The following is an extract from research carried out on behalf of the Scottish Centre for Regeneration in developing an approach to making links between people involved in regeneration activity. Many of the principles identified will be relevant in setting up the Community Planning Practitioners Network.
Objectives need to be clear before starting, and once it’s up and running the network should maintain its focus. This is important as the network’s organisers and members need to understand its purpose and its boundaries. One of the early Countryside Agency learning networks stumbled because its objectives were not shared by its potential members – it had not been properly thought out beforehand.
Good facilitation is key – the network co-ordinator should be able, welcoming and approachable, have expertise in the topic area and be enthusiastic. He/she should also have good communication skills, be responsive, available and flexible in responding to members’ needs and requests. In fact, the co-ordinator can make or break the network’s success, as is the case in the Health Voice Network.
The network should provide members with a means of identifying and contacting their fellow members - expertise locators and knowledge management agents. Good, consistent indexing of skills, experience and interests of the members will be instrumental in this working well.
There needs to be a critical mass of members, and also a critical mass of active members. The Health Voice Network finds that the diversity of members’ backgrounds and experience gives a breadth to the knowledge members can tap into. Some networks have found that they have “lurkers” ie people who seem to be inactive, but who are actually new to the subject area and are soaking in knowledge from more experienced people. The hope is that these “lurkers” in turn become experienced and then share what they have learnt.
The network should give access to quality information, it should provide social contact and also give status and recognition. People need to feel that they are part of something worthwhile. People travel hundreds of miles to attend meetings of the Cambridge Network as they get so much out of the content of the events and the other people there.
A good network needs to engage its members and entice them to come back for more. People are busy and will only come back again if it’s worth their while. A query answered successfully or a piece of knowledge shared is one of the best testimonials a network can have. Also a good network has a buzz about it – it should give the feeling that something is always happening. New things should be communicated to the members regularly, but the mechanisms for doing this need to be worked out carefully eg too many emails will put people off, or if there are too many discussion forums people will not immediately see how busy the whole network is.
The infrastructure of a good network should be simple and straightforward. For instance, any technical solution should bear in mind the kinds of PC its potential members might have. The Countryside Agency, which has focused on an electronic approach, made design a key feature of its networks, ie they had to be reliable and not too high-tech.
Networks can be formal or informal, and there should be recognition that in some cases an informal network might be more appropriate than a formal network. Sometimes networks grow themselves, organically, out of a shared need. It is good to be aware of this and to allow it to happen. Not all development needs to be controlled. An informal network could be a group of workers in an organisation who feel that it helps their day-to day work to share experiences, and an example could be one set up by product delivery managers in Hewlett-Packard. The managers, who were located across North America, held a monthly conference call via telephone. They shared experiences, sometimes with one member bringing along a problem, and discussed current issues.
Before setting up a network, target numbers of members should be considered in the development phase, as there could be difficulty in servicing all the membership if the numbers are too high, and equally a lack of engagement if the numbers are too low. The solution will have to mirror the expected numbers. Networks can also be resource hungry, and so in the setting up phase it should be made clear to prospective members what services are included and what are not.
Other networks which already exist should be considered in the development stage, and care taken to complement their work where successful, perhaps through partnership or joint-working.