I picked the audiobook version up a week ago, after seeing it mentioned here. I’ve still got two chapters left, but I’m really enjoying it so far. I signed up for the meeting, but it’s being held at 1am my time, and the second one is at 3am. I’m interested in the discussion, and will try to attend the first meeting, but I won’t be able to make the second. Even if I do attend, I won’t be able to speak much as I’ll wake people up. Given that, I’ll jot down a few thoughts here instead.
I am inspired to find SCRF adopting this approach. I’ve read a lot of the foundational literature this book draws upon over the last few years, on topics such as resilience/systems thinking, emergence, networks etc, and the sources the author references are familiar. I am just about to submit another paper for publication which outlines the importance of these networks in disaster management contexts in NZ and proposes a framework that can be used to account for them in institutional decision-making structures. I’m very impressed with the book, it’s one of the best articulations of the concepts within I’ve come across so far.
My PhD focused on the drivers of social resilience in a disaster context – during my fieldwork I spent a lot of time talking to communities affected by adverse events, as well as government and private institutions that responded to them. A theme that was present throughout the results was the importance of social networks, of both the learning and impact variety. However, what was most striking to me is that governments often failed to account for the networks during responses, and in some cases actively attacked them or degraded their capacity to function.
It is very difficult to measure/quantify these networks, which is a key problem and means their benefits are invisible to bureaucracies. I talked about this a bit in one of my previous posts:
Additionally, some of the aims of networks can challenge existing power structures and make them targets for attack. My motivation to take part in the crypto community, despite a seemingly unrelated background, is because I see potential here for the creation of trustless underlying support infrastructure which can be used for more decentralized and less fragile versions of these networks, and more importantly, the networks themselves can become more visible. Quantifying these networks is difficult because the number of connections is less important than their quality – this was a key point CS Holling (1973) made in his seminal paper on resilience which is reflected in the book. Coupling onchain identity with cryptography should make it much easier to collect reliable qualitative data in a privacy preserving manner (ZKPs) which gives insight into the quality of connections. This is potentially revolutionary in a lot of ways.
More specifically, I am excited that SCRF is pursuing this approach, and I would be very interested in participating in the process and helping however possible.
I’d also like to thank @Muhammad for the detailed notes from the first meeting. I appreciate being able to see what was discussed, and where I might fit in.