Networks, control and the fear of loosing it

Talking with Nancy White and reading her last posts about community management triggered a whole network of thoughts around why the idea of a network organisation and network structures appeal to some people (and some organizations) while they make others shudder.
And I think this has a lot to do with the balance between control and [...]

Response to “Do African villagers learn less from Net-Mapping than African policy makers?”

I’m happy that Prakash Kashwan takes up this question and adds his own experience, as you can see below, because the question is still out there and I have not found an answer that really satisfies me. I like his notion of community members actually simplifying matters for the researcher, who is a rather ignorant [...]

P.s. on chicken

This is not a chicken blog so I’ll finish my musings about the external vs the internal chicken in Ethiopia by providing one last link to Solomon Demeke’s paper “Growth performance and survival of Local and White Leghorn chickens under scavenging and intensive systems of management in Ethiopia”.

Pod-Cast for Net-Map and Knowledge Sharing for Development

You might remember that Nancy White asked for your help in trying out an online exchange of and about Net-Map. That was in the context of a knowledge sharing workshop of the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). As the workshop is mainly an online activity (though with face-to-face meetings), the Knowledge Sharing team [...]

From Specific to General

While I used the (general) Net-Map tool to learn very specific details about the poultry and maize sector in Ethiopia, Dawit Kelemework, our Ethiopian research officer, experienced that working on these specific issues opened his eyes to a much bigger and more general field of research approaches. He writes:
“From specific to general
Few weeks ago, I [...]

Marathon Chicken up-date

I sent my musings about Marathon Chicken Support to my colleague David Spielman in Ethiopia and he assures me that our colleagues at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) do demand oriented research. He writes:
“Yes, ILRI is actually working to improve local poultry breeds, rather than introducing exotic breeds. Dr. Azage Tegegne with ILRI’s Improving [...]

Local Materials

In his comment today, Prakash Kashwan asks, whether we have used local materials for doing Net-Map, which reminds me that I wanted to put together a slide show of “stackable things” that could be used as influence towers. So, the answer is yes, and things that we have used include local board game pieces, bicycle [...]

Marathon Chicken vs Whitebreasts

In Ethiopia people don’t care much for huge, tender, tasteless industrial style chicken. Everybody, from farmer to university researcher agreed: For good Ethiopian food you need tough and streetwise Ethiopian chicken. This poses a big challenge to the development of the commercial poultry sector: While there is a big market for eggs, farmers and extensionists [...]

Net-Map on Wikipedia

That’s the whole content of this post: Net-Map now has a Wikipedia entry. Check it out and change, add, contribute!

Do we really need to draw all these links?

When we were net-mapping the innovation systems in poultry and maize in Ethiopia, we wondered: What is the benefit of spending so much time, drawing different links and is it maybe enough to just name the actors and put them on influence towers? So we tried a two step approach: With the first interview partner, [...]