Network Weaving

Hub or Spoke?

2008-05-08T19:11:00.001-04:00

Often, in social/business situations, we are either a hub[blue node] or a spoke[green node] in the network of interaction and knowledge exchange.

A few months ago, I blogged about how "not to be taken advantage of" if you are a spoke in an interaction. Now my old network buddy, Guy Hagen, tells us how to be an effective hub in a negotiation.

See how these two strategies use similar, yet opposing, network dynamics?

Connect your allies, fragment your opponents.

Pod[cast] of Gold

2008-05-07T13:11:00.008-04:00

I will be teaching a graduate level course in Organizational / Social Network Analysis @ Michigan State University during the summer semester. In preparing the reading list for the course I ran across an absolute gem of an article and podcast by one of my favorite network scholars -- Herminia Ibarra.

Herminia is one of those rare academics that can effectively straddle the two worlds of research and business -- she can talk to either audience and translate between the two. In fact, this boundary spanning behavior is an example of her own advice -- bridging between the inside and outside [of whatever organization you belong to] is vital to career success.

Download her interview [MP3] and put it on your iPod and listen to it until you can recite it in your sleep. IMHO, this is the best 10 minute lesson in building effective social networks that I have heard in a very long time!

Listen, learn, and link.

The DC 5-Step

2008-04-20T13:23:00.019-04:00

Last week I posted about how Washington DC lobbyists create an indirect quid-pro-quo to hide how legislation is influenced.

This week we read in the NY Times -- Behind Military Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand -- how the Pentagon also uses this 5 step dance to influence public opinion for the Iraq War.

The diagram above shows the strategy described in the NYT article. The goal is to have a positive public opinion for the Department of Defense's [DoD] activities -- in this case, the Iraq War. Public opinion/approval is indicated by the green link. The "message machine" is composed of the grey links.

The grey arrows show the clockwise flow of influence. What is not obvious are the relationships of dependency that move in a counter-clockwise direction. It is these pairwise dependencies that enable the flow of influence. A-->B: A influences B because B is dependent upon A for work/money/information/access.

The NYT article explains how firewalls were set up to hide some of these dependencies.

"The access came with a condition. Participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon."

Poor traceability enables plausible deniability.

Is it personal opinion or coordinated group-wide spin? Examine the network of social/business ties the "expert" is embedded in!

UPDATE: The Pentagon has put a temporary stop to feeding of information to retired officers acting as military analysts while they investigate the issue.

The Other Pentagon

2008-04-13T14:56:00.004-04:00

Everyone is familiar with "The Pentagon" in Washington DC -- the heart of U.S. military thinking and operations.

There is another pentagon in DC that works surreptitiously and affects the lives of more Americans than the military Pentagon. It is the pattern of influence and corruption in Washington. Let's call it the Lobbyist's Loop of Deceit.

We first discovered this when I was mentoring a client doing a network analysis of the recent Lobbying Scandals in Washington. This pattern was most noticeable in the network of Jack Abramoff and his lobbying ecosystem.

Abramoff's clients often wanted to affect legislation in the House or Senate. To avoid an appearance of a direct quid-pro-quo, Abramoff engineered an indirect quid-pro-quo that put great social distance between the client and what they wanted to influence.

The Lobbyist's Loop of Deceit is mapped below. It reveals no direct contact between the client and the target legislation. The greater the social distance between the two, the greater the plausible deniability of both the client and the politician when they are accused of participating in favors/corruption. The lobbyist wants to hide what is happening below the yellow line in the diagram.

A direct quid-pro-quo would have an arrow of benefit/money flow going directly from the Client to the Legislator -- thus creating a tight [and obvious] triangle between the three key nodes in the network...

[Client --> Legislator -->Legislation that benefits Client]

Of course the Client and Legislator do not want to expose their direct ties, so they take a surreptitious route. We know from social network analysis, that the more social distance between two individuals the harder it is to show relation/influence between the two.

Social distance is often measured in the number of steps between two individuals. In this simple network: A-->B-->C, A and B and B and C are 1 step apart, while A and C are two steps apart. Based on social network research on intermediaries and "network horizons" we know that anyone separated by more than 3 steps are usually not known, nor influenced by each other. Plausible deniability increases with perceived distance. In the indirect quid-pro-quo, the client is more than 3 steps from the legislation they seek to influence.

