Value Networks Cluster  Worldwide Value Networks Uplift Academy Workshop Creating Better World Networks April 27/28, 2006 8:00am - 5:00pm Click Here preferred Secure On-line Registration Secure Online Registration in Advance is Required Sponsors

Value Networks Cluster  Worldwide Value Networks Uplift Academy Workshop Paris   United Nations Environment Programme Offices 39-43 quai André Citroën 75739 Paris Cedex 15 Tel: +33 1 44 37 14 27 Fax: +33 1 44 37 14 74 E-mail: unep.tie@unep.fr Web: http://www.unep.fr/energy Visitor Information Map Hotels

Spring 2006  

Uplift Academy Workshop
Creating Better World Networks

Secure On-line Registration Online Registration in Advance is Required

April 27, 2006 8:00am - 5:00pm

preferred

Time	Interaction	Speaker
9:00 - 10:30	Introduction to the Uplift Academy  Creating Better World Networks	Tom Munnecke
10:30 - 11:00	Participant Introductions Morning Break	All
11:00 - 12:30	Despite Good Intentions: Why Development Assistance to the Third World Has Failed	Thomas Dichter
12:30 - 2:00	Hosted Luncheon	All
2:00-3:30	Next Practices™   Lessons Learned from Self Help Groups	Marcia Odell
3:30 - 4:00	Afternoon Refreshments	All
4:00 - 5:30	Social Networks & Analysis Network Weaving: Building Smart Communities and Companies (paper)	Valdis Krebs
6:00	Reception

Uplift Academy Workshop
Creating Better World Networks

Secure On-line Registration Online Registration in Advance is Required

April 28, 2006 8:00am - 5:00pm

preferred

Time	Interaction	Speaker
9:00 - 10:30	Self Organizing Self Help Groups  Towards a Networked Model	Tom Munnecke
10:30 - 11:00	Participant Introductions Morning Break	All
11:00 - 12:30	Helping People Help Themselves: From the World Bank to an Alternative Philosophy of Development Assistance	David Ellerman
12:30 - 2:00	Hosted Luncheon	All
2:00-3:30	Breakout Sessions	All
3:30 - 4:00	Afternoon Refreshments	All
4:00 - 5:30	Next Practices™  Panel Conversation: The Future of Uplift	Thomas Dichter David Ellerman Tom Munnecke Marcia Odell
5:30	Adjournment

 

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Abstract

Thomas Dichter, author of Despite Good Intentions: Why Development Assistance to the Third World Has Failed will present some lessons learned about "When Less is More" from his 30 years in the development field.

Valdis Krebs, president of Orgnet will be presenting a model of Network Weavers in contrast to traditional models of intermediaries.

David Ellerman is author of Helping People Help Themselves, From the World Bank to an Alternative Philosophy of Development Assistance (Evolving Values for a Capitalist World) , advisor and speechwriter to Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz at the World Bank,

Learn about ways of using internet radio and Podcasting to reach widely dispersed with audio, ways of supporting a diversity of local languages, and support group-forming networks of uplift on a global basis.  The workshop will feature the world premier of the episodes of Better World Radio.

Background

Using the Network to Help People Help Themselves
Preparation for Paris Workshop Apr 27-28
www.upliftacademy.org/paris

Whether it is buying and selling on eBay, finding things on Google, or communicating instantly around the world with email or Internet-based telephony, global communications networks are rapidly changing the world.  Even more remote areas are getting connected to the global communications grid through mobile.  For example, the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh is in the process of installing a broadband network to connect 21,000 villages to carry information at 100 million bits per second, about 100 times faster than the average US household high speed internet connection.[1]  Relatively low cost cameras, MP3 music players/recorders, and widespread mobile phone service also enhance our ability to communicate globally in text, audio, and video.

This rapid (and accelerating) advance in communications “wiring” is happening as the Internet is rapidly growing the content it can transmit over it.  Huge communities have formed in very short time.  eBay has about 150 million members for buying and selling.  Myspace connects about 30 million users, signing up 3.5 million new ones each month.  Technorati now lists 31 million blogs - people publishing their own journals.  Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit that contains over 1 million articles, outstripping traditional encyclopedia publications.  In China, hundreds of millions of people play the same video game.  60 million Skype users can use their computers to place phone calls to each other for free.  There are free web sites to store photographs, videos, access email, or create blogs.  A new model of web interaction, sometimes called Web 2.0[2], is characterized by greater individual control and content as well as richer networks of connections.

