Recently I've been drawn more and more to thinking of RegenCHOICE as essentially a network

From the personal point of view, everyone appreciates belonging: the only things more basic in Maslow's hierarchy of needs are the basic needs for survival and security. We recognise that psychological belonging happens within the range of Dunbar's number of people.

Within a network or association up to that size, people don't need a CHOICE system. First, people know each other; second, good networkers can introduce you to the other people you might want to meet. Moreover, the quality of matching that you can get in a network of that size is pretty limited. It is highly unlikely that someone else will be just the person you're looking for, at the same time as you are the person they are looking for. What may well help within that small size of network are tools that help people get to know their neighbours better. If you start with this size of group, it is unlikely that you can find within the group a team of other people who are able and willing to work together on their dream projects.

I see this scale of grouping a lot when I look at the kind of people I mix with these days. There are many, many small groupings, and quite a lot of interconnection, but still it feels like really good luck to find the people you really need to be in touch with, for whatever reason. The relative success of online recruitment, and online dating, depends on having a much larger pool of people, who could not possibly know each other, and where it is even unlikely to be introduced by a third party. Despite any issues with online recruitment and dating, to climb Maslow's pyramid towards self-actualisation does need a much wider pool of people to be available to each other.

So how to combine the two? Remember “Think globally act locally”? Wikipedia quotes René Dubos as saying “natural and social units maintain or recapture their identity, yet interplay with each other through a rich system of communications”. So how about something like:

• Connect global belong local
• Be small scale reach global
• Belong to a small group; connect worldwide

I see several components as needed for RegenCHOICE:

1. a belonging level where people know each other, and can vouch for each other
2. a community of practice level where people can design and maintain helpful questions about their area of life
3. a network server level where the information is stored, and where the software processes take place
4. maybe other levels, fractally, for network resilience
5. the global level, coordinating all the questions, as well as routing all the information

Governance of all these levels will be an interesting challenge. Quite possibly sociocracy might be a way to do this.