Network tradecraft
New working paper released – “Working Wikily 2.0: Social Change with a Network Mindset”
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 | Network theory, Network tradecraft, Networks in action, Synthesis | 3 Comments
We’ve posted on the Monitor Institute site our most recent paper: Working Wikily 2.0: Social Change with a Network Mindset. The paper examines how networks and working with a network mindset—embracing principles like openness, transparency, decentralized decision-making, and distributed action—can help funders and activists increase their impact. Working Wikily 2.0 draws on our research and experience managing network-related experiments with the Packard Foundation over the past two plus years. The report builds on the original Working Wikily report, a descriptive account of how networks are changing social change, published in the Spring of 2008.
Please let us know what you think! What are your stories of social change driven by a network mindset? What lessons are you learning about working wikily?
How can a funder best support networks?
Monday, July 13th, 2009 | Network tradecraft, Synthesis | 7 Comments
How can a funder best support networks? This is the question I have been asking myself for the past 18 months. It started with research the Monitor Institute did last year, when we surveyed Packard Foundation grantees structured as networks about their needs; more recently the question came up at a community of practice meeting for network funders that Monitor Institute had the privilege of facilitating. › Continue reading
Should nonprofits be crowdsourcing or “smart-sourcing”?
Friday, March 27th, 2009 | Network tradecraft, News | 2 Comments
As techPresident’s Pete Peterson reports in his piece titled “Government Needs Smart-sourcing, Not Crowdsourcing,” Clay Shirky has changed a few notes of his tune: whereas he previously was advocating for government to use Web 2.0 tools to pay more attention to public opinion writ large, he now believes that it should give greater weight to expert views. Peterson’s post builds on that idea, developing a critique of crowdsourced policy suggestions, along the lines of Cynthia Gibson’s earlier post on the stupidity of crowds: › Continue reading
What does it really mean to “organize” a netroots campaign?
Friday, March 13th, 2009 | Network tradecraft, Networks in action, News | 4 Comments
Everyone in politics these days loves to talk about the “netroots,” but hardly anyone really knows what it means to organize a netroots campaign. Enter Apollo Gonzales, the Natural Resource Defense Council’s new netroots campaign manager. The grassroots is easy to picture: they’re the everyday people who are on your mailing list, contribute money so you can lobby Congress, and occasionally call their leaders to voice their opinion. But the netroots is a more abstract concept that Gonzales and a few other pioneering netroots organizers are beginning to learn how to handle. › Continue reading
Data-visualization: seeing is believing
Sunday, March 8th, 2009 | Network tradecraft, News | 1 Comment
Visualization gets its power from the simple fact that some things are just easier to understand when you can look at them, a fact familiar to anyone who works with networks and maps their connections. The nascent field of data visualization continues to probe for new kinds of information that are easier to relate to as images, and back in December FlowingData posted their list of the five best visualizations from 2008. Look carefully: can you spot the networks? › Continue reading
McKinsey’s corporate best practices for Web 2.0, with insight for the social sector
Thursday, February 19th, 2009 | Network tradecraft, News | 2 Comments
Corporate experimentation with Web 2.0 tools is still in its early stages, and many of the lessons that companies are learning can be directly applied to social-sector organizations that operate at a similar scale. A major question has been whether these tools are simply the latest technological fad or whether they can offer significant benefits to an organization’s efficiency and effectiveness. The latest McKinsey article on the topic, “Six ways to make Web 2.0 work,” contends that they absolutely can, › Continue reading
[SYNTHESIS] Social networking: it’s not just for millennials anymore
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 | Network technology, Network tradecraft, Synthesis | 2 Comments
The argument for foundations and nonprofits to get savvy with social networking sites just got better: the teen and twentysomething early-adopters are now rapidly being joined by their Baby Boomer parents and Generation X. For the past few years, social networking sites were the place to go to attract next generation donors–now they’re rapidly becoming the place to interact with existing donors. › Continue reading
[SYNTHESIS] How to Cultivate a Web 2.0 Community
Friday, January 9th, 2009 | Network tradecraft, Synthesis | 2 Comments
With all the new Web 2.0 tools out there, it’s tempting for organizations to create their own blog, or try to build their own on-line social network. However, this can sometimes be a bad idea. There’s a reason why it’s called the “social web” – Web 2.0 tools thrive on popularity. When everyone sets up their own gathering place, this leads to the phenomenon of ‘10,000 Groups of One’: › Continue reading
New links from the holiday break
Thursday, January 8th, 2009 | Network technology, Network theory, Network tradecraft, Networks in action, News | No Comments
Thanks for your patience over the holidays. To make up for the break in content, here’s an extensive list of worthwhile links from the past few weeks, broken up by category: collaborative practices, serious tweeting, and technology/tools: › Continue reading
Networked funding for professional journalism at spot.us
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 | Network tradecraft, Networks in action, News | No Comments
One of the basic tenets of working wikily is to bring a collaborative and participatory spirit to the relationship we’ve traditionally known between “audiences” and “authorities,” and the new website spot.us does that in a very creative way for the world of journalism. It applies wiki logic to the problem of funding quality stories: if a journalist has a story idea that the commercial papers won’t buy, with spot.us she can pitch it straight to the public. › Continue reading
TweetsGiving successfully breaks in the new model of tweet-raising
Monday, December 8th, 2008 | Network tradecraft, Networks in action, News | 1 Comment
I’m very happy to report that TweetsGiving was a smashing success, proving that “tweet-raising” can be used as a viable model for getting donations. The preliminary case study reports that the campaign raised $11,021 in 48 hours from 364 donors (beyond its $10k goal), prompted over 3,000 gratitude tweets, received 7,563 unique visitors from 101 countries, and got over 100 mentions by bloggers and the press. (UPDATE: There are now additional thoughts and reflections posted, which are worth reading.)
