Difference between revisions of "Important Discussion for all Members on Leadership"

Revision as of 14:52, 5 March 2014

Original Message

From: Carl Jackson, posted on 2014/02/16

Hello KM4Dev,

We are now moving to the third topic of the focused conversations related to shaping the future of KM4Dev.

Community leadership in KM4Dev happens thanks to a self-managing and participatory collective of volunteers known as the Core Group. The purpose of the KM4Dev Core Group is that members contribute their time and energy towards supporting the needs of KM4Dev members and developing the community (for more info see core group TORs).

A challenge for our community is to ensure that community members feel encouraged to volunteer as Core Group members, are enabled to play a useful and gratifying part in collective leadership, and can leave in a transparent and healthy manner for the best of the community and of themselves. In other words, a crucial challenge for KM4Dev is Core Group succession management.

Community members Jasmin Suministrado and Benedict Rimando have led one of the IFAD-funded KM4Dev Futures studies looking at this challenge and have identified that the processes and systems for succession management are quite random and not well institutionalized. Indeed the ideal picture is far from the current reality.

We would like to ask the community to read Jasmin and Benedict’s study on Ideas for improving Core Group succession management in KM4Dev which has very interesting components:

• Why this matters (in this community of practice as in any other)
• The ideal picture and the reality of succession management - from the perspectives of a) a community member and b) a Core Group member.
• Some suggestions (as mind maps) for each of the steps in succession management: Awareness building, matching needs & opportunities, recruitment and application, initiation, integration and performance, withdrawal and renewal.

Based on your reading of the study, we would love you to reflect on your own experiences in KM4Dev and in other communities, and build up this conversation by sharing your ideas for improving succession in the KM4Dev core group. Possible topics include:

• What is your experience of leadership succession in informal groups and community organisations (including KM4Dev) as a volunteer leader or regular member?
• Where do you think are the most immediate succession needs? At what phase described in Jasmin/Benedict’s piece of work, or otherwise?
• What early wins and long term approaches to Core Group suggestion management can get us to a healthier and more transparent, more effective Core Group and community as a whole?

Thank you to Jasmin and Benedict for this important piece of work. Lets hear from you now.

Warm wishes,

Carl Jackson & Ewen Le Borgne

Contributors

All replies in full are available in the discussion page. Contributions received with thanks from:

Anna Maria Ponce
Bendict Rimando
Carl Jackson
Dan Boom
Ewen Le Borgne
Jaap Pels
Jasmin Suministrado
John Emeka Akude
Liz Clarke
Lucie Lamoureux
Martina Hetzel
Nancy White
Pete Cranston
Philipp Grunewald
Riff Fullan
Sarah Cummings
Valerie Brown

Related Discussions

Summary

Detailed Description

The discussion on Succession Management of the KM4Dev Core Group included points about:

• Important to have some balance in terms of geographic representation, gender balance, types of organisations present + ideally link with the KM4D Journal
• Somewhat un-transparent (difficult to access) information about the Core Group and how members join and leave, though that information is available (to some extent?) and some peopleknow where to find it
• Different options have been proposed for that succession management
• Virtual elections along the lines of Ana maria's experience / during face-to-face events. But begs the question of processing these elections based on limited volunteering time.
• Perhaps good to make it either compulsory or strongly recommended for a departing core group member to identify a potential new C.G. member and to rope them in for a given period
• More business(-oriented) people, possibly from Asia, would be a priority?
• How to balance structure and openness in an ideal Core Group look like, vis-a-vis its current composition
• Preserving the collective, open-ended and synergistic organisational mode typical of KM4Dev

Examples in Application

One or a few practical examples and references that illustrate the topic or show how it is done in practice

Recommended Resources

Links to publications, websites, contacts and general resources shared in the e-discussion

• KM4Dev Futures: Ideas for improving Core Group succession management