The Next Society 3: The Process

Let me begin by saying again that the emergent process for a future social/political/economic structure is going to be organic--that is, messy--if it's going to work at all.  All the wonderful theories in the world have less influence than all of the many competing and divergent interests that slowly form organic structure. 

When I talk about communities like Twin Oaks, I often joke that "...no one in their right mind would create a community like Twin Oaks."  That's because no one 'created' Twin Oaks.  Twin Oaks is the way that it is because it evolved that way over time.  It certainly didn't become the little behaviorist community that its founders envisioned.

Likewise, as new structures emerge, they won't be exactly what anyone has planned.  And they will emerge.  Anyone who thinks that capitalism as it's currently practiced is sustainable, hasn't looked what it's doing to the environment, the growing anti-globalism sentiment, and the fact that it's only a recent player on the scene (as I laid out in my first article, Some Background).

And I'm not saying that a decentralized, diverse society is what's going to happen.  It's what I consider most likely and most feasible (and I also think most desirable).  But if we're talking about an organic process, we're talking about something that we can't control.  Unexpected things are going to happen and society will change as a result.

When I say that this corporate capitalist society is not sustainable, I mean that  it will bring down the planet if it continues--but I also know that it will continue for a while yet.  I see us in the place where the Roman empire was as it started falling apart.  Just as that process took a long time, I see corporate capitalism in a slow, incremental process of decay.

The feudal system that followed the fall of Rome was fairly decentralized (although anything but nonhierarchal) even though there were periodic attempts to recreate a centralized structure.  The irony is that the biggest, longest lasting attempt (the Holy Roman Empire) turned out to be rather patchwork and decentralized.  As Wikipedia puts it: "The empire never achieved the extent of political unification ... evolving instead into a decentralized, limited elective monarchy composed of hundreds of sub-units, principalities, duchies, counties, Free Imperial Cities, and other domains."

And that's what I think is going to happen again--this is the patchwork politics I spoke about in my last post.  However, I think that successful communities, co-operative networks, etc, can form a template that can be built on and can influence the structures of this new, decentralized society.  And building those communities and alternative structures is the work that we can and need to do.

Trying to build a whole new society from a some blueprint won't work. It's good to have some idea of where we want to go, else as a society we will simply drift, but we're not going to be able to control the process.  Letting things happen, trying to influence what happens when we can and letting it go when we can't, is what we can do.  I think we will need to have some idealism and a lot of pragmatism to get anywhere.



Quote of the Day:  "How did Twin Oaks get so far from its origins?
"When I tried to start a Walden Two community, I didn't expect it to turn away from the scientific and rational and embrace popular movements.  But we did not have a lot of choice in member selection.  Who was available to join the fledgling community of 1969-1972?  Hippies, that's who.  I know one group that was very serious about Walden Two and tried to build a community without any hippies in it.  It failed for lack of people." - Kat Kinkade

The Next Society 2: A Patchwork Politic

There are lots of good ideas about what the next society could and perhaps should look like.  There's Parecon (Participatory Economics), which I wrote about way back in a post on Participatory Economics and Economic Theory, (7/8/08).  I just read quite a bit from a book entitled The Next Revolution by Murray Bookchin, where he talks about his theory of Libertarian Municipalism. There are a lot of interesting theories of how society could be organized. These are all lovely, detailed plans for the next society and, because of that, I don't think they're going to happen, at least not in any way that will be like their proponents specify.

I think Starhawk's writings on future economies in her book Webs of Power (which I also talked about in my post on Participatory Economics and Economic Theory) are more resonant with what I'm talking about. She looks at Participatory Economics, Natural Capitalism, the Gift Economy, and the views of bioregionalists, anarchists, and socialists, and concludes that "...in a diverse world we may need a spectrum of systems to fully fit each unique set of circumstances." She points out that "Our visionary political efforts might best be directed not toward putting in place some preconceived system but toward creating the conditions in which that experimentation can begin."

