Is Rigorous Advocacy an Oxymoron?
Filed under: Connected Communities, Social Capital, Social Networks
I gave a talk on the social and educational value of chess in Dallas, Texas recently. The person driving me to the event, John Jacobs, read on the blurb that I worked at the RSA, “a think tank in London”, and asked, in a melodious southern drawl: “I see that you work in a think tank. So what do you think about?”
I gave the quick elevator pitch for our project(social networks are a tool than can be visualised and used to assist in community regeneration), but the real answer is that we don’t just think, but also research and advocate. In fact the core tension in any think tank is between the rigour of your research and the relevance of your findings. You are obliged to pay allegiance to Truth, Validity, Reliability etc, but while you want the blessings of such celestial Gods, the success of your projects are typically judged by their impact on the terrestial Gods of Media, Funders and Whitehall. (And at the RSA we also want the participants in the research, the people ‘on the ground’ to endorse what we do).
This context explains the recent musings of our great leader, who accurately reflected the ambience of a meeting yesterday in which the Connected Communities Team showed Mathew a few emerging findings, subject to some important qualifications, and he told us which of the ‘findings’ had traction, and which ones needed more work.
When you spend weeks collecting data and trying to make sense of it(especially social network analysis data), you realise that your ‘findings’ are actually constructed on a host of more or less problematic assumptions that are part of the choice architecture of any research project . But when you want to make a splash, and tell the world that you have a new model of social change, there is an understandable tendency to gloss over such details and focus on the strength of the core message, even if the strong core message is based on tentative foundations.
You only realise how messy social research is when you start trying to do some, and although you may want ‘evidence’, what you tend to get is concepts that are contested, samples that are more indicative than representative, methods that may or may not be replicable, correlations that may or may not be causal, and ‘findings’ that were created by looking in a particular way for a particular purpose. As any honest researcher will tell you, respecting such tensions is crucial if the research is going to be informative, or provide the basis for action.
Such rigour is not easy becuase most research is timebound and opportunistic. It is a huge challenge to feel confident that you have tapped into some truth about human nature or the structure of society. For instance, at a recent RSA event, Christakis mentioned that it took 25 years to collect the Farmingham public health data that provided the basis for our interest in social networks, and 5 years and 5 millions dollars to analyse it.
So here is the nub of working at a place like this. If you are passionate about an idea, you can be a vigorous advocate for it, but as part of a project research team, you are asked to be a rigorous advocate. You are asked to push an idea, and, often simultaneously, asked to support it with evidence, even when it is in the nature of evidence to be equivocal and open to interpretation.
The challenge is that robust advocacy is unequivocal and passionate, while reliable research is equivocal and cautious. So is rigorous advocacy an oxymoron? Or are there ways to feel at ease with the conflicting demands of rigour and relevance?
How many friends does one cyborg need?
Filed under: Connected Communities, Digital Inclusion, Social Networks
Yesterday’s RSA Thursday featured Robin Dunbar, Director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford, but best known for having his own number (a sure sign of success), 150, which he argues is the upper limit on the number of people you can maintain stable relationships with.
The idea is powerful, but it’s not new. I first came across it more than a decade ago when it was already called Dunbar’s number (Dunbar’s first major paper on the idea was in 1992), but it was then a much simpler anthropological notion about optimal group sizes, i.e. the upper size that communities and organisations should maintain in order to retain the informal efficiency of mutual recognition, trust and stability, rather than creating cumbersome rules and regulations that we seem to need in society at large.
In this respect, Dunbar’s new book, How many friends does one person need? can be thought of as Dunbar 2.0, in which the idea has been revitalised as a corrective to the rampant polyphilia on facebook and other social networking sites. Dunbar 2.0 says loud and clear that you can have thousands of facebook ‘friends’ if you want, but there are constraints on how many of them can meaningfully be called friends.
There can be no uncontested notion of what ‘friend’ means, but Dunbar argues that humans consistently show a pattern of layering their social contacts, with a core of close friends around 5, 15 considered ‘good friends’, 50 as ‘friends’ and up to 150 as acquaintances. Jacob Morgan’s blog gives a powerful graphic for this idea and the discussion on socialmediatoday.com is well worth reading.
