Subject: [cc-affiliates] CC global network
strategy meeting - Kill it! - Fix it! - Add it!
Hi all,
as you will (hopefully) know
we are having the first CC global network strategy meeting in Washington
D.C today and tomorrow. This is the first physical meeting of the
network strategy group that was formed as a follow up od the discussions
that we have had at the last day of last years summit in Seoul. The
purpose of this meeting is to stake out a couple of options for the
future of CC's global network that we can then investigate further
within the strategy group and with the rest of the network. While there
will be more comprehensive notes that will be circulated after the
meeting we wanted to aslo give a quick informal update on what is being
discussed here during he two days. This post is a quick little summary
of what we have done today and hopefully someone else will follow up
with a summary at the end of tomorrow.
We spend
the first half of the day doing a post-it heavy exercise mapping the
current state of the affiliate network. Paul S and Kamiel (who are
facilitating the meeting) walked us through a series of exercises
focussed on identifying things that we know about our network (data -
white post its in the picture below). This was followed up by an
exercise aimed at identifying frustrations/negative feelings that we
have (the red post-its) and another one focussing on positive feelings
(the yellow ones). As you can the negative feelings outweighed the
positive ones, which is probably recognizable for a most of us (and the
reason why we are undertaking this process). We concluded the morning
session by two more exercises, the first one focussed on identifying
elements of the networks that we want to get rid of, that we would like
to improve and that we would like to add (the kill-it, fix-it, add-it on
the door). The last exercise collected and contrasted historic goals of
the network with future goals (the multi colored post its).
We
kicked off the afternoon with a session in which we analyzed other
network organisations to identify positive and negative traits of their
organization models. This included the usual suspects (wikimedia,
peer2peer foundation) organisations working on humanitarian en
environmental issues and organisations advocating for entirely different
causes that have interesting organizational models.
We
concluded the afternoon session with a open discussion in which we
tried to better understand why our network seems to be caught up in a
"us vs. them dynamic'. This was quite an intense discussion that
scratched a number of open wounds (paid vs unpaid work, the inadequacy
of our structural instruments (such as MoU and roadmaps) and the role of
regional and global coordinators.
While none
of the discussion lead to anything very actionable yet (although if i
was a betting man i would not bet on a long future life of either the
MoU or the roadmaps) we hopefully laid the groundwork for some more
results oriented discussions on day two. i think most if not all of us
where very happy with the constructive and open nature of the
discussions and to discover that there is more that unites us than that
divides us (even though the red and the yellow post its might give
another impression). so much for now....
Paul
(on behalf of Alek, Carolina, Claudia ,Claudio, Delia, Scann, Kelsey,
Kamil, Mari, Naeema , Paul S, Ryan, Simeon, Sohyuun)