Tinderbox Weekend: How To Handle The Networks
Terrific Tinderbox Weekend! We were really packed into the historic old farmhouse that’s Eastgate world headquarters and it rained, day and night, without pause. But the talks were terrific, and the breaks and meals were fascinating.
I've done three different talks in three different cities over the last three weeks. I’m bushed. So in place of a grand overview, I plan to simply point to a few ideas and memories from the weekend over the next few days.
Certainly among the most memorable talks from all the years of Tinderbox events we’ve hosted was Terrorists and Talibs — How To Handle The Networks with Tinderbox. Felix Kuehn and Alex Strick van Linschoten discussed their studies of personal networks in Southern Afghanistan and the various ways they use Tinderbox to try to understand the complicated networks of personal, family, tribal, and historical forces that connect people and organizations. Here, from the Tinderbox Flickr group, is an overview of their sketch of relationships between the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
The adornments, interestingly, are smart adornments that automatically gather together individuals from different regions. Particularly interesting to me was the importance of identifying individuals – not necessarily conspicuous or well-known – whose importance lies in their connections, in the way they link different groups, tribes, and interests. And, naturally, it’s fascinating to hear about using Tinderbox not only for gathering and analyzing data but also for writing their recent book