by Nancy White
January 11, 2012 in Uncategorized
I thought I should stop by and leave a note that this project is now over. The site is up for now — we aren’t quite sure how long it will be here. It was a wonderful adventure. For those with ongoing interest in network weaving, make sure to stay abreast of June’s work at http://www.networkweaver.com!
by Nancy White
May 10, 2011 in technology
(Cross posted on Full Circle and Technology for Communities)
A conversation emerging in the Network Weaving Community of Practice (NWWCoP) focuses on this question: how can/do we use social media for intentionally weaving our networks? As we prepare for a synchronous conversation today, I realized I can frame this question from a technology stewardship perspective, specifically the idea of curating our own personal technology configurations so that they can help us tap into and amplify the value of our networks.
From Digital Habitat’s we framed the idea of configuration this way: “By configuration we mean the overall set of technologies that serve as a substrate for acommunity’s habitat at a given point in time—whether tools belong to a single platform,to multiple platforms, or are free-standing.”
For a while I was obsessed with tagging material that helped us see others’ configuration, via my Delicious tags. Each configuration teaches me something new and gives me a new perspective on my own and the configurations of my communities. (See also other posts on the Digital Habitats blog on configuration.) In some ways, these felt like a type of fingerprint. While many communities used similar tools, the individual variations were fascinating. This made sense to explore at the community level, especially with more bounded communities.
While community’s have their configurations, so do individuals. When working with networks, where we are tapping into the value of connections between people, it becomes the intersection of individual configurations that fascinate me for many reasons. Here are a few:
Let’s get a bit more concrete about #3. Clearly a lot of non profits are interested in social media generally, but lets focus on network weaving for a moment.For example, some of my key network weaving practices include “closing triangles” (introducing and helping people connect), sharing information from smaller, closed groups out to the larger world/networks, and curating resources within and across networks. What configurations might I use for these?
A major challenge we run up against in this proliferation both of practices and tools is how to manage this. There is a lot of talk these days of dashboards and tools like Social Base. I have resisted digging too deeply there due to my own habit of “rabbit holing” and not getting my work done, but clearly this is on my radar screen. What I’ve seen so far has been more about tracking metrics of social media rather than tying the media to the practice and desired outcomes.
Any guidance for me? What is your practice of managing your technology configuration from a particular practices perspective, such as network weaving?
by Nancy White
May 3, 2011 in Resources
Via a link from Luis Suarez I watched this great little video. It reminded me of something that came up in our community ShareFair in August — our delight and SURPRISE to see how others valued our expertise on something.
We can’t utilize the power of our networks to help ideas and information flow if we don’t “put it out there.” That means realizing that yes, you and I both have something valuable to share. Sometimes it may not be earthshaking, but rarely are we well positioned to understand how what we know or do can be of value to someone else.
Put it out there. Let it shine. Don’t hold back your OBVIOUS because it may be a delightful wonder for someone else!
by John Smith
March 31, 2011 in announcements, Events, Questions
Twenty-three of us gathered to talk about our community, where it’s been, what we’ve learned, and where we’re going. A somewhat simple agenda led to a rich conversation.
As is our practice, the notes and the recording are stored here and the whiteboards are stored here.
There is a lot of interest in getting together face-to-face!
We talked about what projects and topics we want to emphasize. Some sessions are already on the calendar and more are on the way. It’s remarkable how comfortable we’ve become with Elluminate — both the chat function and the whiteboards. Wow!
We ended up with a fun exercise where we were only allowed to enter three words on a line in the chat room.
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by John Smith
March 28, 2011 in Project, Resources, technology
Ken, Terri and I got together on Elluminate last Thursday and worked with Terri’s most recent NodeXL spread-sheet. It was so informal and such a small group I didn’t turn the recording on, but it provokes a lot of thoughts after-the-fact that I thought would be worth sharing.
The first thing that impressed me is how what we’re trying to do in this community is pretty audacious. We are trying to be effective actors in a social network at the same time as we are able to step way back and look critically at a network as represented in a diagram. I think we are all aware of the challenges of gathering data and representing a network in a computer program like NodeXL. But a couple of comments that Terri made about switching jobs and about how her role had changed as a result made me realize that on a day-to-day level most of us are working way down in the weeds in a very complex and fast-changing landscape. We have to work within whatever the constraints are of our organizations, our projects, or our funding. Standing back and looking at a social network graph from a distance is a momentary luxury.
The second thing that came up was the kind of network that Terri was mapping. I’m most familiar with social network maps that show “friends” or “people you admire” or “people you go to for help”. That’s what leads so naturally to our conversations about “closing the triangles.” But Terri is mapping “referrals”, where an agency sends an individual or family to another agency for help. That suggests there is more of a relationship between the two agencies than just “liking”. In fact, Terri talked about how agencies become very aware of each admission criteria or actual service performance. She gave an example where an agency said it wasn’t worth sending a particular case to one agency because the client faced a long-term problem and the agency was limited to only 45 days of service. All of that makes “referral” a very interesting thing to look at in terms of the performance of a public health care system as a whole.
