The first paper diagnosed what broke. This one is about how it gets rebuilt.
The short version: not by an organization. The collapse of trust is a wicked problem — no policy, technology, or charismatic leader resolves it, because every part of it is entangled with every other part, and it shifts when you push on it. What can address a problem like that is a network that learns faster than the problem moves.
Building a Catalytic Community sets out what such a network is, how it forms, and what it would take for one to matter.
It is a network of networks. The model draws on General Stanley McChrystal’s Team of Teams, in which autonomous teams bound by a common purpose outperform rigid command in fast-moving conditions, and David Ehrlichman’s Impact Networks, whose first principle is trust. Leaders are gardeners, not chess masters. Three kinds of people have to be in it, and the paper is insistent that all three are load-bearing: thinkers who bring evidence, doers who build and test, and resource allocators who move relationships, expertise, and capital toward what works.
The people are already at work. Bridging groups, civic technologists, local-news experiments, the funders behind them — the paper names them, and its claim is that they are the constituency of a catalytic community, not its competition. What they lack is connection across the three fronts trust fell on, and across the three kinds of people. That is the whole of what this network would add.
It grows in three stages, and they cannot be skipped. First, an information network: people connect, build a common language, and come to share a picture of the problem. Then an action network: small empowered teams take on concrete work under the lightest structure that will hold. Then an impact network: coherence at scale, where the thing behaves like an ecosystem rather than an organization. The paper is honest about which of these it can vouch for. Its argument has three links — that the network can be formed, that it will produce work, that the work will move trust — and it claims only the first, tests it in public, and says the other two are what the later stages exist to find out.
It moves at the speed of trust. This is the constraint everything else obeys. You cannot rush the first stage, and attempting to is the most common way these efforts fail — an action network built on relationships that were never formed is an org chart with nobody behind it. Front Porch Forum spent years as an unremarkable neighborly bulletin board before a flood turned it into the community’s lifeline. Taiwan’s g0v was volunteers self-organizing into project teams until, after the Sunflower Movement, the government came to them.
It says how it would fail. Stage one, as this publication is conducting it, begins with every connection running through a single host (me). The paper sets a test anyone can watch — the network is working when connections form that don’t run through us — and closes with the seven ways a community like this goes wrong, from becoming a cult to becoming a salon, and what guards against each.
Near its end, it turns to a line from Pirkei Avot, two thousand years old and still the honest version of what any of this asks:
“It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.”
Read it in order:
Part I: Why a Catalytic Community — the definition, the foundations it rests on, and what transfers from a military network to an open society and what does not.
Part II: The People Already at Work, and the Three Stages — who is doing this now and why they are not yet a network; then the three stages and what marks each.
Part III: Stage 1 — Making the Builders Visible — the podcast and newsletter as the first stage, conducted in public, and the test we will be held to.
Part IV: What Stages 2 and 3 Will Require, and How This Fails — the principles the later stages will have to hold, four task forces the network might run, and seven ways it could all go wrong.
Part V: Where We Are, and What We Ask — what exists today, what comes next, and the smallest ask a venture with these stakes could make.
Written by Keiron McCammon.
This is the thesis this publication and its accompanying podcast put into practice: stage one, conducted in public — thinkers, doers, and the people who can move resources — encountering each other one conversation at a time.
Igniting the Trust Revolution