I had a chance to chat with Anil Dash this past Friday, and the conversation is making me rethinking how networks are formed.

I’ve been thinking a lot about networks recently, especially in context of entrepreneurship and building scalable businesses on top of internet infrastructure. The word “network” for me conjured the idea of platforms like Kickstarter and Petri Dish. I approached the conversation with Anil wondering about how cultures form around those networks. Are the cultures of Facebook, Kickstarter and Cowbird the way they are due to how its social mechanisms are built?

I came away from the conversation realizing that I’ve been far too focused on networks as infrastructure, and not enough on networks as connected people. Anil told me a story about how the book The Long Tail came about. It was a story about how Clay Shirky shared the idea of power law distribution on the internet with Chris Anderson, who began to write and talk about it. A chance conversation that Chris had with an audience member was the source of the term “long tail.” The idea became a blog post, which became a series of blog posts, entered popular parlance and it is now a book.

All of this happened in a network, but it didn’t happen because of a specific platform or protocol. It happened because interesting people paid attention to each other, shared values and recombined ideas. Clay and Chris and others like them found each other through the stories and ideas they were putting out. It is perhaps enabled by protocols and platforms, but it is fundamentally about the conversations which happen over these networks. Network infrastructure is merely the conduit for the social connection between a network of people.

People put their energies into networks not because the interactions are fantastic, or the technologies are slick. People invest in networks because of what they believe, and who they connect with. Good design is required, but insufficient for connecting people.

The question of how to build a culture on our networks becomes the question of what is the story of the network? The culture of the network comes from the people connected, and the people connect because of the beliefs that they share. To build the culture that we want, we have to tell a compelling story of that culture. The culture must come through in every piece of copy and every design decision that’s made on a platform.

To build culture on our networks, we must ask ourselves, what is the story we are telling about the networks that we build? What do our networks aspire to be?