Can you see your whole network as one living graph?

Hypothesis

Thrivbe's whole thesis is networks of networks — but our own ecosystem lived in a database nobody looked at. Rendering it as a live force-directed graph should make the structure (and the gaps) visible at a glance.

What we built

The interactive graph at /ecosystem: organisations and initiatives from our Notion workspace sync into Supabase, and the site renders them as a physics-driven network you can drag, zoom, and explore. The page regenerates itself on a schedule, so the graph stays current as the database evolves — no manual publishing step.

The map now also has a Planet lens: a token-free, rotatable globe that plots the same filtered ecosystem data at committed city and country coordinates. It is inspired by OSIRIS (MIT), but is a small in-repo MapLibre implementation rather than an embedded dashboard.

Learnings

• A graph is an honesty machine: clusters you believed were connected turn out to be islands, and the bridge nodes are rarely who you'd guess.
• Content pipelines beat content pages: Notion as the editing surface, an automatic sync, and a static-regenerating page means the visualisation never rots.

Log

• 2026-09-14 — Repaired Planet's production rendering: the bundled map worker had been loading the page HTML instead of its JavaScript module. Worker assets now ship with the site, and a production-browser regression checks visible nodes and connections, filters, selection and camera movement.
• 2026-09-14 — Added the Planet lens: a rotatable MapLibre globe with committed geocoding, the same filters, detail panel, search and voice-guide selection contract as the graph views.
• 2026-07-31 — Two computed layers added on top of the graph — see Who Should Talk To Whom.
• 2026-07-01 — Sync hardened; graph regenerating on schedule.
• 2026-06-15 — First version live at /ecosystem.