Open Networkers, are people who take upon themselves the burden of maintaining contact with a large number of people. Generally Open Networkers are happy to accept a connection to all those who ask. Many Open Networkers cannot ask you to join their networks because they have already exceeded the "lifetime Limit" of invitations that LinkedIn has set.
Open Networkers are not obliged to accept your invitation, they retain the right to refuse invitations, but they seldom do. Generally if you invite an Open Networker to join your network in a polite way, they will happily accept your invitation. Open the profiles of all the people below and see how many of them you can easily connect with.
Most Open Networkers have a reason for building a super-large network. In my own case I was a person with lots of experience in online networking arising from my work on NZ Dances, between 1995 and 2000. There were over 700 people involved in that network.
The opening of LinkedIn (2004) was for me a key opportunity to build a large network that would be useful both to me and to the NZ business community. At first it was slow hard work. My current first level network is over 9911, including only 1,000 New Zealanders. (There are over 2522 in Kiwi Scrum) New Zealanders are NOT well connected to each other. Kiwi Scrum is one small effort to help change that. (I estimate that about 70,500 New Zealanders are LinkedIn members, most of them with less than 100 connections. You can't find them, because they are not "linkedin".)
August 2011 update: About 118 New Zealanders have in excess of 1000 direct connections. Five with more than 10,000 connections. Many more people have understood the importance of joining many diverse LinkedIn Groups. (Up to 50.)
If you have your own reasons for wanting to build and maintain a large network, you might choose to have your name listed as an Open Networker. Don't rest there. Actively connect to all the other open networkers yourself. Then quietly continue to build your network to make it both bigger and more diverse.
Regards
John S Veitch
The Network Ambassador
Every member of Kiwi Scrum should take advantage of the opportunity to connect to all of these people. That will give you a well connected base. Then build your network in two entirely different ways. Look for people who specialize in the same things as you, and look for people who live in your local area. Help other people. Make a special effort to mop up the ones who only have a few connections. Encourage them to join Kiwi Scrum?
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