I’ve been mapping networks for some years now but in the past months I have used a more traditional approach to social network analysis for the first time. In a project with the United Nations University, we (Nancy White and I) are tasked to find out how their networks are structured and to initiate a debate around improving networks for increasing impact in Africa.

As the UNU is spread around the globe, we chose not to visually map the networks, but send out network questionnaires, basically asking questions like:

• Who of the people on this list have you ever interacted with?
• Who of these people do you currently collaborate with?
• Who would you like to work with but have not approached yet? etc.

The questionnaire was administered by the people at Cross Analytics (at 4 US$ per participant they did a pretty good job in terms of support etc.) and all I had to do was wait for the results to be delivered to me in the square matrix format I need to enter it into Visualyzer.

I was absolutely excited when I got the data because it did look like magic – out of the blue these interesting networks emerged and I could play around with them, exploring the structure, observing how they evolved over time and guessing what it all meant.

And that is the biggest difference between participatory network mapping and a survey approach: With the survey you get the network structure but little of the background, the how and why. Sure, you can add non-network questions to the survey to elaborate the background. But often I only see the questions emerging while I draw the network, which means that after analyzing the survey results, I have more questions than answers… Confused but on a higher level… In this case that doesn’t hurt: The survey is planned as a first step in a longer process and an entry point for discussion, so I will get to ask all my questions.

But how do researchers do it who only rely on one course of surveys? How do they find out what the network structures mean? Why doesn’t this drive them crazy?

The Society for International Development in Washington DC will host another knowledge management event next week and they are giving me the chance to talk about Net-Map there. If you are interested, it’s a public brown bag seminar and it’s on the 10th of November, from 12:30 p.m. to 2:00 p.m.. You can register here.

“I don’t have much by way of possessions, a lady riding the bus to Montgomery once told me. But, she said, I do have a lot of belongings. I belong to my family, my people, my church. And they belong to me. With all the mouths I feed, she continued, looking out the window, I won’t lie to you – I could use one of them big houses. But don’t never, ever let anybody tell you that you’re poor. In the eyes of the world, maybe, she said. You just keep looking through your own eyes.”

from: Traveling Light – On the Road with America’s Poor, by Kath Weston, 2008.

Today I met with Natalie Campbell, who works for Management Sciences for Health and was really interested in how to best map out the relationships between their communications group and the rest of the organization. If we start with the picture of a traditional communications group, which mainly serves as a hub in a hub-and-spoke network, we get this rather straightforward (did I hear anyone say boring?) map.

It shows how it is supposed to be, the formal and expected lines, the communication group gives information to every other department. But even in a situation like this, there is much more to this story than just a factory assembly line. So how can we tell a more interesting story about this knowledge distribution unit?

How about this:

Look at how well the communication goes and use normal lines for so-so, thick lines for excellent and dotted lines for really bad.

The next thing you might realize is this:

You communicate about different things with different people. In this case the red lines are communication about events and the black lines are communication about tools. As you can see, with some departments you communicate about both, sometimes you might have, for example, very strong communication about tools and very meager communication about events or the other way round.

But what does it mean, when you say THE DEPARTMENT communicates? Right, it means that Peter, Paul and Mary, your staff members, communicate, and each of them might be involved in their own specific way.

And by looking at their different roles and how they interact with each other and the rest of the organization, you might learn a lot about the specific strengths and weaknesses you are facing.

As you can see, the department is here represented by a circle with the staff members as individual actor cards and links are drawn

• within the department between communication staff
• between individual communication staff and other departments and
• between the communication department as a whole and other departments.

But maybe it’s not enough to just see how strongly different actors communicate. You want to know more about how and why:

So you add explanations to the links, so that just when you look at the picture you can see what the major story lines are: Is the communication between two departments weak because of a fight or because they don’t need to communicate much to fulfill their roles? Is there intense communication with another department because of a personal friendship, because of a specific event they plan together etc.?

And finally, after getting a more detailed map of the status quo, let’s talk about your vision:

Do you want to continue with this hub and spoke model of a network? Or would you prefer the departments to communicate more with each other? Are their other issues (colors of lines) that you want to communicate about? Are there some weak links that you would like to strengthen? Who within your department or from the other departments could help you there? What is a good strategy to get from the situation as is to this vision of a denser, less centralized network?

Isn’t it strange, how the internet changes our offline life? I’ve moved into my neighborhood (Capitol Hill in Washington DC – also called “parentville”, because the baby-less are a small minority) a year and a half ago. And while I enjoyed the fact that people great you on the street right away, I didn’t feel like I was part of a neighborhood, I just lived in a house that was located in this area of town.

