Thinking Like a Network!

The following are notes taken from a session/ presentation on June 3, 2010 held at Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo B.C. featuring Barbra McMillan, BC Rep for the Community Foundations of Canada.

When we talk about networks we are talking about a collection of objects that are part of an interconnected system. Be it people, objects, web patterns etc. The focus is on the relationship between the entities. Networks are as old as human society. We are all part of networks, be it our families, communities, people we work this etc. So networks aren’t new, but network technologies are fairly recent.

What do networks do? They:

· create new things, knowledge, products, solutions

· learn and disseminate knowledge

· innovate and generate new ideas and solutions

· generate and allocate resources with needs

· advocate and influence public policy

· support and build capacity by connecting individuals to share resources and foster belonging

· solve problems, achieve goals and particularly when they are intentional.

Networks primary aim is around sharing information and dissemination. But they can and do, do so much more! We’re learning that networks can act big without being big, get things done quickly, can involve more people, skills, and intelligence for the common good and produce higher quality outcomes impacts because they allow for connection, coordination, collaboration and competition.

Some basics around network thinking:

Networks are all about relationships or 'social capital'; the ties that bind us together, the glue that holds the community together. Robert Putnam, who coined the term 'social capital', also talks about bonding capital (relationships of trust) and bridging capital (inter-relationships among and between).

When thinking about networks you can think about them in a whole lot of ways, but it can be helpful to create a common language. As we get thinking about networks we can start thinking about the following metrics:

· Awareness – how likely is it that information will spread throughout the network. Influence: who do people look to in the network?

· Connectors: who links people who would not be connected?

· Resilience: how dependent is the network on a few people?

· Integration: what is the overall health of the network?

Network Components:

The network is the structure upon which the community dances and self organizes and there are primary structures and components including:

· the core (the central purpose or project)

· links (connections between individuals)

· clusters (siloed groups)

· nodes (clusters that come together)

· weavers (people who bring others together and close the triangle).

There are 3 basic types of networks:

· Connectivity: for easy flow of access to information.

· Alignment: for a similar purpose and collective values.

· Production: moves beyond shared values and fosters projects and activities by aligned people and organizations.

And there are common characteristics that all networks have including:

· Centrality

· Coherence

· Range

· Content

· Directedness

· Durability

· Intensity

· Frequency

· Rearrange-ability

· Blocking.

It's important to think about how your network is structured, where the links are, where the blocks are so you can think about how to enhance it. Look at it’s resilience, durability, what would strengthen it, what would weaken it. It’s not a healthy thing to have the network based on one’s person’s shoulders. There can also be different types of blockers, not just people. For example, technology can be a blocker or a barrier if there isn’t good connectivity in some communities, capacity level to use online tools etc.

The Importance of Weavers:

Weavers in particular, are the people who intentionally, informally – and often serendipitously – weave new and richer connections between and among people, groups and entities in networks. They also weave new and richer connections between and among networks. Weavers actively make the introductions, they don’t wait or act passively.

The key task of the network builder in a connectivity network is about rapid growth and easy sharing of info. In an alignment network, there’s an adaptive capacity. The weaver’s role is to evolve the shared values. In a production network, the weaver’s role is to assist joint actions for specific outcomes.

Network Wisdom/ Learnings:

There are a number of network paradoxes within networks including chaos and order; learning and teaching; stewardship and agency; individual and organizational, verb and noun (networking – network); formal and informal, homogenous and heterogenous. A healthy network needs to think about how they navigate these tensions.

Smart networks encourage self-organizing across divides, we acknowledge organic growth (that they will go where the energy is), they should allow for new strategies for innovation and collaboration. Also:

· Diversity is important

· Birds of a feather flock together naturally

· Robust networks have diverse paths between nodes

· Some nodes have more prominence than others

· There are a lot of indirect links

· Shorter average path links are better for work flow, info exchange and knowledge sharing

· Information percolates quickly when the nodes are shorter connected

· Strength of weak ties: these are often found between clusters and they have that bridging role. The connections are not as frequent but they may bring several clusters together.