We also saw longer loops that created even more perceived distance between the influencer and the target of influence. In these cases the Spouse node was replaced by a two node relationship where the spouse or other family/friend of the Legislator was a key player in an organization that benefited from the flow of money/influence in the Loop.

Be careful of those who deceive via perceived distance.

Opening Day

2008-03-31T22:01:00.006-04:00

Today was Opening Day for most Major League Baseball teams.

It was a great day in Cleveland -- it did not snow, and the Indians won!

During the winter, most baseball talk was about who was mentioned in the "Mitchell Report" on steroid use in baseball. Digging through that report, it is easy to uncover a network -- who supplied whom with drugs. But that network, by itself, does not explain the social dynamics of steroids in baseball over the last decade. We have to look at the social networks amongst players to see:

how steroid acceptance spread,
how drug sources were shared,
why outsiders were in the dark while it was happening.

These dynamics are explained by the dense social networks that develop through the movements of players from team to team via trades and free-agent signings. A dense clique, like the one above [not all networks are pretty]...

efficiently spreads information -- everyone knows what is going on
maintains conformity -- everyone knows what not to discuss with outsiders
over time, creates acceptance of norms that are aberrant to outsiders

For more info, see this short brief on the social life of steroids in baseball.

With many of the "stars" of the Mitchell Report, out of baseball this season, the steroid controversy will be relegated to the court room and not the ball yard.

Play Ball!

Friends talking to Friends

2008-03-06T12:34:00.007-05:00

A while back I blogged about the social network strategy of the Huckabee campaign and how it was accomplishing a lot with very little (money). The campaign was using the power of the social tie/link -- friends talking to friends about voting. Good strategy, limited population. Huckabee focused on well-defined clusters, like christian evangelicals, that tend to be very insular and limited in size. With insular cliques, your strategy may work, but it only goes so far -- influence does not cross the chasm to other groups.

The Obama campaign is also following a grass-roots, bottom-up, friends-talking-to-friends strategy as described in the current issue Rolling Stone magazine. To get the vote out, they are using both the Internet AND Obama's experience of F2F organizing. They get the technology. They get the sociology.

In addition, the Obama folks seem to have learned the lesson of the Howard Dean campaign which focused mostly on technology, but were clueless about sociology. Howard Dean's staff organized the Deaniacs over the WWW, but then resorted to the strangers-talking-to-strangers strategy. To accentuate their mistake, they made their activists were bright orange hats which just emphasized them being "not one of us" as they canvassed Iowa neighborhoods. Obama knows that in organizing, locals need to interact with locals.

Yet, the mostly top-down political machine of Hillary Clinton has won elections -- especially the big states. Which strategy will win out? Pennsylvania is the next test. More than a month to go... are the bottom-up networks of influence in place, are locals talking to locals? Or will the top-down barrage of mass media carry the day? Will Hillary borrow the local social networks of her friend and supporter, Pennsylvania's governor Ed Rendell? Are the Obama folks building wide-reaching radial networks, or are they also falling prey to the Huckabee problem of getting trapped in cul de sacs?

Which view will win?

top down...

bottom up...

or both and...

Social Network Justice

2008-02-22T12:22:00.003-05:00

One of the pleasures of selling social network analysis software and services is seeing what clients do with the new knowledge and tools we provide to them.

Several years ago I started working with an economic justice organization in a major U.S. city. Their focus is on tenant's rights and eliminating slum housing conditions. They had been working with their city attorney gathering information on a group of slumlords that owned apartment buildings that had a long list of continuously unresolved violations that were affecting the health of the tenants and their children.

They wanted a new way to analyze and visualize their data. Since the slumlords were keeping their activities covert, it made sense to uncloak their network using the data my client had gathered along with other available public data. Instead of mapping jihadi terrorists, the economic justice organization would be mapping economic terrorists.

Duncan vs. The Influentials

2008-02-10T15:28:00.000-05:00

Much has been written about how the influential few [an elite 10%] tells the rest of us what to buy, how to vote, etc. There is a book on the topic naturally named The Influentials. A tiny cadre of highly connected elites influencing the rest of us was a key theme in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point.

Most people would look at the social graph below and say Diane is the influential in this sub-group [all of this group's connections and contacts are not shown]. She has local reach, but her message gets nowhere without the help of her network. Influence needs many connected people to spread -- not just the highly connected. Heather, Fernando or Garth all need to be in a cooperative mood for Diane's message to travel.

