I’m developing the Digital Opportunities Intelligence Network (DOIN) as an open-source community project focused on helping communities move beyond measuring broadband access to understanding how opportunity, capacity, and collaboration develop over time.

Grounded in my “Birds of Unlike Feathers Need to Flock Together” concept, DOIN combines semantic modeling, knowledge graphs, network analysis, and community intelligence to help people and organizations build shared understanding and coordinate action. The goal is to transform fragmented data into collective intelligence, expand equitable participation, strengthen regional resilience, and help communities create more inclusive, opportunity-rich futures by connecting people and organizations that might not otherwise work together.

We’re Looking for DOIN Network Members

DOIN is built on the belief that meaningful innovation happens when birds of unlike feathers flock together.

We welcome people with different experiences, perspectives, knowledge, skills, and connections who share an interest in helping communities thrive. Whether your contributions come through research, technology, education, community engagement, planning, storytelling, public service, entrepreneurship, lived experience, or simply curiosity and a willingness to learn, your perspective matters.

Network members can help:

  • Shape the DOIN framework
  • Contribute ideas, data, and insights
  • Share community challenges and success stories
  • Participate in pilot projects
  • Build partnerships and collaborations
  • Develop tools, resources, and documentation
  • Create new connections across disciplines, organizations, and communities

Together, we can transform data into understanding, understanding into action, and action into collective intelligence.

A Simple DOIN Equation

One way to think about DOIN is that community opportunity is created through both capacity and connections.

If a community has:

  • Capacity = 50
  • Collaboration = 10

Then:

Opportunity = Capacity + Collaboration

50 + 10 = 60 Now imagine the community strengthens relationships among schools, libraries, nonprofits, local government, and businesses:

  • Capacity = 50
  • Collaboration = 35

50 + 35 = 85 The community did not necessarily add more infrastructure, but it increased its ability to work together.

This reflects one of the core ideas behind DOIN:

Collective Intelligence Community Capacity + Community Connections Or, in mathematical form:

Where:

  • = Collective Intelligence

  • = Community Capacity

  • = Engagement and Connections

The lesson is simple: stronger communities are not built solely by increasing resources. They are built by increasing the number and quality of connections between people, organizations, and ideas.

As I often say, meaningful innovation happens when birds of unlike feathers flock together.

Join the Network

If you are interested in helping build an open-source framework for community intelligence, digital opportunity, and regional resilience, I’d love to connect.

The future of community development will depend not only on better technology, but on stronger relationships, shared understanding, and the ability to learn and act together.

Let’s build it together.

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