· Mash-ups happen when two disparate / different things come together and then something entirely new emerges.

· Structural holes are when there are no connections between groups: there are huge gaps. There is role/ value in bridging structural holes and an opportunity to broker the flow of information people, projects, organizations, sectors etc.

· The law of preferential attachment occurs in networks: in other words they create more for those who invest more.

Advice for Network Builders:

As your network develops, you need to identify the pockets of interest and energy by creating a ‘proof of concept’. Then you start with a working group, bring them together to guide the evolution of the broader network. Experiential learning, pilots, case studies, examples and provide people with enough information to encourage them to think it’s worthwhile. Also show who else cares about this. You need quick wins or chewable chunks to build trust and value. People need to see some results or progress early on. You need some ‘doing’ pieces as well as the visioning pieces. Look for patterns and where the energy is. There also may be parts of your network that may not be active at certain times.

Network values: some are implicit – but they should also be explicit (stated). How do they make decisions; is there reciprocity (contributing and not just taking); are there sustainable practices? It’s really important to clarify expectations in order to foster commitment.

Sometimes you hit a critical mass and opting out can occur because people feel over-whelmed by the information. You need to always think about the relevance of the content broadcasted.

Any network thinking about innovation needs to pay attention to what’s happening on the periphery. Rather than having the same cast of characters, bring new people in (strange bed fellows or ‘mash-ups’). Often we get too used to our own perception and need that jolt.

Networks aren’t always the answer: they may not provide enough return, coordination costs can be high but are often hidden (people don’t realize how much actually goes into them) etc. But they are effective for building relationships with diverse people, disperse responsibility, can generate new possibilities, they can help hierarchies, they can harness a diverse work force etc.

Getting started:

· Map your network

· Analyze it and look for patterns

· Listen to your network, collect data, stories, analyze shifts, do surveys, focus groups, create feed-back loops etc.

· Learn how to shape and guide it, develop strategies to enhance it

· Be a network weaver and identify, encourage and support other network weavers.

To Think Like a Network you need to:

· Be organic and intentional

· Recognize individual, organizational, cross-sectoral

· Think about the concepts, tools, learnings and promising practices

· Look at the structures, mapping, patterns, weaving, listening and values.

Links:

Ted talks: Seth Godin on the Tribes We Lead.

Barb McMillan's Thinking Like a Network power point presentation and handouts:
10 minute video produced by the BC Healthy Living Alliance that features our speaker Barbara McMillan (as well as Rose Soneff and Claire Gram) about the power of networks. :

My own digital story: An Island Connected

Future Planning for the BC Food Systems Network!

It’s been 12 years since the BC Food Systems Network (BCFSN) was formed by Cathleen Kneen at her kitchen table in Sorrento. Since then, the issue of food security has grown from a fringe topic discussed by a small group of self ascribed foodies to a global movement on everyone’s lips. Here in British Columbia, local and regional food security groups have popped up all over the province bringing the issue from an initial kitchen table, to field to table, and beyond. As a result of this growing and necessary surge in interest, the BCFSN board and staff came together in Nanaimo from July 16th to 18th for an intensive strategic planning retreat.

Funding and facilitation for the retreat was provided by the BC Healthy Living Alliance’s Community Capacity Building Strategy. The group came together to review the overall purpose of the network and to discuss ways to better connect with bio-regional and topical groups that are sprouting up all over the province. As well, the group discussed issues related to sustainability and governance.

An overview of Barbara McMillan’s ‘Thinking Like a Network*’ workshop was presented on the first evening in order to set the stage for contemplating next steps for the BCFSN. According to McMillan, networks aren’t new, but the ways and means of networking has exploded in the last decade (particularly social media). There are three main types of networks:

• Connectivity - connects people for easy flow of and access to information and transactions (all networks start this way)
• Alignment –aligns people/ organizations to develop and spread an identity and collective value proposition
• Production – fosters joint action for specific outcomes by aligned people/organizations.