Referring patients to other agencies was seen by the agencies themselves as a positive behavior, so showing people this map was a way to hold a mirror up to an agency so that it could see itself in a larger context. The size of the dot is proportional to the number of referrals. The natural question that the agency spontaneously asks itself is, “how can we make our dot bigger?” Talking about that question in the context of a network map is automatically more concrete and specific than talking about “increasing referrals” in some general or abstract sense. And concrete talk leads to more concrete actions. 
(Because all of the information we discussed might be sensitive, the blog post has really small images that communicate the gist of what we talked about. You can go to the Network Mapping Group for the full size images and a lot more detail if you’re a member of the NWWCoP community.)
One of the topics that we discussed was the fact that no network map is ever really complete. There’s always the temptation to not show it to people because of its incompleteness (or because of some other defect). But we can turn the logic on its head and use “incomplete” to our advantage by showing a map to a group and focus on how their relationships are represented. In this case, you click on one node in NodeXL, all of the links pertaining to that node are highlighted. NodeXL also jump to that node in the spread-sheet window so you can scroll through other characteristics of the node. Then you can ask, “what are we missing? What needs to be added for this map to show our situation more accurately?” You can add relationships or correct the data in real time or after the fact.
Something that Ken did during our session on March 24 made me realize that there was an easier way to get images out of NodeXL than what I was doing. I had been using the print-screen function on my computer and then chopping the image down as needed. After our session I followed up on Ken’s example and found that you can use a slider bar in NodeXL to zoom right in so that the image is just the right size and then right-click on the image to get NodeXL to save exactly the image you want.
Finally, something that really caught my attention was how many different uses for a network map came up in our conversation. I’m not sure I caught them all (and I may not be describing them exactly as they came up) but here are some examples:
by John Smith
March 18, 2011 in announcements, Events
What is so powerful about a community set-up like we have in this project is that we can talk about what we want to do. Therefore what we do in the end addresses the needs of people who are involved. (The key, of course, is that you have to be involved!) This process can be a little bit disconcerting if you aren’t expecting it. After all we all have a lot experience with schools where you walk into class, sit down, and are instructed by someone who knows what they’re talking about (or is alleged to know, anyway).
I think the discussions that have been going on in the last few days between Ken Vance-Borland, Terri O’Bryan and me in the Network Mapping Group are a great illustration of how negotiating in a community style mixes up a lot of elements that are sorted out (or hidden) when we learn in school. Our discussions include:
If you read closely there are probably other things going on, but you get the idea. It seems to me that our platform works pretty well for all of this, provided that you subscribe to the discussion or group that you’re interested in. Since I get a little email notification whenever someone adds something to the discussion, I can choose whether to jump right on or do it later on. And if I add something now, it’s not a problem if someone else takes a day to respond because I’ll get an email alert when they do respond.
I don’t actually log off the site, so when I get an email from the site, I just click on it and it takes me right to the discussion, where I can see the latest postings in context. That makes it so that I feel comfortable deleting emails as they come in — they are just reminders, not a substantive record of what’s happened.
Bottom line: several of us are going to have an informal work session to talk about Terri O’Bryan’s network map. The discussion is going to mix up all these issues that are on the table: how do you represent a social network, how you figure out what a network map is telling you, and then what you might do about it as a result. Of course, if you join us, you can contribute to the discussion — adding questions and concerns that come from your work.
by Nancy White
March 10, 2011 in Resources
On today’s full community “share fair” meeting the concept of tweetups and tweet chats came up. I mentioned that there is an open Google doc listing some of the more well known tweetups and I would share it, so I wanted to post that link and a few others here. In poking around, I found a few more lists (Meryl’s list was updated just last week!) and resources.
How to Run Twitter Chats
There are both technical and facilitation things to consider to effectively pull people into a coherent interaction on Twitter.
Hashtags Resources
A hash tag (i.e. #nwwcop) is a way to aggregate tweets during a tweet chat and to aggregate tweets with other digital content with the same tag.
How to Capture the Content of Twitter Chats
Here are just a few of the tools you can use as interfaces for the tweet chats themselves and to aggregate the content. See the “how-tos” above.
Strategy
I think the last bit of thinking — that really might be best considered first — is thinking about WHY you want to do a Twitter chat. Thinking about intent, about purpose, can be a productive precursor to planning and action. Smile. Visit some twitter chats. Experience them. Then think about your community and network. What would work? Twitter chats are inherently open – is that ok for you? Do you want to have a defined group, or attract people to the twitter chat topic? Food for thought, eh?
by Nancy White
March 9, 2011 in Resources
Jenny Ambrozek and Victoria Axelrod have a nice slide deck on networks and social network analysis in organizations that I thought our community might enjoy. You might also enjoy the resources on their blog and related wiki.
by Nancy White
March 8, 2011 in Events
More from our own fab LLN colleagues. You might want to check out these events! Eugene Kim is fabulous!
