Networks

The theory

After the opening announcement of the site to a mailing list composed of contacts accumulated in about five years, there were a number of responses and questions, but the most common was: "Who are you?" The main reason for that was that I forgot to sign the email introducing the site, but a second reason was that some of the contacts, like the editor of the Transition Network newsletter, were weak contacts that had long ago forgotten about me and never knew much to start with.

Which only goes to show the importance of networks. Before even wanting to read or listen anything, we want to know how to relate to it. For most people it's extremely hard even to decide whether they like or dislike something if they don't know what it's connected to.

What is a network? It's just a way of looking at any bunch of things or living creatures. If you decide that, instead of looking at each element, you are more interested in studying how they relate to each other in some way, you will call it a network. If the elements are computers, you call it a computer network; if they are living creatures, you may call it a food web; and if they are people, you call it a social network.

When you talk about networks, you call each element a node, and each relation a link. "Relation" can mean a lot of things. It may be that the two nodes can communicate with each other. It may mean that something physical goes from one to the other, for example, food or supplies of materials.

Nodes are represented with dots, while links are represented with lines or arrows. You then look at the picture and sometimes the picture gives you a better understanding of what's happening there.

Networks may take many shapes. You can see some examples below:

There are a few things that you can learn straight away from looking at the shape of a network:

• If there is a long chain, you know that anything that is passed along that chain (information, food, materials) has a risk of being lost or degraded in some way at each step, and the transmission from one end to the other will be slow.
• Nodes that have many links are always special. Those nodes are the ones that have the best access to information, food, etc. On the other hand, links often need some kind of maintenance. A node with a lot of links may spend a lot of time, energy, money, or other resources, just keeping those links working.
• Different kinds of networks work well for different situations. It's very easy to add new nodes to a star, where all are connected to the central node, but the central node is critical for the network, and if it goes, the whole network goes. A fully connected network gives all the nodes as much connection as they could possibly have, but it's often too complex and costly (in money, time, energy or other resources) to put into practice.

The practice

Experiment 1

If you are a human being, you are part of many social networks (and if you are not a human being, please tell me all about it). You relate to other people and groups of people in a number of ways. If you are reading this, you probably are involved in some kind of "green" activity, and chances are, you aren't doing it entirely on your own, you are relating to a number of other people and organizations. A good understanding of the shape of those relationships can help you a lot if you think you will ever need to do a big, coordinated effort together.

This is an exercise I tried to do once in a workshop. It wasn't too interesting because there weren't enough people involved; if you want to try it, make an effort to get as many people involved as you can.

1. On a big piece of paper, write the names of all the groups of people involved in this area that you know of. Don't write a list, use all the space in the paper, and try to put close together those groups that you think work closely with each other. It will be useful if under each name you draw a circle that in some way represents the "manpower" of the group. A single person working a couple of hours a week should be a tiny dot, while a big organization with lots of people working full-time in this area should be a huge circle.

2. If you find that after writing all the groups, the paper got a bit messy, don't be afraid to re-do it in a neater way. If you think it's messy now, after the next steps it can become a real tangle. Best to tidy up early.

3. Draw links between the groups in different colors. A red link means that there is at least one person working in both groups. A black link means that the two groups work closely: there is a meeting between members of both groups at least once a week. A green link (it's best if you do this with a thinner line) means that the two groups collaborate in some way, but not closely.

What do you see there? A few things you may want to think about:

• Many red links but few black links indicate a weakness. A red link is often kept by only one person. If this person goes, the link goes. Are there any ways that at least some of the red links can be turned black?
• It's normal that there are many more green links than black or red, but if black and red are extremely few, the network is also weak and it will be difficult to coordinate. Are there any ways to turn some of those green links black?
• If you look only at the red and black links, is the network disconnected into several smaller networks? In that case, it may become difficult to coordinate between those separate collectives. Can you create black links that connect the different smaller networks?
• Look at the nodes with many links. How big are they? Big nodes can manage well a lot of links, but small nodes will have trouble with many links. Are there ways of making those well-connected small nodes bigger, or fusing those nodes with another one they connect to with a black or red link, or distributing the load among several nodes?

Experiment 2

If you grow food, an understanding of food webs can help you control pests without using pesticides (or using a lot less of them). You are probably aware that a way of eliminating pests is introducing their natural predators, but it isn't enough to understand that. What is the natural predator going to eat after they have eaten your pest? Are there enemies of this natural predator in the environment? If so, are there too many (the predator won't survive in big enough numbers) or too few (you may be creating a whole new problem there!)? Don't think only about the one link you care about (predator eating pest), think of all the other links that this predator is going to have with the rest of the environment.

Most people who give some thought to the whole food web end up introducing their chosen predator anyway, but make a decision to observe a lot more carefully what happens after the introduction. That's permaculture for you!