3
Organizational Equipotency
On December 3, 1979, the rock band The Who was scheduled to play a concert at 8 p.m. at Cincinnati Coliseum in Cincinnati, Ohio. By 6 p.m., masses of people had gathered outside the doors and were anxiously waiting to enter. When coliseum officials opened just a limited number of the many stadium entrances at 7:30 p.m., thousands of excited fans rushed in through the few doors simultaneously.
Some blocks away at the Cincinnati General Hospital emergency room, I was working the night shift in the psychiatric emergency room and was the shift lead. What began as a relatively calm night changed abruptly when groups of panicked, screaming people showed up at the ER—frantically begging for information about friends, children, and loved ones—asking things like “Are they alive?” and “Where can I find them?” For a few minutes, the emergency room staff had no idea that a riot had occurred not far from the hospital itself, but it was not long before someone volunteered information that drug users had stampeded the stadium and trampled eleven to death. The trampling accounts were quickly debunked as rumors.
Even without direct knowledge of the riot, the emergency room staff was swift and calm in their interactions with each person we encountered. Staff members stepped into whatever role needed to be filled in the moment. While one person went to the general ER to gather information about the situation, another alerted on-call staff that they would likely be needed. We attempted to reach hospital security and the Cincinnati police department to determine what to expect in the coming hours. We anticipated what preparations would be needed and moved swiftly. We remained calm, were alert to updated news, and were attentive to those seeking information. In short, everyone on duty did what was needed when it needed to be done. We knew our standard operating procedures, how to take care of those who presented at the ER doors, how to maintain a professional manner under stress, and how to follow the procedures and protocol we were trained to follow. Our individual levels of expertise and what was needed at the moment guided when we led and when we followed.
In node communities, we all have the ability to participate in certain conversations and organizations without an intermediary, but how do we feel, think, and operate when we are on equal footing with others? Another essential element of the peer-to-peer architecture is equipotency, defined as all nodes within a node community being equally privileged. Each node in a peer-to-peer network is an equal peer node and each node provides their available resources—processing power, network bandwidth, and disk storage—to other nodes. There is no need for any central coordination of resource sharing, and each node both provides and consumes resources.