Birds of Unlike Feathers Need to Flock Together
Network Weaving, Policy Learning, and Regional Knowledge Infrastructure
Abstract
Complex community challenges rarely belong to a single organization, profession, or level of government. Broadband intersects with education, healthcare, workforce development, energy, public safety, economic development, and civic participation. Yet the institutions responsible for these areas often operate within separate professional, administrative, and funding systems.
This paper introduces the Birds of Unlike Feathers Principle, expressed through a phrase I commonly use:
Birds of unlike feathers need to flock together.
The principle proposes that communities become more capable of addressing complex problems when people and institutions with different forms of knowledge, authority, experience, and resources intentionally build relationships around a shared purpose. It translates established ideas from network weaving, social network theory, collective intelligence, collaborative governance, and policy learning into language intended for community practice.
The paper explores the principle through the development of the EUPConnect Collaborative in Michigan’s Eastern Upper Peninsula and considers its implications for the Digital Opportunities Intelligence Network, or DOIN. EUPConnect provides the human and institutional network through which diverse partners can learn together. DOIN is envisioned as a complementary knowledge infrastructure connecting community experience, research, data, policy interventions, provenance, and outcomes.
The central argument is that digital opportunity requires more than connected infrastructure. It requires connected institutions, connected knowledge, and feedback loops that allow learning to move among local communities, state institutions, and national policymakers.
A Story of Separate Conversations
Several years ago, before the EUPConnect Collaborative had taken shape, many organizations across Michigan’s Eastern Upper Peninsula were working on different parts of what was ultimately the same challenge.
School districts were considering student connectivity and educational access.
Libraries were helping residents navigate technology.
Tribal partners were advancing connectivity while protecting sovereignty and community interests.
Healthcare organizations were confronting the practical limitations of delivering modern services across a large rural geography.
Local governments were thinking about public infrastructure, economic development, emergency services, and long-term community vitality.
Colleges and workforce organizations were trying to connect education and training with emerging regional needs.
Telecommunications providers and network operators were working through the economics and engineering of reaching geographically dispersed communities.
Each institution had expertise. Each understood part of the region. Each had relationships, responsibilities, and resources. Yet these assets did not automatically form a coherent system.
The problem was not a complete absence of knowledge.
The knowledge was distributed.
The relationships needed to connect it were incomplete.
That distinction matters. Communities frequently approach complex challenges by commissioning another study, creating another program, or purchasing another technology. Those actions may be helpful, but they do not necessarily correct the underlying fragmentation. A community can possess considerable information while still lacking the relationships needed to interpret and use it collectively.
The early documentation of the EUPConnect Collaborative reflects an effort to overcome this fragmentation by bringing educational institutions, municipalities, nonprofit entities, and other community-serving organizations into a shared regional structure. Its draft consortium agreement described a collaborative effort to plan, govern, and build connectivity serving communities across the Eastern Upper Peninsula.
As of March 2025, an internal overview characterized EUPConnect as a partnership spanning K-12 education, local government, Tribes, higher education, healthcare, and economic development. That institutional diversity is important because it reveals that the collaborative was not merely assembling organizations interested in telecommunications. It was connecting organizations whose missions increasingly depend on communications infrastructure but whose perspectives extend well beyond it.
Looking back, I recognize this as a form of network weaving.
At the time, however, I expressed the idea more simply:
Birds of unlike feathers need to flock together.
Turning the Familiar Saying Around
The familiar proverb tells us that birds of a feather flock together.
There is truth in that observation. People naturally build relationships with others who share their profession, experiences, vocabulary, or interests. Schools talk with schools. Engineers talk with engineers. Healthcare professionals talk with healthcare professionals. Researchers build communities with other researchers.
These connections are valuable. Specialized communities allow knowledge to deepen, professional practices to mature, and people facing similar problems to learn from one another.
However, complex community challenges do not respect professional boundaries.
Broadband is not only a telecommunications issue. It influences education, healthcare, commerce, public safety, workforce participation, and civic life.
Workforce development is not only an employment issue. It is shaped by education, transportation, housing, childcare, communications infrastructure, and employers’ changing needs.
