How do networks sustain themselves (financially)?

May 2010

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I'm just back from the red eye and really tired - and wanted to capture a few reflections about network effectiveness and resourcing.

Yesterday, I attended a retreat day for the Girl Geeks of the World Cafe at Juanita Brown's beautiful home in Marin County. This is a group of women who have been working/playing together to explore how technology can support the World Cafe global community. Two years ago when this group was meeting in California, Nancy White saw me online and skyped me. In a kismit way, the Fedex man rang the bell at the same time and delivered Juanita Brown's book. As I returned to the skype call, I got to hear Juanita's voice for the first time! Much of my connection has been facilitated by online technology so it was great to participate - finally - face-to-face.

The World Cafe is structured as a 501-c3, but it is really a network. One of the things we discussed was were strategies for resourcing the World Cafe. One of conversation threads was about how to make the story of how this network works more visible - and how a network goes about resourcing itself. We talked a lot about gift economies, storytelling, and some web2.0 tools that facilitate this.

Marnie Webb by JD Lasica

The session I did at Blogher was about tools for community fundraising (Marnie Webb set up a wiki with notes and links). My friend, David Cohn, attended. Dave founded “Spot Us,” a nonprofit that allows an individual or group to take control of news in their community by sharing the cost (crowdfunding) to commission freelance journalists to write important, or uncovered news stories. (Hmm ... here we have another nonprofit that is legally a nonprofit, but operates as a network)

Dave wrote a terrific piece called "Ten Tips for Journalists to Raise Money"

By the way, JD Lasica took some great photos of our session and at BlogHer - check them out.

It strikes that this type of fundraising - personally socially networked fundraising or crowdfunding - is something that a network will do to sustain itself. What are the best practices? What are the conditions that the network will do this for itself? How is this activity best guided?