Amsterdam, 25 July 2012: If you want to
contribute to social change, you get the main actors together and work out how
to effect that change successfully. I am currently
organizing a conference that aims to change the experience that gay men,
lesbians, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people have when interacting with heritage
institutions.
An international conference is the
working space a network organization expert like myself dreams of.
Our vision is that when a young lesbian visits her national
archive in Europe or North America
in 2020 she will easily discover lesbians in history, women living their lives
fully. She will find lesbian artists in museums. She will find lesbian novels in libraries. She will find
that she is part of the ‘we’ that is society. As will gay men, bisexual and
transgender people. And ‘society’ will notice that ‘we’ includes LGBTI people.
In this short
essay I will dwell on where, in the process of organizing a conference,
networked organization expertise help make outstanding results. Networked organization expertise uses
various tools in finding the players that are so essential in achieving the
results you want. It also acknowledges that the circles of friends, relations
and contacts in which each and every player is situated has the potential to
provide value to the larger group. Value can come through the possibility of
getting in contact with strategic partners (structural value), creating a sense
of community and trust that supports players in developing challenging projects
in their own circumstances (relational value) and building knowledge that
allows participants in the network to gain ground (cognitive value). As a
networked organization expert, my job is to bring all these levels of value to
the project.
1. Defining the
vision
When we started
working on developing this conference, my client, the International Gay and
Lesbian Information Centre and Archive (IHLIA) wanted to establish a network of
LGBTI archives, libraries and documentation centres in Europe (both EU and
non-EU countries). It is part of an international group of people working in
LGBTI archives, libraries, museums and special collections (ALMS) that have met
in the USA three times over the past decade. They call their meetings the ALMS
conference. Most participants were from North America and a sprinkling, like my
client, came from further abroad. When the call came at a previous conference
for volunteers to organize the next conference came, IHLIA offered and was
chosen.
I was hired to
develop the concept of the conference and to take it – whatever ‘it’ was – from
there. Rather than taking the intention
to set up a network as an ambition, I encouraged my client to first get a firm
grasp on the vision of the conference. What change did they want to see
happening in the world, as a result of their efforts? Establishing the vision is a necessary
first step to knowing the change you want to see in the world three years
or more down the road and set up the team to begin the process of making that happen.
We asked a lot of
questions when preparing for this visioning process. For one, how did IHLIA see
its role in the Netherlands and beyond? What were its ambitions for the future?
What resources did it have already and what resources did it need? The organization had a strategic plan,
but that did not give direct answers to the question of what value did the
proposed conference have in meeting the longer and shorter term goals of the
organization. From this line of
questions it became clear that the board and the management team should be part
of the visioning process. It also became clear that key stakeholders in the
Netherlands were clients such as researchers and people representing research
institutions.
In the end we had three
external stakeholders and three internal stakeholders involved in the visioning
process.
Because the
conference has an international history we realized there was, besides the
IHLIA board, a whole community in the world with expectations of the next
conference. We decided to test the vision against these expectations. We also
felt it prudent to have buy-in from important stakeholders, to create a shared
ownership of the idea of an international networking activity that would commence
after the conference. We established an international advisory group. The group comprised people who knew each
other from the previous conferences plus, as the vision had a European-wide
action radius, from organizations IHLIA knew or found in various parts of
Europe.
After discussing
the vision with the international advisory group, an important addition was
made. Not only would mainstream heritage institutions make their LGBT content
visible and accessible, grassroots LGBTI ALMS organizations would flourish. This
is an acknowledgement that leadership in making LGBTI heritage accessible has
always come from organizations within the LGBTI community. Great leaps forward
happen when collaboration between mainstream and community organizations takes
place.
2. Getting the
right people to the table
We used
stakeholder analysis, a key tool in networked organization, to find people for
the advisory group as well as potential participants and speakers. In a
stakeholder analysis, the client puts aside existing ideas of who ought to be
involved and looks at the vision. What parties affect the outcome? Who has a strong interest in the success
of the vision and how much power do they have. By charting the relative
position of stakeholders, the client begins to get a sense of what strategies
are need to make the vision a reality. For example, they will see that some
organizations that are key to success are powerful but not interested. Others
are not powerful but very interested.
One conclusion of
this exercise was that the program should be focused on bringing new actors to
the conference. If, by 2020, cultural heritage organizations in Europe and
North America make LGBTI history visible and accessible, we needed as many
partners in the mainstream cultural heritage world that we could find. This meant that in the outreach program
we had to focus on people known to the client and people not yet known to the
client.
