Endless Knots

The history of social network analysis

Mike Gotta has an informative post about the long history, beginning in 1853, of social network analysis, the scientific field that studies phenomena like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and all their social networking cousins (originally, believe it or not, not online).

Reminded me of this quote from Alexis de Tocqueville, Chapter 5, Democracy in America, 1835:

The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.

"A geek doctor takes a 2.0 approach..."

My profile of John Halamka, CIO at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and its affiliates (plus a ratttthhher famous medical school), is up at TheStandard.com as "A geek doctor takes a 2.0 approach to healthcare technology." Thanks, John, for the easy interview and help with fact-checking.

Metanet at 25

Metanet, the online conversation started a quarter-century ago by Frank Burns and nurtured forevermore by Lisa Kimball, is celebrating with a party in Washington, DC, at the end of March. Lisa is such a prodigious networker that we profiled her in The Age of the Network (see "All the way to New York to buy a modem," Chapter 7). Wish I could be there. Metanet was the second online community I joined (EIES was first). Over the years, many good ideas and, more importantly, deep friendships have grown from the connections it's spawned. All will miss Frank at this celebration, whose laugh I can hear just typing this. Congratulations, Lisa, and warm fuzzies to all my friends from Spirit, the women's conference there.

With Lisa's permission, I'm posting the anniversary party details here as I know at least some friends from those days are reading:

MetaNetwork is 25 years old this spring and we're having a party!  You and all your family are invited !

It will be held in the afternoon of March 29th - probably around 2pm ...at the home of:

Lois Mandelberg
6303 Waterway Place
Falls Church, Virginia  22044

mamalois[at]hotmail[dot]com

703-658-7776 (h)

Plans for pot luck are being organized in the MetaNet25 conference on Metanet ..

Hope we'll see you there!  * lisa

Social networking in the Bible

Someone has done it.

"Heisenberg and social networks"

Patti Anklam went to see Copenhagen at Boston's American Repertory Theatre (technically, it's in Cambridge, Mass.) the other night and, as a result, extends the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to the social domain. In her post, "Heisenberg and Social Networks," she wonders whether the very observance of a social interaction, what she calls its "visibility," influences the interaction itself.

Given last night's immersion in thinking about what we can see and not see and the impact of observation on interactions, it was impossible to not beg the question of uncertainty. Certainly, people expect to meet and connect with others when they go to conferences or symposia, but to what extent and in what ways does the visibility of the connecting process impact the experience? Are ties made during the excitement of the moment any less or more durable than the ties that are not observed?

It's making me think about writing. If I send you an email, I say one kind of thing. If I send it to you and copy a bunch of other people, I say something different. Others are watching. Not certain that this is precisely what Patti is talking about...but what do you think about what she's saying?

Why Twitter may lead to world peace

Some years ago, Jeff Stamps and I were invited to keynote the US Intelligence Community's Fourth Annual Conference on Collaboration. Honestly, at the time we were invited, I didn't even know there was such a thing as the "intelligence community" (Jeff probably did). And so when we were invited to dinner with the CIO of the CIA the night prior to the speech, I was hungry with questions.

As the conversation unfolded, it turned out that the CIO's young son, around nine years old, as I recall, was on AOL, the Facebook of its time, and participated in chat rooms with kids all around the world, including in Pakistan and the UAE (I think I've got this right - might have been Bahrain). I asked the father what he thought the implications were for future diplomacy. He hadn't thought about it yet, he said, but allowed as these early encounters might have an effect on his son's approach to the global problematique.

I just came across "Trust and cooperation cannot be surged," an excellent post by technology visionary Dan Bricklin that deeply connects the current social networking craze with solving our terrible dilemma. If you've been hanging around the tech world, particularly here in Boston, you know who Dan is. Even if you haven't, he's had an effect on your life - or that of your accountant or your kids or anyone who's ever opened a spreadsheet. Nearly 20 years ago, Dan invented the spreadsheet so next time you open one, take a little bow in his direction (and mine as he's a neighbor here in Newton, Mass).