These changes mark a stunning reversal from an era of scarcity in information technology services to an era of abundance.  For example, an organization could create a system for 1 million users to have unlimited electronic mail, a blog (journal of activities), photo archives, video archives, wiki workspaces (openly editable storage areas) for the cost of basic internet connections.  They could create audio or video “podcasts” – their own personal broadcast system. They could tag their information as they saw fit so that they could find each others’ postings.  They could use a free service to translate text from one language to another (not perfectly – yet).  They could carry audio or video information from an Internet café or office in town to play or record in remote villages on battery powered gadgets – or even mobile phones.

The early days of broadcast networks were characterized by a central broadcasting source and N listeners.  The value of the network grew directly with the number of the listeners.  The Ethernet and the Internet came along, which introduced a rapidly increasing value with the number of participants, called the Network Effect.[3]  This also introduced a notion of “smart edge” network design, putting the intelligence of the network on the edges, relegating the network to simply transmitting bits from one edge of the network to the other.  This was an inversion of the “smart center” model of network that the phone company preferred.  They wanted the network to intelligently handle the information (at a fee), and use “dumb” peripherals to do so (the standard telephone).  The End to End principle[4] was a momentous shift in our network thinking, spurred partly by the vision of David P. Reed, who also extended our network vision to include group forming networks.  If each node in the network were actually a group, the value of the network rises exponentially with the number of members of the network:

"[E]ven Metcalfe's Law understates the value created by a group-forming network as it grows. Let's say you have a GFN (Group Forming Network) with n members. If you add up all the potential two-person groups, three-person groups, and so on that those members could form, the number of possible groups equals 2^n. So the value of a GFN increases exponentially, in proportion to 2^n. I call that Reed's Law. And its implications are profound."[5]

One of the major constraints limiting the growth and value of Reed Networks is attention.  As we have seen with the profusion of profusion of information on the Internet, the constraint is not lack of money, but rather lack of attention.

Networked relationships are fundamentally different from the hierarchical relationships that have dominated much of our industrial age thinking. 

Here is a quote from Siegfred Woldheck, founder of Nabuur :

"Businesses, NGOs and governments are all 'hierarchies' – organizations with management structure, controls and rank. A hierarchy is designed to carry out its own plans with its own people and its own funds. After 1000 or 1500 projects, most hierarchies are stressed to the limit. The effort needed to keep such a thing together – to manage the staff, to communicate internally and externally, to maintain proper bookkeeping procedures, etc, etc takes up nearly all the available energy.

All these organizations have drawers full of work that they would like to do — but they will never get it all done. This is not a matter of lack of time, lack of people or lack of funds. Working a bit harder or smarter will not be enough. The system is simply full. Now... at the same time... there is a huge reservoir of people — both in the north, in the developed world, and in the south, the less developed places... People who are eager to commit some time and energy directly to other people. This cannot be facilitated at the proper scale by hierarchical institutions.

In other words, there is no shortage in the knowledge, funds, manpower, contacts or other resources; what is lacking is a trusted, effective institutional format that allows many people to interact directly around local issues."

The key to unlocking the value of the network is to create richer forms of linking and relationship – ways of paying attention.  We have an abundance of people who want to help and participate: the scarcity is in our ability to connect them in meaningful ways.

How can we use this technology to make the world a better place?

The network capabilities emerging globally are happening whether individuals like it or not.  The question becomes, what can we do to use them to make the world a better place.

This is a tricky question.  We have a large sector of the economy already trying to do this.  Developed countries have spent or invested $1 trillion in loans or aid in less developed countries over the past 50 years.  There are 1.4 million registered non-profit organizations in the United States alone, as well as 275,000 NGOs operating in Brazil.  Workshop participant Thomas Dichter, a 35 year veteran of the international development industry, writes:[6]

 “the development organization is in a constant state of anxiety and ambiguity.  For here we are, with no proven product, facing, to say the least, a rather flawed sort of “demand,” committed by the very nature of our mission to seeing fewer rather than more “customers.”  Meanwhile, we are seeking greater “market share.”  Rather odd.”

