They are by design boundary spanners.

Most people and organizations who are long term members of the system maintain “mature” networks and one thing that networks tend to do as they mature is to become more and more homogeneous – you link up with people (or organizations) of you type, people of similar social standing, interests, ethnicity, age, occupation etc. The project that comes from outside brings all the links to the outside world with it. But also within the local context their interactions are often less constrained by routine and social norms. This is why making introductions and facilitating (adding content to) links between unlikely partners is one way how development projects can become engines of innovation.

A project that links informal businesses to the formal banking sector does exactly that. Because normally the informal business people would stick to their informal financing sources (informal lenders, family, contracting), while the banks would stick to their formal big clients. What happens, if an outside actor brings its status and backup capacity to bear to convince banks that it might be ok (or even profitable) to do business with female informal rice par-boilers? The radical changes in the women’s networks can move them from being contract par-boilers to being independent business women. Independent? Well, the case below is from a strongly Muslim context, so the women still have to rely on their male family members for most contact to the outside world.

Network with intervention

These pictures show a combination of the networks we gathered from women who had not participated in the project (network 1) and those who did (network 2). The color of the nodes is according to gender (pink: female, blue: male, gray: composite actor, male and female). The size of the dots indicate the height of the influence tower. In picture 1 the interview partner is “contract par-boiler” in picture 2 the interview partner is “par-boiler group”.

This makes me think of the friend who told me, when my first excitement about Net-Map had settled and I was ready to do the next more exciting thing: “This might be the best idea you’ll ever have! Don’t waste it! Give it your 100%.”

And I think he was so right. I mean, no one knows if I’ll come up with the cure for AIDS or the perfect chocolate chip cookie tomorrow (both unlikely though). But I think our good ideas need a lot of respect. Treat them like kings. Treat your good idea as if it was the one shot you get. Focus. Be brave. Bragg. Work like a donkey. Feed your idea all the good stuff. Take it with you, where ever you go. Even to parties and on airplanes. Just smile (what do they know?) if your older male colleagues say: “Ah, there is the girl with the toys again.” Be your idea. At least for a while.And see if it catches on, if it works.

Because I’m convinced: You need so much more than the good idea itself for the idea to have an impact.

But then, if it does, if you see people writing their PhDs using your method, or evaluating their projects with it, or translating it in their own language… man, that’s about as great as seeing your flesh-and-blood baby make her first steps (which, by the way, little Sarah did today). Giving you this feeling that: YES! All these sleepless nights were absolutely worth it!

Every day I will make a list of three things I am grateful for. Counting my blessings. Grand and mundane. My beautiful baby and the crunchy fennel and anything in between.

Maybe I’ll start yoga or meditating or running next year. For this year, that’s about as much time as I’m ready to set aside for striving for enlightenment. A three point list. You’ll see if I start glowing like an old fashioned light bulb and walking a few centimeters above the ground by the end of the year.

Now since I joined the majority (read: since I had my baby), I have also joined an online parenting group for this neighborhood, MOTH (Moms on the Hill) and that made all the difference. Through the listserve I learn about lost teddy bears and dogs, free baby stuff on the porch, about burglaries and yard sales in my neighborhood and all of a sudden have 3000 mommy and daddy “friends” that I can ask for advice when my baby doesn’t sleep through the night and that I can invite for “home office blues lunch” if I’m missing the company of office mates. And since I am on this list, I do feel like I am at home in this neighborhood and I meet people I know (from the list) when baby and I go for walks.

I find it fascinating, how on the internet geographical origin explicitly does not matter but still it can help to develop something so extremely location specific as a neighborhood. Do you have similar experiences, where online and offline enrich each other?

Also, when I thought about it more, I realized that we might run into a number of “internal” methodological problems.

1. I don’t know of any SNA program or algorithm that deals with weighted links. So finally, if we wanted to analyze anything quantitatively, we’d have to decide on a cut-off point (define that only links of a certain weight and above will be included) – how would we decide on that and would it make sense?

2. And more importantly, the logic of a network flow can be completely turned around by leaving out one link. If you take a circular flow involving 6 actors. One of these flows is three steps removed from our interview partner so we decide that’s the cut-off point and remove that link. All of a sudden we don’t have a circle but a line with a beginning and end point. And Paul, who used to be an equal partner in the circle is an isolate all of a sudden… This is a simple example and easy to spot, but in complex networks there will be a lot of flows that don’t make sense any more if we remove one or two links just because they are too far away from the interview partner…

I’ve experienced again that the best way to find something or to find something out, is to ask someone who knows more about it than you do. Because a library (and even more so the internet) is a place where thousands and thousands of sources of information sit next to each other on shelves, not really indicating which ones are crucial. But if you walk up to the librarian, or ask the jellyfish expert (if that’s what you’re interested in) they’ll point you to the bible of jellyfishology and provide a structure to the overwhelming magnitude of jellyfish literature.

Now with the internet, this gets a new twist, because you can go out and ask everyone – or at least a sample of everyone, pre-selected by “who reads your blog”. So that’s like going to the library and while everyone is tiptoeing and wispering and bent over their books, you yell into the room: “DOES ANYONE KNOW WHICH ONE IS THE BEST BOOK ABOUT JELLYFISH?” Good thing though, they won’t kick you out of the internet for doing this (while they would most likely ask you kindly to leave the library).

What does that mean? You don’t know yet, who the experts are, they self select by reading your question and choosing to answer, you might not necessarily reach the “official” experts on something who have a title and reputation attached to their name and you might get some weirdo answers of people with a strange cause or plain old spammers. But, chances are, you get your answer. So, as to my question, who talked on TED about the fact that our profession is change, the answer is: Seth Godin

And I was wowed again when I listened to it the second time. Thanks for explaining to me what I do. And thanks Gauri for hearing me yell in the library…

My professional community on the other hand consists of people who do not bake bread or repair cars but… What? “Confuse people for money?” “Kick ass with a smile?” Sometimes, when I don’t want to explain, I say I’m a social scientist. They still don’t know what it is I’m doing but it intimidates or bores them enough, that they won’t ask any more questions.

If I really want them to understand what I’m doing, I share concrete stories about projects that I have done: I help a research institute understand how their research can have a greater impact on Nigerian politics. I hope to work on a project that tries to use personal networks to reduce obesity among Latinos. In a number of African countries we looked at the communication around avian flu outbreaks, how does the information about suspicious chicken deaths reach the authorities and how do they react?

These are things that people understand. And after thinking about these concrete cases they wonder what they have in common, why one person would be qualified to work in such different fields. Well, it’s all about how people work together (or against each other) – while there are chicken experts and nutrition experts out there, I’m in the team as the people expert.

That reminded me of a TED talk that I would love to listen to again, but can’t find… Do you recall which one it was that explored that our shared profession was “working on change”?