Dunbar’s work is highly complex and interdisciplinary, and his core claim is that there are two constraints on stable relationships. The first is cognitive, the neural density and processing power needed to retain detailed information on people, or ‘keep track’ of them as Dunbar put it yesterday. The second is temporal, the time we need to invest so that people to create mutual interest and regard, and so that such relationships don’t decay, i.e so that friends don’t become strangers all over again.
There are many things to say about this fascinating idea, but I want to raise one in particular. It might be true that human beings are limited by Dunbar’s number, but much of Dunbar’s work seems to be based on extrapolations on primate behaviour. He thinks in evolutionary terms that are framed principally by biology and anthropology. But I wonder whether he should pay more attention to technological change as part of cultural evolution, for 21st century human beings in the developed world are now suspended somewhere between primates and robots. Indeed, many, most notably Andy Clark, have argued that human beings should be thought of as cyborgs.
“We cannot see ourselves aright until we see ourselves as nature’s very own cyborgs: cognitive hybrids who repeatedly occupy regions of design space radically different from those of our biological forbears. The hard task, of course, is now to transform all this from (mere) impressionistic sketch into a balanced scientific account of the extended mind.”
So that would be my challenge for developing a Dunbar 3.0. Our minds and our technologies are increasingly part of continuim, with much of our memory and functionality stored in digital form. A person may only need a certain number of friends, or be capable of maintaining 150, but what of person-plus? What of the fact that we now live and learn and think with machines? What of the Cyborgs that we are becoming? We are so now thoroughly dependent on digital tools, and our sense of self interwoven with them, that it is far from unimaginable that future technologies will overcome the temporal and cognitive constraints intimated by Dunbar’s existing work.
Perhaps we are already doing so, because it is easier to keep track of people, and it is easier to invest time in relationships than it has ever been.
However, one of the many big suggestive points made yesterday was that we may need to physically touch people to remain close to them. The importance of touch for bonding is not fully researched yet, but it might be crucial- those handshakes, hugs and cheek-kisses may matter more than you know… and as Dunbar noted, it is hard to imagine ‘virtual touch’…but you never know…
Think Tank Clash
Last night’s Think Tank Clash at the South Bank Centre, organised by New Deal of The Mind was hopefully the first of many such events. Around 300 people were hosted by comedian Rory Bremner and the atmosphere was as playful as it was political, with a pint or two enjoyed by many of the audience, and most of the participants. Reviews of the Think Tank Clash format so far have been good, though I am sure if the event is repeated it has scope to be even better.
There were 8 think tanks involved: Progress, ResPublica, Fabian Society, Reform, Policy Exchange, IPPR, Demos, and of course, The RSA. You might not have thought of the RSA as a ‘think tank’ before, and indeed the organisation as a whole, with our fellowship, House, and Events programme, does not match that description very tightly. One way to square this circle is to think of the RSA Projects team as a think tank within the RSA, albeit one that places less emphasis on producing pamphlets and informing policy, and more on practical impact in the real world.
Each think tank had two representatives, the head honcho and their ‘witness’. I was Mathew Tayor’s witness, and I think the role of the witnesses more generally was to signal that the organisations involved are more than just their most public face and voice, an association perpetuated by the media reflex to seek comment from prominent and familiar faces.
We were pitched against Demos, represented by their Director Richard Reeves, and Stephen Scott, who looked a little bit like Kramer from Seinfeld. There was no Oxford Union style ‘motion’ to debate, but we were charged with convincing the audience that in the realm of big ideas, our work on social networks, particularly their role in community regeneration, was more important/pertinent/illuminating than Demos’s work on Character .
Needless to say, the debate involves a bit of a false binary, and is more about means than ends, because it makes little sense to be against character or networks. Demos argue that good societies need good people, which is a powerful point, and their claim that character is largely shaped by good parenting is carefully argued and empirically grounded. More specutively, they suggest that government should take a more proactive role in encouraging good parenting.
Our response is that networks are character forming, and that who your parents are and how they are is largely based on the nature of their social network. Moreover, character may be an important personal quality, but social networks can be thought of as a public good- a shared resource that nobody owns but that everybody can potentially benefit from. In short, our idea is more progressive.
