What others write about Net-Map at the Knowledge ShareFair

Vanessa Meadu of the World Agroforestry Center in Nairobi sums up the experiences of using Net-Map that IFAD staff shared at the FAO Knowledge ShareFair in Rome:

“Chase Palmieri discussed how an analysis of the IFAD Asia-Pacific network revealed a number of connections and activities that the network facilitators had not been aware of, such as new working relationships. The network managers at IFAD will use this information to help participants work together more and learn about each others’ expertise. In Ghana and Mali, IFAD used Net Map (https://netmap.wordpress.com/) to map power asymmetries in pro-poor rural water. Moses Abukari and Rudolph Cleveringa shared how the participatory tool helped reveal social structures and hierarchies in a community, which can inform decisions about who to involve in a project and what strategies to engage them…”(read more)

Very valuable about her post is that she also points out the risks of using an approach such as Net-Map with the goal of directly implementing the results (as compared to research uses). While Net-Map is meant to make implicit networks explicit, that same feature might also be perceived as (and used for) exposing people and their weaknesses and thus do more harm than good…

Look here for Nancy White’s observations from the same session, focusing on the effect that the act of knowledge sharing (supported by different methods) can have on the way we work together.