Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness

Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness
Inquiry and learning into social networks, organizational network analysis, and the relationships among people and systems in complex organizations and networks.

Saturday, November 08, 2003

Multiples of 1

The Multiples of 1 conference just concluded. It was a mentally enriching (and tiring) day and a half of speakers, dialogue, and networking.

Bill Snyder (co-author of Cultivating Communities of Practice) cast the provocative question about the emergence of community from those attending, and what its domain of practice going forward would be.

Robin Chase, CEO of Zipcar, talked of the unexpected but vital community that emerged among Zipcar customers. The success of the company is all about relationships.

Francis Duffy -- a real pioneer in thinking and designing spaces for people to collaborate and work -- challenged the speakers to think about history and theory, not just the immediate in the design of devices (nodes?) that shape our lives. The "horrible" 20th century was brought to us, he said, by people who fundamentally believed that people could not be trusted, and that is why it was all about control, and why it was so horrible. We are building the wrong spaces in cities the wrong shapes.

He and Robin both helped me distinguish a new kind of community, a community of the "commons," that is, one that arises around a shared artifact or space. (Long ago, when I smoked, I did notice the special community and norms -- guilty smiles and all -- of the people who frequented the "smoking room.")

David Reed (author of Reed's Law, which demonstrates that networks that support the formation of communicating groups create value that scales exponentially with network size, opened a conversation that Richard Li of Red hat had begun Friday afternoon and took it to another level. The question in the room became, what is possible when the means of production of network capacity shifts to the nodes in a network? (I confess I did not understand much of the technology in his remarks, nor the economics in the talk by Yochai Benkler of Yale Law School that followed, but I have a lot to think about.)

Kudos to Kate Ehrlich, Hani Asfour, and David Tamés for designing an awakening experience.

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patti anklam. How to make networks work.

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