Discussion Report 14 Elsa Scholte - making sense of Sister/Brother communities and networks

Participants:

Maarten Boers Maggie Carl Jackson Sara Cummings Caroo Nancy Karel Mark Hurst

Objective:

creating more insight into the several online communities that we are directly or indirectly linked with.

Introduction:

one of the exercises on Wednesday was to make an inventory of all networks the participants were engaged in. It seemed to us that this information was valuable and deserved to be explored deeper and broader.

Solution

We started with the end in mind. The end in this case is an interactive collaborative open tool that visualises the relationships between the various networks. We took some time to explore various tools that are available to do this. We found that Aduna may offer what we are looking for, but Mark will explore other options.

Benefits

For many reasons, there is a clear value in mapping out networks. For one, it may help KM4dev to form consortia. It may also help us as members to find our way through the different available networks, find critical mass. For the networks in turn it may help them to brand and position themselves.

Actions:

In the end, communities would need to tag their own sites. We can send an e-mail to all networks in the system to tell them that we built this system and ask them to tag it. But we decided to create at least a kind of basis database with more information about the communities: information that would be valuable to know is: Name: url/E-mailadress: Languages: Region: Country: Size: Themes: Gender Health Orientation: communication, capacity development, KM4dev, Kind of stakeholder: policy network, government, multi-stakeholders, private sector, civil society.