WiserEarth Blog

The folks over at The Monitor Institute have been working with The Packard Foundation to explore this question. Their conclusion? Don’t worry so much about the social media tools and instead realize that you are building a social network. To do that you need a ‘networked mindset’ characterized by ‘openness, transparency, decentralized decision-making, and distributed action’. We encourage you to read the full paper ‘Working Wikily 2.0′ but here is a summary of the more important points for people working in the social sector. › Continue reading…

We’ve written before about how you can view your community as a network. Here we use the ‘network lense’ to show how communities typically evolve and what specific actions you might want to take to get to the next stage. › Continue reading…

All communities can be summed up as people who know each other and do things together. As a general rule, know more people in their community, both they and their communities are more productive. So how do we go about increasing those connections between people? Increasingly, community leaders are turning to ‘Network Weavers’. › Continue reading…

Looking at your membership as a network map can help you build a sense of community, improve collaboration, and generate ‘eye-candy’ for your donors. Here we share some network basics and a cheap do-it-yourself mapping tool. › Continue reading…