12/06/2015: WAS creates community of practice activity

Image: Republic of Korea

The World Aquaculture Society (WAS) has agreed at its Jeju, Korea, board meeting to provide the opportunity to create Communities of Practice (CoP). The aim is to assist the growing global aquaculture community in addressing specific issues through collaboration.

A CoP is a process that enables a group of people who share a common concern, a set of problems, or interest in a topic and to come together to fulfill both individual and group goals.  The initial idea of Working Groups, whilst successful in the earlier years of WAS, has been acknowledged as not being able to keep up with the requirements of the fast growing industry in need for collaboration to find solutions through electronic communications.

WAS is facilitating the formation of CoPs focused on sharing best practices and creating new knowledge to advance relatively new domains of professional practice in aquaculture. Interaction on an ongoing basis is an important part of this and WAS-CoPs will facilitate such opportunities. A community’s specific purpose and goals inform the appropriate activities and technologies that should support it. However, each CoP will need to meet WAS guidelines and be approved by the Board.

Incoming WAS President, Dr Rebecca Lochmann, said “Initially the Board has approved the Community of Practice Agreement and two CoPs – the first is ‘Yellowtail Kingfish’ and the second ‘Aquaculture - Food Security and Nutrition’. The Yellowtail Kingfish CoP was the catalyst for this concept following the High Value Aquaculture Finfish Symposium held in Kagoshima, Japan through the Asian Pacific Chapter of WAS. A group of people engaged in farming and researching yellowtail kingfish from that event saw the benefits of sharing ideas so we are very pleased to have found what we hope will be a good solution for them.” 

Image: Tech Hub

WAS Director and Industrial Relations Chair, Zuridah Merican, said “The additional CoP 'Aquaculture – Food Security & Nutrition’ came from WA2015 Jeju session Seafood & Health (GILLS) when it was clear that there many missing pieces to the full Aquaculture nutrition story.  The session had a panel led by Shakuntala Thilsted (Worldfish) with Jillian Fry (John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health), Madan Dey (University of Arkansas) and WAS Director, Roy Palmer. 

At this session, they discussed the Recommendations of the 2nd International Conference on Nutrition (click HERE for details). Subsequently, this group acknowledged that a CoP could greatly assist in gathering data and information for education and communication."

The information relating to the CoPs will be posted on the WAS website, and will include information for anyone that is interested in engaging with either CoP.

Visit the WAS site HERE.

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