Workshop participant David Ellerman speaks of autonomy-respecting aid, echoing the smart edges/smart center debate of communications era. Referring to participants as doers and helpers (rather than recipients and donors), he notes: [7]

“In a top-down or planning model, an agency offers incentives to mobilize agents of change to bring about a certain desired transformation.  This may work if the transformation only concerns various stroke-of-the-pen reforms that can be implemented by external motivation.  But for most structural or institutional reforms, changes in short-term behavior incentivized by the agency will be quite insufficient to induce a transformation… An external helper can at best locate, not create, the agents of change and then perhaps help them along.”

Networks introduce an entirely different model for connecting people and ideas.  For example, a village in Mali writes on the web:

“A group of Dogon youth has settled in the city of Bamako. They try to support their families by guiding tourists around their home villages. Unfortunately the pay they receive from tour operators is very low. Therefore they want to set up their own web site to offer their services directly to tourists.”[8]

 A group in Boston may have dealt with this exact problem in a different context, and have some lessons learned to share with folks in Mali.  The Boston group would likely have been supported by a different non-profit than in Mali (or the chain of NGOs supporting Mali).  However a direct “end to end” connection would allow the exchange of information between folks in Mali and Boston, sharing lessons learned directly with each other.

Workshop participants June Holley and Valdis Krebs call this “network weaving”:[9]

What does a vibrant, effective community network look like? Research has been done to discover the qualities of vibrant networks. Sociologists, physicists, mathematicians, and management consultants have all discovered similar answers about effective networks. The amazing discovery is that people in organizations, routers on the internet, cells in a nervous system, molecules in protein interactions, animals in an ecosystem, and pages on the WWW are all organized in efficient network structures that have similar properties… As the weaver connects to many groups, information is soon flowing into the weaver about each group’s skills, goals, successes and failures. An astute weaver can now start to introduce clusters that have common goals/interests or complementary skills/experiences to each other. As clusters connect, their spokes to the hub can weaken, freeing up the weaver to attach to new groups.

Communications between the branches of a hierarchy (or multiple hierarchies) is difficult.  A network approach, however, allows much greater connectivity and relationship.  If a network’s growth is limited by attention, then a model in which people pay attention to each other creates a supply for attention at the same time demand for attention increases.  This opens up the possibility of a viral model – a network in which nodes create other nodes spontaneously. [10]

“We use the term viral architecture to mean a system that is adopted “virally” as that term has come to be used in the marketing industry. Viral adoption refers to a system architecture that can be adopted incrementally, and gains momentum as it scales. The growth behavior of such a system can be called viral growth.”

Workshop participant Marcia Odell developed the WORTH program in Nepal, teaching women literacy and savings-led microfinance.  In this model, women save their own money, increasing their self-control and eliminating debt-based obligations to others.  She also noted that the idea was viral.  After a presentation in Kenya, someone had taken her ideas and implemented them on his own.[11] 

“In Migori, Kenya, while Erica and I enjoyed a cup of tea following a WORTH orientation meeting in the community, thirteen groups of women set about developing by-laws for new WORTH groups that they formed on the spot, even though there was no specific program start-up in sight.”

Jeffrey Ashe of Oxfam International has implemented similar savings-led microfinance programs and noted that about 25% of the groups of Saving for Change groups “spontaneously” create additional groups, confirming again a viral spread of the idea.[12]

“Oxfam America is working with local partners in Cambodia, Mali, and Senegal to develop a community finance approach that trains poor people to save what they can and distribute it within their villages—for an investment of about $20 per savings group member.

Oxfam and its partners use this methodology to combat poverty on a large scale with low costs, local control, and an easy-to-replicate format, said Jeffrey Ashe, the manager of the Community Finance program.

"What you want to do is drop that pebble in the water and see the ripples spread," he said.”

We can think of savings-led microfinance as a pattern of uplift, which seems to be working as a simple but viral model.  Is there some way that we can use the network capabilities that we have today to spread this pattern more broadly and more quickly?  What can we learn from the viral spread of the idea to improve it and use it for other patterns of uplift?  What can we learn from connecting local clusters of people around the world, sharing their ideas and patterns?  What value can we create by helping folks pay attention to each other?