In social network analysis, a boundary spanner is someone who "crosses the chasm" between groups/clusters. They are not often highly connected. In the above network Fernando, Garth and Heather are all boundary spanners. They may not be influential, but they need to be ready to accept the message/trend/idea if it is going to make the jump out of their local domain and travel further. Otherwise the innovation/idea bounces around and dies in a cul de sac.

Duncan Watts, at Columbia and Yahoo! Research, has been slowly dismantling "The Influentials" theory. This Fast Company article is a good overview of his argument. He basically says that it is not the elite few that matter but the connected many and they have to be ready to be influenced. I'm with Duncan.

Connected Customers

2008-02-06T13:01:00.001-05:00

As mentioned in the previous post, I attended the INSNA Sunbelt conference and had a wonderful experience. The only negative with the event was the conference hotel's awful WiFi service -- and their response to it.

Hotels are used to dealing with disconnected customers -- hotel guests who do not know each other. They can tell these guests anything. Since most guests do not talk to each other, nothing is verified, no action is coordinated. In terms of social network analysis: the hotel staff spans structural holes between the guests -- occupying the power position in the network. Below is a network map of the situation. The centralized hotel staff are shown by the blue node in the middle, while hotel guests are represented by the green nodes. The green nodes only talk to the blue node and not to each other.

When INSNA arrived, the hotel guests were no longer disconnected -- many people in INSNA know each other and after initial greetings started to talk.

The conversation soon went to the lack of connectivity in the hotel -- no one could get a connection out of the hotel to the internet. Not only did everyone discover they were having the same bad experience, but they discovered they were receiving the same lie from the hotel staff -- "everything is fine, no one else is complaining". Being lied to made "being disconnected" all the more infuriating.

Soon "emergent clusters" of INSNA members went to the front desk as small groups and started demanding better service -- after all we were being charged for WiFi. The front desk manager became overwhelmed by the coordinated action and soon went into hiding and refused to talk about the topic. A network illustration of the connected INSNA hotel guests looks different. Because the green nodes are talking to each other and coordinating a strategy, the big blue node is now more constrained in it's response, and ability to act.

Eventually, wifi service improved, but not to the level one would expect in a business class hotel.

This white paper shows how power dissipates when people in a hub-and-spoke network [a.k.a. hierarchy] start to talk to each other.

Power dissipates, but learning begins.

Network of Social Network Scholars

2008-02-01T23:11:00.000-05:00

Last week June and I attended the Sunbelt Social Network conference, sponsored by INSNA -- the network of social network analysts.

It was great conference focusing on all aspects of social network analysis. When it started in the 1970s it was an academic conference, but every year, as of late, more and more practitioners show up. Both June and I did presentations of our recent work in community network mapping and weaving. Great people [old friends, new friends], great weather, well organized, great conversations! Thanks to John Skvoretz, Chris McCarty, Russ Bernard and all of the other organizers!

The organizers provided a goodie bag and inside was a nice USB jump drive with some social network data on it! The author and co-author data was gathered by Chris McCarty from the field's top journal: Social Networks. I took the coauthor data and made a little web app from it. It is a simple network mashup that connects the coauthor network to Google Scholar.

Enjoy!

Shared vision & values in networks

2008-01-27T18:36:00.000-05:00

One of the more interesting questions I get about social networks is the question of whether we find networks where everyone shares common vision or values.

This does happen in networks that are also communities where people naturally share vision and values. In the many networks that are not also communities, there can be as many versions of vision and values as people in the networks, even in dense networks where many net-members are regularly trading in ideas, influence, and assets.

The observation points to the reality that a network can thrive without common threads throughout the network. It can be a whole and dynamic fabric connected by transactions rather than shared dreams and priorities. Neighborhoods are networks in this way. They are for most people communities of shared place and as such networks where isolation, fragmentation, and cliques are characteristic of the networks.

As with religious communities and corporations, the appearance of shared vision and values don't necessarily guarantee network density, agility, or thivancy.

Revisiting core distinctions

2008-01-24T21:15:00.000-05:00

I continue to be amazed at the common confusion of network building with networking. The difference is a significant one. I netbuilding, our intention is to build the community. It is the intention of leader. Networking is the intention to build one's own property.

At the end of the day, networks thrive on both intentions because both foster quality connections and ultimately lead to the kinds of densities and reaching that builds networks and communities.

