Purpose
What does this blog offer to the field?
The purpose of this blog is to provide practitioners in the social sector with a filter for the events that are pushing the field towards a more networked form of work and a perspective on how and why those events are unfolding.
Networks and networking began as fashionable buzzwords with the arrival of “Web 2.0″ tools around 2004, and they gained greater currency with the arrival of new theory about the structure of social network soon after. Since then the technical tools have matured and theory has begun to be applied in serious professional environments, first in the commercial world and now in the social sector. The widespread adoption of social networking sites has opened up new possibilities for mobilizing social and political movements, blogs have become a new medium for mass (and micro) communication, and even large organizations are experimenting with enterprise forms of collaborative communication software.
Keeping track of this emerging set of practices is more than most busy professionals can manage. The technology is still changing at a fast clip, with new tools for networked communication popping up on a regular basis; new theoretical ideas are still being introduced; and, social sector organizations are now adopting both at a rapid clip. Our goal is to accelerate the spread of these innovations by identifying the most interesting and relevant events from the mass media, the technology blogosphere, and the social-sector blogosphere. It is our hope that by providing this material we will draw in many more participants from across the field to what is already a lively conversation about the new possibilities that are opening up today.
How did this blog begin?
Our effort to track and analyze these practices began in the fall of 2007 as a means of providing insight to the Packard Foundation, with the work output published on the Packard website and released into the public domain. That first year of reports is now included here in the blog as past posts, prefaced with the heading (ARCHIVE).
How does this blog connect to the other work of the Monitor Institute?
The Philanthropy and Networks Exploration (PNE), a partnership of the Packard Foundation and Monitor Institute, was an inquiry into how foundations can tap and support the power of networks. It began in early 2007 and ended in the spring of 2009.
We began the learning journey motivated by the belief that networks offer a source of decentralized power, creativity, and wisdom that the Packard Foundation—and philanthropies more broadly—can and should tap into. We started by reaching out to leading academics and practitioners to understand the current landscape; we got a flavor of the accelerating innovation and activity in the world of networks, and quickly became aware of how much there was to learn. When we started experimenting with using collaborative technologies and social network mapping, we really began to gain traction. We then focused our work on running pilot projects, and learning from these experiments and from the much broader set of developments and new knowledge about networks being created outside of our work. At the same time, we ran a research and strategy project to develop an approach for enabling the Packard Foundation to support and increase the capacity of networks (including the capacity of organizations to work through networks). Findings from this research led to the development of a set of tools and a series of “network effectiveness” workshops for Foundation grantees.
2 Comments to Purpose
[...] spent the past two years reflecting on networks and social change, we’re convinced that the Obama campaign represents a tipping point in larger public awareness [...]
August 17, 2009
A number of practitioners, many with over 20 plus years working with networks, partnerships and virtual organizations, are organizing virtually around the upcoming OD Network conference in Seattle (Oct, 2009). Many with varying levels of experience consulting around applications of social media are engaged in an action research project to link practitioners to the face-to-face conference via Twitter. A fast growing wiki site will be worth watching for those wanting to link organizations and networks to a large community of practitioners who have been working with a network mindset. Anyone can participate at the wiki: http://flockingtoseattle.pbworks.com
On that wiki resource page I’ve directed participants to this wiki.
November 12, 2008