Josique Lorenzo, from the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Centre in Costa Rica, was one of the participants at the OCSDNet Workshop. She had the following to say about it all at the official network launch:

 

 

I am coming from Costa Rica and I am very happy to be here with you tonight in Nairobi – a city I have yet to discover in the next few days, although I already had a good glimpse of the friendly and welcoming character of the people of Kenya.

I work in the field of natural resources management, and one thing that strikes me about knowledge as a resource, is that it does not deplete from using it; rather the opposite: knowledge tends to grow when shared. And science is also knowledge. During this fruitful 3-day workshop, I had the chance to share a lot, and to learn a lot. Beyond my own project I have grown myself thanks to the 13 other very diverse proposals that were presented.

I am always amazed at how diversity is such a great thing. We came from many different countries, many different horizons, with diverse ideas, perspectives, challenges. and still, I feel we have more things in common than differences. That may be because we all have a shared vision, which is creating a collaborative culture in the Global South through open science, with one major goal: fostering development in our countries.

For bringing us together here, I would like to thank the whole OCSDNet team, including iHub. I know it was a nightmare in terms of logistics, but to me it was like a dream! So thank you Leslie, Angela, Nanjira, Abby, Rosemary, Joe, Kelvin, Samuel, and also Ellie from IDRC.

 This very well-designed workshop helped to make this newly-born network much more real. In our globalized, virtual world, nothing can always completely replace face-to-face human interactions. I believe knowing each other will also help us make this network grow in the future. I am very excited to be part of it, and I will return to Costa Rica with a lot of inspiration in my mind and my suitcase.