Digital equity is not only a question of service availability. It is affected by affordability, skills, institutional support, accessible applications, community context, and whether connectivity produces meaningful outcomes.
Birds of a feather can improve their own field. Birds of unlike feathers can begin to understand the whole system.
The Birds of Unlike Feathers Principle does not argue against specialized expertise. Nor does it suggest that diversity automatically produces collaboration or better decisions. Its proposition is more specific:
Complex community challenges are more likely to be understood and addressed when institutions with different knowledge, authority, experience, and resources build trusted relationships around a shared purpose and develop the capacity to learn together.
The phrase is a practical metaphor, not a replacement for the underlying scholarship. Its purpose is to make that scholarship easier to carry into township halls, school boardrooms, libraries, Tribal institutions, cooperatives, community organizations, and regional planning conversations.
The Research Foundation: Network Weaving
The most direct intellectual foundation for this principle is network weaving.
Valdis Krebs and June Holley described sustainable community building as an iterative process of knowing the network and knitting the network. Knowing the network means making existing relationships, assets, gaps, and patterns visible. Knitting the network means intentionally creating connections that help information and opportunity move more effectively.
Their work begins with a straightforward observation: communities are built on connections, and better connections can create better opportunities. Network maps can help a community ask whether the necessary relationships are present, which connections are missing, where expertise resides, and whether useful collaborations are forming.
Network weaving is therefore more active than networking.
Networking often emphasizes the number of contacts available to an individual. Network weaving focuses on the health and capability of the wider network. A network weaver notices that two people or organizations should know one another, helps establish the relationship, and then allows that connection to develop without requiring the weaver to remain at its center.
This is an important leadership distinction.
A conventional leader may seek to become the hub through which every relationship and decision passes. A network weaver succeeds when the network becomes less dependent on that central position. The long-term objective is not a larger audience for the convener. It is a greater capacity for people throughout the network to connect, organize, exchange knowledge, and take action.
The Network Weaving Institute attributes the introduction of the term “network weaver” to a 2004 collaboration between June Holley and Valdis Krebs. It also expresses a key practice principle: the work of a network weaver includes helping other people become network weavers.
The Birds of Unlike Feathers Principle builds on this foundation by emphasizing a particular kind of connection: relationships across institutional, professional, cultural, jurisdictional, and geographic boundaries.
Similarity Builds Trust, but Difference Creates Reach
Networks require both cohesion and reach.
Strong relationships among people with shared backgrounds can build trust and reinforce common practices. These relationships help communities sustain effort over time. Yet networks composed only of tightly connected and highly similar participants can become insular. Information circulates efficiently within the group but may not easily cross into other communities of knowledge or practice.
The network-weaving literature recognizes this tension. Communities of common interest naturally form clusters, but vibrant networks also maintain connections across difference. Diversity of connections increases the number of pathways through which knowledge, opportunity, and resources can move.
This is where the wording unlike feathers becomes significant.
Unlike feathers may represent different sectors, including education, healthcare, telecommunications, energy, government, research, or community development.
They may represent different scales, such as a township, a Tribal Nation, a regional organization, a state agency, or a national institution.
They may represent different kinds of knowledge. A researcher may contribute empirical analysis. A resident may contribute lived experience. An engineer may understand system constraints. An educator may see barriers affecting learners. A policymaker may understand statutory authority and public finance.
None of these perspectives is sufficient alone.
The work is not to eliminate those differences. It is to create conditions in which they can become complementary.
EUPConnect as a Regional Network Weaver
The EUPConnect Collaborative offers a practical setting in which to examine this principle.
Its original work focused heavily on broadband infrastructure, but its structure brought together institutions whose interests reached beyond network construction. That broader composition created the potential for the collaborative to function as a regional convener and network weaver.
As of February 2026, EUPConnect described itself in public comments as a regional partnership connecting K-12 and higher education, Tribal partners, healthcare providers, local government, workforce organizations, and network operators around broadband access, digital skills, and community capacity.
This distinction matters.
If EUPConnect were only a telecommunications project, its work might conclude when fiber construction was completed or grant funding ended. But if EUPConnect is understood as regional civic infrastructure, its purpose is larger. It can create and maintain relationships through which communities identify emerging challenges, coordinate resources, connect local experience with outside research, and learn from interventions over time.