Networks add value at a structural, relational and cognitive level
Finding people we
do not yet know is the playground of a networked organization expert. In the networks surrounding each and
every one of us there are “weak” and “strong” ties – concepts coined in the
1970’s by a researcher by the name of Granovetter. “Weak” ties are the
connections we have with people outside our immediate (family, work) affiliations
that give us access to deals, knowledge, tips and connections. They are not
part of our “circle” and our circle gives us access to them.
Here are two good examples of how we used the structural value of networks to find the people that could help make our vision a reality. To find archivists throughout Europe who may be interested in working with us
in the future, we used our connection with the director of the Dutch National
Archive. He is a leader in the
international community of archivists and he enabled us to have access to the
relevant email addresses.
When IHLIA’s director recently visited London, she had an experience that led to the creation of a new weak link. She came across a
permanent ‘trail’ at the British Museum, pointing out the various objects of
same-sex desire exhibited throughout the museum.
These objects are and always have been part of the permanent collection, and since the advent of the 'trail' visitors can easily find them. The British Museum provides visitors with a folder , available at the front desk. Keen to get in touch with the people behind the trail, our interns dug deep and found the person responsible. We invited him as a keynote speaker to the conference. As a representative of a
world-renowned heritage institute he is an important binding element
between mainstream and community heritage organizations at the conference.
We used network
theory to define the content of the conference. Network theory has it that the
whole is made up of the sum of the parts, and the magic that happens when these
are brought together. It is not the act of bringing together that causes magic,
it is how people are brought together that make a difference. We all have
experienced reading a book in which many ideas from different people are
collected. It does not often have the feeling of magic to the reader – although
the process of creating the publication may have been magical to those
involved. The magic at a conference happens when the knowledge that one person
has, is purposefully added to the knowledge another person has, and that they
together create something new. The program was developed cognitive value of networks with this in mind. The
program looks at what exists, what tools and resources there are and leaves
space for developing the many divergent sorts of collaborations that are
possible when community and mainstream organizations meet and share ideas,
knowledge and ambitions. In fact, the program also acknowledges that we live in
connected times and that there is no reason to wait till some time in the
future to pour our ideas into a room. This was the reasoning behind creating a
blog on which all contributions were shared before the conference. In this way,
the participants could use their value face time at the conference to get to
the point of the conference: creating collaborations to make out vision
possible.
We developed the
relational level of the conference purposefully. If this conference is to be a
starting point for future collaboration, people need to know and trust each
other. They also need to have a
sense of community of like-minded people. The job at hand – the future we are
living into of LGBTI history being visible and accessible in every country in
Europe and North America, is for some people quite daunting. We know for
example that the Slovenian national archive does not accept the existence of
the lesbian archive and has actively worked, unsuccessfully, to close it down.
In the Ukraine and Russia, talking about homosexuality in public places has
just been declared punishable by law.
For these reasons,
an important part of creating the conference is creating a common ground, a
meeting place of people sharing the same values, vision an goals. By setting up
a facebook page, with its built in mechanisms for sharing and getting to know
others interested in any specific field or subject, and by presenting
information through the conference blog, the conference established itself as a
set of relationships, even before the conference started. These relationships
extend beyond the people in the room. They will be friends of friends and they
will be needed in the next phase of realising the vision. Clearly, the people
in the room at the conference will not be able to make the vision happen on
their own. They will need a community. A vast network of people who stand in a
future that says that ‘we’ are part of this great thing called ‘society’, its
history and its future.
The proof of the pudding
At this point,
with the conference about to happen, we do not know how the participants will take the vision and ensure its implementation. We do know that the future will be caused by actions. These
actions will have predictable and unpredictable results. They are already
happening. While we were preparing the conference, the librarian of a European
capital city received our invitation to participate in the conference shortly
after attending a meeting on women in the library world. At that meeting, a
young woman presented a very emotional statement. She was upset because while the position
of women in society were discussed, there was never reference to lesbians. The librarian listened and was moved. She happened to come from the same place as the
young woman. When my invitation to attend the LGBTI ALMS 2012 conference arrived a week
later she knew what she had to do: work with the young lady to make material
that is relevant to lesbians visible and accessible in her library. In a way,
our work was done in that city before the conference happened. What we
anticipate is that all through Europe, librarians, museum personnel, archivists
and people running special collections will find ways of making their LGBTI
content visible and accessible. That is our vision.
=========
Lin McDevitt-Pugh MBA
Lin McDevitt-Pugh is director of NetSHEila and expert in networked organizations.
She provides training to schools, universities, public and private companies
and employee networks, supporting them to do more, with more fun, by utilizing
the circles of people in which they operate.
For more on the conference, see the conference website.