Social Networks: 1 Political Machine: 0

2008-01-04T22:06:00.000-05:00

The first U.S. presidential primary of 2008 is over and it was full of surprises. After the first inning, we have an unexpected lead.

One of the biggest shocks was on the Republican side -- Huckabee beat Romney. The low budget guy beat the the big spender -- shocking all of the pundits. The common wisdom in politics is that money wins -- s/he with the biggest machine marches on. Since Huckabee couldn't outspend his rivals he had to out-think them. [Lack of money frequently leads to creativity]. Huckabee chose to network his way to success. From USA Today:

"Huckabee, whose campaign has caught fire only in recent months, is largely relying on pre-existing networks within Iowa, ..."

He found local social networks of conservative Christians, gun owners, home schoolers and tax reformers. It was in these networks that Huckabee's message caught fire and spread to other networks that intersected with these. Soon Huckabee had large clusters of interconnected supporters, all reinforcing one another -- friends talking to friends.

Meanwhile, Romney and the others where following common campaign wisdom and setting up phone banks, canvasing neighborhoods and spending money in the mass media -- strangers talking to strangers.

What was the big difference between these two approaches? Huckabee was connecting to intact networks that had a long history together, while Romney was connecting to individual voters -- one at a time. While Romney's supporters were also members of social networks, they were talked to, and influenced individually, alone. Who knows what they did when they went back into their social network? Huckabee's networks all got the same message at roughly the same time -- they probably had very fewer defections.

From Jonathan Tilove @ Newhouse News:

...ultimately, for all the talk about voting being a private act, it is in fact a social act in which individual behavior is hugely dependent on the thinking and actions of others.

Messages to people alone on the phone, alone in the car[radio], alone on the couch[TV], alone with the newspaper, alone with the computer, don't STICK the same way messages conveyed in a group of trusted others. Alone, we hear the message, forget the message, make the promise, forget the promise. In a group, we hear the message, discuss the message, internalize the meassge, make the promise to the group, keep the promise to the group. Huckabee supporters were more likely to remain in support for their candidate during the caucus process, than Romeny's supporters -- who promised support when alone, but had to act in a group at the caucus.

As I was thinking about these social network dynamics of voting, I got an email from Debra -- who had been entertaining similar thoughts...

"... and immediately thought of your "Conversation Stupid" article after Huckabee's upset win in Iowa. I told an economist / blogger friend a while back not to underestimate the power of Hucklebee's social network -- especially from the home-schoolers. I am a Democrat (former Republican) in a very red district in southwestern Ohio. I recently forwarded your article to some of my colleagues in our county party, along with my cliff notes. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party puts a lot of emphasis on phone-banking and door-to-door canvassing, but I am convinced that "brute force" methods such as these are ineffective. Our party is small and insulated in southwestern Ohio and I'm afraid it will stay that way if we rely too much on cold-calls to strangers."

In 2004, George W Bush won Ohio and therefore the presidency -- Ohio put him over the top in the electoral college. In several conversations I have had about the 2004 Ohio election I have been told that Bush won his slim majority in Ohio by also connecting to exisiting social networks. The Bush campaign used the social networks connected to churches thoughout the state -- not just evangelicals, but Catholics and Protestants also. The extended social networks of a couple hundred churches roughly equal Bush's 119,000 vote margin in Ohio in 2004.

We have heard that "all politics are local", now we also find out that "all politics are social".

Updates...
Huckabee continues "networking strategy" in Michigan
{Hat tip to Jill}.
Huckabee's social network army
{Hat tip to David}.

Looking Forward to 2008

2007-12-31T15:21:00.000-05:00

Change will be happening in 2008, both technologically and socially.

One of the most important events of the new year in the U.S. will be the presidential election. The first primaries happen just 3 days into the new year -- January 3rd in Iowa. What affect will these early choices have on the overall electorate?

A very interesting article on the social network dynamics of elections by Shankar Vedantam was published in the Washington Post today. Shankar quotes the recent research of Duncan Watts that reveals it is often the local patterns in networks that influence how people think about events and people. And, these patterns can act differently depending on the information they are fed. Watts also points out the high influence of those people who act early in the process -- the voters of Iowa and New Hampshire.

I wrote a chapter for the book Extreme Democracy a few years ago that also looked at the social network dynamics of voting behavior. Based on the literature review, I reached a similar conclusion to that of Watts -- "it's the [local] conversations, stupid". People are influenced by what those around them think and do -- including choosing to vote, and who to vote for.

