This is how you made a group in the 20th century. One especially motivated person kicks things off, grabs the minimum complement of helpers to prop up the formal structure (president, secretary, treasurer) and they scrape together the funds to do the paperwork, secure a venue and advertise. If they hit upon a genuine need then people turn up and join the group, possibly contributing funds to keep the show going. This model suffers some common problems in modern times. The supply of people with the time, skill and dedication to manage such groups is running low, so succession of key positions often fails, leading to group dysfunction. If the group offers something people want, then more people turn up until the functions of the core organisers is pushed to the limit, at which point the service suffers until more members drop out to restore equilibrium. Admission to the group is usually a very casual matter, so as the group grows it is inevitable that serious personality clashes will emerge (which is an unpleasant surprise for the core group of organisers to manage). This style of organisation still persists to some degree, but is in serious decline.
One major issue is the competing structure of digital and social media. Here people can sit in the comfort of their home and join new groups with a single click, anywhere in the world. The practical payoffs of membership tend to be much lower, and the filtering of bad actors is even more of an issue (not least since bots and scammers can also click to join at zero marginal cost). Many such groups struggle to translate into real world activity, and fail to build meaningful human relationships.
In following months, I hope to review a stack of books that explore various aspects of social organisation in order to help me create preliminary designs for groups that breed locally adapted crops together. The first book that got me thinking on this front was “Design in Nature”, an exploration of the life work of engineering Professor Adrian Bejan around his constructal law of nature, which states:
For a finite-size flow system to persist in time (to live), its configuration must evolve in such a way that provides easier access to the currents that flow through it.
The book explores several applications of this law. The branching patterns that evolve in river basins, lungs and lightning strikes that permit flow between a point and an area are explored first, where common repeating patterns in terms of diameter, branching rates and flow distribution are explored. At times the author referred to the system as minimising friction, but I think in river basins the addition of living plants instead increases access to the water flow overtime by selectively increasing friction in places. Humans use similar patterns in road systems, with a large number of small driveways feeding into successively larger roads to balance access and efficiency of flow. The most important principle is that these systems constantly remodel themselves in response to local stresses, rather than being designed top down. These flow systems are all powered by an overriding gradient. Trees for example run on a gradient between moist soil and dry air.
The common trends in the size, motion and energy efficiency of moving animals and vehicles is explored next (though humans are an unusual exception to the usual trends for mammals since our mode of locomotion is significantly more energy efficient than four legged animals). Coordinated groups of animals often function more like a single large animal, such as a flock of birds in formation reducing collective air resistance.
Social networks also evolve to facilitate the flow of goods or information. Hierarchy is a common feature of human societies, with the number of levels of division increasing as the size of the network grows just as it does in river networks. A functional hierarchy features flow of benefits in both directions, rather than an imposition from the top. At the smallest scales of organisation where random diffusion is sufficient hierarchy is no longer beneficial. Scientific knowledge can also be imagined as a river basin, with a vast area where rain falls corresponding to the raw observations and data, which are gradually combined into larger and larger structures which represent theories which efficiently reflect the whole. As internet traffic grew, the flows tended to become centralised in an ever smaller number of websites, much like a larger river basin will create bigger rivers.
As a general design principle, a flow network should take the same amount of time to flow through the first slow part, as the latter fast aggregated channels. For example, a functional transport network will see people spending as much time slowly going from their home to the train station as they spend on the fast train. The longest paths should have around the same total travel time as the shorter branches by spending a larger proportion of the journey in a large, fast-moving channel.
The book then explores other interesting, though less directly relevant topics such as the evolution of academia, the links between the golden ratio and cognition, and the design of history.
When applying the insights from this work to possible structures for plant breeding groups in the community, a few things stand out. Firstly- the gradient that sets up the flow is the common desire to put the best crop seeds in each location, utilising the networked power of shared crop gene pools to accelerate selection for local conditions. At this point in history this gradient is fairly weak in most parts of the world. Not that many people grow their own crops, and only a subset of those are currently doing breeding work. Spreading awareness of the benefits of breeding to local conditions has the potential to form a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop to strengthen the gradient driving participation in such groups. Changes in the economic pressures to grow your own food without spending on inputs is also likely to help in this regard.
The issue of collective breeding is very much a point to area problem where the best seeds must come together from many growers, mix and then spread out again, so the optimum solution should look something like a river basin or lung. The simpler alternative is to have a single person in the centre of the network who founds the breeding project, distributes seed to all the other participants along with guidelines for growing and selection, then everyone sends their selected seed back to the founder at the end of the process. This simple design puts a huge amount of pressure on the central founder, which limits the expansion of the group beyond a relatively small number of people.
Based on the principles in this book, the maximum number of links to any one person should be capped at around four others. This makes it easier for each person to form a meaningful connection to the people on the next layer down the hierarchy, which opens up the possibility of distributing duties, such as visiting people’s gardens to give suggestions on cultivation, selection, and the assessment of seed quality before adding it back into the common pool.
For annual crops, the pattern ultimately ends up resembling the dynamic function of a lung as it breathes in and out. At the start of the season selected seed is distributed from the centre out through a branching network of group members. In today’s society it is tempting to have everyone drive to the same place at the same time to do this job, or just spend money to mail out the seed to everyone, but both of these methods fail to form a manageable number of high-quality interpersonal connections. Allowing people to choose their own connections greatly reduces the chance of personality clashes. Allowing the founder to veto the admission of new members could be a useful policy if used prudently.