Faithful readers of this blog are probably aware that I consider intentional communities as a prime place to do that experimentation.  My vision of an emerging political/economic/social situation starts with having lots of successful experiments up and running and including not only communes and cohousing, but all sorts of cooperative businesses, a lot of the pieces of what is sometimes called the Solidarity Economy, and even bits of small scale capitalism--small businesses, family run stores, things that I will call true free enterprise.  (When I actually studied what free enterprise is, I realized it wasn't as bad as I thought.  The problems we are having are with corporate capitalism, also known as monopoly capitalism, where the big corporations use small companies as testing grounds for what's profitable and anything that works is either bought out by them or out competed by corporate imitation.  The only other alternative in our present system seems for an innovating business to become a major corporation themselves.  This is the grow or die strategy.  Another name for what we have now is 'growth capitalism'.)

Once we have enough of these small systems up and running, I believe that the next step is in the process could be to network the successful experiments, perhaps using what Bookchin calls a democratic confederation. (But probably not as precisely structured as he details.) So rather than having one overarching system, there are lots of small, local, diverse economic and political systems, connected in a highly decentralized structure.  This is based on the idea that what works in one place probably won't be what works in a very different place.  While there are no guarantees on any of this, I think this might be a workable scenario.

How do we do this?  That's the subject of my next piece: The Process.



Quote of the Day: "What is our vision, our picture of an ideal society and economy? When we say 'Another world is possible,' what kind of world are we talking about?
"The global justice movement is diverse.  It ranges from union leaders who want to secure a fair share of this economy for their members to old line Marxists, to anarchists, to indigenous communities struggling to preserve their traditional lands and cultures.  No one picture of the world can describe all the different viewpoints.  No one vision may actually serve this tremendous diversity.  And how could it? How could the aspirations of an urban office worker be the same as that of a Mayan farmer in Chiapas?  Why should we think that one form of economy or social organization should serve all?" - Starhawk

Reclaiming the Commons

In 1968, Garrett Hardin wrote an often cited paper for Science magazine, called “The Tragedy of the Commons”.  He claimed that any common property “remorselessly generates tragedy” since it’s to the advantage of each individual to use as much of this common thing that they share (called by those who deal with this stuff, “The Commons”) and thus deplete it to the point no one could use it.  While this might make some theoretical sense, many writers since (most notably Elinor Ostrum--who I talked about in my post on Original Virtue, 9/14/08) have pointed out that tribal societies have managed the commons without difficulty for generations and generations.

The book, Whose Common Future? by the staff of the magazine The Ecologist (subtitle “Reclaiming the Commons”), is an in depth look at the use and misuse of the commons.  They begin by citing several examples from around the world where local folks carefully manage their common assets.  They point out that tribes, neighborhoods, and societies have developed checks and balances so that no one takes a lot more than their share and resources are sustained rather than depleted.

Then they look at the enclosure movement, which was the end of common property and the beginning of almost all property being private. (For more on this see my post on Land, 5/28/09, where I reference Whose Common Future?)  The book goes into great detail about globalization and privatization, how power elites want to manage the commons and profit from it.

In their final chapter, called “Reclaiming the Commons”, the writers return to examples of how people can take back common resources and how they can collectively manage it.  They finish with “A Concluding Remark” where they are careful point out that they have no policy recommendations.  First, because policy recommendations assume that there’s some policy-makers that they want to appeal to, which is once again giving power to the elites.  And, most importantly, it implies that there are global, overall solutions where their point is that the commons need to be managed by local communities and in each case, the community itself will find a way that works for that specific community.  Local solutions are diverse solutions.

Quote of the Day:  “One cannot legislate the commons into existence; nor can the commons be reclaimed simply by adopting ‘green techniques’ such as organic agriculture, alternative energy strategies or better public transport--necessary and desirable though such strategies often are.  Rather, commons regimes emerge through ordinary people’s day-to-day resistance to enclosure, and their efforts to regain the mutual support, responsibility and trust that sustain the commons.” - The Ecologist

Emergence

Emergence by Steven Johnson is a wonderful, frustrating book.  

