Ideas

Jan

2026

From Minneapolis: The Power of Collective Courage

A dear friend from Minneapolis sent me this heartfelt message about the resilience of her fellow citizens in the face of the ICE crackdowns (shared with permission):

“I’m so proud of my city right now. Everyone is in it for the long haul. Every shitty thing they do, more of us come out to witness, record, object. I’m expecting it to get worse before it gets better (if that’s even a thing anymore ‘better’), but we won’t go down quietly & we will win the narrative war.”

As an eyewitness account of the power of community she recommended:

https://margaretkilljoy.substack.com/p/from-minneapolis-ive-never-seen-unity

Its author really captures the spirit of what’s unfolding:

“The resistance to ICE in Minneapolis is strong, generalized, and sustained. It’s also entirely decentralized and leaderless (or “leaderful” if you’d like).

Dec

2025

Van Beleidsprogramma naar Wijkimpact – Zo sla je eindelijk de brug

De kloof tussen beleid en wijk is geen motivatieprobleem, maar een verbindingsprobleem.

Vanuit mijn werk aan het bouwen van sterke samenwerkingscommunities zie ik dit patroon telkens weer: beleid, professionals en wijkbewoners opereren in parallelle werelden. Allen met eigen belangen, logica en doelen. Ze snappen elkaar niet omdat ze letterlijk verschillende talen spreken.
Wat nodig is? Gemeenschappelijke grond: een “werkveldtaal” waarin beleidsmaker, buurtcoördinator en bewoner elkaar daadwerkelijk begrijpen. Niet door één perspectief op te leggen, maar door samen een gedeelde werkelijkheid te creëren.

Dát is waar SDGs (duurzame ontwikkelingsdoelen) en IDGs (innerlijke ontwikkelingsdoelen) hun waarde bewijzen: als brugbegrippen tussen werelden die concrete maatschappelijke doelen verbinden met de capaciteiten die nodig zijn om ze te realiseren.

In onze praktijkgids laten Johan Vermeulen en ik zien hóe je die verbinding via SDGs en IDGs smeedt.… Read more...

Oct

2025

The Dance of Mapping and Facilitation – Field Building at a Global Agricultural Conference

Aldo de Moor & Nancy White

When Nancy White and I stepped onto the stage at the KM Triversary Forum 2025, a global online conference on Knowledge Management for Development, this year focused on bridging the research-practice gap, we weren’t just presenting another conference paper. We were sharing a story eight years in the making, one that began in a conference hall in Lusaka, Zambia, and that challenges conventional wisdom about how we navigate complexity.

The Zambia Conference Experiment: Where It All Began

Picture this: January 2017, Lusaka, Zambia. Practitioners and researchers from across the globe gathered for the INGENAES Global Symposium and Learning Exchange—a USAID-funded initiative designed to bridge three seemingly disparate worlds: gender equity, nutrition, and agricultural extension services.… Read more...

Aug

2025

When Paper Beats Pixels – A Bikepacking Lesson in Effective Technology Use

During my recent bikepacking trip through the Dutch countryside, I had one of those sudden insights about how we actually use technology in our daily lives.

I’d planned my routes using the brilliant Fietsknoop – a sophisticated web app that navigates the Dutch cycling node network by calculating the shortest path between numbered waypoints along cyclist-friendly “green roads”.

The app creates a simple list of nodes forming the shortest path: start at 47, head to 23, then 89, then 12, and so on until you reach your destination.

The obvious next step seemed to be to mount my phone in the bike holder for turn-by-turn navigation. But after just one morning of cycling, this turned out to be a less than ideal setup.… Read more...

Jun

2025

Reclaiming our agency over AI

The AI Now Institute has published a most timely and incisive “Artificial Power: 2025 Landscape Report”, proposing an actionable strategy for the public to reclaim agency over the future of AI. Excerpt from the Executive Summary:

“Why society would ever accept this bargain is the critical question at hand. Amid the excitement over AI’s (speculative) potential, the sobering reality of its present and recent past is obscured. When we consult the record on how AI is already intermediating critical social infrastructures, we see that it is materially reshaping our institutions in ways that ratchet up inequality, render institutions opaque to those they are meant to serve, and concentrate power in the hands of the already powerful. It makes clear that for all the whiz-bang demos and bold Davos proclamations, on the ground AI is consistently deployed in ways that make everyday people’s lives, material conditions, and access to opportunities worse and the systems that incorporate them stronger.”

May

2025

Community Building: The Hard Work Beyond the Tools

Just came across this story by Elle Hunt in The Guardian, which highlights an often overlooked fact: community BUILDING means exactly that – it requires time and sustained effort for a community to truly form and thrive:

“The word ‘community’ has warm, fuzzy connotations. But a siloed, individualistic culture also makes it harder to establish and maintain community; creating a shared identity and spirit of reciprocity takes effort and is not always comfortable.”

https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2025/feb/05/how-to-build-community

Time and time again, this truth is forgotten – especially with the abundance of (online) community tools that promise instant connection, but often overlook the hard work required to build genuine community.

Of course, we community building professionals know that very well, but amidst the deluge of tools, tech, and systems we face in our daily work, it’s sometimes good to be reminded of the social roots of it all through a simple personal story: getting along with your neighbors!… Read more...

Apr

2025

The Community (Platform) Recession – Breaking Free to Build Better

Richard Millington from FeverBee Community Consultants shares some very interesting observations on how the field of community management may have entered a “community recession.” He points to possible causes such as a shift to profitability, changing member behaviors, and the growing expectations around AI.

This rings especially true in the area of platform-based enterprise communities. However, there is a much richer landscape of community types and tools—of which he lists some compelling examples. “Communities for Good,” in particular, is of personal interest to me and still offers so many opportunities for community building and support. The key development to watch is the gradual shift in community work from platform-centric to audience-centric approaches—what Richard calls the COMMUNITY EVERYWHERE approach.

Increasingly, communities live and work across many different online and physical spaces.… Read more...

Mar

2025

Augmenting Human Intelligence – How Generative AI Conversational Audio Extends Human Dialogue

In 2017, my friend and fellow mapmaker Christine Capra from consultancy company Greater than the Sum, interviewed me about my work on participatory community network mapping as collective sensemaking. We had a blast, Christine with her incisive questions turning this into a conversation so insightful, that – instead of Christine converting it into a single blog post – she produced a full series of six blog posts – over the next few years. As Christine wrote in her concluding post -at the height of the COVID19 pandemic:

It’s been over two years since my original interview with Aldo. That one interview was so rich, it generated six blog posts and an abiding friendship. We’ve met online semi-monthly ever since that first great conversation, to talk about our projects, challenges, ideas & dreams.

The Zambia Conference Experiment: Where It All Began

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