Tinderbox Weekend: Complex Networks

At Tinderbox Weekend Boston, Mark Anderson explored the construction and exploration of particularly complex links networks in Tinderbox. Here, for example. is an excerpt from McChrystal’s Afghanistan Counter-Insurgency Planning document. Here’s a detail of one section:

This doesn't look quite as elegant as the beltway think-tank version:

Anderson pointed out it does have some advantages. It’s malleable: you can correct it and manipulate it, you can add notes and explanations. Significantly, several nodes and links in the original version are literally impossible to see, having been obscured by labels. That’s a hint: some steps are important enough to represent in the briefing, but not sufficiently important that they actually need to be seen. More seriously, Anderson showed how new Tinderbox features, like link animations, translucent notes, and column displays, can not only help construct complex networks, but can also help verify that the network in the file is actually the one you intended to represent.

From the Flickr group, here’s Sumner Gerard’s sketch of “Blame Flows” in the ongoing financial crisis:

Again, we’ve got a complex network. It’s tangled, but it’s not merely tangled: the connections are real, they can be understood, and clear thinking requires that we explore and understand them. We can’t just throw up our hands and cry, “it’s complicated,” because sometimes things simply are complicated. Lots of things are connected, but not everything; we can use Tinderbox to explore these networks and, perhaps, to master them.