The vote was close, but we won for two main reasons: 1) I emphasised that our research was grounded in fieldwork on the ground, and that we were literally ‘knocking on doors’ to make sense of the power of social networks in deprived communities, and 2) Mathew Taylor looked like “the sexy bad guy in a James Bond movie”
Reed’s Law
Filed under: Connected Communities, Social Capital, Social Networks
The main reason social research is so difficult is that human interaction does not lend itself to law-like regularities. However, after stumbling across ‘Reed’s Law’ (more on that in a sec) in an article about social capital, I was moved to examine wikipedia’s list of eponymous laws i.e laws named after people. These laws range from the serious, like Amara’s law: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run”, to the troubling, like Wirth’s law: “Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster”, to the wry, like Hofstatder’s law: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law”.
In the context of social capital, a core concept of the connected communities project, Reed’s law is particularly pertinent. Like many of the eponymous laws, Reed’s law initially sounds like it came from ”The Department of the Bleeding Obvious’, becuase it simply states that networks grow exponentially i.e. the more people there are in a network, the more scope there is for sub groups that connect with other networks. Reed’s analysis amounts to saying more than that network growth is geometric(2,4,8,16,32 etc) rather than arithmetic(1,2,3,4,5 etc), because the key elements of a network are groups rather than individuals, and connecting with one group invariably means connecting with more than one group, if only because each individual member of a group typically belongs to other groups too.
The idea is a bit more subtle, but basically contends that connectivity feeds off itself, a point that becomes clearer by considering the morphology of networks. Broadcast networks are the most basic, amounting to a ‘one to many’ network. In this sense my network is everybody I know, and spreading the word across my network merely means broadcasting information rather than an exchange of information. Transaction networks, or one-to-one networks, are more complex, featuring an exchange of information between two people. However, the most powerful form of network is the many-to many network, also known as group forming networks or GFNs. These networks are at the heart of Reed’s law, because it is the connection to another group that significantly increases your resources. This kind of bridging or linking capital is the kind of connectivity we most need.
Reed expresses his own law in the following technical language: “Let’s say you have a GFN with n members. If you add up all the potential two-person groups, three-person groups, and so on that those members could form, the number of possible groups equals 2n. So the value of a GFN increases exponentially, in proportion to 2n. I call that Reed’s Law. And its implications are profound.”
Profond indeed, because it means that every time you aad a person to your network, you are really adding several people from several different ‘packs’. A fuller exposition can be read in a Harvard Business Review article aptly called ‘The Law of the Pack’.
I am not totally sure what Reed’s law means for community regeneration, but I think it suggests that, at least in network terms, the more people you know, the more access you have to potentially valuable sub-groups, and that the really valuable people to know are those who have the most connections to several networks. Such assumptions are already built in to our empirical work, which is designed to guage levels of connectivity in areas like New Cross Gate, without making any judgment on how valuable particular networks are. Our contention is that GNFs, group forming networks, are one of the most important antidotes to the pending public sector squeeze because we all need to become more adept at mobilising existing resources, rather than buying new ones, or waiting for the government to bail us out. Following from Reed, our claim is that the value of such resources has until recently been underestimated.
As I think I have said before, and as Reed’s law seems to confirm, it is not what you know nor who you know, but who they know that matters.
Five Reasons why you should care about social networks.
Filed under: Cohesion, Connected Communities, Social Capital, Social Networks, Think Global Act Local
Sometimes you need to back up a little. I have spent most of the last few days trying to get my head round the intracacies of social network analysis, and I fear I am losing sight of the bigger picture.
Why bother with community? Who needs connections?
The first answer that jumps out at me is trust. Trust is closely related to connectivity and we want a trusting society, not just to reduce transaction costs, but because we feel better when we feel trusted and trusting. Anthony Seldon developed this point at length at a recent RSA event. So the connected community project is partly about trust, in particular about how to build it, and to better understand how it can be lost.
The second answer is loneliness. The first RSA speaker event I attended was John Cacioppo’s lecture on lonliness, which detailed decades of interdisciplinary research into the pervasive feeling of subjective isolation, and details the deleterious effects of lonliness on health, wellbeing and, yes, trust. We care about social networks because we are looking for such patterns of isolation and exclusion.
The third answer is scarcity. What do you do when the money runs out? There may or may not be green shoots signalling the beginning of the end of the recession, but we know that the public sector typically lags two years behind the private sector, and there will soon be acute pressure on budgets for local public services. If that were bad enough for the short term, rising energy prices and an ageing demographic create enduring pressure on existing services. So what can you do when the local authority faces a funding shortfall of (on some estimates) around 30%? Well, you can look for money elsewhere, rely on enterprise, or you can seek to build social capital so that people make better use of their available community resources(time banks, car pooling, local currencies etc.)
The fourth answer is inequality. There is now good evidence that societies with lower levels of inequality tend to be happier, and we know that social capital is used to perpetuate patterns of inequality. The more we can understand the functioning of these networks, the more informed we will be in our efforts to create a mor egalitarian society.
The fifth and (for now) final answer is friendship. People are basically social creatures who we now understand to be
conditional altruists. In other words, we are inclined to want to help others, but only insofar as we expect that help to be reciprocated. I walk past several people every day without saying hello, or asking how they are or who they are. Some of these people are random passers-by, but many I know I will see again, waiting for the same train, selling the same magazine. Understanding networks will not shift this sort of intertia, but it’s a start. The more we realise the powerful impact of social networks on everything from health to wealth to happiness, the more value we will place on making these links and measuring these effects well.
I am glad I got that out of my system. Now I can go back to reading about alters, nodes, name generators, betweennesss, sample sizes etc without feelign completely disconnected from the real world!
Count me in: limiting social exclusion through regulation?
Filed under: Cohesion, Connected Communities, Social Capital, Social Networks
In his last blog Jonathan concludes that one of the ingredients of Barack Obama’s success as a community organiser was his “deep appreciation for people and communities.” Obama not only sought to understand ‘communities,’ but importantly recognised their diverse constitution and that reaching out to people and individuals was essential groundwork. He had what is sometimes coined the ‘human touch.’
The need for such a capacity to include is at the heart of the Connected Communities programme as we seek not only to reinforce existing community networks, but also to build these networks out in ways that oblige them to include those people at the margins with depleted stocks of social capital. We must try, that is, to overcome a recurrent pattern in community regeneration whereby projects come to work alongside the usual suspects (be they individuals or local CVS organisations) and concurrently fail to reach the most excluded (potential) community members.
How we manage this is going to be tricky, but I’m hopeful that the ‘Regulation for Regeneration’ summit being held in conjunction with the Local Better Regulation Office (LBRO) at the RSA next week may help us to develop some ideas. Specifically, this event is going to bring together local authorities and businesses to discuss the challenges that they face in the current economic recession. In particular, through a series of sessions led by expert speakers, delegates will be asked to consider what the priorities for action should be and in what ways regulation can make a contribution to meeting these priorities.
The last of the sessions will bring the summit together by enquiring into what a new model for regeneration might look like. One of the key themes of enquiry for this session concerns how regulation can help us to nurture the types of communities and local economies that we’d like to participate in. Specifically, it is posited that in this new model of regeneration we might look to draw upon regulation as a means to help us build constructive social and economic norms through which communities can ‘regulate’ themselves.
Hopefully this in-depth conversation about the relationship between regeneration and regulation will garner practical ways of harnessing the principles of regulation as a means to facilitate more equitable community regeneration on the ground. Could, for example, a framework for regulating the involvement of community members in projects be developed so as to ensure inclusivity? Or, in a related way, might the social capital strategy we create out of our work in Knowle West and New Cross Gate comment on how the reach and accessibility of interventions looking to build social networks is regulated? Out of this, the hope would be that we start to see the development of more deeply resilient and empowered communities in which engagement (and so responsibility) is more open and shared.
Provoking responsibility, nudge-style
Filed under: Connected Communities, Social Capital, Social Networks, inequality
It was a bit of a surprise to hear at the end of last week, and verify over the weekend, that Barack Obama has been awarded the nobel peace prize for ‘extraordinary efforts’ to improve world diplomacy and co-operation. My initial response, no doubt mirrored around the world, was what has President Obama done to warrant receiving this award? This is a question that numerous other blogs have covered directly, for example Gideon Rachman’s blog at the FT.
One answer of particular interest to the Connected Communities programme can be reached if we turn this question around. That is, if we ask why would the Nobel committee grant President Obama this award so early on into his presidency? Looked at this way round, I would argue that a strategic motive for this gesture emerges.
That is, it could be argued that this prize was given to Barack not so much in recognition of achievements to date, but rather so as to characterise his presidency as one directed by peace-making from the off. In many respects, this is the nudge principle writ large. Set ‘peace presidency’ as the default position, but leave the door open to opt out (although significantly such an exit could not be achieved quietly given the issues at stake).
Such a strategy has interesting implications for our work at Connected Communities. In particular, at last week’s AGM the question of how to involve leaders in our proposed Community Garden Project was a thorny one. On the one hand, it was recognised that identifying leaders at the local community level was critical as they can generate so much momentum on the ground. On the other hand, it was also recognised that going to existing leaders can reinforce existing community divisions, and that a fine balance between leaders and facilitators must be struck.
Here, then, the question arose as to how Connected Communities might not only use existing local community leaders, but also help people to generate leadership qualities at the local level. Might it be, therefore, that one approach may be not to only view leadership as something earned, but also to ascribe leadership to individuals (e.g. by rotating committee duties between local residents interested in participating in a community garden scheme). That is, by simply assigning responsibility (for reviving a disused local space or, more ambitiously!, world peace) might we also provoke more responsible decision-making?
Driving through conditions for community
Filed under: Cohesion, Connected Communities, Digital Inclusion, Social Capital, Social Networks
Just been prompted by a comment by mas on Jonathan’s blog, namely that community connectedness nowadays is often undermined “by among others people not walking the streets where they live (just to the car & back), not working where they live and in too many cases being fearful (rightly or wrongly) of where they live.”
I would certainly concur with these arguments (in particular when we’re thinking about Jonathan’s first, community-cum-neighbourhood, community typology) but there’s much more to it the contribution of car use to diminishing social networks. Specifically, I am thinking here of Donald Appleyard’s classic ‘Liveable Streets’ study of the effects of vehicle throughput on different streets in San Francisco on neighbourliness in those streets. This study was re-created by Josh Hart in Bristol in 2008 – see www.driventoexcess.org – and came to the same striking conclusions. Of particular relevance to Connected Communities, this more recent study found that:
- Residents of the heavily-trafficked (>20k motor vehicles/day) street studied were found to have less than a quarter the number of local friends than those on the lightly-trafficked (140 vehicles/day) street and under half the number of local acquaintances.
- Residents on the heavily-trafficked street had a much smaller ‘home territory’ (the area over which they felt ‘a sense of stewardship or personal responsibility’) than those on the less-trafficked streets.
That is, studies both in the US and the UK demonstrate convincingly that car-use not only reduces the number of opportunities that the driver might have to develop social networks in his or her local neighbourhood – through chance encounters etc. – but also drastically erodes the conditions in which fellow residents might feel comfortable connecting with their neighbours.
Getting motorists walking, that is, not only increases their own chances of socialising in their local neighbourhood, but also increases the likelihood of other residents doing so. Choosing not to drive becomes a civic, ’other-regarding’ decision in a very immediate sense.
With this in mind, might local community-based digitally-networked work spaces (such as the hub in King’s Cross or Knowle West Media Centre in Bristol) not only foster digital inclusion, therefore, but also – by reducing commuting distances – indirectly enable the conditions in which more traditional forms of social inclusion take place?
Is the idea of community nostalgic?
Filed under: Connected Communities, Social Capital, Social Networks
“Now you’re telling me, you’re not nostalgic. Well give me another word for it, you who are so good with words”
- Joan Baez, Diamonds and Rust(in reference to her relationship with Bob Dylan)
I am still too young to get nostalgic on a regular basis, but this Baez line always made a deep impression on me, and comes to mind when thinking of community. The idea of neighbours coming together, looking out for each other, having a common sense of identity, values and purpose, and such neighbourhoods bridging with others like them to form some sort of civic whole….Well, has there ever been such a place? Is community an inherently nostalgiac notion?
Before pondering this question I surfed for quotes on nostalgia and my favourite was by American engineer Charles F Kettering:
“You can’t have a better tomorrow if you are thinking about yesterday all the time”
If community is going to be a non-redundant concept, we need to stop looking back to a bygone pre-globalized, pre-digital age and reimagine community as something that people with multiple parts can still feel some belonging to, and desire to contribute to. So what kind of community do we want here and now?
Part of the problem is that community seems to be at least three things today:
1) Your geographic neighbourhood (where you live, the streets you walk)
2) Your social network (who you meet, go out with, do things with)
3) Your digital network (who you email, who you text and call etc)
Community is all of these things and more, but the calls for stronger communities is tied up with an understandable conflation of 1 and 2, plus
a growing awareness of the importance of 3.
