Tinker Toys, String Art, Neurons and a New Tapestry
I woke up thinking about Tinker Toys this morning. Those little wheels, spokes, connectors, and green fans were “the bomb.” Often, my sister and I would build fully-loaded little farms complete with animals, trucks, windmills, and barns. Or sometimes we created huge cellular-looking blobs with random hubs and spokes, together sculpting a funky abstract nexus of modern art. Whatever emerged from our play, it always had its own “je ne sais quoi” of connectivity.
The creation of the Internet and the emergence of Web 2.0 has filled me with the same sense of wonder about its potential for connections. For those of us who are web-connected (or web-addicted), the world is now flat and our degrees of separation continue to shrink. We routinely connect globally with colleagues on LinkedIn and Twitter, and we swap stories, pictures, and videos on FaceBook. We StumbleUpon, Digg, Buzz, and Wave. Hand-written letters and cards were first replaced by email, and now are down to cheery 140-character tweets and text messages. Brief repeated encounters with an amazing variety of people now pepper our online days and nights. Venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson has diagrammed his network of global friends and I find that it looks like the string art I made in my post-Tinker Toy days.
While we find new ways to connect globally, the very essence of our humanity also draws us nearer to each other. As social beings, we live, love, and work in communities. Whether in rural communities of farmers, small towns populated with multi-generational families, or large urban cities surrounded by suburbs, we still rely on local connections for much of our day-to-day lives. Connections, that for many of us, are forged by nonprofit community-based organizations. They are:
- The local hospitals and clinics that provide us with medical care.
- The free-standing libraries where we research and read, and access the Internet if we can’t afford access at home.
- The performing arts organizations that foster our love for music, dance and theatre.
- The advocates that preserve our local habitats and protect our waterways.
- The day care centers and the after-school programs that serve our youth.
- The adoption centers where we find our furry family members.
- The helping hands that provide us with emergency food and housing assistance and keep us safe during disasters.
These organizations don’t work in isolation, though. Together, they form a network of resources that allow all of us to remain fully participating and thriving members of our communities. They inform and refer us, provide critical services, and collaborate in ways that benefit us all. They are the neurons that are the basic building blocks of our communities.
So, Tinkers Toys took me to string art and neurons, and I now find myself thinking about the tapestry of humanity:
- How can we take our global string art and weave it into our local neural networks?
- How do we find ways to benefit from this new tapestry?
- And, what does that tapestry look like?
Would love to hear your thoughts.
–Laura
p.s. Thanks to @askdebra for a comment that she made yesterday during the #NPCons twitter chat about, “Humanity opening doors.” It was part of my day residue and inspired some of my thoughts.
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Networks, community and humanity, by @deatweets http://is.gd/cql8H (with correct link)
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Laura – What a wonderful post with brilliant analogies and pictures (I especially love the colorful string art)! You ask a very important and challenging question (in a lovely poetic way): “How can we take our global string art and weave it into our local neural networks?” For some of us this comes easy – we are born ‘network weavers’ and holistic, integrative thinkers. We naturally take everything we observe and learn and find places (wherever we may find them) to make connections that will provide additional benefit and value.
For others of us, though, and for many of our organizations these global-local connections and “weaving” doesn’t come naturally, and in fact we often need to fight against structures that suggest to us that we are trying to fit round pegs into square holes. The good news is that the more of us “out there” in the world who do take a integrative approach, the more we can encourage others to do the same, and eventually change some of the more traditional ‘mindsets’ that limit our thinking. Changes is coming, albeit more slowly sometimes than some of us might like
Thanks again for spurring on our thinking!
Lovely article with some great questions for Baby Boomers.
Connection will become more important to all of us in this inter-connected world. We will thrive on the warmth of face to face conversations. Boomers have this in their memory bank as a skill. The question I often think about is the X and Y generation connecting as a skill set? The tapestry will unfold. i hope it is filled with rich beautiful pictures.
Connecting the Global & the Local:Tinker Toys, String Art, Neurons & a New Tapestry http://ht.ly/1Qe3m by @deatweets via @3rdsect #NGO
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Laura,
To me, the global connections could even be anything outside of your local community. I am having a very hard time tho, envisioning the Tinker Toys and the string art intermingling without getting completely garbled and very tangled. Maybe that is symbolic of the struggles we (or certainly I) really do experience as we try to reconcile our online networks and our more local networks. In some ways those networks can be very separate, especially as the networks become more spread out. However, I am continually amazed by the lack of connection even within local communities…the number of organizations involved in very complementary work that have never heard of each other. I have been joking lately that my goal is to have everyone in Chicago’s social justice community meet and make a giant circle and sing kumbaya together.
Perhaps everyone’s network is a combination of tinker toys, string art, and maybe some not nearly as graceful or beautiful connections. And perhaps the point of strategy and integration is to help everyone reclaim that beauty-to help us create purposeful networks that make communities and ultimately the entire world a more connected and friendly place to be.
Thought provoking piece by @3rdsect on connecting locally, globally and integrating the two: http://bit.ly/aW18CA
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As far as how do we benefit from this new tapestry I think the greatest benefit is the depth and breadth of resources at our fingertips. We are beginning to realize that all problems are basically systemic, that si they are not unique top our particular situation. At the touch of a button I can get input from around the world on problem-solving. Someone, somewhere in my network has either solved the same set of problems or possess the requisite skills sets. In days of old it would take months and lots of dollars to find these answers if I even could.
The birth of twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn has brought the whole world into my desktop. They span space and time and compress it into a little box on my desktop or on my smartphone. With the Internet time travel has basically become a reality. I can chat with Moscow, Paris, London, Rio all within the span of a few seconds through the Internet and have real time exchanges of ideas across thousands of miles at virtually no cost.
The drawback of course is that we have become addicted to the Internet and are losing a sense of the quietude of being alone. Even when “unwinding” and watching my favorite TV show, or at a sporting event, I find myself reaching for my phone and checking what’s happening in my network during lulls in the action.
[Admin note: This comment was originally posted at our Third Sector Connector LinkedIn group and we've cross-posted it here.]
Thanks to all of you for your thoughts.
Bonnie, you are such a tremendous example of someone who does integrate/weave both global and local at the same time, I knew this would resonate with you.
Lynda, I think that you may be right to have concerns about upcoming generations as technology leads us away from face-to-face more and more. My hope is that since our very essence is still local, we will still cherish and nourish those face-to-face conversations in a way that keeps us connected to community. I do believe that community-based nonprofits are part of the very fiber of that beautiful tapestry that we can envision.
Heidi, your comment hit the mark directly. So, given our global/local lenses, how DO we “create purposeful networks that make communities and ultimately the entire world a more connected and friendly place to be?” That’s the tapestry that I’m envisioning, and that’s where I see such a critical role for local nonprofit organizations. And, you’re right. Even within local communities, so many organizations are part of the neuronal network, but may not even know it!
Harry, I love your thoughts about systemic problems and that the global network brings with it not only “the real-time exchange of ideas” but also may have answers to our issues and challenges that streamline our work, and reduce our cost. As a fellow “time traveler”, I agree, too with your thoughts about “losing a sense of the quietude of being alone.”
Still pondering, and love what you all have shared. I’m particularly thinking about how all of this impacts the work that we do within community-based organizations, including how we best strengthen the neural network (from Heidi’s post) and best leverage our time travel to benefit local communities (Harry’s post).
Thank you! Keep it coming!