The Future of Work and Collaborative Knowledge Networks

My friend and colleague Peter Gloor is co-leading a course at MIT Sloan with Tom Malone. The class includes a guest lecture, "My blog is my social network," by Bill Ives, who recently posted a nice summary of the class right here. Bill says:

"I am mentioning this course because aspects of it are open to anyone on the web, as indicated below, and they are interested in more participation. As part of their coursework students will do consulting at real companies and feed back their results into a real research project.

"Peter and Tom are looking to recruit more companies for participation. Course materials will be online on the Web site for everybody. Research results will also be published on the Web site for anyone interested. You can go to The Future of Work and Collaborative Knowledge Networks course site to learn more and see the complete schedule. "

Network Power for Philanthropy and Nonprofits

At last fall's KM Cluster I had the pleasure of meeting Marion Kane (Exec Dir) and Roberto Cremonini (Chief Knowledge & Learning Officer) of the Barr Foundation. They had just unveiled their new slogan, "Using Knowledge, Networks, and Funding to Build a Better Boston for All."

Marion and Roberto told me about a report they commissioned to survey the potential benefits of social network analysis to the world of philanthropy and nonprofits. Written by Peter Plastrik and Madeleine Taylor, it's an excellent overview that I recommend to anyone interested in applying SNA in this sector.

After concisely surveying the relevant parts of social networks, the authors recommend these five strategies to nonprofits seeking the benefits of networks:

1. Survey existing networks
2. Develop communities of practice
3. Develop experiments demonstrating benefits of network approach to NPs
4. Pioneer network strategy as means to change large-scale systems in society
5. Use viral marketing to spread idea of networks

And now, I am very pleased to announce that Barr has just made this report publically available as part of the new "Resources" section of its website. You can download the PDF right here. In the spirit of #5 above, please pass it along with thanks to Barr.

social network analysis and knowledge management

There's been some recent discussion on SOCNET (the SNA email group) about knowledge management. Is KM a legitimate field of study? Does SNA have application in business organizations? I am especially interested in the intersection of SNA and KM, and answer yes to both questions. I invite you to check out the discussion and join in. While you're at it, I recommend this post by Bill Ives, who happens to be co-chairing the Jan 21 KM Cluster Boston event on social networks.

Social bookmarks

From my buddy Neal Young comes word of StumbleUpon, a service that lets me rank any website I happen to see with a simple thumb up or down. Then whenever I get the itch, I can click the "Stumble" button on my browser and discover a new page I never knew about, that has been highly rated by other subscribers with interests similar to mine.

From George Siemens comes a vision of furl as a low-overhead blog. Furl lets me save my Internet bookmarks in an online database that I can choose to make public. When a particular page really catches my eye, furl will tell me not only which of its subscribers have "furled" that very page, but also what other pages those folks have furled. For an extremely relevant example of this, see the new "Who is FURLing SNA" link at the top of my links section.

From Denham Grey comes a review of del.icio.us as a social bookmarking tool for knowledge management.

OK! I have finally crossed my threshold of adaptation and will climb aboard the social bookmarking bandwagon. After a little Googling, I highly recommend this comparative review of furl and del.icio.us by Andy Roberts.

And don't forget to check out StumbleUpon too -- it's by far the most fun-oriented of the three.

Goodbye Tree

I actually bought a real tree this season, thanks to an enthusiastic and inspirational friend who reminded me how great real trees are. Though nothing fancy, my tree was sized just right for my living room, beautifully proportioned, and smelled fantastic. I kind of forgot to water my tree after I set it up, and it spent most of the holiday season stubbornly refusing to drink my belated watering. But thankfully, it was rather stubborn about holding onto its needles as well. I guess you could say it fit right in.

Dragging the tree outside was another story. I sadly let it go at the curb and turned around to see a spectacularly messy trail of needles leading me back to my living room. That's all swept up now, except for a few lingering stowaways that I'm sure to discover in some nostalgic moment of 2005.

Christmas trees are perhaps my most favorite and special of all trees. But conveniently enough for this essay, a tree is also a special kind of network beloved by network analysts. (Keep reading, you non-mathematicians. I promise this will go down easy.)

To a network analyst, a "tree" is kind of like a family tree, only simpler. Here is a complete definition of "tree" that I find rather poetic: A tree is a network where every pair of nodes is connected by exactly one path. A good real-world example of a tree is a military-style hierarchy. When we speak of the "chain of command" in this kind of regime, that makes sense only because there is precisely one path of supervisory relationships connecting any pair of individuals in the group.

Network analysts love trees for the same reason generals do. Whether you are designing algorithms for Mapquest or commanding an offensive strike in Falujah, it's very expedient to eliminate ambiguity in favor of unequivocal efficiency.

