John Smith and Etienne Wenger invited me to give a talk on social networks for the CPsquare research forum; I gave the talk yesterday to a global audience of almost 20 people, I think. It is CPsquare’s 2nd birthday; it was good to be able to reflect on how my own thinking has evolved over the past two years and to see how much of my work in networks is rooted in the time I was active in CPsquare at the beginning.

I took the opportunity to pull together the storyline for my paper for the Bentley conference in March, which is based on the Report I am doing for the Ark Group which I hope to see in print next month (stay tuned for announcement!).

The CPsquare conference call is only one element of the research forum. I started a few days ago by posting one of the questions I’ve already brought up here (and received responses about) and at the KMcluster: identity. The collaboration space for CPsquare will be open for another week, and I hope and expect to get more feedback and more tough questions. Some of yesterday’s questions included:

• If I say that networks can be managed, whom am I talking about? (Who is it who does the managing?) [You can really only manage the environment in which networks grow and develop; leadership is about network leverage.]
  
• In SNA surveys, how do you account for potential inaccuracy based on how people report about themselves? [I believe that good question design can improve the possibility of valid responses.]
  
• How well do people in a network understand the geometry of that network intuitively? [Not usually, but research shows that effective leaders understand the networks in their organizations.]
  
• If a network like Gennova has membership dues, how is it not a formal organization? What are the distinctions, really, between organizations, communities and networks? [This is my very large current inquiry, which is to understand distinctions in types of network and how to select governance models, membership boundaries, etc. in each.]
  
• How can you do a survey if you don’t have a sampling frame (that is, you don’t know who the people in the network actually are?) [Let people fill in the blanks to a question like "Whom do you go to when you need to solve a problem related to topic x?"]
  
• How do you decide what questions to ask? [Start with the presenting business problem and decide what you want to find out.]
• How do you avoid the fear of some people that “big brother” is out to find out about them? [Communicate, communicate, communicate. Sponsoring manager must publicly commit to honoring requests for privacy.]
  

The awesome Nancy White blogged most of the conversation, and Patrick Hindert (a colleague of Denham Grey’s) provided detailed notes as well. I don’t think I’ve ever had the experience of so many of my words being captured and available right back at me before. It’s humbling.