Its history provides examples of this broader role. Internal records include infrastructure planning, grant coordination, digital literacy events, Tribal broadband engagement, youth technology initiatives, research participation, school connectivity, and regional policy conversations.
In a July 2026 conversation about the 4-H Tech Changemakers initiative, I returned to a central evaluation question: If EUPConnect had never existed, what difference would that absence make? The discussion connected the collaborative’s formation with partnerships, regional research coordination, program support, evaluation, and continuous growth.
That question should remain central to the collaborative’s development.
The value of a network cannot be measured only by the number of meetings held or names appearing on a membership list. A more meaningful evaluation asks what became possible because the relationships existed.
Which conversations occurred that otherwise would not have happened?
Which organizations found one another?
Which resources were combined?
Which community concerns reached policymakers or researchers?
Which lessons moved from one community to another?
Which initiatives became more effective because partners saw their work as connected?
Those are network-weaving outcomes.
From Network Weaving to Policy Learning
Relationships create the possibility of collaboration, but collaboration does not automatically produce learning.
A network becomes a learning system when it can observe conditions, reflect on its actions, evaluate outcomes, revise assumptions, and preserve what it learns.
The Digital Opportunities Compass provides an important foundation for this shift. Developed by Colin Rhinesmith, Pierrette Renée Dagg, Johannes M. Bauer, Greta Byrum, and Aaron Schill, the Compass organizes digital opportunity across six connected dimensions:
- Contexts
- Governance
- Connectivity
- Skills
- Applications
- Outcomes
The Compass was developed to help communities and policymakers monitor, evaluate, and guide broadband and digital equity policy more comprehensively than infrastructure measures alone.
A companion research paper proposes combining the practitioner-oriented Compass with statistical analysis to support systematic policy learning. The paper states that local experience can inform decisions, outcomes can be monitored over time, peer communities can be compared, and data can be continuously analyzed to improve understanding of policy interventions and their repercussions.
This idea changes the role of a collaborative.
Instead of serving only as a coordinating table, a collaborative can become part of a regional policy-learning system.
Partners do not merely report activity. They examine what changed.
They do not merely implement programs. They compare intended and observed outcomes.
They do not merely collect data. They interpret it with the communities whose lives it represents.
They do not wait for a final evaluation. They use feedback to adapt as conditions change.
This kind of learning must move in more than one direction.
Local communities hold contextual and lived knowledge that state and national datasets may not capture.
States can identify patterns across communities, align programs, and connect regional experience with policy and funding structures.
National institutions can compare broader patterns, support research, and revise programs based on what implementation reveals.
Policy learning becomes more effective when knowledge moves upward, downward, and laterally. Communities learn from peers. States learn from regions. National policymakers learn from implementation. Local leaders gain access to research and lessons developed elsewhere.
The Birds of Unlike Feathers Principle supplies the relational condition for that process. Different institutions must be present, connected, and able to trust one another before their knowledge can become collective intelligence.
Where DOIN Fits
The Digital Opportunities Intelligence Network, or DOIN, is an effort to extend policy learning into shared knowledge infrastructure.
DOIN builds on the Digital Opportunities Compass but is not itself the Compass. The Compass provides the organizing framework. DOIN explores how data, research, community knowledge, policy interventions, and outcomes might be connected into a living and traceable learning system.
The current DOIN framework includes three integrated components:
- The Compass, which organizes digital opportunity through the six dimensions.
- The Network, which connects research, infrastructure data, community assets, stakeholder knowledge, programs, and policy interventions.
- The Intelligence Layer, which supports evidence synthesis, analysis, and decision-making.
Public DOIN materials describe the concept as a policy-learning system rather than a static dashboard or index. The intended learning cycle observes conditions, interprets signals, models relationships, considers possible actions, measures outcomes, and updates the system as new evidence becomes available.
These descriptions represent the proposed design and direction of DOIN. They should not be read as evidence that every technical or governance component has already been implemented or independently validated.
DOIN’s relevance to network weaving lies in the distinction between human relationships and knowledge relationships.
Network weaving connects people and institutions.
DOIN seeks to connect evidence and experience.