But here is a funny thing: As easy as it is to find next year's Christmas tree in your nearest woods, it is basically impossible to find social network trees occurring naturally. People have a powerful desire to connect however they see fit, and the hierarchies we observe are but convenient artifices of simplicity laid upon the glorious natural mess of it all.

I guess I lay down the philosophy a little thick when it's past my bed time.

Happy New Year!

Holiday Special -- The Corrections

I am just back from Bethlehem, PA, recovering from family time, and settling in for the final countdown to 2005.

It's a longish drive from Boston to Bethlehem -- not worth flying, but still taxing on my sanity. A couple years ago, I discovered that books on tape structure the drive time infinitely better than radio or my modest collection of music tapes and CDs. Being a musician, I never would have guessed this but just luckily stumbled into it. And thank God I did. Holiday time by itself is already taxing enough on my sanity.

From this year's holiday drive, I am pleased to recommend The Corrections, as written by Jonathan Franzen and read by Dylan Baker. It's a dark and utterly hilarious account of the crazy dysfunctional Lambert family as their lives fall apart in a myriad of ways. Baker's reading is right on and features evocative accents of the many different characters.

The funny thing is that I didn't have any idea what The Corrections was about when I borrowed it from the library. Had I known, I probably would have put it back on the shelf, in the manner of the Lambert's firstborn son Gary, whose actions are carefully calculated to conceal his pains. As it was, I was blessedly free from the self-conscious weight of deliberately choosing a crazy family story, and so I relished every bit of it. The fact that the novel careens towards a Christmas-time climax made the whole story almost too perfect for my holiday driving entertainment.

And now, prepare to be amazed by my obligatory connection to social network analysis....

What planted The Corrections in my brain and got me to listen to it? Ironically, a rather funny commentary in its own right about meta-humility, from a recent Sunday NY Times Magazine column (which you need to pay to read by now, since it's buried in the archives). In contrast to the many actors and politicians who profess to be "humbled" when they win Oscars or big elections, Jonathan Franzen has not learned the art of public so-called humility. Hence when Oprah offered to list The Corrections on her best-seller-guaranteeing Orpah Book Club, Franzen's reply was essentially, "No, thanks. I am a serious writer and the Oprah Book Club is beneath me." You have to hand it to the guy for sticking to his principles even when it not only costs him immediate big sales but also alienates thousands of potential lifelong fans.

So anyway, even if Franzen is quite possibly a jerk who thinks we won't appreciate his book and prefers not to have common folks recommending it, I am going to go out on a limb and advise you to check it out anyway.

Are You a Change Maker?

Happy Holidays everybody! I am ready for a relaxing Christmas weekend in my hometown of Bethlehem, PA. It's "Christmas City USA" and worth visiting in December if you're ever nearby and curious for an 18th century Moravian take on Christmas. You'll love the hundreds of Moravian stars hung above front doors all across town. And you can marvel at the gigantic electric star that sparkles from a nearby hilltop and guides wise people of all kinds to the growing industrial parks emerging from the rubble of Bethlehem Steel.

Before I go, let me recommend a good read --

Check out the latest issue of Fast Company. You can recognize it on the newsstands when you spot Malcolm Gladwell's big wooly afro, which is featured on the cover. Gladwell's unruly haircut is actually central to his next big book (you'll never guess why, though). I love Gladwell, and Fast Company's cover story is a good profile, but the story made me a bit sad for the true founders of SNA who now stand in the long, long, shadow of "The Tipping Point."

Also in the issue, Keith Hammonds has written a great article, "A Lever Long Enough to Move the World," about Ashoka and its visionary founder Bill Drayton.

Drayton's quest is to bring the world's citizen sector to life. He's trying to recitfy a couple hundred years of over-focus on the corporate sector, dating from the Industrial Revolution. How to achieve such a monumental task? With the power of networking, of course. Ashoka is a "21st century United Way" that identifies social entrepreneurial fellows and creates a world-problem-solving network through their combined expertise. Wow!

Here's a passage from the article that both conveys the scope of Drayton's vision and invites all of us to join the quest. Are you ready to accept Drayton's invitation?

Drayton was meeting two years ago with eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, whose Omidyar Network ultimately committed to investing $20 million over five years in Ashoka. Drayton described Ashoka's central goal -- to speed and make possible the emergence of an entrepreneurial citizen sector. Omidyar pressed: "That's an intermediate goal. What are you really after?" It was a good question, Drayton realized.

And he thought, We have this network of entrepreneurs, all of them seeding social innovation. "That is changing a lot of things, upsetting local patterns, weakening existing structures, weakening the idea that things are the way they are. It's an invitation for people to step up and do things differently. That first change touches a series of people who weren't doing this before. They're not passive anymore. They're full citizens, change makers."

As of right then, Ashoka embraced a new goal: "Everyone a change maker."