Personal Blogs

going through the interviews i can see different needs and readinesses of the fellows. Reasons for wanting an alumni scheme seem to depend on the fellows' progress on their personal trajectory:

• skills acquisition, motivation, access to expertise

• desire to share forward, multiply what they have experienced, sharing forward leadership training, writing training and mentoring younger fellows in instituttions , sensitiszing men, reaching out to girls in schools
• desire to engage with external environment, set agendas, influence policy, lead relevant research

Frameworks to help understand this or locate individuals are:

Mayoux four powers framework that we use in AWARD

• power from within (confidence, motivation, networking for inspiration)
• power to do (skills acquistion, networking for personal career development)
• power over (resource generation, networking for visibility)
• power with (setting agendas, influencing policy, networking for concerted action)

What i feel doesn't fit exactly and maybe this extends that framework a bit, is the desire many of them have to act as a multiplier of the AWARD effect. Maybe the empowerment framework is seen principally as a personal thing and doesn't cater for this kind of altruistic power to in the sense of giving it to... What other preposition could we use to render this idea?

Power from? Power through? Power beyond? Power across?

Waddell typology of networks

societal learning. Networks can be seen as a typology of increasing societal impact where the last is generative network in which the network is outward looking and aims to create societal change.

Appreciative systems

Using the term 'readinesses' made me think of Vicker's appreciative systems.  I wonder if there is anything there which could be helpful in this analysis. TIme to go back and reread.

Kitchener's three levels of cognition

AWARD helps the fellows solve problems better, then they get meta prepared, reflexive, self aware to step out of their scientific cloud and see the bigger purpose (as Sheila Ommeh said). A third level can be seen as trying rather than being good at adapting to the envrionment, as trying to shape the environment.

Of course the framework i haven't mentioned is the actual CoP framework that guided my research. I hope that is not going to matter....

I have let go of the purpose of this research to be "to get the qualification". As long as i follow the instructions enough when writing it up, I shall get over 40% and why should I let a good research project be ruined by the constraints of a university module? I figure if the module is good - and why shouldn't it be? - it will accommodate good research.I am also letting go of pleasing work.

And so, to my research purpose...

Scratching and chewing what it is i am curious about, it comes down to this. Indications from fellows, AWARD itself and its Steering committee and donors suggest that an alumnae association/scheme/initiative¹ could be useful. When I think about that from my Systems Thinking in Practice perspective, i start seeing blobs of people in trajectories, and in relationships, and with shared purpose and meanings. There is a large dollop of CoP theory there then. But also i feel there is something wider, the supra system of CoP if you like, which is social learning² , which can be conceptualised as a learning system. The other image that comes into my mind, from Complexity thinking is that of systems far from equilibrium and near equilibrium and the energy that goes into keeping a structure in its shape, or shifting it to a new shape.

The other thing I got from TU812, and have just been reminded of by reading the Ulrich paper, is the importance of design.

Add to this, my values and beliefs that I don't want to impose my ideas on others.

Every time i looked at the Thing i want to research, i found myself in normative mode. I want to form a COP, I think a COP would be useful for our fellows when they finish the fellowship, I think they are already in a CoP though they dont know it themselves.  At the same time, I know that CoPs are notoriously difficult to set up successfully.

Anyway, all these trajectories are now coming together in the following

my research project is a system to explore design principles that have the potential to support a successful alumni system in the context of the AWARD Fellows by:

• reading CoP literature
• reading societal learning literature
• case studies of other fellowship programs
• identifying design principles
• discussing design principles with fellows, colleagues and other stakeholders
• drawing up a list of Most Desirable and Feasibile design principles

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1. actually perhaps we could call this an Alumnae System as i do perceive it as a collection of entities working together for a purpose

2. Note that when i say "social learning", I do not mean collective learning but "societal learning" in the sense coined by Woodhill, Guijt and Bawden as learning that makes a difference in society. I see society in the terms of Stafford Beer that its purpose is to create what it creates. If you want it to create something different, people have to do different things and doing different things implies learning.