*See the ‘Thinking Like a Network’ blog.

In terms of functioning as a connectivity network, the BCFSN does this through its’ main vehicles of list-serves and the annual gathering. It was also decided that the network has helped to normalize / align the values of food sustainability into a powerful movement throughout the province and amongst key stakeholders like health authorities. The network has also had some successful joint actions in the past and decided that this should be an annual outcome at each year’s gathering.

The group discussed the things they valued most about the BCFSN including:
- statements that have come out of gatherings and fostered action steps
- First Nations values / spirituality
- diversity/ inclusivity across cultures and sectors
- mentorship and youth involvement
- it’s grassroots ‘ness’ and extreme honesty
- theoretical and practical opportunities for discussion and learning
- fostering relationships
- personal food policies and story telling

In terms of looking towards the future and important next steps for keeping the network going and growing, the Board identified four key initiatives including:

1) to respect the autonomy of the emerging bio-regional and topical groups, and to invite representatives from these groups to participate in an advisory that would meet quarterly and discuss ways that the groups can connect and share resources etc. A network outreach group was struck.

2) acknowledgement of the importance of the working group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty and a desire to incorporate its values into the overall mission of the network. The Alert Bay Accord (www. ) was provided as a model for future discussions and a governance committee was struck to provide recommendations for future directions.

3) the importance of enhancing member engagement and the opportunities that social networking and web tools can provide. A ‘communications’ sub-committee was struck that will make recommendations to enhance the networks presence on the web. As well, the vital importance of face-to-face connections was emphasized and some members agreed to help spread the word / create displays in their communities/ at special events etc.

4) that funding and fund-raising is a key and urgent issue for the network and it was agreed that special emphasis would be placed on identifying key opportunities for creating sustainability for the network. As a result a fund-raising committee was also established with one of the first tasks being to create a promotional strategy, in conjunction with the communications committee.

The retreat wasn’t all work though! Delicious meals based on a local food philosophy were provided by Jessica Chenery and an evening picnic at the mouth of the Nanaimo river provided excellent opportunities for eating, sharing and laughing together.

Michael Tippet on 'Google'

Experimenting on the Web!

The following are notes from a presentation given by Michael Tippett at a 'Writing for the Web' workshop I attended at Hollyhock in May 2010. Michael is a pioneer in citizen journalism and Founder of Now Public, one of the largest news agencies in the world. This is what he had to say....

Platforms:
To create something equivalent to what you can do now for free, in 1998 would have cost you a million dollars. I'm impressed by how robust these 'free' platforms are. A 'platform' is something you can build on top of. In terms of free blogging platforms you've got Word Press and Blogger.

I personally use these as experimental platforms to learn things and make mistakes with: do something meaningless. Post a blog that no one is going to look at! Make mistakes on something that does not matter. Whatever your objective is, get stuff on line.

The harder part is aggregating and building an audience. Do experiments with that. I had my birthday party recently. I went way out there. I had a Twitter Feed set up and a Tumblr account. I ended up owning the term 'MT40' in the top 10 search results. It's actually not that hard to do, but it requires practice. First thing is to come up with a moniker that' unique and then getting out there with as many lines as you can. A Twitter account, a blog etc.

They don't take that long to get set up, but take time to maintain. Your experiments will teach you how long it takes something to get into the search engine. If you're on the second page of Google, you're invisible pretty much. If you're trying to own a debate or a point of view, you need to understand the language of it and understand who is competing for it. You need to understand that line of inquiry. You need to know what is the question people are asking and then you want to own that page.

