Synthesis
Weigh in on the future of networks and engaged communities!
Thursday, August 26th, 2010 | Synthesis | No Comments
As mentioned in an earlier post, the Monitor Institute is doing research with and for the Knight Foundation on the “emerging potential of network practices for informing and engaging communities.” We have had fantastic conversations about the topic with many luminaries, including Clay Shirky, Bill Traynor, Mimi Ito, Howard Rheingold and several other deeply thoughtful leaders from the Knight Foundation and elsewhere.
Based on what we’ve been hearing, we’ve developed a short list of driving forces that could shape how networks and network practices will help inform and engage communities. We would like to hear your opinions on which of these drivers of change are most important and what you think is certain about this space over the next 5 years. Your input will help us frame a powerful set of scenarios – or stories of the future. (More on scenario thinking here.)
We’ll use the scenarios to stretch our thinking about the opportunities and threats that the future might hold and thereby arrive at a deeper understanding of the philanthropic investment case for networks for community engagement. We’ll be sharing what we learn from you and others along the way. Stay tuned.
The survey will take approximately 10-15 minutes to complete. Please respond by Tuesday, August 31st. Thank you in advance for your participation!
Learning and Adapting Better in Today’s Rapidly Changing Landscape
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010 | Synthesis | No Comments
This post is fourth in a short series being published at the Intrepid Philanthropist. You can find the original here.
I focused last week on a couple of the ways that funders can begin to “act bigger” in today’s more networked and interconnected landscape for public problem solving. But I want to also give a quick preview of the other major way in which we believe funders will need to improve over the coming decade: “adapting better.”
Adapting better is critical because even if funders begin to act bigger, mistakes made at a grand and ambitious scale are still mistakes. Funders will need to get better at developing judgment based on the best evidence available, and then try to learn and adjust rapidly as they go. › Continue reading
Networks and Engaged Communities: Beginning a Conversation about Knight Foundation Research
Monday, August 2nd, 2010 | Synthesis | 2 Comments
This is the first in the series of blog posts Eugene Eric Kim and I will be doing on networks and communities. We’re working together on a fun and fascinating piece of research for the Knight Foundation exploring the “emerging potential of network practices for informing and engaging communities.” That’s a big and abstract topic. Let’s unpack it a bit.
We’re looking at how social networks – loose connections of people—are and will be organized to make a difference in communities. We’re looking at how people are › Continue reading
Acting bigger by activating networks
Thursday, July 29th, 2010 | Synthesis | No Comments
This post is third in a short series being published at the Intrepid Philanthropist. You can find the original here.
Yesterday I wrote a bit about the Strategy Landscape, an innovation that the Monitor Institute has been developing to help funders better “understand their context”—one of the 10 next practice areas we discuss in our new report, What’s Next for Philanthropy. The next practices represent principles and behaviors that are particularly well suited to the more networked, dynamic, and interdependent landscape of public problem solving that is now emerging. They’re approaches that we believe have the potential to become the widely accepted best practices of tomorrow.
The idea is that if the last decade was › Continue reading
Tools: making It easier to work in new ways
Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 | Synthesis | No Comments
This post is second in a short series being published at the Intrepid Philanthropist. You can find the original here.
Before I dive into some of the different “next practices” highlighted yesterday that we think may become important parts of philanthropy’s future, I wanted to first say a few words about one of the key pieces of what I think it’ll actually take for funders to start acting bigger and adapting better over the next decade.
Change in philanthropy is especially hard. As organizational theorist Edgar Schein puts it, the only time that organizations learn and change is when the normal level of “learning anxiety”—the anxiety produced by having to shift and learn something new—is trumped by “survival anxiety” › Continue reading
Innovating next practices for philanthropy’s next decade
Tuesday, July 27th, 2010 | Synthesis | No Comments
This post is the first in a short series being published at the Intrepid Philanthropist. You can find the original here.
When the Monitor Institute first started its exploration of the evolving “future of philanthropy” ten years ago, I was one of its funders, a program officer at the Packard Foundation. A big part of what we were trying to do was to create an urgency and an awareness that the world around philanthropy was changing, and that if philanthropy was going to remain relevant and achieve its potential in the coming years, the field—and the institutions and individuals within it—were going to need to change too.
