Spending the day in a network capacity building workshop that promises to be quite interesting. I'll be posting as the day progresses but thought you'd enjoy seeing a bit of the invitation. Having spent the better part of my career investigating and reporting on networks, it should be fun to see what comes of this. Most surprising so far was that of the list of invitees, I recognized precisely one name other than that of the people at Interaction Institute for Social Change (which I've mentioned before here), one of two organizational conveners of the day. Shows how far the field has grown since Jeff Stamps and I wrote Networking (Doubleday, 1982).
The Barr Foundation and the Interaction Institute for Social Change (IISC) are partnering to create a learning opportunity that will bring you together with other capacity builders to learn from one another about the approaches and tools that you have used and insights that you have gained in your network building practice. As consultants -- people whose job it is to stay ahead of a field, to help define it and to translate it for those heroic individuals who spend every day on the front lines making ours a better world -- we rarely have this kind of opportunity to pool our knowledge and improve our practice.
We hope this next convening will be the first step towards building a community of practice. The Barr Foundation is generously offering to support us in a process that will not only deepen our learning but will catalyze collaboration among us. We are planning to achieve this by coming together four times over the next year.
