Cross-cultural learning at Sunbelt

Hello from Vancouver, BC! I flew here yesterday, having had barely enough time to pack my bags after Wednesday's exhilarating Network Roundtable in Boston.

Mike Prescott very generously offered to pick me up from the Vancouver airport, and on the way into town he explained that Vancouver is one of the most multi-cultural cities in the world, mixing an old guard of British founders with a recent influx of Asian and Pacific cultures.

Multi-culturalism provides a great backdrop to share the results of the network mapping that Claire Reinelt and I did a few weeks ago at Creating Space. Among other questions, we asked this nation-wide audience of community network-weavers, "Who has provided you with useful ideas or resources to do your work?"

Thanks to the Leadership Learning Community (LLC) for granting me permission to share the (anonymized) answers we received to that question. As you can see at right, there is a lot of learning happening within the LLC.


To help digest this "plate of spaghetti," I focused on reciprocal learning relationships and used a betweenness analysis to highlight nodes with diverse contacts throughout the core and periphery:Images like this provide a fantastic personalized way to bring the basics of social capital into group discussion and stimulate appreciation for the core, the periphery, and what they have to offer each other.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License and is copyrighted (c) 2006 by Connective Associates except where otherwise noted.

Rolaid's guide to network visualization

Next week I am headed to Sunbelt, the mother of all SNA conferences, where my colleagues and I will be admonished to gorge ourselves on plates of powerpoint spaghetti like this:

I often ask colleagues suffering from spaghetti-network indigestion, how do you spell relief? (Forgive me for that gratuitous pop-culture reference.) They spell relief...

• m-e-s-h-f-o-r-u-m, which is hosting its second annual all-comers network conference, this time on network visualization, May 7-9 in San Francisco.
• v-i-s-i-u-a-l-c-o-m-p-l-e-x-i-t-y, the wonderful visual resource compiled by Manual Lima, who will be a guest of honor at MeshForum.
• M-A-S-9-6-5, the course on "social visualization" taught by Judith Donath, director of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. Her online reading list will expand your visual horizons far beyond nodes and edges. (Thanks David Carpe for pointing me to MAS965.)

BTW, network visualization is one of my favorite topics. You can peruse my postings about it relatively effectively here.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License and is copyrighted (c) 2006 by Connective Associates except where otherwise noted.

Social network analysis and the story of digital identity

Aldo Castaneda produces "The Story of Digital Identity," a weekly podcast in which he interviews various personalities in this rapidly emerging field. Somehow my name slipped into his schedule. The result is this twenty-minute interview featuring my ramblings on social capital, bridging, bonding, SNA, digital identity, and why we are at a(n) historical crossroads in the interplay between organizations and technology.

I had a great time meeting with Aldo for the interview, and the experience has reminded me to pay more attention not just to the field of digital identity but also to the medium of podcasting. Others eager to learn about podcasting may want to check out Boston University's Podcast Academy, April 28-29. (Thanks to Erin Rodat-Savla of ICEX for the tip.)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License and is copyrighted (c) 2006 by Connective Associates except where otherwise noted.

Living Bibliography for Leadership Network Development

I am still glowing (in an exhausted kind of way) from Creating Space VII--the annual meeting of the Leadership Learning Community (LLC), which was Wed-Fri last week in Durham, NC. Many, many thanks to Claire Reinelt (Research and Evaluation Director at LLC) for inviting me into the work of this community.

As part of our presentation on leadership networks, Claire and I shared the following list of resources. I'd especially like to highlight our Leadership Network Annotated Bibliography, which includes a link to our leader network online survey template, which you are free to copy and adapt for your own use.

Resources for Social Network Analysis
Presented at Creating Space VII
April 7, 2006

By Bruce Hoppe and Claire Reinelt

Reading on the Internet

There is a lot of good information on social network analysis available for free on the Internet. Start your web-surfing at

• http://connectedness.blogspot.com
• http://leadernetwork.pbwiki.com

These two sites are filled with pointers to help professionals build organizational capacity and leadership using social network analysis. They include pointers to the following sites:

• Online Network Survey Utility. A free template you can adapt to create and administer your own online social network survey.
• Organizational Network Analysis Community of Practice. A community of professionals who share ideas on improving organizations and communities with social network analysis.
• Building Smart Communities Through Network Weaving. A good introductory case study by Valdis Krebs and June Holley that introduces the process of community network-weaving, based on work with the Appalachian Center for Economic Networks.
• Lawrence Community Works: Using the Power of Networks to Restore a City. Another good case study, by Peter Plastrick and Madeline Taylor. The story of how this organization in an immigrant city north of Boston connected, networked and developed the leadership of residents to become change agents in their community.
• "Leading Between: Leadership and Trust in a Network Society" by Paul Skidmore. An overview of six characteristics demonstrated by successful network leaders.
• "Social Capital of Twenty-First-Century Leaders" by Daniel Brass and David Krackhardt. An introduction to social capital and its role in effective leadership, including a guide to the “strong tie” and “weak tie” strategies.

Popular Software Tools for Visualizing Social Networks

• UCINET is the most popular and full-featured system for social network analysis. It is a comprehensive system designed by academics for academics, with a very steep learning curve that can easily discourage novices. It costs $250. UCINET has a healthy (and quite technical) users group.
• NetDraw is the visual interface to UCINET. It is quite useful as a stand-alone network analysis tool, very easy to use, and completely free.
  
• InFlow is another user-friendly SNA software tool. It is designed with business professionals in mind who do not want to sift through unnecessarily academic features. It costs $995.
• NetMiner is designed for exploratory visual analysis. If you ask who are the key players in an organization, NetMiner draws an interactive picture highlighting them, whereas other packages give you numerical rankings. NetMiner is full-featured like UCINET, with a learning curve just as steep. It costs $950.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License and is copyrighted (c) 2006 by Connective Associates except where otherwise noted.