Designing a network with the people who would belong to it

2022 Connected Futures Forum and open design work

Held

2023 governance proposal (regional hubs, knowledge network)

Delivered to programme

Programme's decision on structure

Chose a university host, not a separate non-profit

Alumni network launch and town halls (Feb–Mar 2024)

Launched

2025 programme transfer to University of Twente

Programme, not the alumni network

Ongoing governance

Evolving

04Situation

A network cannot survive on a contact list alone. Working with fellow organizers and program leadership, I helped develop a model for a self-organizing University Innovation Fellows alumni community: how people participate, who makes decisions, how the organization relates to its institutional host, and what kind of infrastructure keeps members connected.

The University Innovation Fellows programme has trained students from universities around the world for more than a decade. Each year adds a cohort; each cohort graduates; and the people who were most engaged as students become, within a few years, a distributed group of professionals with a shared formation and no shared structure. The question the organisers took up in 2022 was how to turn that into something durable without building an institution nobody had asked for.

05Research

The design work was participatory by necessity: an alumni network designed for alumni rather than with them would have had no legitimacy and no members.

• The 2022 Connected Futures Forum brought alumni together and opened the question of what a network should do, who should run it, and what it should never become. The forum's sessions produced the first draft of the needs the structure had to serve.
• Open design work through 2022 and 2023 — working sessions, surveys and drafts shared back to the community — tested proposals against what members would actually join.
• Engagement with programme leadership on the relationship between an alumni body and its institutional host: what the programme could support, what it could not, and where an alumni organisation needed to be independent.

06Design decisions

Regional hubs around a shared knowledge network. The 2023 governance proposal, which I helped draft, organised participation geographically — hubs where members could meet and act locally — connected through a knowledge network for the things that only work at scale: shared resources, introductions, and the record of what alumni had learned. The hero animation shows that shape; the actual diagram from the proposal will be reconstructed and labelled as such.

Governance that members could see. The proposal set out who decides what: how hubs form, how decisions that affect the whole network are made, and how the network relates to the programme. Writing that down was the point; informal networks fail when the people doing the work are invisible and unaccountable.

A separate non-profit — proposed, not chosen. The proposal argued for an independent legal home for the alumni organisation. The programme chose instead to keep the network closely tied to a university host. That is the clearest instance in this story of a proposal and a decision diverging, and the network launched under the structure the programme chose. ^[S08]

07Artifact

What exists:

• The 2023 governance proposal: hubs, knowledge network, decision rights, host relationship.
• The alumni network itself, announced by the programme in February 2024, with launch town halls in February and March 2024; the announcement names me among the organisers with Vincent Arena and Jacqueline Curtsinger. ^[S08]
• Town hall agendas and notes and a timeline of the work, 2022–2024, which will be shown here once reviewed with the other organisers.

08Outcomes

The alumni network launched in 2024 and exists. ^[S08] The structure it launched under differs from the 2023 proposal in its institutional home, and its governance continues to evolve; I would not describe it as finished.

A separate event is worth keeping separate: in 2025 the University Innovation Fellows programme moved its home to the University of Twente's DesignLab. ^[S09] That is a transition of the programme, not of the alumni network, and the two should not be read as the same organisation.

What I did not do: found the programme, which predates my involvement by many years, or hold the title of UIF Fellow. My part was the alumni network's design, with two other organisers and the programme's leadership.

09Reflection

This was the slowest project on this site and the one where "design" meant the fewest drawings. Most of the work was listening, drafting, and bringing a draft back to the people it described until they recognised themselves in it. The decision that went against the proposal taught me the most: a well-argued structure is still only a proposal until the people with authority adopt it, and the useful response is to help make the chosen structure work.

It also shaped how I read every other institution I have worked with since: find out who decides, and whether the people doing the work can see it.