whitepaper | Hive Research Lab

In the summer of 2014, Hive Research Lab facilitated a design charrette focused on supporting youth interest-driven learning trajectories in the Hive. As part of the preparation for the meeting, members were asked to provide illustrative examples of what successful pathways or trajectories looked like on the ground. From the extraordinarily rich stories that members provided emerged our latest publication, a community-developed white paper entitled: On-ramps, Lane Changes, Detours and Destinations: Building Connected Learning Pathways in Hive NYC through Brokering Future Learning Opportunities.

This paper [pdf, exec sum, handout] makes a strong case for the importance of brokering as a key strategy for supporting youths’ interests in sustained and robust ways. Brokering (1) connects youth to meaningful future learning opportunities including events, programs, internships, individuals, and institutions that will support their ongoing interest-driven learning; and (2) enriches youth social networks with adults and peers that are connected to or have knowledge of future learning opportunities. The paper emphasizes that the Hive NYC community—with its robust social network of educators and professionals—represents an impressive cache of human and social capital that could be leveraged more fully through brokering.

Challenges to brokering are discussed as well, including how a young person’s network orientation or help-seeking orientation may affect her ability to take up and navigate the opportunities brokered by high resource individuals. Several recommendations targeted towards individual organizations and the network are offered as generative starting points for thinking about ways to extend the impact of brokering.

We wish to thank the 70+ individuals (named in the Appendix) who engaged in the collaborative sensemaking discussions, reflective conversations, and feedback-giving that resulted in this paper. We hope this collective effort felt of value to all who participated and that HRL, as facilitators of the process, was able to capture adequately the thinking and expertise of the community.

And of course, we look forward to more conversations and collective knowledge building around this core youth development practice!

In the summer of 2014, a group of Hive NYC members and stakeholders came together to think, talk and design around the idea of ‘working open’ in the Hive. The context was the Network that Learns design charrette. Led by Hive Research Lab, we created this two day sprint as a space to address key knowledge management issues that were brought up State of the Hive meeting in March 2014. Members had voiced needs around making it easier to locate expertise in the network, continually capture best practices from ongoing projects, and figure out how the network could be a context for accumulating collective wisdom. In our ongoing work studying innovation in a ‘networked’ context, we’ve see how just such issues can be critical in supporting organizations to effectively leverage Hive as they dive into new areas of work and strengthen existing ones, and so the charrette acted as a space where we could collectively think them through.

We used the idea of ‘working open’ during the charrette as somewhat of a grounding theme that cut across these knowledge management issues. As a way of working that values collaboration, failing early and often, ongoing storytelling, community building and an experimental and flexible spirit, ‘working open’ felt like it might have something to offer these issues that were raised at the State of the Hive. If understood and supported in a way that speaks to the Hive community’s distinct context, working open could be considered a mode of engagement that allows Hive members to progress both individually and collectively.

The white paper we’re sharing now [pdf] is the result of those discussions, and aims to synthesize many views about what constitutes ‘working open’, what it looks like in practice, what tensions are involved and what this all might mean for the Hive NYC community. Drawing on the voices of participating Hive members, as well as our field research in Hive NYC, the white paper offers somewhat of a vision for collective organizational learning within the network. We’d love to hear what you think, and how you could see these ideas applying to the way you do your everyday work.