Google Ads:
You can use Google ads to direct traffic to your site. It only takes a couple of hours to become a reasonably competent enough to do it. You just go to Google Advertising programs and sign up. (Can also be found in the fine print at the bottom of any Google page). In terms of identifying 'key words' to use, they will suggest things to you. In NY there is a big ad guy who says that in a branding sense, make the biggest promise you can own. Make a claim and make it as big as possible, but not so big that you can't own it. For example: you aren't going to own food, but maybe it's 'food security' or 'food health'. You get it down so far that it won't cost millions of dollars but it's something that can attract and influence the right kind of people.

Google advertising is essentially an auction based system. You buy a word. For example, I can buy Mike Tippet. It would show up next to the search results. You could buy 'food' if you wanted to spend a bazillion dollars and change what people think of food generally.

Step one is sign on and then type in the word you think is most interesting and then do it. Then to get that placement you need to pay 'X' number of dollars. There are two ways of buying it: either impression based or per click. Impressions are based on the way they price billboards i.e. how many cars will drive by. So you pay say, for a thousand impressions. Ads on the Internet work in the same way. You can buy a thousand impressions, but if you have a thousand people see your ad and nobody clicks through - then how valuable is it?

So it essentially becomes a math problem. For example, I can buy a thousand clicks for a dollar and estimate that say 10% will click through (100). So for a thousand ads that you pay a dollar for, you are really paying ten cents per click, if 100 people check you out. Google ads are kind of like stocks: you're buying means or ideas of concepts and the value will go up or down. If you wanted to buy oil spill right now, it would be very expensive! (And that is just what BP has done!)

As an example, if you go through the word 'food', it would be very expensive. The next value for assessment would be how many people search for the word food. If you had a budget of $100 that would be used up pretty quickly. Google walks you through it all. They'll show you how many people will see the ad and what the likely click through rate is. That's a function of how good the copy is. Ad copy is the hardest copy to get right. You want six or ten words to grab people's imagination, explain to why they need to click now, and suspend all their skepticism about advertising. If you get it right, its valuable.

Look at billboards or things. Less is more, be concise and get to the point. Keep it really really simple, and then test it. The nice thing about these ads is you can test your thesis. Let's say that people are interested in food security for one of three reasons: the health of families, the environment, and because they're hungry. So then let's write a catchy slogan that will appeal to each one of those three reasons. We buy a couple of thousand ads and then run a test. It's called 'abc testing' and you see which ads get the better response. You find out actually people don't care about the environment, they actually care about their family. Maybe it's about the health of your children, or something to do with health.

Behavioral Analysis:
You can start to get a sense from behavioural analysis of what the core thing that's going to motivate people to act and click, so you can also use Google for amazing social research. They can show you aggregates of what people are looking for. You will see which ad people click on and then you will know this is the ad that got the magic. Then you will have the benefit when running your campaign. Or type in something generic. Maybe you want to cover arts in Vancouver. If that's a focus, then find out who owns that on Google. There's research to be done there.

So, my advice would be to invest a small amount of money and do it really intelligently with an objective. What is the message that has resonance with your audience? That' s money at the end of the day. If you can get insight early on, it's worth it. It can inform your whole messaging campaign. Identify the sweet spots in the dialogue and you can use it as a way of forming your whole communication strategy. Because if you went to an ad agency they 'd say 'let's test and copy', but you don't need an ad agency. You just need to sign up.

It's all about finding the audience you want. You don't just want people to click through. If they think they're getting something general, they just click and go. You want it to be super precise to weed out anybody that's just passing.

You can find out about your audience on a site called Compete dot com that has some good demographics. These numbers give you relative measure, it's like that old line that in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king, this is kind of like that. So, if you log in you can get a demographic breakdown of who your audience is.

Content vs: Audience
What you do need to understand is that it is as important or more important to get the audience, than to produce the content. It's the tree falling in the forest thing. Now public gets 5 or six million users per month. That generates a lot of interest, from everyone, including advertisers.
Our strategy is not dissimilar from a tabloid kind of mentality. Arianna Huffington is the master of this. If you go to Huffpo, you'll see that the homepage of your site is really less relevant than the traffic that comes from Google. Even the NY Times that everyone knows about gets half its traffic from Google.