It starts off talking about slime molds, which are sort of the mascot of the self-organizing systems world.  These are tiny single celled creatures that, when threatened, coalesce into a multicellular organism.  For years scientists searched for the ‘pacemaker’ cells that started the process.  It turns out there are no pacemakers.  Slime molds have a completely decentralized method of coalescing.  

I’ve referenced Steven Johnson before--way back in a post on Clustering and Coping (8/13/08).  Even then I mentioned he had a book called Emergence.  I just hadn’t read it until recently.  I picked it up in the bookstore that I’m now working in when I visited it in November.  I’ve now read it twice.

One of the things it reminds me of is Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom’s book, The Starfish and the Spider, which I’ve talked about in two early posts: Catalysts and Network Weavers (8/31/08) and Decentralization (12/9/08).  The big difference is that Brafman and Beckstrom’s book focuses on the phenomenon of decentralization, where Johnson focuses on emergence which is a decentralized process.  In some ways this is the most important process in self-organization.  And, in many ways, it’s unpredictable.

What’s wonderful about Emergence is how clearly Johnson spells out what’s involved in the process.  What’s frustrating is that he seems seduced by its uses in corporate culture, cybernetics and the internet, and particularly entertainment systems.  However he does cover (briefly) cell systems and immune systems, and spends more time with cities as organisms (which I find very interesting) before he gets caught in the morass of the world wide web and online games.

However, just when I was about to give up on the book, he steers into emergence and decentralization in politics and gives the WTO Seattle protests of 1999 as an example.  (Of course, this type of organizing was going on long before this--I see it dating back to feminist and anarchist organizing in the 1970s.  For more about what was happening back then, see my post Social Movements in the Seventies, 3/30/09.)  I wish he spent more time on this.

This is a good book to read in conjunction with other systems books and books on decentralization.  By itself, it’s only a small (but significant piece) but it’s incredibly useful in understanding the whole.  I’ll end with the warning at the end of the book: “...it is both the promise and the peril of swarm logic that the higher level behavior is almost impossible to predict in advance.  You never really know what lies at the other end of a phase transition until you press play and find out.  That is the lesson of Gerald Edelman’s recipe for simulating a flesh-and-blood organism: you set up a system of various pattern-recognition devices and feedback loops, connecting the virtual organism to a simulated environment.  And then you see what happens.”

That’s emergence.

Quote of the Day:  “This emphasis on rules might seem like the antithesis of the open-ended, organic systems… but nothing could be further from the truth.  Emergent systems... are rule governed systems: their capacity for learning and growth and experimentation derives from their adherence to low-level rules…  If any of these systems… suddenly started following their own rules, or doing away with rules altogether, the system would stop working: there’d be no global intelligence, just a teeming anarchy of isolated agents, a swarm of without logic.  Emergent behaviors… are all about living within the boundaries defined by rules, but also using that space to create something greater than the sum of its parts.” - Steven Johnson

Red Earth Farms

A week ago Saturday, the visitor's group I'm in at Dancing Rabbit went on a tour of the nearby community of Red Earth Farms.  The relationship between DR and REF reminds me of the relationship between Twin Oaks and Acorn.  (See my posts on Update 2: The Acorn Community, 9/14/12, and Update 6: Life at Twin Oaks, 12/4/12.)  Dancing Rabbit and Twin Oaks are both large sized communities that are high on structure and policies, where Red Earth Farms and Acorn were much smaller and more into individual freedom and figuring it out as they went along.  The big difference is that where Twin Oaks and Acorn were both income sharing communities and very strong on sharing everything, DR and REF are both much more individually oriented--while they both share a bunch (particularly DR), at DR there's a strong sense of  'this is mine' and 'I need to make sure I'm being paid for what I do', and REF (which is a homesteaders community) is divided into individual sites with the expectation that each site can pretty much do what they want (although they're all pretty committed to sustainable, ecological living and most of them live rather simply).

