Friday, April 28, 2006

Cross-cultural learning at Sunbelt

Hello from Vancouver, BC! I flew here yesterday, having had barely enough time to pack my bags after Wednesday's exhilarating Network Roundtable in Boston.

Mike Prescott very generously offered to pick me up from the Vancouver airport, and on the way into town he explained that Vancouver is one of the most multi-cultural cities in the world, mixing an old guard of British founders with a recent influx of Asian and Pacific cultures.

Multi-culturalism provides a great backdrop to share the results of the network mapping that Claire Reinelt and I did a few weeks ago at Creating Space. Among other questions, we asked this nation-wide audience of community network-weavers, "Who has provided you with useful ideas or resources to do your work?"

Thanks to the Leadership Learning Community (LLC) for granting me permission to share the (anonymized) answers we received to that question. As you can see at right, there is a lot of learning happening within the LLC.


To help digest this "plate of spaghetti," I focused on reciprocal learning relationships and used a betweenness analysis to highlight nodes with diverse contacts throughout the core and periphery:Images like this provide a fantastic personalized way to bring the basics of social capital into group discussion and stimulate appreciation for the core, the periphery, and what they have to offer each other.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License and is copyrighted (c) 2006 by Connective Associates except where otherwise noted.

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