A regional convener may introduce a school district to a cooperative, a Tribal partner to a researcher, or a workforce organization to an infrastructure provider. DOIN could complement that human work by preserving the reason the connection mattered, documenting the evidence considered, linking the resulting intervention to the Compass dimensions, and following the relationship through to observable outcomes.
In that sense, EUPConnect and DOIN are complementary.
EUPConnect can help weave the human network.
DOIN can help weave the knowledge network.
Policy learning connects the two.
Provenance as Institutional Memory
Community collaborations frequently generate valuable knowledge that disappears.
It may remain in meeting notes, email threads, personal memory, reports, grant files, or datasets stored in separate systems. When staff members change roles or initiatives end, the reasoning behind earlier choices can become difficult to reconstruct.
That creates institutional amnesia.
A learning network needs more than access to information. It needs provenance: a traceable account of where information came from, who contributed it, how it was interpreted, what assumptions shaped a decision, and what outcomes followed.
The proposed DOIN Provenance Framework treats provenance as a first-class element in a community knowledge graph. Its purpose is to connect indicators, observations, contributors, methods, recommendations, and outcomes so that evidence can be reviewed rather than accepted as an unexplained output.
This is as much a governance issue as a technical one.
Communities are more likely to trust a recommendation when they can understand the evidence behind it. Contributors deserve recognition for the knowledge they provide. Tribal and community knowledge may also require governance rules determining how it may be collected, represented, shared, or withheld.
An internal EUPConnect digital-opportunity analysis proposal explicitly identifies Tribal data sovereignty as a critical consideration and describes Indigenous governance of data collection, ownership, and application as essential to self-determination.
Birds of unlike feathers cannot simply be gathered into the same room and expected to surrender their knowledge into a shared system.
Relationships require consent.
Learning requires trust.
Data requires stewardship.
Collaboration must respect differences in authority, culture, sovereignty, and risk.
Diversity Is Not Enough
The phrase “birds of unlike feathers” should not be reduced to assembling a diverse list of participants.
Representation matters, but presence alone is insufficient. A meeting can include many perspectives while still allowing authority, specialized language, institutional status, or control of resources to determine which voices shape the outcome.
Nor should the principle imply that every possible participant must be involved in every decision. That approach can overwhelm a collaborative and blur accountability. Different questions require different combinations of knowledge and authority.
The purpose is therefore not maximum participation in every activity.
The purpose is appropriate connection.
Who understands the problem?
Who experiences its consequences?
Who possesses decision-making authority?
Who holds relevant data or expertise?
Who will be responsible for implementation?
Who is absent but should be present?
Who bears risk without having meaningful influence?
Network weaving helps identify and build these relationships. Governance determines how the relationships affect decisions. Provenance documents whose knowledge was used and how.
Collective intelligence research similarly cautions against assuming that more voices automatically produce better decisions. Governance must help a system determine what to ask, whose knowledge is relevant, how participation influences action, and how decisions are followed by implementation and feedback.
The Birds of Unlike Feathers Principle is therefore not an argument for diversity as decoration. It is an argument for diverse knowledge becoming consequential through trustworthy processes.
A Three-Layer Model
The synthesis developed in this paper can be expressed through three connected layers.
1. The Human Network
The human network consists of residents, practitioners, institutions, governments, researchers, and community organizations.
Its essential resources are relationships, trust, lived experience, professional knowledge, and authority.
Its key practice is network weaving.
2. The Knowledge Network
The knowledge network consists of data, research, observations, community assets, programs, policies, decisions, and outcomes.
Its essential resources are evidence, context, metadata, and provenance.
Its key infrastructure may include DOIN and other community-governed knowledge systems.
3. The Learning Network
The learning network connects action with observation and reflection.
Its essential resources are feedback, evaluation, comparison, interpretation, and institutional memory.
Its key practice is continuous policy learning.
These layers are mutually dependent.
A knowledge system without a human network may reproduce data silos or overlook local meaning.
A human network without shared knowledge infrastructure may repeatedly lose what it learns.
A learning process without provenance may generate recommendations that communities cannot verify or trust.
The goal is not simply to connect everything.
The goal is to create the right relationships among people, evidence, decisions, and outcomes.
