Early roots of Social Network Analysis

“It may have been possible in the past, for things to have happened in isolation, but from this time forth, the world must be seen as an organic whole, everything affects everything.”
(Polibius, born c. 200, Megalopolis, Arcadia, Greece, died c. 118 BC)
Steeve Ebener, who uses social network analysis in the context of accessibility of [...]

Learning more about Social Network Analsyis

The Knowledge Management for Development (KM4Dev) community has a great Wiki which has an interesting introduction on Social Network Analysis within the field of knowledge management, which is worth checking out, if you want to learn more of the background of the approach.

Integrating research and governance

Sounds great. But how do you do it? How can we as researchers for development do projects that have an impact on governance in the countries we work in? Or, is there a problem in this question already, as it sounds like: First we do research, then we go and have an impact.
Should the question [...]

Podcast on Maize and Chicken in Ethiopia

“Wow, we learned more about chicken than we ever asked for…” my colleague David Spielman joked after a week of Net-Mapping poultry and maize innovation systems in Ethiopia. You can listen to the (more serious) rest of the discussion by clicking on the media player below (or here) . The project is still in [...]

Give and take

I am so excited! By posting the invitation to our Net-Map training on the email lists of MandE (Rick Davies’ great Monitoring and Evaluation platform) and KM4Dev (Knowledge Management for Development) I have spurred an absolutely unexpected wave of reactions. We offer the option to participate in the workshop online and I have received applications [...]

Web-Find: One small project

I love blogs of people who graze the web for us and find the most amazing links. Reading around in Simon O’Rafferty’s research blog, I stumbled over “transformative innovations” and ended up here , at a place where architectural design and the lives of the poorest and homeless meet.

Process Mapping

Regina Birner (IFPRI) has been one of the first people to really push me to go forward with Net-Map. And right from the beginning she has been bugging me: But how to I look at processes with this, not just snap-shots in time? One option is a time series of Net-Maps as discussed earlier. But [...]

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”.