On the other hand, the REF homesteads are quite interesting.  Since there
are no rules about what anyone can do or can't do, each of them is pretty
different.  One in particular had a house that was very old fashioned and
obviously hand built.  Several people said that when they entered it they
had the sensation of going back more than a century in time.

And it's important to note the back and forth between DR and REF--I've
seen a bunch of folks from REF hanging out at DR from time to time and
people at each community will say, 'I built this with the help of
so-and-so at ...' the other community.  This interconnecting of the two
communities also reminds me a lot of the relationship between Twin Oaks
and Acorn.  But both communities here have a strong interelationship with
the third community in Rutledge, Sandhill, which is also the oldest of the
three.  I'll write about that next.

Quote of the Day: "Red Earth Farms is an intentional community of
homesteads sharing a 76-acre land trust in the rolling hills of northeast
Missouri. Our community’s mission is to creatively explore and evaluate
sustainable ways to meet our needs in accordance with our guiding
principle: 'Love the land; love your neighbors.' " - from Red Earth Farms'
website

Organization

Okay. Organizing and organizations as a human need. Sounds a bit strange. But really, if we are going to get anything done, we are going to have to find ways of working together and working together well.

In order to get any type of work done, we need energy. But, although there are many folks that prefer to work alone, when we work with others we get much more done. And if there is more than one or two of us working together, structure helps. That's what organizing is all about.
It doesn't mean we have to have bureaucracy. If you've been following this blog for a while, you know that I advocate decentralized structure. But structure, nevertheless. Organization to get the work done.

This also doesn't mean organization for the sake of organization. In fact, I think many organizational structures should be temporary. Just as I think we need to avoid bureaucracy, we need to avoid institutions--organizations that seem to exist primarily to perpetuate themselves. Organization exists to achieve certain goals. When the goal is met, often the need for the organization is over. I think the transition movement is smart about this. The steering group that helps guide the initial effort deliberately plans its own demise. (See my post on Transition Towns--10/16/08)

In spite of things like bureaucracy and institutionalization, organizations and organizing are an important part of life. Early on, in my post on Creating Social Change, I blogged on the motto: "Agitate, Educate, Organize". Organizing is part of the process of social change, part of getting work done, part of how we will need to live.


Resources:
Covey, Stephen, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People--Covey devotes a chapter to 'Principles of Creative Cooperation', outlining the habit he calls 'Synergize'; this is a way to build on the fact that the whole is more than the sum of it's parts, so as we work together new things can emerge; as he points out, 'All nature is synergistic'; our organizations should be as well
Jo Freeman, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness"--The need for structure, in fact the impossibility of 'structurelessness', and how those advocating for 'structureless' organizations are usually the ones benefitting from obscuring power dynamics
Steven Johnson, "Two ways to emerge, and how to tell the difference between them"--A chapter of a book on cybernetic democracy that I liked so well I devoted a post to it (see Clustering and Coping--8/13/08); it talks about two different ways that organization can emerge and what makes the difference
Bruce Kokopeli and George Lakey, Leadership for Change--A manual on the difference between leaders and leadership; organizations need leadership, they don't need leaders; this little booklet is available from Training for Change

Also see the resources in my posts on Communal and Cooperative Resources (10/12/08) and SLoDBN Resources (12/15/08)

Quote of the Day: "Don't agonize. Organize." - Forynce Kennedy

Weaving the Threads Together

I started this blog claiming that 'it's all connected'. For the last few months, I've been laying out my own theories of social change. Now let me show how they're all connected.

I began by explaining I was trying to get a clear sense of what my politics were. I came up with the realization that I want a world that supports Simplicity, Equality, Community & Cooperation, and Sustainability. But I also enjoy Complexity, Diversity, Individuality, and Practicality. I've spent a number of posts showing how this was not so much a contradiction, as a case of complementality: Complexity evolves from Simplicity--and can actually support Simplicity; Equality and Diversity are both needed--and, in small systems, we can have both; Community and Individuality are interrelated and enhance each other; and Sustainable has to be Practical just as Practical needs to be Sustainable.

