I am working with a community-based advocacy group to develop their strategies of influence. The one hour session at their last meeting articulated their five principal objectives, and a set of strategic priorities for the next two years. This has left us with the question of actions, and measures. With the small working group formed to prepare for the next meeting, in relation to actions, I suggested that delegates prepare themselves in the following way ….

I have been mulling over the relationship between communities of practice and networks. What does each social structure do that is distinctive? “Practice” means the legitimate behaviours and the formal and informal rules that guide that behaviour. Practice forms within the close relationships of a community of practice, between people who interact often, building up relationships with a history. However, these close relationships operate within the affordances and constraints of the wider social context. Staff of a government program, for instance, develop a body of practice within their team, while policy and politics provide a context for their action.  

The City of Melbourne has its strategy out, and a vision that covers all the bases. How about this - Melbourne will be, or it already is:

• a city for people
• a creative city
• economically prosperous 
• a knowledge city
• an eco-city
• a connected city.

So much for a simple vision, something you can grab hold of in a phrase. A city is a complex entity, but it's hard to sell your mission when you're trying to be so many things.

Andrew Campbell takes a slightly different tack, putting up a vision of NRM and the people in 2020. He takes seven elements and paints a picture of the future, each a different brush that puts in part of the picture. Then he tells us how to get there.

Landscape scale projects are a high priority for funders in Natural Resource Management (NRM), and a big opportunity for the federations of local Landcare groups known as Landcare Networks. Since around 1995, local groups with a sense of affiliation based on geography, agricultural systems and social community have been organising themselves into Landcare Networks. They have begun to think and operate at landscape scale.

Funders' are interested in landsscape scale projects as a way to target action where it will have most impact within a landscape, and integrate action between projects focused on different aspects of landscape change. Landcare's involvement presents a way to integrate goals and action between community groups, agencies and industry. In a recent forum in Bendigo, one of a series of three I have put together for the Landcare Network Readiness Project, Landcare staff and community leaders running landscape scale projects shared what they are learning and what underpins their success.

Pure command-and-control structures started breaking down post-WWII, in the industries experiencing most rapid change ? plastics and electronics. The emergent structure is a network of teams, collaborating where necessary, but functioning autonomously, making their own judgements about what needs to be done.