example, measurements of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere from 1900 to the present aren’t easily accessible. However, we can understand how increasing the concentration of hot peppers in hot sauce has an impact on its taste and colour, literally making it hotter and eliciting a reaction from the taster. This type of multi-sensory experience helped participants stretch how they think about communicating their work when they were asked to create “data cuisines” of their own.

These are only a few examples of the many innovative formats used at CBA which included a marketplace, an art exhibition, field trips and a film expo. By providing a diversity of offerings, the CBA conference allowed participants to choose between different learning styles and tailor the experience to their interests and how they felt in the moment. These types of engagements can be translated to many other settings including team meetings, workshops and projects to enable better, more effective communication and learning.