The Birds of Unlike Feathers Principle
The principle proposed in this paper can now be stated more fully:
The Birds of Unlike Feathers Principle holds that complex community challenges are more likely to produce durable and equitable responses when people and institutions with different forms of knowledge, authority, experience, and resources intentionally build trusted relationships, develop shared ways of understanding the problem, and learn collectively from the outcomes of their actions.
The principle has five practical implications.
Difference is an asset
Different perspectives reveal different parts of a system. Productive collaboration does not require participants to become alike.
Trust must be built intentionally
Putting organizations on a distribution list does not create a network. Trust develops through repeated interaction, transparency, reciprocity, and follow-through.
Relationships need structure
Informal relationships are important, but durable regional collaboration also requires governance, convening capacity, communication practices, and shared stewardship.
Learning must be preserved
Experience becomes an institutional asset when its sources, reasoning, interventions, and outcomes are documented and made available under appropriate governance.
Leadership should multiply connections
A successful network leader does not own every relationship. The leader helps others develop the confidence and capacity to weave the network themselves.
A Call to the EUPConnect Steering Committee
The EUPConnect Collaborative has an opportunity to understand its next chapter not simply as the continuation of a broadband consortium, but as the stewardship of a regional learning network.
The infrastructure work remains important. Communities still need reliable, affordable, and resilient connectivity.
But infrastructure is now the foundation, not the finish line.
The collaborative can use its cross-sector relationships to examine how connectivity interacts with education, digital skills, workforce pathways, healthcare, energy, public safety, research, and community development.
It can create space for local experience to shape regional priorities.
It can help state and national partners understand what implementation looks like in rural, Tribal, border, and island communities.
It can connect external research with local knowledge without treating either as complete by itself.
It can build a culture in which evaluation is not a judgment delivered at the end of a project, but a shared practice of asking what we are learning and what we should do differently.
This means continuing to invite unlike feathers into the work.
It also means helping those participants build durable relationships with one another, not only with EUPConnect as the convener.
The measure of success will not be whether every participant agrees.
It will be whether the network becomes better able to act, reflect, adapt, and carry knowledge forward.
Conclusion
Birds of a feather will continue to flock together.
They should. Professional communities, sector partnerships, and relationships among peers remain essential.
But the challenges facing communities in the digital age increasingly live between those flocks.
They live between infrastructure and education.
Between technology and trust.
Between research and lived experience.
Between local knowledge and national policy.
Between data and human judgment.
Those spaces between institutions can remain gaps, or they can become bridges.
Network weaving helps us build the bridges.
Policy learning helps knowledge travel across them.
DOIN may help us preserve where that knowledge came from, connect it with other evidence, and learn what happened after it was used.
That is the deeper meaning behind one of my favorite Jedi mind tricks:
Birds of unlike feathers need to flock together.
It is not a claim that difference is easy.
It is a recognition that difference is necessary.
The future of digital opportunity will not be built by a single profession, institution, community, or level of government. It will be built through relationships that allow many forms of knowledge to meet, challenge one another, and become something none could produce alone.
If the first phase of digital policy was about connecting places, the next may be about connecting wisdom.
That is the work before us.
Provenance and Scope
The phrase “Birds of unlike feathers need to flock together” is presented here as the author’s practice-based expression and translational framework. This paper does not claim that the author originated the underlying theories of network weaving, social networks, collective intelligence, collaborative governance, digital opportunity, or policy learning.
The phrase translates and synthesizes those bodies of work for use in regional collaboration. Its proposed application to the EUPConnect Collaborative, DOIN, and multilevel digital-opportunity policy represents the author’s conceptual contribution.
A general web and internal document search conducted during preparation of this working paper found established use of the conventional phrase “birds of a feather flock together” and extensive research supporting cross-boundary networks. It did not establish a complete historical record sufficient to prove that no one has previously used the exact inverted phrase. The claim of originality should therefore be framed carefully as:
“A phrase I commonly use,”
“My Birds of Unlike Feathers Principle,” or
“A practice-based framework I call the Birds of Unlike Feathers Principle.”
This paper draws on:
- Network-weaving research associated with June Holley and Valdis Krebs.
