How can we work better together?

We must be uniquely good at working well together. Rather than using their tools, which perpetuate dominant models of competition and capitalism, we need to work together. A node's value is not stagnant (money in the bank), but rather how it moves and makes connections, moves information through the network. Individuals are in this sense like routers, moving traffic / information from one node to the next.

How do you know if a network is healthy?

• Neighborhood communication flow
• Look to natural ecosystems - prey / predators. Sense of competition fragments - competition for funding, ideological battles.
• When it comes to social justice we need to show a face of solidarity
• Come together over a shared goal
• Sense of ownership
• Moments of convergence and celebration
• Fallbacks work out because ways of working together - processes - are clear
• With mesh networks- it's a mentality of 'we own it ourselves and create it together', that the network won't work if individuals don't learn to share and feel secure in their sharing - that they're creating the network
• When one feels compelled to invest in the community
• The things that people pay attention to everyday, making the edges visible - ATTENTION LITERACY
• Redundancy and resiliency
• Joint purpose problem
• Reach people where they're at - don't push a platform
• Anyone can emerge and lead
• With Wiser, hard to measure, hard to quantify the health of the network
• Efficiency of the network more nuanced - the ability of the network to adapt and change in different scenarios is essential
• What is intended by 'health'? Will vary depending on the individual perspectives
• Planning how the network will scale is importantC
• Coalition of LGBTQ orgs for people of color - the big orgs with lots of money (and strings), twisting the grants to help the smaller orgs - without homogenizing the work any given individual is doing.
• Jane Jacobs, organics of city planning - how communities come together and self-regulate. A sense of shared ownership gives way to a sense of shared responsibility
• Trans-local Autonomous Organizing - trust in the other components of the network functioning independently
• Being able to respond at scale appropriately
• Adaptability and flexibility
• Main impediment to ownership in a network is sometimes resources - capacity to participate and explicit invitations
• Heterogeneity and diversity of voices and perspectives in conversation
• Network of service providers / trainers for human rights organizations - very heterogeneous nodes
• Common vision vs. common threat -> threat seems to be a better organizer of people