Following the tradition of our brown bag lunch menu, we started with an icebreaker, went on with some food for thought followed by a substantial main course.

This month’s brown bag lunch was on sharing resources. Since the tools out there that allow you to share your resources with a global community online are countless, we decided to start with one tool for sharing photos, presentations and bookmarks. We decided on tools that we use regularly in our daily work;   flickr, slide share and delicious.

During the icebreaker we tried to find out which tools the participants have used so far for sharing resources. It turned out that emails are still our all time favorites.  What is wrong with that? Let’s see!

Food for thought-this month we can recommend a presentation à la Presentation Zen style on sharing resources online

We had quite an ambitious agenda and went straight into the food-for-thought-course  which was “served”  by my colleague Maike in form of a power point presentation à la Presentation Zen where she unfolded the problems that most probably all of us have already experienced when sharing photos or presentations via email. Often the files have a tendency to be too big. This can be frustrating and time consuming to fix. Sharing your resources via emails can also be quite limiting in terms of the audience you reach. But she would not be Maike, if she did not also have a solution to this problem.  In the presentation it became apparent that sharing tools such as flickr, slideshare and delicious offer a wide range of functions that can make sharing a pleasure. For more info, please take a look at the presentation.

Many functions sound like a hassle to learn

Maybe! But a problem shared is a problem halved. And this is exactly what we ended up doing during the main course of our brown bag lunch. We had created test accounts on flickr, slideshare and delicious for some hands-on practice. Everyone was then invited to join the groups they were most interested in. Each group had a task list to work through in order to discover some interesting functions and principles behind these tools. The tasks all groups had in common was the completion of their profile. A good and catchy profile is often underestimated, even though this can be an efficient way to be found by people who share your interests.

Why should I be generous with my resources again?

Even though this was our sixth brown bag lunch this year, as organizers we are still living and learning  new lessons every time . But what would this knowledge be worth if we did not share it? Well, it would turn into personal knowledge and could be lost in the cracks of time. . However, if we manage to overcome our fears of losing ownership of the information  when we share our knowledge, we might come to the conclusion that

Knowledge is one of the few things that multiplies as it is shared.

Isabel Thompson (thompson[at]vie.unu.edu)