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?

In an email exchange Roberta Amaral, who is preparing a Portuguese version of the Net-Map manual, asked: “How do you discuss a messy map at the end of an interview?”

What you need to do to work the network magic is to take all this abundance of detail and simplify it by adding focus and teasing out the structure and negotiating meaning. You have been there during the interview so your are not just working with the spaghetti (the messy drawn network) but you can use the discussion that led to this drawing to guide you towards an understanding of the most important points. Practice makes perfect, so the more often you do this, the better you can read the structure and find the crucial issues in the qualitative discussion.

But what do you look out for?

Look for everything that doesn’t make sense. For example the well connected actor with no influence. It sure will make sense once you asked your why questions. But the sense might be completely different from what you expected. Follow your gut feeling: If you don’t understand it, it means at least that you need more explanation to get it. But very often there is more to these confusing points than just a matter of content that needs to be clarified.

Look for the extremes: High density and gaps in the network, most and least influential actors, ask more questions about them, what does it mean for the achievement of your goals that there is a gap, that these actors have no power at all, that there is so much interaction etc. There is no ideal network density that fits for all situations so the question is always: Does it work here? Who benefits?

Ask for trouble: Ask your interview partners to help you focus by asking questions like: Where are the most important stumbling blocks in this network? Where is an entry point for corruption? Where is it most likely that the communication chain will break down? Which actors have a conflict of interest?

My tango friends sent me an email that started with the following thought by J. Tarrant:

“Change itself is sudden; like harvest. It is preparing the ground that takes time.”
It’s oh so true and not just for tango…

Last Sunday I learnt this in a quite direct “slap in your face” kind of way. After returning from a nice outing to Baltimore with my family, we found that someone had entered the house through a (previously) blocked dog-flap, had had a good look around and left with an arm full of stuff (the amount of stuff he – she?? – took and left indicates one individual), including my laptop computer. No, I’m not good at making regular backups. But, just by the nature of my work (and my personality) I tend to collaborate, share, put stuff online before it’s a 150% polished product. And, guess what, you can’t steal the internet. At least our little neighborhood hoodlum can’t.

So everything I shared, I still have. Whatever I kept to myself, the thief got. I decided to see it philosophically – for what else can I do, after the fact.

Why do policy makers push for certain decisions? Together with a group of IFPRI researchers I work at better understanding how agricultural policy making processes in Malawi (and other African countries work) and how research results can play a bigger role in it. This question, how to bridge the gap between research and the rest of the world, has been bothering me for a while now. So instead of jumping into action, I actually sat down and brainstormed (in my own brain… what a storm) about the question what makes policy makers tick, what gets them to prefer a certain direction over another, what makes them push really hard for their solution. My very preliminary first list is this:

Why do actors push for specific directions?

* because of political negotiations, compromise
* because of voter pressure, public opinion
* because of media
* because of trusted advisor
* because of external shock: drought, market crash etc.
*because they can, because they personally benefit (abusive power)
* because of cultural norms
* because of past experience
* because of research findings
* because of general paradigm shift, “development fashion”
* because of donor priorities and funding.

(The order of the list signifies nothing) Any more ideas?

I’m still searching for a board game producer who can mass produce Net-Map boxes at the price and quality that makes sense. Today I found bluepanther, who look interesting and from their website I landed in a different universe that was unknown to me before: The world of Piecepack.

“Flexible. Portable. Affordable. Public domain. The piecepack is a set of boardgame parts that can be used to design and play a wide variety of games. Anyone may design and publish a piecepack rule set. Any manufacturer or individual may produce piecepacks.”

The piecepack website has an ever growing list of games that you can play with the boardgame  parts. The sets of rules are developed and uploaded by passionate players. In ChoosySushi you are an overworked waiter in a sushi restaurant, in Interstellar Contest you are an alien who wants to build colonies in other aliens’ star systems, while Senat is the adaptation of an antique Egyptian forerunner of backgammon… By now there are 138 games you can play with this basic set of pieces, dices, pawns etc.

I’m fascinated by the idea and by the way the community of practice (or community of passion?) around it works. I would love to develop a similar approach with my colleagues who use Net-Map and adopt and adapt the rules in the field according to their needs, make it a process map, bundle or differentiate actors, invent new symbols for bottlenecks and future links, combine it with timelines, try out different ways of combining the knowledge of more than one interviewee etc.