Collaboration
The Secret of Networking is to Give Way More
Published October 20, 2009 @ 01:14PM PT
The old model of networking is all about assertiveness and hustle. Push to get the meeting; push to deliver your pitch. Push, push, push. The new model of networking is all about listening and giving. Less about the business card, less about what you need, and a whole lot more about what you can provide.
Why do we network? We network to find support, whatever our enterprise may be. Sometimes that support is financial, sometimes it's an implementation partner, sometimes it's something entirely different. The perception is, for many, that it's about finding ways to get what you need.
But that's actually dead wrong. Networking is not - at least usually - about finding the specific things you need. Far more, it is about building layers of support that can be leveraged later on. It's much less like a transaction - where you contribute to get something back immediately - and far more like interacting with a community, in which you expect a return for your inputs, but when and how that return comes is not determined at the time.
When people network from the "I need this now" position, it makes them far less likely to actually get what they need. And even if it works for a while, it quickly builds a "taker" reputation that can be extremely hard to shed.
On the other hand, when people network by learning what others do, what they care about, and what they need, and then do their best to provide the connections and other assets that can help their new contacts achieve their goals, it builds layers and layers of good will and personal brand value. These perceptions are extremely convertible to real resources, introductions, and connections later on.
So give more. A whole lot more. That's what tools like LinkedIn are really about - giving you the tools to put more in. Sure, you'll get more out eventually, too, but you may just find in the process giving feels pretty good.
Photo: Mr. Kris
President Obama to Speak at Social Business Themed Clinton Global Initiative
Published September 16, 2009 @ 03:33PM PT
While the Clinton Global Initiative has historically focused solely on key philanthropic categories like climate change and public health, this year the economic crisis has prompted a broader focus on understanding the relationship between innovation, business, and social change. And to kick it all off, President Barack Obama will address the opening session next Tuesday, September 22.
I was extremely excited to read a few months ago that CGI would be taking a step away from it's specific program categories and instead focusing on a program that was more about the collaboration between leaders from across sectors. I think it's a hallmark of social entrepreneurship to look for those sort of connections, and to see "scale" as the thing that happens when you connect a transformative action model with the institutions, individuals and communities who can help it grow.
CGI has absolutely lived up to it's brand when it comes to assembling an incredible group of people. I'm not one usually impressed by the nametags at an event, but President Obama is one of 60 current and former heads of state who will be in attendance, including leaders of countries like Turkey and Rwanda that are building their own ecosystems for innovation. What's more, major business leaders like the heads of Coke and Wal-mart will be there.
From the social entrepreneurship world, there are a number of notably attendees, including Kiva president Premal Shah, Ashoka founder Bill Drayton, Green Belt Moment founder and Nobel laureate Waangari Maathai, and microfinance innovator and Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus.
And of course, it wouldn't be complete without celebrities like Matt Damon, Alicia Keys, and Ashton Kutcher. I'm actually not as cynical as some about their participation. If the conversations are serious, they can act as powerful distribution and engagement channels. If Kutcher tweets during the event, that's almost 4 million people who get the message. That's about as powerful as any media CGI could buy.
While I can't be at the event next week, I'll be keeping track of it via remote. Read the full Press Release about President Obama's participation after the jump.
(Photo: sofauxboho)
African Collaboration Goes Global
Published August 24, 2009 @ 09:57AM PT
Collaboration is a complicated thing. We increasingly recognize that the complexity of global problems suggests that no one individual or even organization is likely to have the expertise and experience necessary to provide the solution. Even more exciting, we're starting to see that the internet might provide the architecture for global collaboration that has in the past held us back. Enter Africa Rural Connect.
Africa Rural Connect began as an answer to how to better channel the ideas, expertise and experiences of more than 200,000 current and former Peace Corps volunteers, and connect all of that to the dense network of diaspora actors, scholars, and local citizens working for change.
The recently launched site allows anyone to submit ideas which can then be endorsed or improved by the community. The goal is not necessarily for people to post ideas which have been fully figured out, but to put something into a public space where other people who have the assets one might need to successfully complete their projects.
To provide some momentum, each month there is a cash prize for the community's favorite projects. Right now the project in the lead is "Zittnet - harnessing information to make rural markets work better," a project to combine electronic information about farm prices with data centers easily accessible to rural farmers.
The history of development has shown us that long-term solutions have to include a diverse array of actors, and successfully harness the talents, capacities and resources of everyone involved - from local participants to international institutions. Africa Rural Connect is one of the most creative platforms I've yet seen to do that, and I highly recommend everyone go check it out.
