Part of what’s been interesting over the past years (as I was working on Net Work and thereafter) is the pick-up of interest in all things networks and nonprofits. I use this graphic in my workshops as a way to get people to talk about what they have (or might) read:

This is certainly not exhaustive, but it’s a pretty good list. So I have published this list (with hyperlinks) as Net Work’s NonProfit Reading List.

Two recent additions to the list (one made it into the graphic, the other not yet):

The LLC’s recent publication, Leadership & Networks (October 2012) by Claire Reinelt and Deborah Meehan. I am a contributing co-author on this paper, along with some great collaborators. The report is intended for “those who run and fund leadership programs that develop and support leadership for social change.” It highlights the importance of, and ways that, leaders in social change should be more network-aware and ways that programs can bring network literacy into their work.

I’ve also added an as-yet unpublished paper developed by Heather Creech and colleagues for IISD (especial thanks to co-author Michelle Laurie, for sharing this). I’ve been a fan of Heather’s for some time as she has been working in the development world for many years offering insights into how networks can support sustainable development. This new publication, Performance improvement and assessment of collaboration: starting points for networks and communities of practice provides a very good breakdown of types of communities of practice and suggestions for ways to measure value created by each.

Which brings me back to the topic of the webinar: it is important to understand not just how network analysis can support nonprofits in designing and assessing networks and measuring the impact of the network, but also to understand the limitations. It’s a topic of active inquiry for me — having been so immersed in SNA/ONA for so long, I am finding that it is important to be able to understand how network maps and metrics can be indicators of outcome. That’s the new net work.

My colleague Dan Keldsen recently invited me to collaborate with him and others on such a proposal. Rather than attach my write-up as an addendum, he (social media guru that he is) published it as a blog on his Information Architected site. See Using Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) and let us know what you think.
And, if you are interested in learning ONA, I think there are still spaces available in the course I deliver with Optimice colleagues Cai Kjaer and Laurie Lock Lee. The four-session course includes access to the online ONA course I developed for Information Architected and that is hosted on Dan’s site. The course runs sessions based on Asia/Pacific, US, and European time zones. The next European session begins next week. Apart from the online course, we work to tailor the content to the needs of the students, that is, we talk about how to integrate an ONA project into the work challenges that they are facing right now.

Maya Townsend (@mayapar), Partnering Resources, has begun to blog on Change, Talent, Strategy, and Collaboration. Two of her first posts reveal how intimately she combines her expertise in ONA with her organizational development and strategic consulting expertise. One, The Most Important Positions in Your Company, provides a nice summary of three key roles in networks: hubs, gatekeepers, and pulse takers. The post links to a short white paper that expand on the topic. If you are interested in networks and organizational development, you’ll find a number of gems on Maya’s site, as she is very generous with her tools, exercises, and cases. (She was a great partner to me in a NetWorkShop I conducted for the Boston Facilitator’s Roundtable last December.)

Meanwhile, over at Activate Networks‘ blog (written by Steve Wardell) references a good article from People and Strategy last year on organizational network analysis. Authors Dan Novak, Mark Rennaker, and Paulette Turner set the stage nicely for talking about the need for ONA as follows:

Using structure to articulate the intent of an organization creates a challenge for leaders because it creates a perception of stability…However in knowledge intensive organizations, people and information need to be brought together in adaptable and flexible ways.

They present five brief case studies focused on culture change in silo’d organizations. In the concluding case study, the COO offered after-action insights, including this echo of the above:

Leaders may expect a neat and clean [organizational] design, but complex, networked realities may appear messy.

I always like a good ONA read. Keeps the juices flowing. Other flows in progress:

• My Optimice colleagues Cai Kjaer, Laurie Lock Lee and I have just completed module 2 of 3 in our first running of the ONA Online Practitioner Course. We complete Module 3 next week when Marc Smith takes the student cohort into NodeXL territory. It’s not too late to sign up for the U.S. course that runs April 25 – May 22, with the interactive sessions May 8, May 15, and May 22.

• The aforementioned Activate Networks is hosting an ONA Summit in Cambridge, MA on May 15. Keynoters include Activate advisory board members and ONA/SNA “heavies” Rob Cross, Nicholas Christakis, James Fowler.

And just to boggle my brain a bit, I’m attending the Collective Intelligence symposium at M.I.T. tomorrow and Friday. I hope to tweet from there (my twittering is a bit rusty, but I can still count to 140.)