I then talked about a strategy that I called SLoDBN--building Small and Local and evolving Decentralized Bioregional Networks. I've recently realized a better acronym might be SLoBiND--going from the Small and Local to the Bioregional by Networking in a Decentralized way. Something I like about this acronym is that it describes the process--slowly binding it all together.

While talking about SLoDBN, I pointed out its relation to SECS--Small and Simple, Local Communities, Decentralized Equally, Bioregionally Sustainable, and Networked Cooperatively. It's also interesting that as I laid out my SLoBiND strategy, I kept referring to earlier posts when I was talking about other people's theories. I think most of them support this way of thinking. Complexity theory, which I talked a lot about early on, particularly supports the bottom up nature of SLoBiNDing. Looking at my post of 9/20/08, where I wove together the theories I had covered, I pointed out: "Complexity theory... suggests small systems built from the bottom up, using cooperation and networking, and allowing solutions to emerge from our collective creativity, the way new behavior often emerges from living systems." I think this is one way of viewing the SLoBiND strategy.

Now let's see this in action.


Quote of the day: "Whenever we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." — John Muir
Word (or phrase) of the day: Earth-Crunchy Dyke
Hero(es) of the day: I.F. Stone

SLoDBN Resources

In reality, most of these catagories overlap. I will start with resources on Small and Local--and even there some of the resources also talk about Decentralization.

First of all is the book, Small is Beautiful, by E. F. Schumacher, with the wonderful subtitle, 'Economics as if People Mattered'.

There is also an E. F. Schumacher Society in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, that focuses on "Linking people, land, and community by building local economies".

In my Going Local post of 7/26/08, I reviewed three books that were all focused on local economic efforts: Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age by Michael Shuman, Making a Place for Community: Local Politics in a Global Era by Thad Williamson, Gar Alperovitz, and David Imbroscio, and America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy by Gar Alperovitz. (See that post for more.)

The term 'relocalization' has been popularized by the Post Carbon Institute, which sponsors the Relocalization Network, as well as a website focused on urban issues called Post Carbon Cities. Another group that sponsors websites with a small, local orientation is an organization called Community Service. One of the sites is called, in fact, Small, Local Community. They also have a site called Community Solutions.

The book The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom, first mentioned in my 'Catalysts and Network Weavers' post of 8/31/08, is a good resource about Decentralization. A blog with a lot of information on decentralization, both for guerrilla warfare and resilient communities, is Global Guerrillas, which I have mentioned in a few posts back in August (8/13 and 8/31).

There are a bunch of websites with definitions of and information about Bioregionalism, including the Great River Earth Institute, The Digger Archives, Green Anarchy, The Co-Intelligence Institute, and bioregionalism.com (which is actually focused on the coast of Southern California). A couple of classic books on bioregionalism are Home! A Bioregional Reader edited by Van Andruss, Judith Plant, Christopher Plant and Eleanor Wright, and Dwellers on the Land by Kirkpatrick Sale.

As far as Networking goes, the paper "Building Smart Communities through Network Weaving" by Valdis Krebs and June Holley and their Network Weaving site are two of the more useful things I've found. Also check out my post on 'Clustering and Coping' (8/13/08).

I also want to point to several other blogs advocating what I think is a SLoDBN viewpoint. The Archdruid Report offers useful critiques of the process as well as some guideposts along the way. Albert Bates' site, The Great Change also offers ideas and perspectives in this vein. But, if I'm right, SLoDBN work is happening all over. Some blogs that support this approach include Murph and Freeacres' Trout Clan Campfire, RAS's My Flight From the Grid, and SoapBoxTech's blog, SoapBoxTech. They (along others trying to live in this fashion, such as undacova mutha) give me hope that there really is a SLoDBN movement.



