Blog Entry

Last November, my friend, Steven Walling, tweeted something that was both innocuous and extraordinary. He said:

Steven is engaged with a global community of amazing people who are creating something incredibly important and unprecedented. He’s making connections and learning things in ways that were not previously possible. But his involvement is at the expense of more local, place-based engagement.

Is this the future? If so, what are the implications of such a future?

Last year, I got a chance to explore these questions with my colleague, Diana Scearce of the Monitor Institute, for some work commissioned by the Knight Foundation. More specifically, we were asked:

What will be the most effective network-centric practices for informing and engaging communities over the next five years?

We underwent a lightweight scenario planning process, where we interviewed staff members at the Knight Foundation, leading practitioners, and some of the best thinkers in this space, including Clay Shirky, Bill Traynor, Marshall Ganz, Mimi Ito, and Howard Rheingold.

From this process, we developed three possible futures for 2015, which we workshopped with the Knight Foundation last October.

Diana took our work and — with the help of Noah Flower — synthesized it into a wonderful report which was released this morning: Connected Citizens: The Power, Peril and Potential of Networks. It offers a summary of network best practices with corresponding examples, and it shares some thoughts on implications for philanthropy. And it presents our scenarios, which I think is a useful framing for thinking about the future.

I am heavily biased, but I think it is a beautiful, powerful piece of work, and I strongly encourage anyone interested in networks and social change to read it thoroughly. And I’d love to hear your thoughts! Please feel free to post them below.

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