It is also time to do another political book network map -- the last major version was done for the 2004 U.S. presidential election. I created a interactive political book network for the 2008 election. It is an interactive map that you can play with, move books around, hide them, etc., and see what emerges! Just click the Help button, in the above link, for instructions on how to interact with the map. Enjoy!

Watch how your local social networks react to the election -- share your observations in the comments below.

Happy New Year!

Update: Great new article by Jonathan Tilove on complexity and networks in voting featuring Duncan Watts.

Accidental conversations

2007-12-23T12:16:00.000-05:00

Valdis' brilliant reminders here about the capacity for resilience through net diversity remind me of a point I made in "Accidental Conversations" a few years ago, that we need to practice diversity in our conversations as well.

This is the practice of sparking and nurturing tangents and lateral inquiries in conversations. Lateral inquiries are questions that take the conversation in new directions. Some of the best are questions like who you've seen lately, what you've been reading or listening to lately, what you've seen on Ted.com or YouTube lately, what you've been up to lately.

These have the potential for a whole vibrant ecology of new discoveries and connections that we could never possibly anticipate, predict, or plan.

Military Intelligence

2007-12-22T14:34:00.000-05:00

No oxymoron this time.

The graphic above [from Gizmodo] points to a smart move by the US Army. The army is diversifying their computer networks with both Macs and PCs to make the networks robust and resilient under attack. They started using Macs in the late 1990s to confuse hackers who only knew Windows hacks[which is still the majority of black-hat hackers].

Smart farmers have always planted diverse seed sets... if one strain of corn/soybeans/etc. is attacked by disease, the others usually survive. The goal is not to avoid attacks -- they will happen -- but to have your complex systems degrade gracefully, instead of collapse suddenly. When your systems can sustain attacks, without sudden failure, you have time to recognize and fix the disruption before it causes much damage.

Social networks need diversity also -- not just the typical gender/race/orientation types of diversity. But knowledge diversity coming from various knowledge pools, ways of learning, backgrounds, and ways of seeing patterns & solving problems.

Innovation happens at the intersections -- where diverse knowledge meets and mixes.

Happy Holidays to All !

P.S. Mix some knowledge while you mix those holiday drinks, eh?

Location, Location, Location

2007-12-20T19:37:00.000-05:00

The golden rule of real estate [location, location, location] is also golden rule of social networks. In real estate, its your physical location -- your geography. In social networks its your virtual location -- your "socialography". One is visible, the other mostly invisible. Yet, they can both be mapped and measured.

Here is an excellent NYT article about how geography and socialography intersect in Silicon Valley.

“... in Silicon Valley, you locate a company where the engineers are”

"These microclusters turn out to be a very efficient way to innovate, to see what works and what fails, and do it extremely rapidly"

This article explains why people are willing to pay $900,000 for a home in Silicon Valley that they could have for $150,000 in Cleveland [or Orlando for sun worshippers].

This NYT article is along the same theme as our previous posts on Knowledge Spillovers and A Perplexing Economy.

Those close by, form a Tie

2007-12-16T22:10:00.000-05:00

Birds of a feather flock together... so do entrepreneurs.

Ed Morrison found some interesting research that examines the dense clustering of successful economic neighborhoods/clusters. This research is similar to that of Thomas Allen @ MIT, who studied how engineers and scientists worked, and from that came the Allen Curve, which shows the correlation between distance and frequency of communication in organizations. Both sets of research support what I have observed in social network analysis projects: those close by, form a tie -- and as a result get things done. In the age of the Internet, distance still matters!

From Washington University in St. Louis, News & Information:

"High-tech firms locating close to each other benefit from the proximity," says Barak S. Aharonson, visiting assistant professor of organization and strategy at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. "The potential for frequent face-to-face interaction, serendipitous encounters and easy scrutiny are facilitated by being near firms that are working on similar things and are open to sharing information."

Coffee shop encounters could lead to new business ideas. These "knowledge spillovers" happen more frequently the closer firms are to each other, and dissipate as the distance between companies grows. In fact, Aharonson said, the benefits of agglomeration are strongest within 500 meters (about 0.31 miles) and fade quickly over distances.

