• Who: Hosted by Hive HQ. Attended by Hive NYC member organizations.
• What: Semi-annual Mandatory Hive meet-up for 2014
• Where: Centre for Social Innovation NYC
• When: Thursday March 20, 2014 10:00 am – 1:00 PM EST
• Why: To practice network thinking, consider what Hive might focus on moving forward and identify mechanisms for collective impact.

Here is the agenda breakdown:

1. Practicing Network Thinking (40 min.):
   We spent the first part of the meeting surveying the Hive landscape by identifying factors, trends and uncertainties that characterize our context as a network and create our shared goals. Leah Gillam (Director of Hive NYC) presented the slide deck below to begin, then we worked as a group to populate the landscape:
   
   Hive NYC SOTH 2014-deck from valleraj

1. Individual Organization Landscape mapping (15 min.):
   
   Next, Hive member organization representatives used a similar framework to map their organizational landscapes in order to identify a realistic sense of where we might go next together.

1. Break-out Groups (30 min.):
   
   Member representatives from 49 Hive organizations broke into small focus groups to share their Individual Organization Landscape maps and discuss ways they overlap. Each group generated a list of big issues they care about within the context of Hive Learning Network.
   Groups wrote the issues onto post-it notes according to three categories illustrated by color:
   • Areas of collective interest/What we care about (Yellow post-it)
   • Ideas/solutions (Pink post-it)
   • Specific problems to solve (Green post-it)

1. Connecting the dots: (20 min.):
   Everyone came back together and placed all their post-it notes into one area. They were given three stickers in the shape of red dots. They used these stickers to vote on the most relevant issues/problems/ideas. This is how member representatives indicated the areas they found most important to their organization within the context of their work with Hive.

1. Affinity Mapping (30 min.):
   Once everyone had placed their organizations votes we had a group discussion about the areas that received the most votes. Chris Lawrence (Sr. Director Mozilla Mentor Community) led member reps in a lively discussion about how/why they voted. People verbalized their ideas and rationales supporting their votes. From that discussion we were able to create an interesting list of small working groups that shared affinity around one of the items most voted for. Here are some examples of what people are most interested in working on:
   • Funding and resource development (described on one popular post-it as the “Funding Industrial Complex”)
   • Youth pathways, impact on making them more overt, transparent and well-walked – aggregate opportunities
   • Sharing of resources, research, evalution instruments, practices and results across similar orgs
   • Reconcile social-emotional learning with the common core.
   • Spread of programs that together advocate for social change that positively impacts youth
   • Philanthropic equity and leverage dollars
   • Group of those not interested in common core, sharing alternatives
   • Social-emotional learning
   • Industry/corporate sponsors

1. Wrap up (20 min.):
   
   We opened the floor for the last part of the meet up. Hive member representatives shared feedback, questions and comments. We shared examples of ways to move forward with areas for desired impact, specific problems to solve, ideas/solutions and the affinity groups. One of these examples was led by Juan Rubio (Associate Director of Online Leadership Program at Global Kids).He shared an idea about Youth Meet-ups among Hive organizations. He explained how this idea would provide opportunity for exchange, collaboration, creation and innovation for youth. Having reocurring Hive meet-ups for young people will allow them to come together in an informal space to get to know each other, learn what they’re working on, what organizations they’re affiliated with, to inspire collaborations and exchanges in a way that mirrors the experiences of Hive’s adult member reps.

1. NEXT STEPS:

   Sign up to join an affinity group or cohort to read, build or design around the issues and ideas that are important to you. Please sign up here: https://hive.etherpad.mozilla.org/stateofthehive2014

What came out of this meet-up?

After the meet up was over, Hive HQ took a lot of time to reflect on the ideas and topics we discussed. There were many areas where ideas overlapped and many areas that evolved through conversation. To summarize these things we put together the following visualizations. They each correlate to various parts of the meet up and are listed as so.

• Practical Network Thinking: Surveying the Hive landscape by identifying factors, trends and uncertainties that characterize our context as a network with shared goals. These ideas came out of the first part of the meet-up when we worked as a group to populate the Hive Landscape.

Connecting The Dots:

Here are the results from the dot vote where members got to vote on topics most interesting for them. The largest words depict the most votes, the smallest words are the least amount of votes.
• Ideas/Solutions (Pink post-its):
• Collective Impact (Yellow post-its):
• Problems to solve (Green post-its):

For a detailed view of images above please see them
here

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