Network organisation for the 21st century
Harry Halpin and Kay Summer, Turbulence.org
Will the upsurge in activity around climate change and the food crisis repeat the cycle of the movement of movements over the past decade – momentary visibility then dissolution? Harry Halpin and Kay Summer say ‘yes’, unless different models of organising are embraced.
Phi Beta Iota: This is worth a full reading. Networks are emergent at this time, and they all lack clarity, diversity, integrity, and sustainability, in part because they are all still stove-piped and not part of the whole. Lacking is a strategic analytic model and a global sparse matrix approach to assuring the integration of all information in all languages all the time such that every human has access to “true cost” information on everything they consider touching; and we can connect the billion rich to the five billion poor at the micro (household) level of need. We're getting there, but the movements themselves lack an appreciation for anything other than passion. They don't have the discipline and intellectual integrity needed to form a world brain and play a global game 24/7.
Key messages for political networks
• Encourage people to become hubs
• Develop other hubs, with dense connections to lots of distant nodes
• Hub redundancy is important – don’t worry about duplicating functions
• Let hubs evolve
• Focus on the long tail: have more limited interactions with the greatest number of people and places
Tip of the Hat to Pierre Levy at LinkedIn.