Imagine a very small network- one founder with four growers on the next level down the hierarchy. This is a manageable number for the founder to visit each of their gardens, spend some time chatting about the crop and its preferences and offer advice, then to follow up once or twice during the growing season. As the group grows, additional people can be connected in a lower level on the hierarchy, up to three more connections per person. This means the network grows on each level from one founder, to four people on the first level, twelve more on the second level, and three times more people on each subsequent level below. The only practical limit I can see with this model is the time needed for seed to diffuse up and down the network each season, like a refreshing breath cycle, in and out once per year. In practice the community probably only needs 20-50 people to efficiently breed the crop, a number achieved with less than four levels to the network. For larger networks an acceptable compromise might be simultaneous seed distribution in the form of a big get together at the start of the season, followed by a networked gathering and assessment of seed into a common pool at the end of the cycle.
One important consideration is the design of mechanisms that allow the network to respond to the changing conditions of everyone’s life. Growers at the lowest level are the most manageable since they only have one connection to their sponsor the next level up. This position is most suitable for the more casual breeders, since nobody else is relying on them if they drop out of the program, though it should be pointed out that they have the potential to be the majority of growers in a well filled network. Loss of a grower at higher levels requires more care. The most organic approach would be to promote a grower from a lower level to replace them. This capitalises on existing social connections in the local network. Ideally growers close to each other on the node would also be close to each other in the landscape, making interaction more convenient and crop growing advice more likely to occur in the same soil type and microclimate. Loss of the founder will be the most hazardous transition, though mentoring an underling for this position long before it is needed is likely to be helpful. This mentoring could also be mirrored to help new founders create separate networks for other regions or other breeding purposes. The efficiency of a community using a single network to coordinate breeding all their crops should be weighed up against the redundancy of having several parallel networks for different types of crops.
The design of social networks for perennial crops will require further thinking on my part, and of course these cartoon models will require field testing in my own future community crop breeding projects. I also need to think of a range of practical implementations of how to build these networks, including methods for recruitment, filtering, assigning people to the most suitable level of the hierarchy, and how to deal with the inevitable issues of interpersonal conflict and bad behaviour. A well-designed network has the advantage of naturally dispersing these stresses, rather than all of them falling on a small group of official leaders who typically struggle to maintain the types of small organisations that were common in the first half of the 20thcentury. Thoughtful integration of communication technology also needs consideration. Social media could be a useful motivator to share progress throughout the season and compare notes on performance and selection. Management of member motivation is a major issue I need to delve into.
All of this is a very preliminary exploration of the factors I hope to evaluate in the creation of social networks for the breeding of locally adapted crops. The principle that avoids excessive centralisation is the main take away from this post. since while it can lead to short term efficiency it inevitably sets up stress and fragility of key components.
If you have any suggestions of additional factors that need consideration, or books on organisational design and dynamics I should read next, I would love to hear about them in the comments.
You may want to investigate the working breeding communities in daylilies and Iris. For example, in daylilies there are at least 300 active amateur and professional breeders in the USA alone, and we gleefully buy or exchange with others for our programs to produce locally well-adapted vegetatively propagated perennial varieties. Our goals are largely independently selected: you might as well herd cats. There is an awards and judging system for breeders. We tend to sell directly to gardeners: only a few make it into the big-box distribution networks. But there are well over 6000 members of the daylily society buying from us.
The book seems like an excellent starting point to design the groups you want to create. I love the idea of gradient flows to understand collective organization better. The troubles your initial hierarchical scheme presents (traditional hierarchy problems) doesn't seem to take advantage of this sort of "carving out river basins" organization idea.
Another description of the gradient as I understand it: move a variety of growers *from* a place of little-to-no organized participation in moving seeds to their optimal geographic location *to* a place of social connection facilitating this optimal localizing and a diverse gene reservoir. The underlying flows are probably made up of an infinity notably including interpersonal affinities, communication styles and spatial proximity, motivation and efficiency of movement.
It's worth re-stating, because seeing this as a mountain, with conceptual knowledge, people and existing genes on the top of it, say, in the form of liquid that will need to flow down the mountain effectively, the founder is probably only really the person that can roll down the mountain, with enough surface tension in the fluid to start to pull the relevant mass into motion. The 20th century model you describe is like creating a raft to navigate an amazing toboggan ride. The hierarchical model you've discussed looks to me like formalizing that you will be going down that hill, with about 4 other people, and thwn they are going to be responsible for getting 4 other to participate (in a sort of multi-level-marketing style recruitment).
I guess I'm suggesting that whatever you're reading might consider developing higher probabilities of emitting other organizers or other first rain drops (a sort of high potential energy model, that is founding responsibility) to all fall down the same mountain and create the necessary flows.
So your first approach would kick the system into gear and assuming buy-in to the group aggregation process, is then dependent on developing a sufficiently flexible hierarchy to span the mountain surface terrain and flow, hoping that the nieches occupied can be confidently managed. Versus founders as developing conditions of high potential energy near the top of a known mountain, helping or fostering the emission of actors into the ecosystem. Watching it flourish or diving right into it when the need for this high potential energy zone is over. Though this may not offer sufficient control towards your precise objective.