How Do We Harness the Innovation Potential of our Networks?
Only in the past few months have I heard this term “asset mapping” as a needed tool to surface hidden but available value, bootstrap communities, and get shit done.
As I’ve gone back through my own blog and thinking/writing, I see that i also have been talking about this since 2009, though I was calling it “Human Capital Metrics.”
I found this post in my backlog – The Future of Collaboration Begins with Visualizing Human Capital, and had made a simple mockup of how Facebook profiles could be expanded to actually show information that was useful for people trying to collaborate or get involved in a creative enterprise together.
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Then I found this little video I had done for Nokia’s Ideas Project, where I posited the web was evolving into a massive “Idea Exchange.”
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I noticed I also spent 20 minutes talking about this in my first public speaking event, which was at Stowe Boyd’s Social Business Edge conference in NYC. My talk was titled “Designing a Culture of Collaboration.”
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So apparently I’ve been yammering on and on about needing an assetgraph for over two years, and it shockingly STILL doesn’t exist.
So, I’ve been exploring what we need to do to make a super simple application that could be plugged into Facebook (or really any social network) so that we can make value visible more easily.
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Asset Mapping Process
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For starters, what types of assets do we want to see?
I read through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Neighborhood Netowrks Asset Mapping Guide PDF, and they break down assets into three levels:
- Level 1 – Gifts, skills, and capacities of the individuals living in the community
- Level 2 – Citizens’ organizations/networks through which local people pursue common goals
- Level 3 – Institutions present in the community, such as local government, hospitals, education, and human service agences
They further break down these three levels into six types: individual, institutional, organizational, governmental, physical/land, and cultural.
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So, my thoughts are that these same techniques for self-mobilization and organizing for change at the local level would work for Creative Economy 3.0.
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What principles does it build on? (via Synergos Knowledge Resources)
- Appreciative inquiry which identifies and analyses the community’s past successess. This strengthens people’s confidecne in their own capacities and inspires them to take action
- The recognition of social capital and its important as an asset. This is why ABCD focuses on the power of associations and informal linkages within the community, and the relationships built over time between community associations and external institutions
- Participatory approaches to development, which are based on principles of empowerment and ownership of the development process
- Community economic development models that place priority on collaborative efforts for economic development that makes best use of its own resource base
- Efforts to strengthen civil society. These efforts have focused on how to engage people as citizens (rather than clients) in development, and how to make local governance more effective and responsive.
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What’s the facilitation process?
1. Collecting stories
2. Organizing a group
3. Mapping the capacities and assets of individuals, associations and local institutions
4. Building a community vision and plan
5. Mobilizing and linking assets for economic development
6. Leveraging activities, investments and resources from outside the community
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Head / Heart / Hands Framework
Donnie MacLurcan of the Post Growth Institute has assembled a nice guideline for how to facilitate an asset mapping exericse, using a “head / heart / hands” framing.
When done in meatspace, participants would list three assets for each category on post-it notes, which then get put up on a poster, answering these questions:
Head: “I have some knowledge around…”
Hands: “I know how to…”
Heart: “I am passionate about…”
I installed the free Pomodoro Daisuki app for Chrome, and have been messing with that to demonstrate this exercise online.
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While this is nice in terms of visualizing your own assets and capacities, there would need to be collaborative functionality and some kind of meta-tagging system so that this information would be pooled into a database and then presented back to you as a location-based data visualization, so you can see who in your community has what and where. There also needs to be a trust network/reputation layer, because you’re not going to offer all your assets to everyone all the time.
The big issue I’m finding with individual asset/capacity mapping so far is that many of us (myself included) aren’t completely clear on what ours are or how to best identify/surface/recognize them. So no amount of technology is going to solve that problem.
There still needs to be a human component to this, which is about facilitating a mental process, and I am seeing that it’s most effective when co-created. What I mean by this is that many of our inherent assets are only as useful as they can be done with others. Otherwise they’re not “social capital.” So an individual can’t really surface their value alone, they need feedback about how others’ perceive their strengths and where others have recognized their best implementations of their superpowers. (I will describe how I’m experimenting with this in a small group in my next post.)
Now, the next level up is assets at the organizational, then institutional levels.
As a specific use case for a nascent “Resilient City Project,” I’m in talks with people from my area here in the Hudson Valley, NY, people in Detroit, in Vermont, and in Montreal. The idea is to map out social enterprises, farms, and their supply chains, so we would have a transparent Eastern Corridor assetgraph, and could begin building business-to-business exchange networks up and down the East Coast.
I just discovered localwiki (ht @ryandeussing), an open-source wiki tool for mapping. It may be useful as a first step to this mapping project. I also found sourcemap last year, which is open supply chain mapping. So you can imagine how mashing up these tools can quickly help us map our regional resources, in addition to surfacing our individual ones.
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After all this is mapped, we then need to bind that with the needs of the community….. and what do we have?
Matching unmet needs with unused resources = Creative Economy 3.0 Marketplace.
teehee.
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references:
Asset-Based Community Development – An Overview
Neighborhood Asset Mapping Guide
Asset Mapping For The Long Haul: A Strategy For Occupy Movements
whatever happened to assetmap?
i’m curious about that myself
Seemingly turned into a skill share facebook app, which is a bit disappointing to be honest
(oh and now they don’t even link to that any more):
http://assetmap.com/about
https://www.facebook.com/assetmap
http://blog.assetmap.com/
Hi Vanessa,
Really enjoying the unfolding of your thought and the precision built into each step.
I work with storytelling as a tool to pull business organisations together, to realise themselves as actors in participative community. Storytelling is then used as a method of investigation to see what binds these people in common, and collectively where do they wish to go. There’s also a step that moves people into considering why they really exist in such a community, so ensuring full participation, from the stomach if you will. I’d be happy to share a methodology of the workshop if it would help your thinking.
I’m really interested to see the integration of physical assets and mapping of current strengths as a contribution to this conversation. It’s something I could consider for future work, at present I’m relying on the knowledge being present in the group.
Appreciate you thinking on this,
Simon
Words That Change
i would love you to share a methodology!
as a matter of fact, if it’s shareable to the public, i’d like to add it to our Open Foresight library.
Open Foresight is a project i started last year, to compile a library of resources, tools, methods, and practices for creating visions of the future together. essentially taking a lot of ‘thinking tools’ from the futures studies field, design thinking, storytelling. and then people could submit their stories so we can collectively start building a shared vision of the future, or at least many emerging narratives, to inspire us to take action NOW.
http://emergentbydesign.com/2011/03/07/what-is-open-foresight/
anything you contribute will include attribution.
still need to build the website, but it will be at openforesight.org
v
Hey, That’s brilliant, I’ll send it along. It needs a little work to make it presentable for general use (it’s currently tailored to clients). Hope it can further others’ work, and be great to receive insight and feedback on it.
Best,
Simon
It’s currently down for a server upgrade but I’ve got LOTS of relevant material at http://files.uniteddiversity.com
Vanessa,
Are you aware of the mapping project of New Economics Institute in Great Barrington MA and NYC? I just learned something about it recently from Susan Witt.
I publish KOSMOS Journal and am following your work. Bravo!
Nancy Roof
no, not aware! would be great to team with them. do you have a link?
I looked for a link but couldn’t find one, although ABCD Institute are listed along with lots of other great orgs here: http://neweconomicsinstitute.org/organizations
http://www.new economicsinstitute.org. This is an outstanding group you will surely like to know about. the key person is Susan Witt.
I just set up knod.es so I can search my Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn network for info by keyword. It doesn’t allow for serendipitous discovery but it can help me find who in my network knows about a specific topic.
I see asset mapping as part of the due diligence necessary for taking account of capital. It’s all about accounting and accountability. If we’re going to move beyond financial currency being the primary accountability metric, we’re going to have to innovate methods and tools around accounting for capital in all its forms.
I’m a firm believer that everything should start with people, so the first step is social capital! We may not have technology to measure social capital, but we sure can map it now! (Thanks Facebook, Twitter, Google, et el!!)
Behind this technology we have this concept of the ‘social graph’ which is the data that allows us to map social networks and visualize them.
Now Facebook is taking things to the next level with their ‘Open Graph’. Not sure how open it is.. but it looks to be a step closer to enabling general asset mapping innovation.
I’d like to explore the idea of the ‘asset graph’ (an open and distributed data markup/semantic web standard/cloud service thingy) and the ‘asset map’ which is how that data is represented and interacted with.
Separating these two concepts out enables us to conceive of Asset Mapping as a dynamic exploration space that’s both real-time and collaborative. IMHO, the natural evolution of social web as the basis for a ubiquitous computing ecosystem that maps closely to and evolves with our existing mental models.
I appreciate what you are doing here but just can’t help feeling uncomfortable with economic concepts – Human capital, assets, gifts
Is it possible to use a humanistic or network theory framework
@timekord
of course. do you have any suggestions?
perhaps a way to frame “needs” + “personal strengths/capacities” could be something like:
intentions + gifts (or ‘superpowers’ if you wanna have fun with it)
I understand the purpose of mapping human assets, (ahem, not the right word for me, sorry) as: how can we learn about each other enough and fast enough – the few we have the bandwidth to select at least? And for what? My purpose for the connection is my key input to make an assetmap useful to me. Mapping and rating are reductionist techniques used in complex and bizarre domains. They may add value if they help build trust, channel useful information, and accelerate the network effects that help augment each others’ capabilities to get shift done.
Some of the mapping techniques by Irene Ng might offer an approach.
http://value-basedservicesystem.blogspot.com/2010/01/value-co-creation.html
Hello Venessa,
I have the same feeling as @martinking but I trust your brilliant mind to keep the focus on “social capital”, “culture”, “collaboration”, “creative economy”, etc. rather than neuro-connectionist-like brain asset mapping. One avenue I have explored in the mid ’90 is in the world of disabled-people (being one of them), see MELBA in Germany where the asset mapping is mostly focused on hands/heart capabilities rather than brain capabilities. Mind that disabled people have different referents for ‘sociality’ than ours. Yet, with an ethnographic mindset, and (why not) the support of some of their methodologies, it should be possible to achieve the highly desirable goal you set yourself in 2009. I noticed that your suggested facilitation process is in line with the objectives and an ethnographic approach.
There are some potential pitfalls, even coming from the mere technologies we rely on to materialize the ‘human capital mapping’ with a social stance i.e. ‘mediated’ social networks. Following works of such people as Lakoff or Churchland, we tend to see human being as not being shaped by culture or driven by our social experience. “… the individual becomes like a node in a network …” , “…a person comes to be made up of a flexible collection of assets; a person is proprietor of his or her self as a portfolio …” (E. Martin : “Fluid Minds”).
Hence, which technologies should we use to carry out the mapping without falling in the trap of the very limited view of human being advocated by “connectionist” that relies on that same technology ?
Anyway, I find that this exercise is key for raising the awareness about ‘creative economy’, because production (in a very broad term) is not any more a collective or social process to be maintained in and through technology and engineering knowledge; it is rather a creative process to be maintained in and through social networks and social capital.
Let’s remember C. Geertz “The human brain is a product of a relation with culture” (not a product of relation with a node in a network).
Phil
Venessa,
“…I’ve been yammering on and on about needing an assetgraph for over two years, and it shockingly STILL doesn’t exist….After all this is mapped, we then need to bind that with the needs of the community…..”
Can I ask who you believe needs it? There are socially entrepreneurial types in communities who are already getting things done. Would an asset map facilitate their efforts? Have they asked for it? Or are you hoping to motivate those on the sidelines by virtue of unearthing hidden informational value?
Marc
hi marc,
i believe *I* need it.
i’m trying to help myself and people within my local community to bootstrap our efforts. we have a lot of people trying to do a lot of things (launch a food coop, which i’m working on (beaconfoodcoop.org), a people’s newspaper (our ning group at beaconcitizen.com isn’t the proper forum for that), a local radio station, a shared tools library, and i can list 15 other initiatives. it goes on and on. these things can’t be accomplished in isolation, and organizing is currently very tedious and long work. if we had better ways to expose our intentions and the assets we’re willing to share with one another to one another, we could all advance our goals faster.
- v
Hi Venessa, thanks for the response!
This is key: “if we had better ways to expose our intentions”.
Projects embody beliefs. People with the right assets will rally to the project if they believe what you believe. Communicate the ‘why’ of the project.
Then communicate what you need.
Belief drives the need, and the need determines the assets necessary to make it happen.
Map the projects, not the assets.
Marc
“Map the projects, not the assets.”
I don’t think it is a question of either/ or. Like most things it’s both/ and.
Venessa,
What are your thoughts are LinkedIN and their approach to Collaboration groups?
I enjoy reading about your ideas, many of them follow my own thought patterns.
Regards,
Karlos K
i’ve never really used linkedin, so i can’t comment