Acronym

In case you haven't seen it yet, you should check out the new report, "Connected Citizens: The Power, Peril and Potential of Networks," from the Knight Foundation and Monitor Institute. It's an important read for any association executive looking to better understand how to navigate the new world of collective action.

The Knight Foundation's aim is toward broad social change, but the principles that the report outlines apply in any community-based context, which includes an association's members and industry at large.

The report opens by illustrating how network-centric practices are already creating new forms of social change in a group of projects the researchers examined, and it offers five practices that the authors see as pillars of future community engagement:

1. Listening to and consulting the crowds: Actively listening to online conversations and openly asking for advice.
2. Designing for serendipity: Creating environments, in person and online, where helpful connections can form.
3. Bridging differences: Deliberately connecting people with different perspectives.
4. Catalyzing mutual support: Helping people directly help each other.
5. Providing handrails for collective action: Giving enough direction for individuals to take effective and coordinated action.

They also illustrate how these methods can be put into action to solve long-term challenges in new ways:

[From page 8 of the report, pasted here with permission. Click to enlarge.]

Last week, I pointed to some ideas about the belief in building systems and environments that enable positive but unpredictable results. In that case, the term cited was "shaping serendipity." I like that essentially the same term appears in the Knight report. It reinforces the idea that social change agents—or associations, in their own spaces—can effect change by facilitation rather than force. Social technologies are continuously making that dynamic more and more feasible and effective.

Further on, the Knight report proposes some potential future scenarios for 2015 and details ways that nonprofits can engage connected citizens and utilize the above network-centric practices. You can find the full report at www.connectedcitizens.net.

Looking at those five practices above, I'm curious what experience your association might have in engaging members in network-centric ways or what opportunities you see where you could do so in the future.