Extending DSR with sub cycles to develop a digital knowledge ecosystem for coordinating agriculture domain in developing countries

![CDATA[Still a large percentage of the world population, especially in developing countries are depending on agriculture for their livelihood. The agriculture domain in many developing countries is not well coordinated leading to over and under production of crops resulting in widely fluctuating market prices, waste and economic hardship for farmers. Rapidly growing Smartphone usage among farming community has opened new possibilities to develop a mobile based artefact to coordinate the agriculture production. We have developed an overall artefact; a Digital Knowledge Ecosystem using Design Science Research (DSR) methodology to solve this complex problem. The main project had many research challenges to solve and they were assigned to several sub-projects to address. The outputs of sub-projects created several artefacts. They were integrated to develop the overall artefact to achieve the main goal of the overall project. Managing the complexity of the overall project was a challenge. For this, we had to split three main cycles of DSR: Relevance, Design and Rigor into 6 DSR sub-cycles; Relevance – Problem Understanding and Relevance – Suitability Validation, Rigor – Learning and Rigor –Contribution, Design - Heuristic Search and Design - Functional Validation. This split enabled us to better coordinate the activities to address different aspects of the problem performed by different researchers, often in parallel at multiple geographical locations. The resulted mobile based Digital Knowledge Ecosystem initially developed for farmers in Sri Lanka is now being trialled in India and adapted to develop a Mobile based Information System for Nutrition Driven Agriculture for African Countries.]]