Dear Amanda, thank you for your interest in the methods.
As I guess you know well, heterogeneous (especially civic society
networks) are super complex as entities are often variably formalized,
resourced, often 'unstable' and sometimes resist normalization and
classification.
To illustrate in our work, some start as 2-3 people, then informal
groups, become initiatives or coordinations of entities, later maybe
NGOs, that create projects that are often more visible than themselves
and might work outside of one entity, even becoming a new one
(spinning-off). This creates fairly dynamic, vibrant and contemporary
cultural outputs and effects, but it is hard to capture and process.
CLUBTURE.org network is particularly good in supporting (even
under-resourced) in open and participatory grass-root culture, then
advocating for its support in doing events, research,
publications...but also people do drop out, projects fail and what
not. There could be a better capture of all to reflect and learn.
For start we entered 50+ organizations, 10+ key infrastructure
entities (and their DKC-HR network) in Wikidata and some basic info on
Wikipedia and media on Commons, just to have initial minimal
visibility and clarity. Mind you I still need to make the first
Wikidata:Property proposal and figure out what is most useful.
We have indeed already started exploring how to visualize networks
across different types of spatial maps, timelines, but also want to
think about capacities (on scale fully volunteer hobist to fully
professional NGO), types and levels of activities (local - int. but
also topical vs. interdisciplinary) and visibility (use of soc. media
and institutional recognition)... with a huge challenge of this not
being just single points of (static) views.
Actually I hope that this can be useful for others in Wikimedia to
track and learn about dynamics of diverse entities (for example of
Wikimedia Affiliates), which are hugely different and hard to grasp as
'network', unless you are fully committed insider with not only access
to info, but capacity to make it useful insight and knowledge.
If you think we could work together and engage others with more
general discussion on methods of tracking networks on Wikidata we can
maybe start with a zoom session and maybe create WikiProject for it?
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Networks_of_organizations
?
Best - Z.