H-1) Introductory Note: We begin this section with an explanation or definition. The written guidelines in SSHRC's October, 1995, document entitled, "Strategic Research Networks in Education and Training", stipulate on page 9 that partnerships exclude post-secondary institutions. However, in conversations with SSHRC staff, it was agreed that we could treat such institutions as partners as long as we provide a justification in this application. We have included universities and colleges among our partners for four reasons.

1. We view partnerships as active alliances between post-secondary educational institutions and non-educational institutions.
2. We have a number of research projects in which college or university students are the subjects of research. Colleges and universities are thus expected to commit resources in support of such projects in the same way that we would expect non-educational public, private, or non-profit partners to do so.
3. Nine universities have committed $748,750 in cash and in-kind contributions to EvNet. Two community colleges are contributing $656,800 to our network. To exclude such organizations that commit resources to our network simply on the grounds that they are post-secondary educational institutions seems exclusionary and somewhat prejudicial.
4. Our network paradigm attempts to integrate and build bridges between education and training. Post-secondary institutions specialize primarily in education and secondarily in training, while private, public, and non-profit organizations often specialize in training. We felt it was necessary to include post-secondary educational institutions as partners in order to capture this symbiosis between the two education/training halves of the same coin.

H-2) Managing Partnerships and Collaborations: Part H is essentially about the methodology of how we will manage partnerships and collaborations among our multi-disciplinary researchers and multi-sector public, private and non-profit organizational partners. We represent 33 academic members from 15 disciplines in coalition with 35 collaborators and 21 private corporations, 29 public organizations, and 11 non-profit organizations. Our 21 private corporations are from publishing, learnware development, telecommunications, workplace training, management consulting, financial services, biotechnology, multimedia design and production, software development, networking, and INTERNET services. Our 29 public organizations are mainly universities and colleges, but there are also 4 government agencies at the federal, provincial and municipal levels (health, environment, education, and planning), and 4 schools or school boards in the k-12 sector. Our 11 non-profit organizations represent the span of addiction, labour consulting and services, teacher federations, trade unions, services for immigrants, the disabled, and women, researchers specializing in the INTERNET, social research institutes, and labour-market skills training. The management of such a multi-sector group is indeed challenging.

We propose our own administrative structure outlined in Part E: Management Structure and Networking Arrangements as the mechanism for managing these relationships. We conceive of the methodology of managing collaborations and partnerships as six overlapping circles in research, networking, dissemination, training, stakeholding, and administration, or the' management of management'.

H-3)Managing Research Partnerships: Research partnerships and collaborations intersect in the roles and contributions among members of the research team (academic member, collaborators, and public, private, and non-profit organizations) outlined in Appendix D. On-the-ground relationships will be managed primarily by the principal investigator in each of the 14 research projects. They will be guided by, and will report to, EvNet's Research Committee outlined in Part E: Management Structure and Networking Arrangements. A critical phase in research partnerships is establishing initial agreement among researchers, collaborators and partner organizations over the terms and conditions, and rights and duties, stipulated in the research contract. This is an exceedingly time-consuming task. It involves negotiating the compromises between the sometimes abstract interests of academic researchers with the more applied and immediate interests of collaborators and partner organizations. One model for this kind of initial 'contract' may be found in the detailed and careful letter written by Dale Schenk, Director, Centre for Continuing Education, McMaster University. The contents and terms of this letter were negotiated among Dale, Gwen Crossan, and Carl Cuneo in several meetings. It expresses a very close integration between the goals of the Centre for Continuing Education in evaluating alternative means of delivering its courses, and the paradigm developed by EvNet members for the comparative evaluation of alternative means of education and training delivery. We would suggest this as a model for other negotiations in our own and other networks. It is an excellent example of how EvNet intends to manage its research collaborations. Research partnerships will be monitored directly by the Research Committee and indirectly by the Management Committee (e.g. in the formulation of an Intellectual Property Rights Policy). The Research Committee will be particularly concerned with the Theme basis of managing collaborations. In Theme One, this involves ensuring that the lessons from INTERNET curricula providers, private educational institutes, and workplace trainers (like Andersen Consulting and EduPlus) are brought to bear on post-secondary education administrative practices and policies in the implementation of instructional technologies. This will be most effectively done in the design of Project 1 and the dissemination of its recommendations in the planned focus group meetings with senior administrators of colleges and universities. In Theme 2, managing collaborations will involve ensuring that sufficient integration occurs among the three teacher-and-technology projects. We plan to pursue discussions with the Canadian Association of University Teachers, and have begun discussions with teacher federations and faculty unions, as a way of bringing their views to bear on the design and execution of Theme 2 research. In Theme 3, the Research Committee will arrange special joint meetings between the principal investigators of the 5 theme projects and the Dissemination Committee in order to bring about ongoing consultations on the relationship between developing learnware products and commercial and other dissemination opportunities. These will essentially be joint meetings among the PIs, publishers, INTERNET providers, content designers, and television interests (e.g, TV Ontario, one of our dissemination partners). The greatest challenge to managing research collaborations at the Theme level will be in Theme Four. Here we have essentially four quite different stakeholders: (1) college and university students concerned mostly with extra-curricula activities and informal learning; (2) students with physical disabilities worried about the effects of computer-mediated communications on their educational and social relationships with enabled persons; (3) corporate workplace organizations (like Mentor, EduPlus, and SystemCorp); and, (4) non-government organizations and labour organizations. As we travelled the country and spoke in person and on the phone with other program leaders, as well as with private and non-profit sector partners, we quickly realized that the greatest challenge in building a communications plan among the five funded networks will be in integrating trade union and corporate organizations under the same umbrella. Potential trade union partners sometime asked us about our corporate partners; corporate partners sometimes told us they could not sit in any network 'dominated' by trade union partners. While we do realize that some trade union and corporate partners cannot work together in the same network, we do know of many examples of successful management/labour cooperation.

