A simple question: What's the performance record of the schools of the leading national charter school operators?

How can you engage school districts in performance improvement when they don't get it, don't want to change, or don't know how? In the last few weeks this question has come up over and over -- from activists in school districts

The Monitor Institute's recent (and excellent) report, "What's Next for Philanthropy," describes the changing strategic landscape in which foundations make their investment decisions--and urges philanthropists to adopt a new set of practices for increasing their impact that includes "activating networks." Monitor's reasoning: "Advances in network theory and practice now allow funders to be more deliberate about supporting connectivity, coordinating networks, and thinking about how the collective impact of all of their efforts can produce change far beyond the success of any single grant, grantee, or donor." 

No one is more excited about the sustainability movement than the workforce development community. When was the last time the public conversation about jobs was this hopeful, this positive? For the first time in recent memory, we feel that the asset that is the skills development system (community colleges, job training programs, community organizations, one-stop career centers) is being recognized as an ally in the effort to develop communities and create wealth, while improving air and water quality and optimizing power, water and materials. Certainly the funding for green jobs training is a welcome change after a decade of disinvestment in skills development.

Here is Shirkey's fascinating insight, offered in an interview in the June 2010 issue of WIRED:

Detroit recently hosted the United States Social Forum. The Social Forum brought anywhere from 20-50,000 people to Detroit for a week of radical conversations, workshops, parties and protests.  The event was covered only by alternative news and media in our region, and more likely than not, the national reporting was spare. A number of foreign journalists were here reporting and participating.

In the two years since we released the original background report on sustainable economic development, the field has rapidly evolved and we have been engaged in a number of projects that have refined and enhanced our approach.

That's old thinking about global flows of people. As we've noted before, more and more what's happening is the creation of transnational dynamics--people moving between countries for work and business; they live transnationally, in more than one place. And trends discussed at the recent Global Forum in Cape Town suggest economic/business reasons that transnationalism will continue to grow:

Knowing what network members want from each other and want to give to each other, and delivering on these "value propositions" makes or breaks a network. "If there's no value," says Bill Traynor, one of our favorite network builders, "people will start to exit. It's a self-regulating system." That's pretty straightforward, but actually understanding and monitoring the members' value propositions (VPs) is quite complicated. A member may embrace more than one proposition; different members may embrace different propositions; and what members care about may change over time. Given this complexity and dynamism, it's worthwhile to check in on a network's value propositions fairly regularly, not just when starting up the network.

Lately I’ve been giving a lot of thought to network adaptation – and, from an evaluative perspective, how best to capture the trajectory of networks with multiple, emergent activities and connections. In open and rapidly evolving nets, of course, members often need real-time information to make effective decisions. But, even in relatively stable nets, organizers want to know about the results of their catalyzing efforts. So many networks begin with a deliberate effort to weave new connections, but few build in the means to systematically gauge the effect of such efforts over time.