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 [...]

Validate the map before you start driving

Imagine the following scenario: You are on a conference call with your colleagues and you plan how to get to the central market square of the city. What you don’t know: Each one of you is looking at a street map of the city - unfortunately, not of the same city. While you start giving [...]

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 [...]

Cleaning up our mental cabinets…

The other day I talked with Jonathan Agwe from the World Bank (WB) about the possibilities of making the Innovation Systems Approach more accessible and innovativeness more measureable by using Social Network Approaches. His excited reaction made me smile because it reminded me of my own first reaction to Social Network Analysis: “I didn’t [...]

Struggling with the Matryoshka Effect

You know these Russian dolls where a little baby doll sits inside a slightly bigger one that sits inside a slightly bigger one etc.? Sometimes, when doing institutional Net-Maps, I feel like I’m on a Russian tourist market, just surrounded by Matryoshkas. Only that the way organizations are nested inside each other is far more [...]

Knowledge transfer as two-way street

Yesterday I had lunch with Michael Barth, founder and CEO of upublic, an education consultancy with international focus and in our brief conversation something came up, that I have been thinking about for a while and I seem to be observing a very subtle shift of thinking - at least amongst some of my colleagues.
What [...]

Reaction from Accra

Jennifer Hauck, who is still busy with her research about local fisheries governance, is in Ghana at the moment and at reading my latest musings, sends me the following insights fresh from the field:

“Maybe a cobbler should stick to his last?
Tying up to the last blog: Do African villagers learn less from Net-Mapping than African [...]

Do African villagers learn less from Net-Mapping than African policy makers?

And if so, why?
Those who have heard me talk about Net-Map know that I get really excited when I talk about the learning experience of my participants of Net-Map activities. They jump off their seats afterwards, praising their new insights, thank each other (and not the facilitator) for all that they have learned etc. That [...]

Facts are Facts - Perception is Reality

A colleague said this to me yesterday and after I stopped laughing it got me thinking.
Because with a method such as Net-Map you basically record people’s perceptions. Some of them are rather easily consolidated with what we could call hard facts (e.g. flows of funds, formal lines of command).
But if you ask: Who puts political [...]

Combination

The issue of the day is combination. Discussing Net-Map as a research approach with colleagues both here and over in Germany, I got a number of responses that had to do with combining the social network analysis with other research approaches.
The underlying thought is that our social interactions are embedded in other factors that both [...]