"Eventually they are all going to meet in the nearby coffee shop. The basis of agglomerations and the benefit for high tech firms is the flow of knowledge," Aharonson said. "At this point high tech knowledge is almost a public commodity. You can protect it, however through interactions with people — especially those outside the company — it disseminates rapidly. Proximity facilitates face to face interaction and increases the likelihood for knowledge spillovers. These knowledge spillovers enhance the potential creativity of the scientists. Increased creativity leads to new ideas, new products and new businesses. Hence, closely located firms are more likely to benefit from such knowledge spillovers than isolated firms."

Here is the full paper on Knowledge Spillovers.

Via BrewedFreshDaily.

Investing in Social Network Analysis

2007-12-04T19:56:00.000-05:00

CNET is reporting that social network analysis company, Visible Path [VP], is about be acquired by a very large firm.

I am glad to see this success. VP is one of the few businesses focused on social networks that actually know what they are doing -- no smoke and mirrors, nor beacons here. Just good science and good business. VP has some of the elite academics in the field of social network analysis as executives and advisors. Congratulations to Stanley Wasserman and his smart network!

UPDATE: Stanley Wasserman has confirmed the deal to me, but he can not disclose any more at this point in time [12/05/2007].

A Perplexing Economy

2007-12-02T12:34:00.000-05:00

Recently a study of the Cleveland economy was commissioned, by a local real estate developer. It got the attention of local blogger John Ettore, who was then noticed by NEO super-blogger, George Nemeth. The study is summarized nicely:

"Cleveland is a perplexing economy," according to Dr. Christine Chmura, President and Chief Economist of Richmond-based Chmura Economics & Analytics, "It should be growing faster than it is because the industry mix is more favorable than the state and the region has so many attractive qualities such as the arts, cultural attractions, recreational opportunities, and professional sports teams."

The key word here is "should" -- emphasis mine.

So, the nodes seem to be in place -- industry mix, cultural attractions, etc. But the economic network/ecosystem is underperforming. Why? Maybe, it is lacking links -- the interconnections between clusters of knowledge and ability that make things happen and get things done in today's economy. Innovation happens at the intersections. Innovation creates new businesses and jobs. Innovation attracts other innovators -- people who know the dance, and want to be with others that know the dance.

Silicon Valley[SV] is known to be a place of innovation. A recent example illustrates the power of intersections. Apple did not create the iPod by itself. It did so with several SV neighbors who had the tech/knowledge that Apple did not have -- innovation happens at the intersections. Apple then took the design created in California, by the intersected firms, to its international network and got it built and distributed.

We all know "It's the economy, stupid!" And in today's economy: "It's the connections, stupid!"

Is it possible that the Cleveland economy looks like this -- many players, many islands, few intersections...

Whereas, the Silicon Valley economy might look like this -- many players, no islands, many intersections...

Email history = Social Graph?

2007-11-25T12:12:00.000-05:00

Forget about Facebook and MySpace for your social graph.

A recent BITS column in NY Times mentions making your email history a lens on to your social network/graph. Both Yahoo and GMail have plenty of data. Microsoft does not have the data, but a big opportunity when you consider all of the email history residing on corporate Exchange servers.

Above is an email social graph, gathered from an Exchange server of a client. Purpose of the social graph was to provide a visual map to project leadership to help get their project unstuck. Social network analysis was applied to spot key connectors, clusters, bottlenecks, and measure the flow of information between the various groups in the project.

Social Graph

2007-11-23T21:23:00.000-05:00

This week we witnessed a tipping point for the term "Social Graph" -- originally a term used by mathematicians and sociologists -- currently the buzz of the social web community. When the designer of the web, Tim Berners-Lee [TBL], wrote a rambling post on the "Social Graph" the tipping concluded in a load cacophony of bloggers commenting on the concept.

One of TBL's insights was very simple, yet useful. He explained how Internet is changing focus from the connections between computers to the connections between people. Sir Tim explained the change using three, three-letter acronyms. First, he started with the III - International Information Infrastructure, in the USA it was originally known as the National Information Infrastructure. It grew up to be the Internet. On top of the III, TBL built the World Wide Web. And finally he sees the GGG, the Giant Global Graph, which will be built upon the existing technology of the III and WWW.

• III - how computers are connected
• WWW - how documents are connected
• GGG - how people are connected

It is now obvious -- computer scientists and mathematical sociologists are long lost cousins!

The diagram above is my social graph from a very early on-line social network [OSN] -- Ryze. I am the green node in the middle, my friends in the OSN are the blue nodes, and their friends [my FOAFs] are the grey nodes. The red links show my connections and the connections amongst my friends and grey links complete my 2 step paths to the many FOAFs. As time went on, and more people joined the OSN, my social graph grew, but it never approached my actual social network -- it was only a slice. A slice of my real life.

Yet, slices are useful -- they show us a particular place at a particular time in a particular state. This is how CAT [computer assisted tomography] scans work -- their photographic slices of our complex bodies help doctors diagnose our ailments. You need the focused slice to understand, looking at the whole often results in overwhelming confusion.

Do we need the whole GGG? Yes, like a map of the world, and GPS, it will have applications. Yet, most of us are much happier with local maps [local to our network -- within a few links of us], revealing local dynamics for our local lives. If a freeway stops in Los Angeles, does the Cleveland commuter care?

Only Connect

2007-11-16T21:49:00.001-05:00

"Only Connect" -- sounds like a quote from Web 2.0 marketing materials, or from a social network analysis guru, or from a network weaving coach. Definitely a quote from this century... right?

Nope.

That quote is almost 100 years old, and it is from E. M. Forster, the author of a prophetic short story -- "The Machine Stops" -- written in 1909. The short story foretells the internet in a most amazing way. The Machine is the pervasive communication device/network between all living spaces/apartments beneath the surface of the planet. People live below the surface because of an environmental disaster above ground.

Two main characters in the story -- a mom and a son. The son longs for F2F contact, while the mom enjoys The Machine and makes a living doing lectures, which are delivered like podcasts and conference calls. She has a "crackberry withdrawal" in one passage where she panics becasue she is away from The Machine and her messages are mounting. The "call center" for The Machine is a laugh. The fear of The Machine is not.

Tonight WCPN 90.3 FM in Cleveland broadcast an adaption of the story for radio. WCPN will re-broadcast the excellent show Monday, November 19th @ Noon eastern time. You can listen live to WCPN.

Interviews with the creators of the radio play are also available.

Enjoy!

Networks, Patterns & Paintings

2007-11-11T20:08:00.000-05:00

I have shared the story of a client saying one of my network maps reminded him of a Jackson Pollock painting. That is J.P. above starting a new painting. [ I never do my network maps standing on one leg.]

Various mathematicians and physicists have looked for mathematical patterns, like fractals, to discover fundamental building blocks present in biological, social, and man-made networks. Now, some of these same number-crunchers are applying their algorithms to a group of recently found paintings -- suspected to be by Jackson Pollock. Are these real? Or are they fakes? Maybe mathematics and motifs will tell us. An initial study of these paintings cast doubt on their authenticity. Now, a group of physicists from Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University have come out with what they say is a better analysis.

We as humans leave behind repeated patterns and motifs in our architecture, music, writing, and social networks... so why not in how we paint?

What's the "Network"?

2007-11-03T13:11:00.000-04:00

Above is a typical social network map [social graph]. It shows the connections amongst various members of an on-line social network [OSN]. Based on data gathering methods, originally developed by academics in the field of social network analysis, this is what most social network maps look like -- a focus on the largest connected component.

Yet, is that everything? Is that the whole community or just the obvious part? Maybe there is more? Are people attracted to the core community, but not yet connected to it? Are people interested in the network, but still lurking around the edges -- waiting for an intro/invite or opportunity to step forward?

Maybe our social networks, er... spaces, look more like the image below? Notice that the map above[red nodes] is only a small portion of the map below[red/green/blue nodes].

This social graph is taken from an actual on-line community that reveals active, semi active, passive and dormant members. Think about social networks and communities you belong to... Is everyone connected to everyone else [by some path]? Or, are their part-time members? Observers from the outside? Sympathizers? Spies? Passive supporters? Orbiting clusters?

IMHO, all of our networks are like the later picture, with very fuzzy borders and overlap with other social spaces. Maybe this question: "Is Z in X's network or Y's network?" does not make sense. Maybe the answer is "Yes!" We are all in multiple networks in multiple ways with multiple strengths of membership. Welcome to the Social Space... you have been here all along! Like fish may not be aware of water, we may not be aware of the fuzzy/overlapping/interacting social circles/clouds/clusters we are all embedded in and floating around in.

Enjoy the self-organizing serendipity of who you will bump into next!

UPDATE: Maybe the name of this post should have been "What's the Graph?" The hot term in 2007 is "Social Graph".