(Photocredit: http://www.odcap.com/)
Creating Ecosystems for Collaboration Around Social Innovation
Published June 12, 2009 @ 09:56AM PT
(One of my students and his partner in a collaboratively-designed after school sports program in Kampala, Uganda, 2007)
Andrew Wolk has a short but important post up about his recent attendence at the Future Trends Forum in Madrid, Spain. In it he shares one of his major take-aways about a new take on collaboration:
I left Madrid with two takeaways I thought were worth sharing. The first was a general agreement that we have been too focused on scale by replication, and have not thought enough about scaling ideas. While this is not new for this blog, I heard a new angle on what should be an increased emphasis on collaboration. As one attendee put it, we do not need another water filtration system to solve the world’s clean water access problem; rather, we need to bring everyone working on the issue of clean water together to collaborate and work on a distribution system of the best solutions.
I'm a member of an extremely collaborative generation. Our use of social tools, our experience in group based learning and other factors have predisposed us to working together where possible.
For example, I'm the member of the Consortium for Student Global Service, a group of student-founded global service organizations that convened to support the work of peer groups, and which has recently collaborated with Change.org on the new Global Service blog. What is interesting to me about it is that I know for a fact that these organizations have to, by definition, compete for resources. There simply aren't enough institutional founders for all of us to get our big pay day. The tone and tenor of the group though is all about the idea that each of the different groups have something slightly different and complementary to offer one another, and that rather than competing for the scraps off the donor table, we should be thinking about ways to better leverage our networks and get creative about social enterprise strategies to generate the resources we need to thrive.
Moreover, my work with the Northwestern University Global Engagement Summit and my new startup Assetmap has all been focused, to greater or lesser degrees, on enabling great people and ideas to find one another in order to create something magical. What I've learned in that time though has subtely but fundamentally shifted my approach to collaboration.
The big difference is where I once talked about facilitating collaboration, I now focus on creating ecosystems in which collaboration can thrive if it wants to. The difference seems small but the approach, at least for me has been profound. The biggest difference is that the "ecosystem" approach recognizes the central role of convening around self-interest, and puts the onus on the nature of collaboration on the people who come together. In other words, this approach disintermediates the community organizer, an inherently temporary force with imperfect information, from the community that will be charged with implementing any partnerships and reaping the consequences, good or bad.
Community development folks out there - particularly those coming from backgrounds like asset based community development or appreciative inquiry - will probably be thinking "duh" at this point. The role of the organizer is always about revealing the assets that exist and allowing people to take charge of how those resources are put together.
But this shift is easy to loose site of. In the heat of agreement about the vital importance of collaboration, it's easy - at least in the communities that I've been in - to remember how fundamentally messy and democratic the collaborative process actually is. It mandates, I think, more and more attention to the vital intersection between online and offline.
Who is most effective at facilitating collaboration out there currently? What lessons can we learn from them?
Introducing the Social Entrepreneurship API
Published May 15, 2009 @ 08:09AM PT
Pop!Tech 2008 Social Innovation Fellows in Camen, Maine (via Pop!Tech)
The field of social entrepreneurship is on the move. Groups like Ashoka, Skoll Foundation, and Echoing Green have created funding programs to identify and amplify top performing organizations; leading intellectual hubs like Pop!Tech and TED have formed social innovation fellowships to bring their creative prowess to bear on social change; online contest and fundraising platforms like Ideablob, Kiva, and GlobalGiving are making it easier for social entrepreneurs to mobilize their communities to support their organizations.
But who are these social entrepreneurs? Where do they exist? What do they do? Until now, there's been no real cross-organization attempt to answer that question, but with the launch of the Social Entrepreneurship API, any funder, fellowship convener, or simply interested citizen can browse a database to discover the answers to those questions.
Convened by Social Actions and supported by the Peery Foundation, the first ever Social Entrepreneurship API is a live feed of information about the fellowship winners from organizations including Pop!Tech, the Skoll Foundation, Ideablob and Civic Ventures. As an API (Application Programming Interface), the database is designed to be available for programmers to build applications on top of to make the data more useful.
A number of bloggers including Sean Stannard-Stockton and Lucy Bernholz have quickly seen and been excited by the potential. Lucy pointed out that it could make groups easier for funders to find, and that because the information exists online, it was all of our responsibilities to figure out how best to use it. Sean wrote about the potential for something like for all philanthropic grantees.
For my part, I'm thrilled to see how the project evolves. Over the next few weeks, I'll have a few follow ups including "Five Questions" with project coordinator Peter Deitz next week.
Full release below the fold:
