To celebrate three months without having a cigarette (no patches, no hynposis, just a terrible cough and chest pains - isn’t that enough incentive?) I’ve just been for a run up the hill, and back.

At one point this involves heading for a hole in the wall which takes me into a pine forest. The trick is finding the hole in the wall on the way back. This particular pine forest is dark, with lots of paths, and try as I might to familiarise myself with it, it all looks very much the same to me.

It struck me on the way back that there’s an interesting metaphor here between the network of paths in this pine forest and social and technical networks and how the complexities of networks work. Getting into the network of paths is easy - I know where the hole in the wall is; getting out is not so easy as there seems to be different paths, not all of which will end up at the place I want. It’s the complexities of knowing where you are inside a network and how to orientate yourself when there seem to be different paths.

I write this because I’m in the process of trying to establish a community of practice and I’m trying to work out where the boundaries and interfaces are - and also to assess how much I need to know about this and how much can be left to it’s own devices. I’m also trying to work out how to create a grid of paths so that everyone in the community of practice can find their way around it easily, know where they are, and how to find signposts when they’re lost.