The funder did not set specific goals for the network. That is, there was nothing that they were expected to work on as a common effort. The intention was purely to provide a container that bounded the network and to stimulate the network in various ways to enable collaborative opportunities to emerge. And they did. Still, some people continued to question the “why” of this network. What were they supposed to do, exactly?

This tension, I noted, is one of the primary ones I exposed in Net Work: “Outcome v s. Discovery.” Tensions, I wrote, “are present all the time; both leaders and members of a network should be aware of how these tensions impact the health of a network. All networks will shift along these lines of tension as they respond to changes in the environment, changes in the demographics of their members, and changes in purpose, structure, and style.”

In one of those delightful moments of serendipity, I very shortly thereafter received via email from Andrew Rixon the following cartoon:

(Cartoonist: Simon Kneebone)

It’s always nice to hear that Net Work is being used, and useful and especially gladdening to see depictions such as this one.  Thanks, Andrew!

• Access to my self-paced ONA learning module
• Three 2-hour interactive virtual sessions with fellow learners. These sessions cover Scoping and Designing Your Project (with moi), Hands-On with ONA Surveys (with Kai and Laurie) and Hands-On with NodeX with (Marc).
• A year’s subscription to Optimice’s ONA Surveys tool for conducting surveys
• A copy of “Analysing Social Media Networks with NodeXL” by D Hansen, B Shneiderman and M Smith (2010)

I’d like to thank my friends at Optimice and my colleague Dan Keldsen (who hosts the online course at IAI University) for the opportunity to participate.

For full details, including a global course schedule, visit the course’s main site: http://www.optimice.com.au/onacourse.php

It’s always a rich pleasure to hear June Holley talk about network weaving. A few weeks ago, she talked about Network Weaving in the Leadership Learning Community’s ongoing seminar series.

In her talk, she outlined four key roles for network weavers and the primary activities for each.

It’s not a stretch to think about these as progressive roles. In a network, everyone can (and should) be a connector. What’s important is to articulate it and be conscious of it. As June also says, the “Number one job” of network weavers is to help more people become weavers. And we can all do that. Moving along the progression, each role requires more skill, more experience, more thoughtfulness. And investment on the part of the stakeholders and funders of an intentional network. Fortunately for the growing number of nonprofits beginning to invest in networks and in network weavers/facilitators/guardians, June’s Network Weaver Handbook is close to completion and available for pre-ordering. I was privileged to get a peek at earlier versions, and it’s an amazing set of resources for planning  and running network weaving events, working with people to help them understand their current and needed skills, and so on.

Slides and a list of resources from this talk are available on the LLC’s Network Weaving Page. This includes the “Network Weavers Role Checklist,” so you can test yourself against the roles listed above.

(The next webinar, October 10, features another of my favorite network facilitators, Nancy White: Communities, Networks and Engagement: Finding a Place for Action. Nancy will talk about building online spaces for networks, a topic that is also a current passion of mine. Look for another blog post soon.)

A recent webinar sponsored by Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO), “What is the role of Networks in creating scale?” highlighted  the work and thinking that is showing results (and is part of the ongoing learning dialogue). The panel for the webinar,  included Diana Scearce, of the Monitor Institute (co-author of Working Wikily and more recently, author of the awesome “Connected Citizens: The Power, Peril and Potential of Networks“); Roberto Cremonini of Cremonini Consulting Network (who led knowledge management and networking activities at the Barr Foundation in Boston for seven years); and Gayle Williams, Executive Director of the Mary Reynolds Babcock foundation, which is focused on alleviating poverty in the southern U.S.  Nancy Murphy, from GEO, facilitated the panel discussion and kept the remote audience engaged and interacting.

Diana set the stage by providing a framework for network thinking and development, an approach that blends traditional mechanisms for supporting social change initiatives with network-minded mechanisms:

Foundations like the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation and the Barr Foundation have been using the networked mindset, and these approaches, effectively, and are working through the challenges of working with multiple stakeholders and learning how to put structures in place that support networked action — and learning — that require giving up on linear thinking and working organically.

Roberto gave a terrific example of how the Barr Foundation managed its funding for Boston youth sports programs by showing, side-by-side, what Barr could accomplish using a traditional approach versus what it could (and did!) accomplish using networked thinking:

Both practitioners emphasized the emergent role of weaver, or facilitator, or “network officer” (as described in the linked document by the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, a good and detailed description of the nitty-gritty of the work required); the need to work with the entire ecosystem; and the importance of understanding accountability.   The RE-AMP Energy Network case study provides a good example of building a network by starting with a systemic analysis of the ecosystem and the use of a skilled network facilitator.

A key audience question was, “How do you measure the success of the network?” Gayle Williams talked about the network that MRBF is funding to push tax policy legislation in Alabama. I liked her answer a lot: you can look at the results, actual changes in the tax policy, but also you need to be sure that the network is always asking the questions, “who else needs to be involved?”  How are the relationships? How easy is it for people to come into the network?” The speakers all agreed that organizational/social network analysis is playing a key role in helping people “see” their networks and understand how to improve connections.

This excellent webinar is available for replay at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYudIfermUg

I have always said (and written) that a network produces value based on its purpose, and also provides value to those in it. One of the cases mentioned in this webinar is one I have some personal connections to, the Barr Fellows program which is also supported by the Barr Foundation and facilitated by colleagues at IISC. My friend and colleague Claire Reinelt recently published a case study on this program, which weaves cohorts of nonprofit leaders in the Boston area. Fellows are given 3-month sabbaticals, a shared learning experience somewhere in the global south, and the opportunity to develop “authentic, honest, and accountable relationships with each other.”  It’s not hard to imagine the value to the city of Boston of such inter-connectivity across the Fellows, nor the amazing fund of social capital that each of the Fellows has to draw on.

This work, this investment, in networks and communities is one of the areas of commonality between what we are seeing in Enterprise 2.0 and the nonprofit world. In E2.0, the focus is on communities (see my comments on Rachel Happe‘s talk at the E2.0 conference — and her talk itself, The Strategic Imperative of Communities) but I refuse to get into the semantic arguments about the differences between networks and communities. For the purposes of declaring that work gets gone, goals get accomplished, and visions achieved best through connected sets of people, it doesn’t matter. Nor does it matter what we call them when there are opportunities to learn. The big learning so far this week: E2.0 and nonprofits agree. If you want to work successfully, you have to invest in networks. Community managers/facilitators/network officers/network weavers. Whatever you call them, you need them, and you need to invest in them.

• Focus on a business problem
• Have senior management support
• It’s 10% technology, 90% people
• KM must be integrated into your business processes; it is not something “extra”
• Look for key partners in HR, IT, and Operations
• Capture and distribute success stories
• Address “what’s in it for me”
• “ROI” is very, very hard to measure and may not be worth the trouble
• Culture trumps everything (that’s a direct quote from Tom Davenport)

And yet, speaker after speaker at E2.0 talked about these lessons without reference to the accumulation of learning within the knowledge management community (from which I believe many of these same folks came). I suspect that part of this lack of acknowledgment comes from not wanting to be tarred with the KM feathers. (Many people still don’t get it that “KM” isn’t one big monolithic system; that it is a collection of methods, practices, and tools that all support various aspects of identifying, creating, transferring, and augmenting both the hard and soft, explicit, tacit, and in-the-flow information, knowledge, and understanding that people need to know to get their jobs done. Think of these tools, methods, and practices as “apps” and good knowledge managers as people who are integrating these apps onto a platform. That’s the 2.0 way to think of it.)

Ok, so I got that off my chest. What was interesting to hear this year, 2011, at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston was that as the themes shift from technology to business transformation, the “K” and “KM” words are creeping in. (Yeah!).

• Sarah Roberts (@robertsgolden): “You can make information flow down in the organization, but can you make knowledge flow up?” “Individuals, left to their own devices, are pretty resourceful and knowledge-sharing prone.”
• Tom F. Kelly (@Moxiesoft): “The three key elements of success in social media: simplicity of design, knowledge as a center point, leadership” “Collaboration is about sharing knowledge, not data.”
• Mike Rhodin, IBM Social network in an enterprise is an everlasting knowledge repository.”
• Ross Mayfield (@ross): “Social software needs to create the knowledge trail as a byproduct of getting the work done, not as a discrete silo of “perfect” information.”
• Daniel DeBow (@Rypple) “For HR, it’s ‘who has the knowledge’ in the organization and collaborative tools can provide the answer.”