 We will be addressing these questions at the workshop. With the appropriate answers, perhaps we can move from a model of scarcity: “we have too many problems and too little money” – to one of abundance: “How do we 6 billion people to help each other help themselves?”

[1] http://purplemotes.net/2006/03/19/innovative-broadband-project-in-india/
^[2] http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
^[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
^[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_principle
^[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed's_law
^[6] Dichter, Thomas, Despite Good Intentions, Why Development Assistance to the Third World has Failed, University of Massachusetts Press, 2003, p. 184
^[7] Ellerman, David, Helping People Help Themselves, From the World Bank to an Alternative Philosophy of Developmental Assistance, University of Michigan Press, 2006
^[8] http://www.nabuur.com/modules/villages_issues/index.php?villageid=125
^[9] http://www.orgnet.com/BuildingNetworks.pdf
^[10] http://www.upliftacademy.org/reed
^[11] http://www.pactworld.org/initiatives/worth/marcias_corner.htm
^[12]http://www.oxfamamerica.org/whatwedo/where_we_work/east_asia/news_publications/feature_story.2005-09-20.6945872013

-Tom Munnecke, Uplift Academy
March 21, 2006

France Cluster

Le groupe d’intérêts Colabria Cluster - France est une communauté de professionnels, d’universitaires et de gens d’affaires spécialisée dans le management par les connaissances (KM) et la collaboration interentreprises, tant à Paris qu’en France.

Le Colabria Cluster - France est voué à la création d’une entente commune, d’une vision partagée, ainsi que d’actions ciblées concernant la mise en application à la sphère commerciale des principes du management par les connaissances et de la collaboration interentreprises. Des solutions émergent régulièrement des événements trimestriels thématiques d’une journée tenus en septembre, en décembre, en mars et en juin, afin de promouvoir les synergies au sein de la communauté.

Quant au Colabria Cluster lui-même, c’est un rassemblement de communautés de praticiens établies à travers le monde. Il opère à des fins non promotionnelles et n’est soutenu que par ses participants.

Par la mise en place du KM Cluster - France, l’organisation cherche à faciliter la création d’une communauté française dédiée au management par les connaissances, et qui s’adressera tant aux praticiens qu’aux gestionnaires, aux universitaires et aux chercheurs.

Le pays comporte déjà plusieurs de ces communautés KM. C’est pourquoi l’intention du Colabria Cluster - France est plutôt de développer et de raffermir l’environnement régional européen en matière de KM, ainsi que de fournir à la communauté KM française des voies d’accès au regroupement international que constitue le KM Cluster.

De ce fait, la mission fondamentale du KM Cluster - France est de faire progresser l’art et la science du management par les connaissances, ainsi que ses applications commerciales.

Une participation communautaire active a de tout temps joué un rôle décisif dans l’amélioration soutenue du progrès commercial et de la croissance professionnelle. Mais la maîtrise de l’environnement commercial d’aujourd’hui, en constante transformation, requiert un degré élevé d’interaction et de communication avec l’extérieur.

C’est ainsi qu’en assurant aux personnes, aux processus et aux technologies un lieu d’échange dédié au KM, le groupe KM Cluster aura pour effet d’encourager une collaboration fertile entre le milieu des affaires, les leader d’opinion et les technologues. Cette collaboration est essentielle, car c’est l’un des mécanismes-clés de la création de richesse et d’opportunités commerciales.

De manière générale, les réseaux sociaux de nature inter organisationnelle sont devenus des pièces élémentaires des environnements commerciaux prospères.

Les participants au groupe Colabria Cluster - France en tirent les avantages suivants:

- une synergie avec les praticiens, les experts et les chefs de file locaux du domaine du management par les connaissances ;
- l’accès aux technologies ainsi qu’aux pratiques de gestion de l’avenir ;
- la création d’un contexte commercial ainsi que d’un vocabulaire communs en matière de KM ;
- la participation à une communauté internationale de praticiens se créant des liens étroits en matière de management par les connaissances.

De par son acte constitutif, le groupe Colabria Cluster - France est chargé d’organiser des événements trimestriels à caractère communautaire, au bénéfice des professionnels du management par les connaissances ainsi que des dirigeants d’entreprises.