Who are the people in your neighborhood?

Networks. In permaculture good holistic design deals in networks. The members of a community, any community (though my favorite is still plants) interact with one another in a number of ways, the most productive being those which have closed loop systems, where the needs and yields of one organism are met or used by others in the system.

This past weekend was another class weekend with Larry Santoyo, as our guest teacher. He spoke mostly about the human applications of permaculture design, or rather how we can use our systems thinking to design human systems that work. We created business guilds instead of plant guilds and thought in terms of meeting the needs of our community with our own yields and skills.

These concepts bring up the question, who is in your network? Where do you fit in your network? Is it the same place you think you fit or would the members of your community place you somewhere else? How big is your network? Can you meet the needs of your community simply with already existing persons or do you need to branch out?

I can readily identify a few different networks I am a part of, outside of facebook and g+ of course. Here in Denver there is an online parenting community that I am a part of. To become a member you must live within a two zipcode zone. This community is a bit too large to be a functional network for our purposes, however within the larger network there are many subgroups, this breaks the community down into more manageable pieces and allows us to develop closer relationships based on more than location, common interest.

I have been able to buy clothes for my kid, sell art, raise money to take my PDC, get my partner a job, get a bike, make great friends, create group crafts and connect with former students, all through using my subgroup networks. Many of the subgroups I belong to have the same people as members so we interact with each other often and have the ability to develop close relationships which creates a stronger network overall. It also allows me to see what needs we have as a whole that are not being met, as I see it, ours needs a better relationship to our food source. There are very few gardens (and gardeners) around here, not enough to support or encourage food stability in our community.

Lucky for me that I love to garden, not only that I love to cook, share food and teach others about growing their own, looks like I may finally have found the place we fit in the pattern. The next step for this network member is developing an NSA, utilizing my skills and other members yards we can fill a gap in our network, making us all more stable.

Can you identify the members of your own networks? How about the ones closest to you? Where is the need that must be met? Those unmet needs are opportunity. As Larry Santoyo said, "It's about byproducts, not buying products." Whose byproducts do you need and where are yours going?