One of the “KM fellow travelers,” http://www.elsua.net/(@elsua), an IBM evangelist was also tracking a lot of the KM themes throughout the conference. Mining the tweet streams (I shower blessings on the capture of these by @jimworth), I found an number of Luis’ nuggets of recognition of KM themes:

• @elsua @joshscribner: finding experts, finding information, sharing knowledge. #IBM #BlueIQ ‘s 3 core values for socbiz. #e2conf” / Yes, sir!
• @elsua: #e2conf knowledge transfer remains one of the biggest issues for any collaboration strategy, regardless the generations #e2conf
• @elsua: #e2conf Ohhh, another flashback from KM in the late 90s: technology, process, culture (=people); was missing it, too! #E2conf

Most astounding to me was that Andrew McAfee, who coined the term eponymous term “Enterprise 2.0″ gave a big shout out to one of knowledge management’s clarion calls from 1998, a quote from Lew Platt of HP: “If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times as profitable.”  (And,  If Only We Knew What We Know was the title of APQC‘s O’Dell and Grayson book that was one of the first KM books.)  Then as if in answer to my unspoken question (“How does E2.0 take KM to the next level?”) he says, “Enterprise 2.0. Succeeded because it solves knowledge problem and gives everyone in the organization voice in a community.”  McAfee’s talk addressed, in a way, the tacit/explicit model in KM. In the first part of his he cautioned against letting “old fashioned management” get in the way of using social technologies that promote tacit exchange and knowledge generation. The second part, on “new-fangled computers” , he focused on IBM’s Watson and its Jeopardy championship. His conclusion: the explicit part of knowledge capture, storing and recovery has been solved. Let’s now focus on “looking for questions that computers are not good at answering.”

I am thinking that this new territory, that computers are not good at answering, and which even in its fledgling days (Marcia Connor said of E2.0, “We’re in the first minute of social business. The next 5 years will tell so much more.”) is pushing beyond what knowledge management was able to address: relationships.  I’ve said before, in the 3rd (current) era of knowledge management, “knowledge is in the network.” Social tools, within, beyond, outside, and organizationally orthogonal to the enterprise are going to give us unbelievably new kinds of knowledge about who we are, how we interact, and the creative results of those interactions. These are the lessons that we haven’t learned from KM. Now that we have tools for creating, evolving, mapping, and –especially — analyzing the impact of relationships we are going to learn a whole lot more.

On the vendor side, it’s clear that as the market is maturing; it’s all about the platform now (see my previous post) and there are a number to choose from. (Some look a lot like intranets, but I think we’re supposed to think that intranets are passé. To me, the intranet is the “home page of the enterprise,” social or not; it has to be where eyeballs start the day, where hands go to search, and where people connect with people and content.)

What felt different (and this has been said by many) is the shift in tone that occurred based on the selection of keynote speakers  away from vendor pitches (with a glaring exception or two) and toward thinking about the nature of business and work. The Wall Street Journal picked up on Jive‘s CTO’s comment  ”that the emphasis has shifted toward business outcomes” in its article Enterprise 2.0 is growing up.” But it was not just about business outcomes.

It was also about the nature of business, relationships (companies <-> customers <-> employees), and some pretty simple principles of management. I had picked Mike Gotta‘s workshop, Organization Next, to attend on Monday, bypassing (except for an occasional drop-in) the Blackbelt practitioner’s session. (Ok, so I was just looking for a larger picture all along and at least at this E2.0 conference I found a lot of good stuff to listen to.) Mike’s workshop was HR-focused, looking at ways that HR managers are coping with/thinking about responding to changes in the employer/employee relationship. Daniel Rasmus did a nifty scenario planning workshop that brought home the number of uncertainties that exist about the world we live in.  Sara Roberts of Roberts Golden also did some great interactive exercises around organizational agility and change management. It didn’t feel like a technology conference at all.

(Sara also did a terrific keynote on Wednesday, “why employees are/should be managing the company,” introducing the notion of working within a complex system: setting the proper boundaries that enable leadership to emerge. She started with the metaphor of streams of humanity on the sidewalks of New York and how people can move in and out of the stream easily.)

In his elegantly constructed Tuesday morning keynote, the always inspiring John Hagel nimbly set  the tone for a business-focused conference. Starting with last year’s big E2.0 question “How do we get adoption for social software?” he linked adoption to passion and performance (“If you are interested in performance you have to be interested in passion”). People who are engaged in activities they are passionate about will connect with other people — and if you’ve got the platform available, and right, then they will use it in conjunction with passion. The only metric that matters is engaging passion.

