Networks, real and virtual

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a get-it-done person. Often, my title has been something like “editor” or “project director,” but my work has run the gamut from actual magazine editing to custom cabinetmaking to tech project management for Stamen Design to stringing network cable in offices from Boston to Berkeley.

So I felt right at home on a ladder in my new office in Oakland figuring out how to wire up a network panel for GreenInfo Network, the nonprofit mapping shop that hired me as its second-ever executive director in December 2015.

Office networks are one thing. Human networks are another.

GreenInfo Network was founded in 1996 by Larry Orman, and Larry’s run the shop ever since. We have a similar willingness to climb ladders, hang shelving, and generally roll up our sleeves to do what needs to be done.

Larry has also built quite a network.

I met him in 2004 when I was hired to edit Bay Nature magazine and he was chair of that nonprofit’s board. Within the parks and conservation world, a lot of people know Larry. He’s a node in a broad network. Before GreenInfo, he was the founding director of the Greenbelt Alliance.

The story of Greenbelt Alliance’s history is best told by them (or at least not by me), but there’s a key chapter of that group’s story that I find deeply resonant personally, and more generally at this moment.

In the mid-1980s, Greenbelt Alliance wanted to mount a more active regional campaign to protect the entire “greenbelt” (parks, farmland, watersheds, scenic areas, and other open space) of the Bay Area from what seemed to be nonstop sprawl development.

The trick was that no one could say where the greenbelt really was, so it was impossible to determine what lands were most at risk. If we don’t know what’s been protected, how do we know what more to save?

This was a data problem. But like most data problems, it was also a human problem. There was no real database of parklands and other protected open space in the Bay Area (or anywhere in California), and there was no single person or entity responsible for that data.

So in the early 1990s Larry and Greenbelt created a central database of every park and other publicly owned open space in the Bay region, and published detailed reports listing all these lands. Whether they meant to or not, they also volunteered to steward that data for the long haul. At first, they used paper forms and early database software to gather information. Later they moved to GIS (geographic information systems), which were just becoming available to regular people and smaller organizations.

But the fundamental challenge was only partly technical. Busy officials with dozens of agencies and land trusts had to be convinced that spending some time and funding on data creation and sharing would make a difference. Not in some vague future for other people. But in the near-term, for them.

Two decades later, the benefits are obvious and those first efforts have expanded into GreenInfo’s California Protected Areas Database (CPAD), now the nation’s best and biggest statewide GIS inventory of parks and other open space (49 million acres, 14,000 parks owned by 1,000 agencies). We now know exactly where every park and other open space owned by the public is located, anywhere in the state. And that in turn is informing GreenInfo’s work on PAD-US, the USGS national database of protected lands, of which CPAD is the California element.

I wonder how many other people and groups were thinking about network effects in the 1980s and early 90s. Some. But not many.

Now, network effects are widely appreciated. But things are still changing. GreenInfo is in transition, and so are the networks of which it is a part.

I see those networks expanding and opening up day by day. Not always easily, but inexorably and, ultimately, for the good.

Over nearly 10 years editing Bay Nature magazine, I was tied deeply into the local network of conservation groups and agencies working to protect and restore habitats all over the region. But the largest and most extensive human network, actually, were the nature photographers from whom we purchased images every issue.

Platforms like Flickr and Instagram opened the floodgates for people to share what they see in the world, and the work is often amazing. If you’re looking for traditional nature and wildlife photography, Flickr is still king (the Bay Nature group alone has 28,000 mostly pro-level nature shots). But for immediacy, nothing beats Instagram. In fact, my new role and my previous job at Stamen overlap nicely in CaliParks.org, which uses CPAD as a filter on Instagram to unearth the astonishingly diverse visual stories that pour out of our parks every day.

Over two years working at Stamen Design, and in my work founding Nerds for Nature, I began to immerse myself in other networks:

• Open source software development, which has unleashed incredible tools and collective efforts most obvious in the vast world of Github.com, where anyone can build, share, comment on, copy, and improve things made with code. Whole companies like CartoDB or Mapbox and whole communities, like iNaturalist.org, grow up around totally open source projects.
• And open map data, particularly OpenStreetMap, has become the largest and most detailed publicly created map in history. It’s far from perfect, but we’ve seen it used to amazing effect in contexts like the Missing Maps project, where the Red Cross and others are empowering people in poorly mapped regions of the world to map their own cities and communities.

With all those possibilities, I have to remind myself that a new executive director’s most important human networks are, first, the staff who do amazing work and, a very close second, the 80 to 100 clients a year we work with.

Without staff to create top-notch work and clients to bring their data and vision to us, then I’m just waving my hands. Luckily, those two networks are incredibly strong here.

And even better, they exist within this growing global web of connection where maps, data, and networks join together in ways that allow us to understand our world and work toward the greater good in ways we’re just beginning to understand.