In April 2012, encouraged by the call made by the 35th General Congregation to promote international networking, a group of Jesuits and lay partners from all over the world gathered at Boston College to reflect on this matter. See website of the conference.
The group reviewed the concept and current experience of networking, its relationship to the universal mission of the Jesuits, its spiritual foundations and heritage, its organizational and governance mechanisms, and the challenges that it poses to the present structure and way of proceeding. After that meeting, a final document was published on December 2012.
The interest generated by the topic after the publication of the document was so wide that a group of institutions involved on the original conference decided to launch a Project called the Jesuit Networking Project. The idea was to continue the promotion of the Jesuit Networking topic in order to mainstream network thinking, research the current networks, and start thinking on possible tools to foster in a proper way regional and international networking within the Jesuit apostolic body.