H-4) Managing Networking Partnerships: A number of partners in EvNet are not as concerned with the distribution of the content (research findings; policy recommendations; tangible products) of the network as much as they are with the means and methods of communications useful in the dissemination process. For this reason, we created a Networking Committee (means) separate from the Dissemination Committee (content) [please see Part E: Management Structure]. Networking partnering represents an alliance between researchers and public, private or non-profit partners in two related areas. First, some EvNet researchers have considerable experience and expertise setting up the mechanisms for electronic distribution. We have specialists in Web administration (Baggaley), web servers, web page production, web maintenance, and hypertext/hypermedia editing (Campbell, Cuneo, Holt, Hoinkes, Wright), 2D and 3D graphical design (Hoinkes and Wright), listserv management and maintenance (Lanfranco), MOOS (Holt), and MUDS (Harnish). Second, some EvNet partners, all the way from telecommunication companies like Bell Canada and NBTel to non-profit organizations like NirvCentre and the Distributed Knowledge Project at York University, are directly involved in supporting communications. The Networking Committee thus represents a coming together of means and methodologies of electronic and INTERNET infrastructural agents and content providers. Under Parts G (Dissemination) and I (Budget) we make an explicit offer to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the other four funded networks. We are willing to set up a central web node server to act as a conduit for the communications of business and content among the networks. This would provide a synthetic linking of all SRNETS in Canada and help to pool resources across the country in order to avoid duplication and attain efficiencies. This would be managed by our Networking Committee, though we suggest under Part G that an inter-network Networking Committee be set up which could develop a policy for such a facility

H-5) Managing 'Disseminating Partnerships': Dissemination Partnerships (content), as opposed to Networking Partnerships (means), will be co-ordinated through the Dissemination Committee (see Part E: Management). We have attempted to bring together two kinds of disseminators - the traditional media in publishing and television (Nelson Canada; Prentice-Hall, UBC Press, TVO; Irwin Publishing), and people and organizations who have special expertise in electronic distribution, especially over the INTERNET (Electronic Journal of Sociology; Athabasca University which distributes all of its courses at a distance by print, audio, or INTERNET). The traditional media are quickly moving into electronic distribution. We thought there would be a special synergy between these two groups in offering EvNet assistance in the diffusion of its findings and products. We view the tasks of the Dissemination Committee as two fold. First, looking inward on the activities of the research teams in order to advise them on the appropriate modes, methods and formats which they should be developing, with an eye towards eventual dissemination. For example, dissemination for electronic delivery on the INTERNET has different implications for costing and format than diffusion in hard copy. Second, looking outwards, this Committee will be monitoring the rapid changes in the structure and content of dissemination channels and markets in order to bring their most up-to-date advice in this quickly changing field to bear on the development of content within EvNet.

H-6) Managing Training Partnerships: EvNet's Training Committee will oversee the management of training collaborations and partnerships in three areas.