Quote of the day: "The undeniable trend of these past forty years has not been toward larger and more consolidated arrangements but, everywhere in the world, toward smaller and more decentralized ones. ... What is so interesting in this amazing process is the clear expression of the bioregional idea." - Kirkpatrick Sale
Word (or phrase) of the day: Rising Tide
Hero(es) of the day: Elizabeth Margaret Chandler

Decentralization

It seems that in writing the SLoDBN posts, I am constantly referring to posts I wrote early on in this blog, the ones that I called my 'Theory' posts. I think that this is because I am repeating much of this as strategy, only SLoDBN gives me a way to organize it.

In my post on 'Catalysts and Network Weavers' (8/31/08), I mentioned a book called The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom. This is actually a book on decentralization. The title refers to one difference between starfish and spiders. If you cut off one of the legs of a spider (a cruel thing to do), you end up with a seven legged spider. If you cut off its head, you end up with a dead spider. (This is their analogy; I'm not pleased with killing creatures.) But if you cut off the leg of a starfish, it will grow a new leg. Even more amazingly, sometimes the leg grows a new starfish.

The point that the authors are making is that decentralized organizations are resilient. They state that "...the first major principle of decentralization: when attacked, a decentralized organization tends to become even more open and decentralized."

The authors begin the book talking about how the Spaniards came to the western hemisphere and quickly destroyed the Aztec and Incan empires. When they moved north and encountered the Apaches, the Spaniards were prepared to do more of the same. They attacked what they saw as the leaders of the Apache, what the Apaches called the 'Nant'an'. (The most famous of the Nant'an was Geronimo.) But the Nant'an had no power in and of themselves, they simply led by example and influence. No Apache was ever obliged to follow these leaders. So as soon as the Spanish soldiers would wipe out a Nant'an, a new one would appear. These weren't leaders in the sense the Spanish were used to, they could easily be replaced because Apache were used to being self-reliant. When the Spaniards destroyed the Apache villages, the Apache became nomadic. The more the Spanish attacked the Apache, the more decentralized the Apache became and the harder to control they were. Where the Aztecs and Incas fell apart after the Spanish attacked them, the Apaches became stronger and held off the Spaniards for over two hundred years.

As I was writing this post, I realized that, just as 'Small' was related to 'Simplicity', and 'Local' is related to 'Community', 'Decentralized' is related to 'Equality'. The point is here that no one is in charge, no one is THE leader, and no group has any power over any other group. The many small experiments may have influence on each other, but each is doing its own thing and none are in control. This creates a certain resilience and sustainability, since if something goes wrong with one (let alone if any are attacked), it won't destroy the others. (The authors of The Starfish and the Spider point out that many terrorist groups use the same structure, which is why the US isn't doing so well in bringing this situation under control.)

In building from the bottom up, we need to start small and local, with many varieties, and (hardest for some of us) no one in control. Decentralization will mean a very different kind of leadership (see my post of 9/2/08 on Equality and Leadership), but it will be a more powerful leadership and what emerges may be more powerful than anyone expects.


Quote of the Day: "In a decentralized organization, there's no clear leader, no hierarchy, and no headquarters. If and when a leader does emerge, that person has little power over others. The best that person can do is to lead by example. ...everyone is entitled to make his or her own decisions. This doesn't mean that a decentralized system is the same as anarchy. There are rules and norms, but these aren't enforced by any one person. Rather, the power is distributed among all the people and across geographic regions." - Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom
Word (or phrase) of the day: Freegan
Hero(es) of the day: Sojourner Truth

SLoDBN

So how do we do it? How can we create what I call a SECSy world--a world where SECS balances out CDIP? (If you can't understand that, review my last dozen or so posts.)

If you read much of the posts I wrote prior to this SECS/CDIP sequence, the answer won't suprise you. I call it SLoDBN, and it's a strategy to build a better world from the ground up. SLoDBN (pronounced Slow-D-B-N) stands for Small, Local, Decentralized, Bioregional, and Networked. Once again, I will go over each of these pieces in their own post so I can adequately cover each one.


