Category Archives: Network Management

Network Development , Network Management

F2F: Designing the Network Meeting

Peter Plastrik

There’s probably no more important event in a network’s life than the convening of network members, whether it happens annually or more or less frequently. Most fundamentally, face-to-face/in-person meetings are a golden opportunity to build and strengthen connections among network members and connectivity dictates the vitality and capabilities of a network. The Urban Sustainability Directors Network’s former managing director, Julia Parzen, understood this and how it was different from a “conference.” When USDN’s leadership was designing the network’s first annual meeting, she recalls, “People started saying, ‘We’re coming to your annual conference,’ and I’d get really annoyed and say, ‘We don’t have an annual conference. We have an annual network meeting and the purpose of it is to help people get to know each other and find people with common interests.’”

The network convening is so important that we dedicated seven pages in Connecting to what we called “customized weaving” and this advice about designing F2F Meetings:

  • Make increasing connectivity an explicit objective of the meeting.
  • Make enough time for members to connect, not just work together.
  • Leave room for network members to invent on the spot what they want to do together.
  • Promote what members are doing and what they know; don’t over-rely on outside experts.
  • Increase members’ awareness of the network.
  • Find out how much connecting has happened.
Guest Blog , Network Management

Addressing the Problems of Network Building

Paul Lipke

Paul Lipke is Senior Advisor, Energy & Buildings, Health Care Without Harm

Given the wicked problems the world faces, and the need to build networks to address them, this book is invaluable.  I’ve worked in, and with social change non-profits, networks and associations for over 30 years, and but still learned a ton.

Connecting to Change the World is chock-full of practical stories, insights, processes and guiding principles for servant leaders and members to build member-driven, continuously improving networks.  It addresses why there are inherent difficulties in networks made of organizations.  It provides a high-power lens with which to examine and precisely improve network functions (and reduce dysfunction).

Connecting raised and largely answered provocative questions:

  1. Are we collecting the right kind of information often enough
  2. How might our value proposition need adjustment (again)?
  3. Key network nodes can come to feel like they are “faced with insurmountable opportunities,” to quote Walt Kelly’s Pogo . How can networks manage this overload so as to avoid its many, serious negative consequences? What about when its difficult to simply engage less, the interactions keep escalating, and additional resources are not available?
  4. Most people, organizations and funders want to support doers, not servant leaders whose work is indirect.  How can networks find sustained resources to support their “unsexy” intermediary role?

Networks commonly experience failures of leadership, are over-whelmed by factors outside participants’ influence, and are even intentionally destroyed by those who find them a threat to their interests and/or personality.  The authors have such rich depth of experience and research, can a subsequent edition or an article offer case study analyses, and lessons learned from such challenges?

This book can even help the millions of interconnected individuals and organizations working for social change which aren’t part of formal networks. May they find and use it!

Network Design , Network Management , Network Startup

Network “Backbones”: The Three Levels of Coordination

Peter Plastrik

At a network’s start-up it’s useful to think through what sort of support network members need and are likely to need in the future.  In our experience there are three coordination roles in network building: logistics, operations, and strategic management–and it’s rear for a network to need all of these roles filled right out of the starting gate. (Network coordination is one of 8 network design elements discussed in chapter 2, “Start Me Up: Designing a Network.”)

Logistics involves setting up meetings, conference calls, and other ways for members to engage with each other; tracking and documenting network activities, decisions, revenues, and expenditures; creating and distributing essential information such as a directory of members and contact information.

Operations typically involves other duties, such as running a website and other external communications; facilitating group processes of members; documenting network decisions and activities and managing an archive of network documents; administering the network’s finances; helping members to draft proposals for funding; and orienting or on-boarding new members of the network.

Strategic management is a higher level of responsibility focused on helping network members, especially those with governance duties, make and implement decisions about the network’s development. this could include managing relationships with outside partners and funders, supporting members who are undertaking initiatives for the network, and creating and modifying network plans.