• First, it will ensure that graduate (and undergraduate) student research assistants are properly trained and integrated within the nexus of partnerships criss-crossing specific research projects. That is, research assistants should not be isolated in the 'corners of projects' but should be fully exposed to the dynamics of developing partnerships that are the life and blood of network project teams. This is a critical part of their training.
• Second, the Training Committee will ensure that collaborations within research projects sufficiently bring together education and training, educators and trainers, formal educational institutions and informal and non-formal training organizations in the public, private and non-profit sectors. We do not view the theme of the present SSHRC competition to be education AND training, but education IN training, and training IN education. The Training Committee will ensure that this happens by broadcasting the paradigm in Figure 6, Appendix A-3.
• Third, the Training Committee will ensure that there are adequate collaborations and partnerships built into the development of the three Multimedia Training Modules being proposed by EvNet (these are outlined in Part F: Research Training and Part G: Dissemination). Each involves a different set of collaborations which have to be managed.
  1. The Workplace Training Module involves an inter-network collaboration between TeleLearning RN and EvNet through Tom Carey at the Universities of Guelph and Waterloo. The Training Committee will negotiate with TL-RN regarding the specific role that EvNet is expected to play in developing this particular module, as well as the rights and duties of each network, and the relative network claims to IPRs (Intellectual Property Rights).
  2. The Graduate Research Assistant Training Module involves the coordination of graduate research assistants across the country in the context of the annual workshops and the Summer Internship Institute in the Centre of Learning and Performance Technologies at Mount Allison University (Director, Tom Gram, an industrial trainer) in developing this module.
  3. The Higher Education Training Module on 'best practices' in implementing instructional technologies in teaching and learning involves managing the relationships among the instructional developers at McGill and McMaster Universities and the School of Applied Arts and Business at Algonquin College. This will be coordinated through the Training Committee.

H-7) Managing Stakeholding Partnerships: This refers to the future, and potentialities and opportunities, rather than to the present or past. We assume that EvNet is not a static coalition of partnerships, but will evolve outwards by bringing in fresh ventures (new research projects and dissemination opportunities) throughout the five years of funding. This is perhaps a survival mechanism more than anything else. It is based on the idea that the ultimate 'best practices' of EvNet is that it can cut its dependence on SSHRC and become an independent, self-sustaining entity by the end of Year Five. For this to happen, we have to put in place a structure in Year One that would work towards this goal. This is the function of the Stakeholding Committee (see Part E: Management). We view the most exciting area of activity of this Committee to be the international arena. We have already set up partnering relationships with the Netherlands (Peter Waterman at the Institute for Social Studies in the Hague), with the Asia Monitor Resource Centre in Hong Kong, and with Dr. Juan Manuel Garlbay, Coordinador de investigacion instituciónal y Desarrollo Docente , Universidad de las Américas, Puebla, México. Additionally, one of our researchers, Sam Lanfranco, has considerable expertise and experience in the international arena, especially in the NGO and labour communities. Such contacts and resources are only the beginnings of the management of a vast new area of activity for EvNet.

H-8) Managing the Management of Partnerships: Finally, the management of all these collaborations and partnerships must itself be centrally managed. This will be the function of EvNet's Management Committee. In order to introduce some order and rationality into this complex web of partnerships, we have developed an administrative structure in which a representative from each of the Research, Networking, Dissemination, Training, and Stakeholding Committees sits on the Management Committee. This cross-membership is critical to managing the management of collaborations of these separate committees. The guide for doing so takes us back to the early part of our research program in Part D where we outlined the skeleton of the theory of the Learning Organization. EvNet's ability to manage the management of collaborations and partnerships will be guided by the following adaptations of Senge's (1990) five disciplines.

(1) Systems Thinking: the system of collaborations at the network level is greater than the sum of individual collaborations in training, dissemination, stakeholding, and communications. (2) Personal Mastery within Collaborations: individuals develop their skills on a lifelong basis by connecting their personal learning in collaboration with other individuals and organisations; organizations develop their group skills on a lifelong basis (at least as long as the organization survives in competitive climates) by connecting their organizational learning in partnership with other organizations in network settings.

(3) Mental Models: organizations must attempt to become conscious of deeply held assumptions against working with other organizations in collaborative networks (e.g. jealously guarding intellectual property rights).

(4) Building Shared Vision: organizations at all levels of a network become committed to a democratically created shared vision of network goals and means.

(5) Collaborative Learning or Teamwork: academic members, collaborators, and public, private, and non-profit organizations learn more by working in collaborative networks than in isolation.