I had a fascinating conversation in December with Ori Brafman, co-author of the The Starfish and the Spider, which forwards the novel proposition that highly effective organizations can actually have flat org charts where anyone can make progress, anyone can assume the responsibilities of people that leave and there is no top-down authority bottlenecking decisions and progress.

Their proof is in the pudding with their large global non-profit Global Peace Networks they ran with no overall leadership, only nodes. As they point out, Al Qaeda is another extremely effective flat organization.

For such organizations to determine their status they can’t do a top-down review they need to determine the overall health of their network of individual nodes. Fascinating stuff.

Then Ori asked me how do we determine the health of our network. He wanted to know how we know the overall status of our community of 300,000 members. It was such a novel approach to a critical piece of what we do, it stopped me in my tracks. Of course we have lots of ways of knowing; open communication channels with members (email, IM and private messaging) as well as public forums, reading external blogs, a group of forums moderators, user-notification tools throughout the site. Then of course we have a full-time community manager, Randi, a customer support rep, John D., as well as the continual interest of John V. and I.

So we have lots of ways of knowing the health of our network, but I never thought of it in that perspective and from here on I always will. As well I’m going to start tracking the network’s health over time on a scale of excellent, good, average, poor and awful. (I’m happy to report that right now ours is excellent. )

I’m debating including more specific states such as healing, in-flux, confused, overwhelmed. Perhaps I’ll keep a secondary column to detail the direction the health is going in (even, healing, improving, sickening, fracturing) and then a paragraph column to recall exactly what the big events were. Later we can look for trends that may be seasonal or tied to new user surges or the loss of too many moderators at once.

So, what’s the health of your network? How do you know?