ICTlogy

Notes from the II Encuentro Internacional TIC para la Cooperación al Desarrollo (Development Cooperation 2.0: II International Meeting on ICT for Development Cooperation) held in Gijón, Spain, on February 10-12th, 2009. More notes on this event: cooperacion2.0_2009. More notes on this series of events: cooperacion2.0.

Round Table: Mul-stakeholder networks and Multi-network actors in Development

What are the key factors that made a network successful?

Stephane Boyera, Device Independence Working Group of W3C

At the W3C more than one hundred working groups in the last 15 years, issued 70 standards. How could this be made possible?

• It’s a multi-stakeholder forum
• Powers are evenly distributed along the components of the network
• Having standards is a key thing for success
• A focussed programme. Working groups have limited lives (12 to 18 months) and expected results to be issued at the end of it
• Members are fully committed. And if they are not, they just cannot participate
• There are tools to support international, distributed work
• Don’t put value on the network, but on the network’s goals, do not promote the Internet bubble, don’t move away from the goal

Caroline Figueres, Global Knowledge Partnership

• Have to review on a regular basis the purpose of the network, so that it adapts to the changing needs and goals of the members.
• Win-win perspective: a good balance of what members bring in and what they get from the network
• Have to be clear about what is your motivation in being part of a network – and cope with other members’ motivations
• Based on trust (might take years to achieve an optimum trust level)
• The network is not there for the benefit of the chairman but for the benefit of the members. It should promote everybody
• Gender balanced

Anriette Esterhuysen, Association for Progressive Communications

• Diversity seen as a strength, not as a weakness
• Flexibility
• Regular contact
• Distributed “ownership” of the network and its outputs
• Manage delivery
• Get critical feedback
• The personal dimension: institutions but also human beings (with their daily human problems) have to be represented in the network
• Branding, indentity
• The network should provide more than what individuals face daily
• Learning space, exchange as equals
• Gender issues are really important for both the inner performance and public outcome of the network

Oleg Petrov, e-Development Thematic Group of World Bank

• Don’t take sharing for granted
• ICTs are great, but they have to be used in an innovative way, try and rethink completely the way things are being done
• Don’t take ICTs for granted either

Discussion

Vikas Nath: what’s exactly the role of the private sector in multi-stakeholder partnerships? Why is their participation so important? Figueres: people from the private sector is more solution oriented. There’s a confusion between what the real needs are and what you think their needs are. The private sector is a powerful informing agent to identify the real needs and bridge them with policy.

Vikas Nath: how to tell back to the society at large what is not working in a network (not only sharing good outcomes)? Petrov: things get wrong if you take things for granted, as knowledge sharing or knowledge management. And knowledge management has to be linked to operations, to task managers.

Manuel Acevedo: how to avoid “network fatigue”? how does knowledge absorbtion (vs. just generating knowlegde fluxes) happens? Esterhuysen: to recover from network fatigue, one can “retreat to the boundaries of the network” and people respect this. And even people retreating back to work again at the local level. Knowledge absorption is about knowledge management, repeating concepts, going back over same topics again and again… Boyera: networks limited in time and tied to achieving specific goals is a way to avoid network burnout. There’s no sense preserving a network that serves no purpose.

(My personal opinion on the previous topic: do we really need knowledge absorbtion? If we just don’t memorize everything we write down, why not use the network as a permanent extension of our cognitive resources? as another way to fix memory. I see networks of people, experts, institutions as just part of the cognitive and knowledge storage resources we have at hand: our brain, libraries, hard drives…)

Q: how to know not people but what (interests) they represent? How to encourage exchange? Boyera: it’s better to have leading networks for specific topics. If working groups work in related or overlapping domains, coordination and cooperation between networks is the way to proceed.

Previous post: Vikas Nath: Cooperation Agencies or Cooperation Networks?

Next post: Centres for Research and Innovation Development and for ICT