Quote of the day: "If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." — Henry David Thoreau
Word (or phrase) of the day: Husbear
Hero(es) of the day: Mala Zimetbaum

Catalysts and Network Weavers

While searching for more information on Resilient Communities I found this post by John Robb on his blog, Global Guerrillas. It's entitled The Guerrilla Catalyst and it's about people who help form and maintain networks and communities. He cites Rob Hopkins (who initiated the Transition Towns concept) as well as arms-dealer/guerrilla leader Henry Okah (aka Jomo Gbomo), pointing out that this type of networking can be used to build guerrilla insurgencies as well as resilient communities.

Robb calls these people catalysts and says that they "accelerate growth and effectiveness by increasing the trust and connectivity of the networks they inhabit". He talks about the book, The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom, where the authors describe the characteristics of catalysts. From Robb's post, catalysts serve as:

• Connectors. Able to map, mine and connect loose networks of people with similar needs/interests.
• Onsite helpers and Trust builders. Willing to work with people on the ground in the role of helper. Forges emotional bonds and encourages trust.
• Supporters. They let the network navigate itself forward by walking away from leadership responsibilities/roles. They trust the network and embrace its ambiguity.

This got me thinking a lot about how to make decentralized networks emerge (the subject of the Brafman and Beckstrom book). But then I saw the first comment made about the post where there was a link to an online essay (posted by one of its authors) claiming, "They are 'network weavers'!"

The eighteen page article referenced is entitled "Building Smart Communities through Network Weaving" by Valdis Krebs and June Holley. In it, the authors begin by talking about the characteristics of effective networks, and then point out there are two types of networks; what they refer to as unmanaged networks and managed networks. The differences between the two networks remind me a lot of what Steven Johnson refers to as 'Clustering' and 'Coping' (see my blog of 8/13/08). Krebs and Holley describe the unmanaged networks as "small and dense clusters with little or no diversity" and give examples of isolated rural communities and 'old boy networks'. They then go on to describe how to build 'vibrant community networks' using a form of leadership they call network weaving. Network weavers take scattered groups and individuals and connect them. This slowly forms what the authors refer to as "a hub and spoke network" with the weavers as the hub. This is only a temporary step. If it stops there, it keeps the responsibility focused on one individual. (This is very similar to what Brafman and Beckstrom call a 'Spider', a group where power is centralized--if you lop the head off a spider, it's dead.) The next step is for the weaver to begin encouraging others to start weaving also. The 'network weaver' becomes a 'network facilitator', mentoring new weavers who take over much of the building and maintaining of the network. Eventually the 'hub and spoke network' becomes what the authors call "a multi-hub small-world network". Over time (as the authors put it "many years of network weaving by multiple hubs") this can build into a 'core/periphery' network that links to other networks. (This is what Brafman and Beckstrom call a 'Starfish', because if you cut the arm off a starfish, the starfish grows a new arm--and the arm often grows a new starfish!)

While reading all this, I was exploring links to Rob Hopkins and the Transition Towns movement (yes, I know I will have to do a post on Transition Towns at some point). They use what's called Open Space Technology--a process that allows people to set their own agendas and run a decentralized meeting. This encourages dialogue and a built-from-the-ground-up process. They start something going, get people involved, and trust the process from there. What seems important is to hold a simple set of values and as long as that's in place, allow the process to emerge--even when it seems like total chaos. And it does seem like stuff emerges.

All this interests me because it could well be the blueprint for grassroots social change, the bottom-up variety, the stuff I've been talking about. Now to get to work on catalyzing and network weaving.


Quote of the day: "Although you may start out developing your Transition Town process with a clear idea of where it will go, it will inevitably go elsewhere. If you try and hold onto a rigid vision, it will begin to sap your energy and appear to stall. Your role is not to come up with all the answers, but to act as a catalyst for the community to design their own transition.
"If you keep your focus on the key design criteria - building community resilience and reducing the carbon footprint - you'll watch as the collective genius of the community enables a feasible, practicable and highly inventive solution to emerge." - from the Transition Towns WIKI
Word (or phrase) of the day: Requisite variety
Hero(es) of the day: Susan La Flesche Picotte and Susette La Flesche Tibbles