(Later in the morning, Bryce Williams from Eli Lilly talked about how social collaboration was enabling emergent leadership in the organization. In his terrific stories, he emphasized how people succeeded because they were able to follow their passions. In the afternoon, in a session on innovation, Roy Rosin from Intuit talked about building an innovation environment: “[it means...] letting people build on their passions.” Sara Roberts said, in her workshop on Monday: “Meaning is the new money.” )

Rachel Happe, of the Community Roundtable, talked about the strategic imperative of communities: “Relationship and Culture are the only sustainable advantage.” And, she insists, that it takes time to cultivate communities, that our tools and technologies are pushing people “on a collision course” with information (beyond the capacity of our brains to process well),  that people must be given time to develop relationships and in an environment — culture — that provides the context for acting on information. “All management is community management.”

Rachel also emphasized changing organizational structures, confident that network structures will remain viable.  Organization structure had also been a big topic for Sara on Monday, who brought it all down succinctly to “What are we trying to do?” “Who needs to be connected with whom?” “Who is already connected?” “How can we foster the connections we need?”

John Stepper described how the “social media” journey at Deutsche Bank started with that core KM method, communities of practice, followed by a community of media enthusiasts, and a focus on expertise before going to technology. He summarizes this approach nicely here. In his keynote, he described how working in networks (oops, I mean communities) helped people to “step out of the org chart.” Terrific phrase. More organizational talk from Jim Grubb, VP of Communications at Cisco: “Your “org chart” is a people chart that needs to be dynamically ordered according to what you need to do in the moment.”

Enterprise 2.0 itself is a highly collaborative event and organizational microcosm. The tweet stream transcripts (767 pages, 20 per page) and links to presentations and blog posts are all posted in the self-organizing wiki set up by Jim Worth.  The community that organizes around this conference deserves a better name than Enterprise 2.0 (and “social business” doesn’t cut it, either). This conference was renamed and repositioned from a series of conferences on collaboration software and technologies, I think around 2008 (after Andrew McAfee coined the term, which was just 5 years ago.)  The co-evolution of people and technology is reaching a point where we can, and should, be looking outside the boundaries of enterprise technologies to understand how to manage, work with, and enable people to work together to create value beyond the corporate sector. E2.0, Boston 2011 has opened the door to many more conversations about how we move into this future.

Let me start with the term. Platform. Railroad platform. Platform shoes. Platform bed. Diving platform. Political platform. Speaking platform. From the French, plate-forme, diagram, map, literally flat form (Merriam-Webster). The use in computer technology derives from the sense of a platform as a set of architectural standards consisting of hardware, operating system, and applications that provide the basis for a stable and (presumably) long-lived computing environment. A recent Economist article celebrating IBM’s 100th anniversary attributes IBM’s success to its ability to migrate itself (and more importantly, its customers) from one computing platform to another. Microsoft, Apple, and Google provide competing platforms on which to build information systems and applications.

In his landmark article, Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration, Andrew McAfee used the term platform 31 times referring to the online intranets, external web sites, and bespoke applications used for “generating, sharing and refining information.” A month or so later he elaborated on this definition of Enterprise 2.0 as “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers,” and fully defined his use of each of those terms: “Platforms are digital environments in which contributions and interactions are globally visible and persistent over time.”

The notion of visibility resonates with some of those other platform-y items: diving platforms, speaking platforms, even political platforms all suggest something that is distinct, somewhat above and differentiated from the fray. The emphasis on contributions and interactions doesn’t suggest the vertical aspect of platforms. I especially think of a diving platform: you climb it or climb onto it and from it, launch yourself into an immersive experience. But I also think of the platform as a place on which to stand, a place from which to move more creatively.

Steven Johnson evokes this aspect of platform. He sets the scene (as he does often in his book) by talking about Charles Darwin’s discovery of the coral atolls in the Indian Ocean. The coral ecosystem, initially structured on volcanoes submerging over eons, continues to build upon itself, a platform on which to build the next layer, always becoming, always emerging from what came before. He extends the metaphor, also, to computing systems and applications noting that even Twitter itself is a platform on which innovators continue to build and extend. “Emergent platforms derive much of their creativity from the inventive and economical reuse of existing resources,” he says, linking the notion of building upon and re-using to the way that city neighborhoods shift over time, as buildings are reclaimed, re-purposed, and re-occupied.

I really like the image of the collaborative platform as a coral reef, a rich ecosystem of people and ideas both using and building on the platform, contributing while they interact. Big schools of small fish, small schools of big fish, eels, crabs, and skates; rainbow fish and clowns; shy tetra and angels and sergeants finding their way, their food, their friends among the diversity of coral. And, like the Chihuly sculpture I mentioned in my recent post, the result is always unpredictable, but within the context of of a set of boundaries and constraints, designed for emergence.