Net-Map Toolbox

“The world won’t stop turning, just ’cause I stop pushing”

A thought that a lot of us facilitators, world-changers, development activists, drivers of change, researchers for development need to sometimes remember, sit down, hold our faces into the sun, breathe out and have a big piece of cake. And a nice weekend.

That’s just a limited choice of the very different issues that my training participants on Wednesday were concerned with. So they drew maps about real and potential cases in developed and developing countries, from the international to the local level. As always, alas, time went too quickly and I wasn’t able to take everything in, that happened. Especially with the online-participants, who sat in their own offices all over the world, following my directions in drawing their maps… at least that’s what it sounded like. I hope that some of them will still be able to send me pictures and a discussion of what they drew and how it worked.

I have recorded the workshop and promised to upload the whole thing, slides and web-cam and voice. But it needs to be cut and straightened first and as these things always take time, I’ll make the slides (876K) available right now, for those of you who don’t want to wait.

And, given the interest was much bigger than the places available, I’ll look into organizing the next training as soon as possible.

The Knowledge Management for Development (KM4Dev) community has a great Wiki which has an interesting introduction on Social Network Analysis within the field of knowledge management, which is worth checking out, if you want to learn more of the background of the approach.

Sounds great. But how do you do it? How can we as researchers for development do projects that have an impact on governance in the countries we work in? Or, is there a problem in this question already, as it sounds like: First we do research, then we go and have an impact.

Should the question rather be: How can we integrate our research projects into local needs and structures in such a way, that research questions are relevant, methods appropriate, results understandable and inviting our partners to act on them…

WITHOUT (!)

doing embedded research (like embedded journalism) that just finds out what the powerful wish to hear and serves particular local vested interests?

I have promised to write about this question and am planning to interview governance actors in Ghana about their experiences with research - and talk with researchers about their experiences with trying to have an impact.

As I am developing an appropriate tool I am toying with the idea of asking people about their best and worst experiences, following an approach developed by a group around the German organizational psychologist Siegfried Greif who analyzed the success and failure of organizational restructuring in the corporate world.

And I’m drawing a Net-Map reflecting on my own experiences in Ghana. What I end up doing is to fill the whole surrounding space around the map with my written comments about the links that are positive drivers and those that are obstacles for integration, note down the many remaining questions and more general observations about this slowly evolving fruitful collaboration. With this added qualitative commentary the map looks so much more informative and self-explanatory than a map that just consists of actors and links.

“Wow, we learned more about chicken than we ever asked for…” my colleague David Spielman joked after a week of Net-Mapping poultry and maize innovation systems in Ethiopia. You can listen to the (more serious) rest of the discussion by clicking on the media player below (or here) . The project is still in progress, so the case study is not completed yet - but I will up-date you as we go.

I use Visualyzer for visualizing and analyzing my Net-Maps and I love it. But while there is a free trial version, in the end it is a software that you have to purchase. As I want to further spread SNA literacy in developing countries, I am looking for free software that is at least as user friendly as Visualyzer, which means having a rather intuitive and visual user interface. Any recommendations?

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 from as diverse countries as Zimbabwe, Nepal, UK and Bangladesh. But what really thrills me are the answers to my questions: “What is your background, have you used social network analysis and/or participatory approaches before, how do you think you will use Net-Map in your work?”

I get the feeling that we will have a group of students, scholars and practitioners with a diverse range of practical and academic experiences and I believe that I will learn about as much from my participants as they will from me. And, as some of those interested in the training live in really incompatible time zones (Who wants to be in the office 3 a.m. to attend a seminar?), have unreliable internet access or busy schedules, we are planning to record the workshop and burn it on CD for those who could not attend.

Why the prospect of meeting these diverse participants online and off-line excites me? Because, of three hypothesis about innovativeness of networks and the points where innovation happens in the network:

The strength of weak ties (A classic, here (429 K) a paper where Granovetter revisits his own argument): You get your new ideas/contacts/perspectives from those people you don’t interact with every day (your closest friends and colleagues will have a very similar knowledge and contacts as you have, as you have spent so much time exchanging information already).

Innovativeness of heterogeneous networks: Most networks have a tendency to mature towards a state of homogeneousness. That’s great for stability but a killer for innovation, because no-one is there to challenge your beliefs or cross unusual thoughts to breed new ideas.

Innovativeness through networks with open fringes, that are dynamic over time: A network that can accommodate and release members in a flexible way over time, will be able to learn from the freshness of their experience and maintain a regular influx of new ideas and new connections.

By the way, a great post on the art of having innovative ideas: “Ceci n’est pas un pipe” by Mark Gould

I love blogs of people who graze the web for us and find the most amazing links. Reading around in Simon O’Rafferty’s research blog, I stumbled over “transformative innovations” and ended up here , at a place where architectural design and the lives of the poorest and homeless meet.

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 each other directions, you first grow slightly irritated and finally think something must be seriously wrong with your colleagues - or maybe they are just plain stupid? And: Will you ever get to the square together?

This would be a strange way to do project planning? It would, wouldn’t it.

However, when it comes to the social landscapes of our projects, this (often) seems to be exactly what we are doing, we start planning our concrete strategic interventions without even trying to find out whether we are navigating with the same map. After mapping water governance in Ghana, one of my interview partners insisted: “This is how it is! Everybody will see it this way!” Just to be shocked a few weeks later, when we had a group mapping workshop, where we displayed the very diverse maps that these team members had drawn and asked them to map together.

Regina Birner (IFPRI) has been one of the first people to really push me to go forward with Net-Map. And right from the beginning she has been bugging me: But how to I look at processes with this, not just snap-shots in time? One option is a time series of Net-Maps as discussed earlier. But now there is something else cooking.

I caught her freshly returned from India and she is excited: “We did Process Mapping there and it was amazing!” What I love about it is that Net-Map turned into Process Mapping because this was needed to understand really pressing questions and not just because it is fun to play around with methods.

So, while Regina has promised to write more extensively about it, here the basic steps of what she did to understand the program implementation of a rural employment guarantee scheme in India:

She asked the interview partners, to tell her the story, while she wrote down actors and drew the network links between them accordingly. Each new actor was written on actor cards as he or she came up in the story and as the actors were linked, the interviewer would indicate next to the link, what the flow was and when (e.g. the date when someone told someone else about an idea, gave an order to them or received funding to do something). All this ended with the question of how influential the actors were in the process and putting them on influence towers.

Regina said that doing this was really helpful to understand the details of the administrative process, discuss sticking points, bottlenecks and alternatives and be sure to avoid misunderstandings and generalized statements that mean nothing. So instead of saying “the community requests this from the administration” you find out who exactly went to whom to ask for what. From my own experience I know it is easy to sit in an administrators office and be flooded with “development speak” that sounds great and tells you nothing about what actually happens. So there it pays that drawing it is kind of pedantic and to the point.

The other thing that is great about following the process with your mapping is that you are not pressing your structure on the interviewee but follow the natural flow of how someone would tell you a story.

How they - by mistake - gathered data about “Who takes how much bribe in the process?” is a different story that Regina will tell us in another post next week.