That's the big question in the content business right now. If you look even at the sites that you think are destinations, the audience that just comes to them is diminishing in relation to the traffic that Google sends them. To ignore it is to be willfully blind of what people want. At the end of the day it's about human behavior and people are more interested in finding information through searching directly or through their social networks.

There's this story about a guy at the NY Times who reportedly had about 90,000 links in his history file and about a thousand that he clicked through to. So there was a proportion that he clicked on. The question that's important is what were the ones that he clicked on? Overwhelmingly they were the ones that were referred by his friends.

So, your social network is providing influence and distribution. Search and social networks are driving consumption on the web and it's less about having a destination. So you need to have something unique and valuable then you tell your friends. I get most of my news through Facebook updates. It's just the way it is.

Making Money on the Net:
In terms of making money on the Internet, if you don't have a ton of traffic, it's difficult to get a ton of revenue. You have to be pretty big to make money in that. So for non-profits, I wouldn't pin your hopes on advertising revenues unless you're going out and getting a bazillion people to your website. But, the Internet is definitely a good channel to find people who are interested in supporting you. If someone wants to influence that area of thinking, they can approach you.

So, the first thing is to own that discussion. If you own the discussion, people who are interested in supporting it will find you. You can always run campaigns and things too. Once you have establish a credible brand then you can promote the twenty things you've done in the last year and the positive impact you've had. If you're invisible on the Internet, people will say 'do they really know what they're doing?' It's a part of doing business now. And at the very least, a good way of establishing your credibility. And then you can build into your site an easy donation button so that you click and donate.

Curating:
Curating is like when you're in an art gallery and you assemble something around a theme. In the context of news it means you can wrap up a story and run it based on something you find 'out there'. Now Public only has a small newsroom, a handful of people. We have our citizen reporters but the reality is they don't get much traffic. So we have our newsroom focus on the big stories. We don't send somebody down to the gulf, we don't need to. In this instance, they've gone out on the Internet and there's a video about it. So we've embedded it into our page and have links to other stories. It's like building a collage. These are not stories that are breaking, they're maybe three paragraphs, a photograph and take ten minutes to do.

You have to be nimble when it comes to creating timely content, there's a shelf life . For example, if there was an angle to the BP oil spill there would be a few paragraphs you could write. So you can whip these stories things up, gain traction and attract an audience. I would recommend setting a target for yourself if you're going to take this seriously, like say, every week. Find something important and write up stuff about it. It's timely and when people come to your site afterwards they'll see these stories and they'll be relevant and important stories to them and all the sudden all these other things become relevant to them. So make it relevant to people's lives.

Other tips:

• If you want to find out what people are talking about on Twitter, there's a great site called Tweetmeme. These are the viral ideas people are tweeting about right now. Every one's playing this game and finding things that are trending.
• Read up on 'How to Write Good Headlines for Google'. This will provide you with tips on how to get noticed on searches.
• Get a face-book page, a twitter page, get a blog and get set-up to publish on all of these things.
• You can check out search traffic at a site called Alexa.
• Check out: 'Newser' with the tag line 'read less know more'. Newser has a very visual front page with photos/ links to short videos, stories etc. (newser.com)
• He also showed us a website called 'Gowalla.com'. It's kind of like a 'guest book' where you 'check-in' to locations and leave messages / comments / photos about where you are and can find out who else is there or who was there recently.
• I'm blown away by what Word Press can do. It's so easy. And Blogger has really improved. Wordpress has more flexibility and more muscle but Blogger is a bit more intuitive for someone just getting into it. But if you're going to be long term in your thinking Word Press is best, because you can host it yourself. Ten years ago these type of platforms would have cost you $50,000.
• To buy domain names, try 'Go Daddy'. They're cheap. You'll find very few names with dot com at the end anymore. I've found 'dot info' is the answer.