Paolo Brunello writes: Understanding group dynamics, identifying leaders

My 30 Burundian trainees are technical high school teachers whom I’ve carefully selected to install and administer a dozen computer labs in their schools. As I strongly believe that such a task can be accomplished only if the people involved share a common vision of the project as a whole, I decided to try out [...]

How does a research assistant become director general?

This was one question that my participants at the ILRI Net-Map workshop chose to map out in a group activity to learn how the method works. I must admit, they didn’t find a simple answer in their one hour speed mapping session. Maybe because we were pressed for time and I didn’t allow them to [...]

Learning by doing

I have just finished teaching my first 5 day “General Introduction to Social Network Analysis” course at the International Livestock Research Institute in Kenya. I must say, I was a bit nervous before I arrived, because I knew I would interact with a group of researchers interested to be trained in a method and (maybe) [...]

Dealing with messy realities

After pre-testing Net-Map to apply it to Bolivian policy processes, one troubling learning experience followed me for some days.
Imagine a political system (and I am not necessarily talking about Bolivia here, because I have seen similar systems all over the world) where the power of different actors is determined by a mix of their formal [...]

Mitgefuehl

The literal translation of this word is “with-feeling” (i.e. empathy) and that’s what my Bolivian colleagues and I discussed yesterday, when planning our focus group discussion with poor people to find our more about the multiple dimensions of poverty. We are still in the process of deciding whether we’ll rather focus on the “logistical” aspect (as [...]

Make sure you know what they mean by this…

Today I tried to make sense of Net-Maps that workshop participants drew some weeks back in individual silent sessions. We had discussed the procedure, the general question, kinds of links, meaning of influence with the group, but mapping the networks was something that each participant did on their own. During the workshop we used the [...]

Incentives, institutional boundaries and life bird traders

I’m sitting here comparing the Net-Maps we have drawn to understand the risks and interventions around avian flu in different African countries and that gets me thinking about incentives and institutional boundaries (more info about the project). Both Ghana and Ethiopia impressed me in their considerably fast reaction to the threat. Avian flu, with its [...]

How to scare the right people enough…

… without scaring the wrong people too much?
That’s a question that hovers over the discussions in our avian flu project, both in Ghana and in Ethiopia (and, if I listen to my colleagues’ experience, as well in Indonesia and Nigeria). When mapping out value networks, risk communication and response, we hear the concrete examples: In [...]

What it feels like

I’m just coming out of an intense session with 70 or so members of the KM4Dev community, mapping out the networks that members of the community have with each other. It was intense because of the size of the group (we worked in sub-groups) but also because we experimented with the format and came up [...]

Just take it and run!

At our last workshop in Bolgatanga, Ghana one of the participants, the regional head of office of the Red Cross, walked up to me with a beaming smile on his face: “Eva, the thing you taught us last time you where here [meaning: Net-Map], we are now using it with our community groups! It’s working [...]