Now, ten years and a financial crisis (or two, if you want to count the dot-com bust) later, I’m working on the other side of the coin. The challenge is no longer about › Continue reading
The “Green Revolution”: a case of being blinded by the new
Friday, July 23rd, 2010 | Synthesis | 1 Comment
“New” is a powerful force for getting people excited. New technologies often create new winners and losers, and in the rush to be a winner, or at least find out who the winners will be, many of us end up getting a little ahead of ourselves. This pattern has been on full display in the past year as the complete story of Iran’s “Green Revolution” has emerged. Many of the most respected media outlets in the U.S. reported on the protests in Iran as being powerfully accelerated by the use of Twitter, and the State Department famously asked Twitter to postpone its scheduled maintenance out of concern that the downtime could hamper the protesters’ coordination. But now it turns out that it just wasn’t so: as documented in Foreign Policy and elsewhere, the tweeting was happening outside of Iran, serving only to spread the news from Iran to the world and hardly—if at all—used by the dissidents themselves. There were › Continue reading
Philanthropy’s creative responses to the spill
Thursday, May 27th, 2010 | Synthesis | 1 Comment
The ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico threatens not only the livelihood of many in the Gulf Coast region but also the health of one of the nation’s richest ecosystems, presenting philanthropy with a sudden demand for action. The story of that response, which will certainly span many years, is only just beginning. But there are already examples of how philanthropy is making a difference in ways that embody collaboration, rapid adaptation, and other progressive methods:
- The Environmental Grantmakers Association ran a webinar to discuss funders’ responses to the oil spill and encourage coordination. Over 200 foundations attended the event and EGA is now surveying the group to gather further information about their responses, which will serve to increase the field’s peripheral vision.
- The Greater New Orleans Foundation is using not just grants but also low-interest loans and guidance to help fishermen through its support of the › Continue reading
Network “leadership” or network “weaving”?
Monday, May 17th, 2010 | Synthesis | No Comments
As part of our ongoing research and practice around leveraging network approaches for social change, Diana Scearce and I have been doing a fair amount of thinking about what it means to be a “leader” in a network. Our recently posted diagnostic tool has a few thoughts on the topic, as do the slides from various training sessions we’ve led. This recent post by Steve Waddell lists several new and helpful resources on the topic, building on new areas of research in leadership theory, and work being done at the intersection of leadership and networks, including this recent framework developed by Claire Reinelt and Grady McGonagill. › Continue reading
Now available: the Network Effectiveness Diagnostic and Development Tool
Monday, May 3rd, 2010 | Synthesis | 4 Comments
What does a healthy network look like? It’s a very subjective concept, just as the meaning of ‘healthy’ differs for people depending on age, gender, etc. However, just as with people, there is some consensus around what healthy tends to be, and conversely, what unhealthy looks like for networks.
Over the past few years, we at the Monitor Institute have created a diagnostic tool for assessing the health of networks. The tool is intended to help network weavers, network participants, and grantmakers reflect upon the health of their networks against eight commonly cited areas of network health › Continue reading
Thinking out loud about social entrepreneurs
Friday, April 23rd, 2010 | Synthesis | No Comments
Like many people, I have long worked to reconcile a dilemma. I admire so many of the great leaders who call themselves social entrepreneurs. And yet I am as certain as I can possibly be that in 20 years we will look back at the strategies that changed the world, and they will not just be about heroic individuals and the organizations they built. I know we need great organizations. But I also know we need great networks, great new laws, great movements and great ideas that spread far beyond their source. Hence the ongoing subject of this blog is one of the powerful new strategies: working wikily.
It was this context that made me an avid listener at this year’s Skoll World Forum, and a grateful recipient of Pamela Hartigan‘s wisdom. In her closing remarks, she proposed her own resolution of the dilemma I wrestle with. › Continue reading
Working Wikily meets the arts
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 | Synthesis | 1 Comment
Thanks to everyone who came out to the San Francisco Bay Area Emerging Arts Professionals gathering last night, and a special thanks to the three panelists who gave the evening a powerful kickoff with their personal stories about how networks have been at the core of their work in recent years: Tamara Alvarado, Anasa Troutman, and Roger Kim. There were about 28 people present from many aspects of the arts in the Bay Area: dance, classical music, theater, street art, and many others. It was a real pleasure to share the Working Wikily content, and judging by the conversation in the room and the comments I heard afterwards, many people found the ideas meaningful for their work. As I mentioned at the start of the evening, this was a chance for me as a consultant & researcher to come down from the field-level perspective that we cultivate at the Institute and help people working in the social sector grapple with the practical questions that they face. It was gratifying to see that the language that we use to describe networks, network-mapping, network health, and network leadership continues to resonate. › Continue reading
Making online social networks work
Thursday, April 15th, 2010 | Synthesis | 2 Comments
This post will soon be cross-posted on Tactical Philanthropy as part of a series on the GEO conference happening this week.
How do you effectively steward technology for online communities? For the past year I’ve been facilitating a community of practice (CoP) for funders. While much of our work has been designed around in-person convenings, we have also been connecting using a group on WiserEarth. WiserEarth is an online social networking platform, similar to Ning, but it’s dedicated to social change. › Continue reading
The rise of networks in philanthropy
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 | Synthesis | No Comments
This post was also published on Tactical Philanthropy as part of a series on the GEO conference happening this week.
I spend far too much time thinking about networks. Why do networks matter to social change? How can funders tap their power? How do they relate to movement building? What’s their role in ‘scaling up’? Talk of networks was everywhere today at the GEO conference. What does this mean for grantmakers?