We are very pleased and excited to announce the first two in our 2011 monthly webinar series. We are working with thought leaders in the field to produce a series of free webinars that focus on promoting more inclusive, networked and collective leadership approaches. This year’s topics range from collective leadership to collaborative technologies, leadership coaching, and more!Register now for the first in our series. Strategic planning. You know you should be doing more of it.
Strategic Planning for Networks
March 22, 2011 at 11:00-12:00 Noon PST
Presenter: Eugene Eric Kim, Blue Oxen Associates
Strategic planning. You know you should be doing more of it. But the way you normally do it requires lots of up-front time to do and lots of follow-up time to get buy-in. And frankly, you have trouble with the buy-in part. All that trouble, minimal follow-through.
Great strategic planning processes are lightweight and participatory. This is nice-to-have for organizations, and its critical for networks, where you don’t have the benefit of hierarchy to influence its behavior. Network will do what they do.
In this webinar, Eugene Eric Kim will describe how to do strategic planning for networks. He will draw heavily from his experience leading the open strategic planning process for the Wikimedia movement, which drew over 1,000 participants and lead to a movement-wide shift in focus on increasing reach and participation in developing countries. He’ll share how you can leverage these types of processes for both your network and your organization. Register now!
And mark your calendars for the April webinar!
Join us on April 28, 2011 for webinar from 11:00-12:00 Noon PST presented by Alain Gauthier on “The Inner Dance of Collective Leadership.” This webinar will encourage participants to interactively explore the inner shifts in attitudes, mental models, beliefs, and intentions that pave the way for exercising more collective leadership.
by Nancy White
February 26, 2011 in musings
Source: Leadership for a New Era
I’ve been tagging a lot of Beth Kanter’s posts recently (see the sidebar to the right which aggregates delicious.com bookmarks with the tag NWWCoP) because she is really turning her thinking towards these things we call “networks.”
By networks, I mean not a new word for our bounded and structured institutions where we think we are now open, and connected. It is something different. And since we started the NWWCoP last October, I have really struggled to define this for myself. I sense many of us define networks differently, presenting a meaning making challenge. In yesterday’s Elluminate session on Alumni networks, we had a very interesting conversation about the role of trust in networks and I felt almost blasphemous to suggest that we don’t always need personal and relational trust for networks to be a success. In that comment, I was thinking about very broad networks which run on loose ties, not always on just strong ones. Where people connect over ideas, issues, domains and things they care about, not always relationships. When these ties are activated, another type of more personal trust may come into play. Or transactional trust. Or very light, conditional trust but some sense of connection that facilitates action, learning or something… not just the mere presence of connection.
In bounded communities, trust is a more consistent element. Yes, communities are a form of network. And that’s just the point. There are many forms. So when we talk about this network stuff, we are pretty darn imprecise much of the time.
So lets talk about descriptors and examples of what we mean by networks. Or maybe find a more nuanced language that recognized the diversity of networks. A back door into a definition, oK?
Beth’s latest post tells the story of a networked project, the making of the video, Story of Stuff. Read the whole post. What I want to share are some of Beth’s descriptors of a network way of working for non profits and see what we might add. Here they are:
(1) Networks are more resilient and flexible and can bigger risks because they don’t have to worry about the longevity of a big institution.
(2) Networks are participatory. They can get millions of people to help, not just paid staff.
(3) Networks offer many different ways to get involved. It’s a buffet of ways to engage people that fits them. Networks value people on whatever terms they want to participate.
(4) Networks are a reflection of where the world is going. There’s a big paradigm shift in everything from our relationship to material goods to organizational models. We’re moving from a “mine” to “ours” environment.
(5) Networks make us all smarter. By sharing information freely and welcoming input and feedback, learning is accelerated. Networks evolve faster because of this.
(6) Networks are more fun. Annie said that she had spent many years trying to get people to talk about the issues that she cared about, thinking her experience and expertise were enough. It wasn’t until she learned to let go of control and shift from lecturing people to inviting them in that conversation exploded.
If these descriptors resonate for us, they have implications for non profits who are seeking “network strategies.” How do these networked forms jive with the structured forms of organizations. With things like letting go of control. Of not building the institution.
To me they suggest that organizations have to get more agile at living polarities, instead of resolving the dilemma they pose for us. And to be able to discern between things we drive, things we tap into and with things we influence.
In your experience of networks, what descriptors would you add? Oh, and lets not ever forget the fun part. 