Net-Map Video

What a great job they did! My colleagues at the IFPRI communications division are amazing. With all my other traveling, I unfortunately couldn’t attend the Annual General Meeting of the CGIAR in Maputo to receive the “CGIAR 2008 Promising Young Scientist Award” in person. So while I was hidden away somewhere in the Ethiopian hinterland, [...]

On the benefits of strange participants

Simon Hearn comments quite rightly that difficult participants can sometimes be very helpful for the whole group. That reminds me of a group of government and NGO staff that I once led through drawing a common Net-Map of their governance impacts. There was one guy who had a knack for misunderstanding everything and being very [...]

Joachim von Braun (Director General of IFPRI) about Net-Map

“This is such a simple way for us to understand and anticipate what can be very confusing and complicated interactions in the agriculture sector. It’s so effective that we are now seeing it adopted far beyond our area of work. Net-Map is being used as a way to improve communications related to the risks of [...]

Facilitation would be so easy, if it wasn’t for the participants…

If I could choose between a day spent with my computer and a day spent facilitating a loud group of disagreeing Nigerians, I’d always choose the Nigerians. There are some people who get their kick out of solving complicated things alone in front of their computer, but I’m definitely not one of them… Yesterday I [...]

Using Networks to tell a story

In the past weeks I have been traveling and teaching and learning more than reflecting and writing. Now back home in Washington DC, I am unpacking my bags and letting all this experience in Bolivia, Kenya, India and Ethiopia settle, to see what the neat and nice bloggable lessons are that I can draw from [...]

A thinking aid, not a thinking replacement

Inspired by Joerg Volkmann’s comment about the similarities between Net-Map and Vester’s Sensitivity Model, I had a look around, started reading about it and was impressed. Vester’s approach is more about how different issues lead to to each other in a complex system (and not so much actor links, power and goals) but I will [...]

Jennifer Hauck writes: Networks in everyday life

A very good example that science does not always have to be rather boring is provided by Linton C. Freeman. The author (who wrote an excellent overview of “The Development of Social Network Analysis: A Study in the Sociology of Science in 2004) assembles 24 comics that focus on networks. Right-click here and save a [...]