Part of what we are doing here at the RSA connected communities project is to understand how best to frame the idea of community in a way that makes it fit for purpose, and the purpose we have in mind is an idea of citizens of the future in which people are informed, engaged, other regarding, capable of handling complexity, and posessing greater self-reliance.
But citizens are embedded in communities of various sorts, and our informed hunch, based on findings detailed at social networking blogs is that the best way to create such citizens is to have strong social networks and the best way to make sense of community in the 21st century is to get a better grasp of how these networks operate. This seems to us to be the pattern that best connects the three forms of community outlined above- let us know whether you agree.
What’s Happening Under the Trees?
Filed under: Book Reviews, Connected Communities, Social Networks
We have all heard the dictum that getting on in life is not about what you know, but who you know. The truth is more complicated, because what you know and who you know are inextricably linked, and who you know is only important because of who they know, and how well.
The Connected Communities programme aims to be practical and tangibly effective at street level, initially in two particular places-New Cross Gate in South East London, and Knowle West in South Bristol- but it has a theoretical heart. In plain language the idea is that relationships and social networks matter much more fundamentally than policy-makers typically imagine, and this idea is grounded in evidence of what motivates people, and how empowering social networks are formed.
As Alasdair mentioned in his last post, Lord Andrew Mawson recently spoke at the RSA. Mawson’s wonderful book, The Social Entrepreneur demonstrates the pivotal importance of can-do people with local knowledge getting together for the regeneration of Bromley-by- Bow. There is a more technical analysis of the same idea in a Demos pamphlet from 2002 with the evocative title: ‘People before Structures.’
Lord Mawson began his eight minute speech on Monday by stating that in his 25 years of local regeneration projects, he finds that central and local government persist in making the same mistakes in public service delivery because
Central and Local Government have a good idea of the shape of the forest but absolutely no idea of what is happening under the trees.
In many ways the connected community programme is about what’s happening under the trees. We are trying to understand what determines, at a more granular level, why local initiatives succeed and fail. The hypothesis is that useful things get done at a local level not so much because of the level of funding and delivery structure of government initiatives(although they are important) but because of how effectively the social networks operate. How much does it matter, for instance, that Andy knows Sally who recently bumped into Brenda who tried something similar a few years ago, and learned how to do it better next time?
We think social networks of this sort are pivotally important. The RSA are informed optimists about our ability to make a better world, and the centrality of social networks is built partly on a theory of human agency. For instance, in the Spring 2009 RSA journal, Director of Research Steve Broome refers to experimental research by Austrian economist Ernst Fehr that indicates most people are neither ‘essentially’ selfish nor altruistic. We are tit-for-tat creatures who want to be good and do good, but will only do so if we like, or more precisely trust whoever we are doing it for. In this sense, Fehr suggests we are ‘conditional altruists’- a useful expression.
The connection to social networks is fleshed out by analytical sociologist Peter Hedstrom who indicates that with just 5% of a sample population acting, not as conditional altruists, but as ‘egoists’, social interaction between egoists and conditional altruists lowers the overall level of cooperation in a network by about 40%. The contention is therefore that if social and civic action is taken in areas with good connectivity and high levels of trust, it is much more likely to be of net benefit, hence the emphasis on measuring social networks in areas in need of regeneration.
But this is still theory rather than practice. As researchers, if you want to understand social networks you have to spend time ‘under the trees’ in the areas in question, and build trust and good will with local residents. In time, you hope to discover who they know, how well, how often they call upon them, and hopefully some finer contextual details about the resulting community hubs, where the most important nodes of the networks tend to be.
However, being under the trees can be challenging, and involves, for interest, going from the relatively protected atmosphere of John Adam Street behind the Strand, to New Cross Gate, as I did on Monday with my colleague Alasdair Jones and community development consultant, Alison Gilchrist FRSA. In New Cross Gate, as in many inner city areas, you find legions of friendly people doing meaningful community work, but you also cannot help but notice dejected people sharing cans of lager on the sidewalk in the morning, while fighter dogs look on.
All the more reason to understand what is going on under the trees, in particular to track the informal social networks that might put individuals and groups in touch with another in constructive ways.
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