- The Digital Opportunities Compass and policy-learning research of Johannes M. Bauer, Pierrette Renée Dagg, Colin Rhinesmith, Greta Byrum, and Aaron Schill.
- Collective-intelligence research and governance literature.
- Internal EUPConnect planning documents, meeting records, and regional policy materials.
- The author’s evolving DOIN framework and related provenance work.
DOIN remains an emerging framework. References to its intended architecture describe a proposed direction rather than a claim of completed implementation or independently demonstrated effectiveness.
References
Network Weaving
Krebs, V., & Holley, J. Building Smart Communities Through Network Weaving. The paper describes community development through improved internal and external connectivity and introduces the iterative work of knowing and knitting a network. Read the network-weaving paper.
Krebs, V., & Holley, J. Building Communities Through Network Weaving. Network Weaver. View the archived publication.
Network Weaving Institute. Resources on applying network science and network-weaving practices to communities and social change. Visit the Network Weaving Institute.
Digital Opportunity and Policy Learning
Bauer, J. M., Dagg, P. R., Rhinesmith, C., Byrum, G., & Schill, A. (2023). A Comprehensive Framework to Monitor, Evaluate, and Guide Broadband and Digital Equity Policy. The paper proposes combining the Digital Opportunities Compass with statistical analysis to support systematic and dynamic policy learning. Read the paper on SSRN.
Rhinesmith, C., Dagg, P. R., Bauer, J. M., Byrum, G., & Schill, A. (2023). Digital Opportunities Compass: Metrics to Monitor, Evaluate, and Guide Broadband and Digital Equity Policy. Merit Network and the Quello Center. Read the Digital Opportunities Compass.
Collective Intelligence
Boucher, S., Hallin, C. A., & Paulson, L. (Eds.). (2023). The Routledge Handbook of Collective Intelligence for Democracy and Governance. Routledge. The handbook surveys collective-intelligence concepts, methods, and applications to public challenges and democratic governance. View the open-access handbook.
MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. Research on how combinations of people and computers can support collectively intelligent systems. Explore MIT collective-intelligence research.
DOIN and Knowledge Infrastructure
Kronemeyer, J. F. (2026). The Digital Opportunities Intelligence Network: A Policy Learning Machine for the Digital Economy. This article describes DOIN as an emerging system for observing conditions, interpreting evidence, evaluating interventions, measuring outcomes, and updating future recommendations. Read the DOIN overview.
Kronemeyer, J. F. Digital Opportunities Intelligence Network: The Policy Learning Machine. A working description of the Compass, Network, and Intelligence components of DOIN. Read the DOIN framework.
Kronemeyer, J. F. The DOIN Provenance Framework: Extending the Digital Opportunities Compass Toward a Verifiable Policy Learning Machine. A working paper proposing provenance as a mechanism for connecting claims, evidence, contributors, methods, and outcomes. Read the DOIN provenance working paper.
EUPConnect Sources
EUPConnect Collaborative. Draft Consortium Agreement. Working documentation describing a collaborative effort among educational institutions, municipalities, nonprofit entities, and other partners to plan and govern regional connectivity. Internal organizational source.
EUPConnect Collaborative. NTIA Listening Session Comments. Regional comments describing EUPConnect as a partnership connecting education, Tribal partners, healthcare, government, workforce organizations, and network operators. Internal organizational source.
EUPConnect Collaborative. Digital Opportunity Analysis Plan Draft Proposal. Working material connecting empirical broadband planning, community-scale analysis, and Tribal data sovereignty. Internal organizational source.
EUPConnect Collaborative. Steering Committee Records and Regional Program Documentation. Internal records covering infrastructure planning, digital-literacy efforts, youth technology initiatives, research partnerships, and regional coordination.
Suggested Citation
Kronemeyer, Jason F. (2026). Birds of Unlike Feathers Need to Flock Together: Network Weaving, Policy Learning, and Regional Knowledge Infrastructure. Working paper.
Short Attribution
The Birds of Unlike Feathers Principle, developed by Jason F. Kronemeyer, proposes that complex community challenges are more effectively addressed when institutions with different forms of knowledge, authority, experience, and resources intentionally build trusted relationships and learn together.