working wikily
Smarter ways to work
Networks & Impact

The Working Wikily Report

A page about Working Wikily 2.0, the 2009 Monitor Institute report on networks and social change: who wrote it, what it covers, its licence, and where to read it.

By Working Wikily Newsroom · 3 min read

“Working wikily” is a phrase from a series of reports and articles by the Monitor Institute, a consulting and think-tank group that worked with the David and Lucile Packard Foundation on how networks and online tools change social change work. This page describes the main report and says where you can read it. It is a description by this site and not the report itself.

The report

Title: Working Wikily 2.0: Social Change with a Network Mindset Authors as published: Diana Scearce, Gabriel Kasper and Heather McLeod Grant Publisher: Monitor Institute Date: completed in May 2009, with funding from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Length: 23 pages Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The report defines working wikily as a way of working marked by openness, transparency, decentralized decision-making and distributed action. Its argument is that the tools matter less than the networked mindset they make possible.

What it covers

According to its contents, the report moves through these questions:

  • Why a second version? It updates a 2008 working paper, noting that social media tools had become more mainstream and that interest in networks had grown, partly because of the 2008 Obama campaign.
  • What is driving the changes? New tools, from free conference calls and email to blogs, wikis and texting, are changing how people communicate and connect.
  • Why do networks matter to social change? The authors point to benefits such as developing and sharing knowledge.
  • When are networks not the answer? The report says plainly that it is not always clear whether networks beat traditional approaches, and raises concerns about quality and accuracy in crowd-sourced work and about information overload.
  • When should you use a networked approach? It sets out when a networked approach fits and when a more traditional, command-and-control one may fit better, and describes several types of networks.
  • How do you start? Begin with the problem you are trying to solve, then pick tools, not the other way round. The report gives an example from its own work with the Packard Foundation, where the most useful ideas came from threaded discussions and not from the wiki that had been the centerpiece.
  • Further reading. A closing list of books, articles and sites on networks and social media.

Where to read it

  • Working Wikily 2.0 (PDF, this site). The report is licensed CC BY-SA 3.0, which allows copying and sharing with credit. We host an unaltered copy of the file: Working_Wikily_2.0.pdf. Credit: Diana Scearce, Gabriel Kasper and Heather McLeod Grant, Monitor Institute, 2009, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
  • The 2008 original. Working Wikily: How Networks Are Changing Social Change, by Gabriel Kasper and Diana Scearce (Monitor Institute and the Packard Foundation, 16 pages), carries a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 licence, which does not allow commercial use, so we do not host it. A copy is kept by the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine capture. The 2009 report says readers who have not read the first version should read the second instead.
  • The magazine article. The three 2.0 authors also wrote “Working Wikily” for the Stanford Social Innovation Review (Summer 2010), which describes five benefits of networked approaches and five lessons: ssir.org/articles/entry/working_wikily.

Sources

More on networks and impact

How Funders Can Build Network Capacity
Collaboration Tools for Social Change
Networked Nonprofits: Working Through Connections
Open Data and Crowdsourcing in International Development