The day kicked off with a plenary session on scaling. Angelica Salas spoke of her work on building a national movement for immigrant rights, rooted in the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. Angelica said, “Coordination for us is a necessity.” So, they work through a nationwide network of state-based coalitions › Continue reading
The Cultivating Change through Philanthropy convening
Thursday, April 1st, 2010 | Synthesis | No Comments
You might be wondering: where did Working Wikily go over the past few weeks? The answer is that myself and nearly our entire team disappeared into the task of getting ready to share the draft of the research we’ve been working on for most of the last year. That research is a project called Cultivating Change through Philanthropy and we had a fantastic time last week sharing it with many of the leaders at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and with practitioners from across philanthropy here in San Francisco at the Golden Gate Club. A big thank you to all who attended the two events. For those of you who follow us on Twitter, I hope you enjoyed the live-tweeting on #rwjf and #monitor. All of the event’s materials — the pre-read, handouts, and graphic recordings — are now available on here for future reference. We’re now going to develop the final materials and we’d love to hear your comments, whether you came to the events or not. It would be especially valuable to hear your thoughts on the event’s pre-read, which is our current version of the paper that we’ll eventually be releasing for the field. Here it is in a handy document-viewer for easy reading and download:
The impact of sharing data: Beth Noveck at the Long Now
Friday, March 5th, 2010 | Synthesis | No Comments
If you share it, will they come? If you listen, will you learn? And if you ask, will help arrive? A resounding “yes” was the answer delivered by Beth Noveck last Thursday at her Long Now Foundation lecture, Transparent Government and the Long Now of Democracy (MP3 audio). She shared a wealth of examples illustrating the government’s new progress towards data-sharing, public input, and crowdsourced effort—many of which were equally inspiring for philanthropy. Noveck is the head of Obama’s Open Government Initiative where (she jokes) she has the dubious honor of being assigned to implement her very own theory of “collaborative democracy” from her 2009 book, Wiki Government. Stewart Brand’s snappy summary her talk is on the Long Now site, so I’ll share the three main points that I felt were relevant for the social sector. › Continue reading
The power of visualizing systems
Friday, February 19th, 2010 | Synthesis | No Comments
I love the Albert-Laszlo Barabasi quote: “Networks are present everywhere. All we need is eye for them.” The trick is developing really good eyesight. Or, to extend the metaphor, the best glasses for developing 20/20 vision. The good news is that there are now a lot of tools out there that don’t require an advanced degree in physics or engineering to use.
I had the opportunity to join a webinar led by Steve Waddell recently on what he terms “visual diagnostics.” Steve has an extremely clear frame for thinking about the range of tools for visualizing systems, or in his words, “visualizing complexity.” He discussed four tools: › Continue reading
“Social Networks and Social Change”: giving and getting wiki-working wisdom at Stanford
Monday, February 1st, 2010 | Synthesis | 3 Comments
Over the weekend I helped teach a continuing-studies course at Stanford with Diana Scearce and Heather Mcleod-Grant. It was a real joy — the experience of sharing what we’ve learned with a diverse audience of highly-engaged listeners made it entirely worthwhile to get up early on a sunny Saturday. We were glad to be able to share our current thinking with people from across the spectrum in the social sector and it helped us a great deal to see that they appreciated the content that we’ve created with primarily foundation and nonprofit management in mind. To all who came: thank you, I hope you found it valuable, and please come by this blog and our Twitter-stream to continue the conversation into the future. We would love to hear your stories of how you’ve tried to apply these ideas in your own efforts. This is a very fast-moving area of practice and only through your eyes and ears that we can keep a handle on what works and what doesn’t. › Continue reading
350.org: giving new meaning to “new organizing”
Friday, January 29th, 2010 | Synthesis | No Comments
A lightbulb went on in my head while I was listening to the PdF webinar last week that laid bare the machinery that made it possible for 350.org to achieve the most widespread day of political action in history back on October 24th. We’re still in the midst of examining the various threats that traditional “membership organizations” are facing and the story of 350’s success is one of the best illustrations I’ve seen yet of the new model. In the words of 350 organizer Phil Aroneanu, “It’s about concerned citizens who are looking for a meaningful way to engage. It doesn’t make sense to ask them to click once and that’s it. That’s not a believable theory of change. Building those [local] leaders is the secret to the way that we organize.” › Continue reading
Working Wikily presentation at The Hub
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 | Synthesis | No Comments
I had a great time last night at The Hub in Berkeley presenting on Working Wikily and discussing the ins and outs of social media with an intimate group of social entrepreneurs. It was the perfect venue, both because The Hub’s members are exactly the people who are out there experimenting with the new networked toolkit and because The Hub is a place for those people to expand their networks and discover new opportunities for connection. Below are the slides that I brought with me. To all of you who came, thank you for participating. I hope you found it valuable and I would love to hear any reflections on how the content could be improved for similar audiences in the future.