Does your network look like this? Perhaps you need to do some weaving.
Friday, November 21st, 2008 | Network theory, Network tradecraft, Networks in action, News | No Comments
A third and final pearl of wisdom from the Pact/WBI essay is the brief case-study description of how Pact realized that the network it had created in Zambia was badly in need of network-weaving. › Continue reading
The purpose of organizational network analysis
Friday, November 21st, 2008 | Network theory, Network tradecraft, News | No Comments
There is also an admirably crisp summary of why organizations need to learn about networks and where their needs lie in opening to the Pact/WBI essay: › Continue reading
[SYNTHESIS] A President who “works wikily”?
Friday, November 14th, 2008 | Network tradecraft, Networks in action, Synthesis | 1 Comment
By now it has become a journalistic cliché to say that President-elect Barack Obama just ran the most impressive campaign in political history. Coupling his background in community organizing with the connective power of Silicon Valley’s latest Web 2.0 tools, he built and then supercharged an enormous grassroots network, › Continue reading
Three types of capacity-building networks
Monday, November 10th, 2008 | Network theory, Network tradecraft, News | No Comments
How do you define a “network”? As the proverbial lawyer will tell you, it depends, since the word an be used for anything from relationships among friends to neural connections in the brain. But if you happen to be focused on organizational capacity-building, researchers at Pact and the World Bank Institute (the WBI referred to below) recommend using this handy three-part typology to think about the kind of networks that would be useful or already exist: › Continue reading
The culture of radical transparency comes to fundraising
Thursday, October 30th, 2008 | Network tradecraft, News | No Comments
Kjerstin Erickson had been successfully running her nonprofit FORGE for some time, providing aid to refugees in Africa, when suddenly she faced a financial crisis of her own that left the organization short US$100,000. › Continue reading
SYNTHESIS (ARCHIVE): The new networked practices that are shaping politics and policy
Friday, July 18th, 2008 | Network tradecraft, Networks in action, Synthesis | No Comments
Technology-enabled activism is known for mass movements and street protests, but it is becoming a tool for creating change in less confrontational ways. The savviest leaders are using the base’s enthusiasm and creativity to advantage, encouraging co-creation of the message, recruiting virally through games and contests, and in turn displaying increased authenticity and responsiveness. The savviest campaigners also know they perform a service that operates under tight constraints: they have a short time frame to tap into large numbers of people activated by an event, and they have to provide a relevant and productive outlet where taking action is both easy, fun and satisfying. This report will highlight some of the more recent examples that illustrate the trend.
SYNTHESIS (ARCHIVE): “Answer people” – the critical two percent
Monday, September 24th, 2007 | Network theory, Network tradecraft, Synthesis | 1 Comment
Several recent articles suggest important contributors to networks may only make up 2% of the total. This 2%, sometimes called ‘answer people’, are not always who you might think they would be. For example, at one corporation they were ‘14 low- and mid-level managers’, not senior executives, with incredible influence. They gained this influence because they convinced people to trust them and focused on solving problems rather than complaining about them. That is not to say the other 98% aren’t important in their own way – but more as an audience, which absorbs, uses and shares the information. We wonder, what this insight might mean for the PNE? Thinking back to the Nitrogen wiki with its core of less than a dozen contributors, perhaps we could have been more systematic in identifying ‘answer people’. For example, we might have used social network analysis to identify them from our existing contacts, and we could have asked these prospective ‘answer people’ to invite others like them with a strong collaborative streak and unusual perspectives. At what point are there too many “answer people” in an online discussion, and not enough lurking and listening nodes from the periphery? These are questions that a future pilot might want to consider.
