Introduction

Collaborative networks appear in a huge variety of places. They show up in how we manufacture goods, how we get around, how we develop new knowledge and in naturally occurring networks ranging from swarm-like organizations. Much of what we depend on today is a result of collaboration between many individuals. Very often we can see that the efficiency or performance of collaborative systems is hindered by the structure of the network, anecdotally when one works in a team that has no clear leader or is too large and in the literature of management practices \cite{hao2012does}.

Collaborative Networks

We take the definition presented in Camarinha-Matos et al. as our definition of collaborative networks: "A collaborative network (CN) is constituted by a variety of entities (e.g.,organizations and people) that are largely autonomous, geographically distributed, and heterogeneous in terms of their: operating environment, culture, social capital, and goals. Nevertheless these entities collaborate to better achieve common or compatible goals, and whose interactions are supported by computer network." \cite{camarinha2009collaborative} and extend it to remove the limitation on purely networks backed by computer networks. Notable examples of collaborative networks include: Organizations, online collaboration networks such as open source projects, the ethereum network or the polymath project, natural symbiotic systems such as those describing the dependencies between plants and their pollinators and swarm systems. Artificially constructed examples of these networks include, distributed systems, and artificial neural nets.