Been thinking a lot lately about networks. How do they work? How is information/knowledge disseminated? What function (if any!) does leadership have? How do you visuallize (conceptually think about) a network?
Here are a few links to those ends:
Newsmap – Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator.
threetwoone.org – This website is devoted to the display of information with diagrams.
Steven Johnson Interview on “Emergence” – Emergence is what happens when the whole is smarter than the sum of its parts. Deals with Social Networks/Theory and Emergent Behaviors.
Books of interest:
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
by Steven Johnson
Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means
by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks
by Mark Buchanan
The Mind Map Book: How to Use Radiant Thinking to Maximize Your Brain’s Untapped Potential
by Tony Buzan, Barry Buzan
Of particular interest is the idea of leadership in a network. Here’s a quote from the interview with Steve Johnson about his book (Emergence):
“The book spends a lot of time with the ants as a great example of this. Colonies having this miraculous ability to pull off complex engineering feats or resource management feats without an actual leadership dictating what any ants should be doing at any time. They just follow a lot of local rules, and through those rules the intelligence of the colony comes into being.”
What could this mean for VC and the Pastoral Council? What does this mean for me, for that matter? I tend to find myself in leadership roles a bunch. What could this mean for how we live out our call as a network of house churches?
