A challenge for our community is to ensure that community members feel encouraged to volunteer as Core Group members, are enabled to play a useful and gratifying part in collective leadership, and can leave in a transparent and healthy manner for the best of the community and of themselves. In other words, a crucial challenge for KM4Dev is Core Group succession management.

Community members Jasmin Suministrado and Benedict Rimando have led one of the IFAD-funded KM4Dev Futures studies looking at this challenge and have identified that the processes and systems for succession management are quite random and not well institutionalized. Indeed the ideal picture is far from the current reality.

We would like to ask the community to read Jasmin and Benedict’s study on Ideas for improving Core Group succession management in KM4Dev which has very interesting components:

• Why this matters (in this community of practice as in any other)

• The ideal picture and the reality of succession management - from the perspectives of a) a community member and b) a Core Group member.

• Some suggestions (as mind maps) for each of the steps in succession management: Awareness building, matching needs & opportunities, recruitment and application, initiation, integration and performance, withdrawal and renewal.

Based on your reading of the study, we would love you to reflect on your own experiences in KM4Dev and in other communities, and build up this conversation by sharing your ideas for improving succession in the KM4Dev core group. Possible topics include:

• What is your experience of leadership succession in informal groups and community organisations (including KM4Dev) as a volunteer leader or regular member?

• Where do you think are the most immediate succession needs? At what phase described in Jasmin/Benedict’s piece of work, or otherwise?

• What early wins and long term approaches to Core Group suggestion management can get us to a healthier and more transparent, more effective Core Group and community as a whole?

Thank you to Jasmin and Benedict for this important piece of work.  Lets here from you now.

Warm wishes,