(Not) Counting Trees

From the Tree [to the Web] of Life...sent to me by Bethany

Click here for a link to an 11-minute crash course in social networks by Nickolas Christakis at Harvard Univeristy as part of its Harvard Thinks Big series.

Christakis is a professor of sociology, medical sociology, and medicine at Harvard Univeristy and Medical School.

David Kittredge at UMass sent me the video link.

For the last several months, I've been involved with the Driftless Forest Network, a consortium of forestry interests in the Driftless Area seeking to harness peer-to-peer models to influence land management and to build outreach capacity among resource managers and others.

In the July-August edition of the Journal of Soil & Water Conservation, we outline opportunities for expanding cross-boundary cooperation, primarily at the policy - management interface. The pdf should be freely available, just click the link in the citation or the one below.

Sustainable bioenergy derived from cellulosic biomass offers the potential to create new market and diversification opportunities for Wisconsin farmers, woodland owners, and their local communities. However, achieving sustainable biomass supply within Wisconsin’s mixed-use landscapes that include both agriculture and forest systems will require some degree of coordination across their strikingly different and traditionally isolated stakeholder networks.

Eli Sagor, University of Minnesota, recently posted on the Woodland Owner Network a summary of a peer-to-peer learning conference earlier this month. He outlined four directions that were important moving forward:

1. Defining peer-to-peer learning,
2. Identifying extension's role in it,
3. Determining appropriate metrics, and

[VIDEO EMBEDDED BELOW] More on networks courtesy of Jon Breschak (he should really start using that login I gave him) from Ted.com.

Jon Breschak, the PhD student working with me, is a voracious reader of both academic works and more popular media interpretations of social science and networks. Consider this recent e-mail...

We had some excellent news on Friday. The Wisconsin Institute for Sustainable Agriculture funded our project, Identifying and engaging stakeholder networks toward sustainable, multi-­sourced biomass production. The proposal summary is below. We anticipate starting the project either this summer or fall, but need additional clarification.

How can social network analysis help managers improve (or at least understand) performance? Rob Cross and Andrew Parker take on this important topic in their scholarly grounded, but highly accessible book, The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations.