How do you map networks of people
A request to the blogosphere…
I am organizing a large conference and part of the work we are doing as we sense into the need and purpose of the gathering is to understand the people who will be coming. The conference is a gathering for a large national movement, and although we know many of the people who will be there, the purpose of the gathering may be different this year, necessitating different participants.
We have a core team designing the gathering and we’d like to use an effective, relatively quick low tech method to map out and overview of the network of people who would be best to include in the invitation and the conference design.
Any thoughts on an exercise for 15 people to accomplish that?
Thank you in advance, blogosphere.
Ask Valdis Krebs
Well now I have truly hunted you down, on 2 fronts. On the tools side, we use Freemind, free mindmap software.
Cool guys…thanks!
I’m sure you’ll have better ideas than this, but what immediately popped into my mind was to get those 15 people to compare their social networking contact lists. This could be as easy as getting them to print off their email address book (or Twitter list, or blog roll) and hanging them all on a wall, then having each person look at each others’ and put a mark beside the ones they have in common.
Assuming the original 15 are diverse enough to represent a cross-section of the potential attendees, then people who are common across multiple social networks I would expect to be the ones you’d want. Just an idea.
Would you be willing to share here what method you eventually choose? Thx!
Chris, Contact Andrew Rixon http://www.babelfishgroup.com to find out about Social Networking Analysis (that he does in action) – or come to the Improv conference and talk with my friend Andrea Barrett (now based in San Antonio, Texas) who is a psycho/socio-drama expert who also uses action methods to ‘map’ the people in a group (and we’re running a workshop on exactly that 🙂 Or I can provide more info if you like.
Cheers
Viv
Hi Chris,
You might be interested in one of the Practitioner Series articles I co-authored with my colleague Ann Svendsen at the Centre for Sustainable Community Development, Simon Fraser University entitled, “Mapping Stakeholder Networks” – see http://www.sfu.ca/cscd/cli/resources.htm, and also, “How to Build Stakeholder Networks”.
All the best,
Myriam
Very cool everyone…thanks for the ideas
Hello Chris,
From what I understood, because your group knows enough about the movement, one suggestion will be to – by looking at the purpose – come up collectively with the roles/stakeholders that are essential in the room. The framework used by Future Search can be an option to help the group to identify that.
Perhaps the “mind map / shared contacts” already mentioned can be clustered and compared to the roles you’d imagined.
Hope that helps,
Augusto
Hi Chris,
Contact Eva Schiffer in Washington DC (Eva-Schiffer@web.de), she has developed during her time in Ghana a toolbox called NetMap (http://netmap.wordpress.com/about/), where you can create a social network analysis in a participatory way.
-marc