So to the point: about a month ago, Dan wrote an excellent post about the deeper meaning of social networking tools like Twitter. Twitter and its cousins (like Jaiku and probably 10 more I haven't heard of) are like belonging to a text messaging club. When you join (and any time going forward), you set up a list of people who receive your twitters and vice-versa (and you can easily post to your blog). The general etiquette is that you send out little updates on your current activities - mine right now would say, duh, posting to my blog when I should be making pancakes. A little news, something personal, a snippet of Life with Jessica (which as you can see is puh-retty boring).

Earlier, when I was not making (Nova Scotia) pancakes, I was tripping along a series of links from Boston Globe reporter Scott Kirsner's Innovation Economy blog and came upon this wise post from Dan where he connects the US Navy's "maritime policy" with Saint Exupery's Little Prince. The idea is that "these social systems, by allowing (and encouraging) repeated, simple, personal interactions, actually help build community and trust." He goes on to say that understanding the mechanisms by which this happens are important and here's where he gets quite creative.

First Dan pulls a great quote from a US Maritime strategy document from 2007: "Trust and cooperation cannot be surged," meaning, to my mind, that you can't just add more troops to a situation and expect they will build social capital. It builds something else (secure neighborhoods perhaps, cleaner streets) but not by itself social capital.

Then he goes on to explain how the Little Prince handles diplomacy:

The Little Prince encounters a fox and asks the fox to play with him. The fox replies that he can't play with the Little Prince because he isn't tamed. He explains that "taming" means to "establish ties". If they establish those ties, then they will need each other. They will each be unique to the other. And, this great quote: "One only understands the things that one tames." Taming takes time. It takes repeated simple encounters. It takes simple "rites" that make certain times special. The Little Prince "tames" the fox by visiting each day, first sitting at a distance, and then moving closer. The closing thought: "You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed."

He wraps his post with this thought:

This idea, that repeated simple encounters (in person or today electronically) help develop trust and friendships, is an important concept to grasp. The Navy gets it (they've been building cooperating teams for hundreds of years). The CNO [Chief of Naval Operations in the US] emphasizes the importance of the growth in understanding of others that occurs. We should look to this idea, too, in our evaluation of social software. People may make fun of blog or Twitter posts about what someone had for breakfast or how they like a certain video game, but it is all part of how humans build a cooperating society that works. It can't be rushed, and it can be nurtured, even with simple text messages.

Excellent, Dan. I've added your blog to my reader...and maybe I'll start actually using my Twitter account.

Look both ways before clicking

"Someone" had a secret crush on me, Facebook kept telling me. Of course, I was curious  so (for the record, not until the zillionth time this came up on my screen), I clicked. To move forward, as I recall, I had to supply my cell phone number. No, no, no...and off I went.

Turns out this, as I, canny Internet skeptic assumed, was some sort of awful thing: malware, in the lingo. Internet News lays out the evil scheme in "Facebook's 'Secret Crush' is a Malware App."

Reminder: If something online gives you that fleetingly awful feeling in your stomach, click elsewhere.

Social networking at work

Bill Ives, prodigious blogger, did a nice recap of the recent Society for New Communications Research awards meeting (where ironically there was no wi-fi - go figure).

There reps of award-winning companies--Coca-Cola, Dell, Scuderi Group, GM, and Sun Microsystems--laid out how their companies are incorporating social media for business purposes. At GM, several senior execs are blogging internally, including the head of their Legal Department (strange, perhaps, but, according to Bill's report, true).

Sun, as my devoted readers know, is using Second Life and YouTube and there is perhaps no more famous CEO blogger than its head-of-all, Jonathan Schwartz. (Note to Jonathan: I don't read religiously but the last few times I've logged in, I've noticed your apologizing for not blogging more often. It's OK, really.)

Ever the astute reporter, Bill points out that after "OK," Coke is the next most often-spoke word in the world. Call the dentists! Meanwhile, Coke's historian is blogging. Apparently. After six clicks on their site, I couldn't find it and gave up.

Dell is using Twitter to pose questions to customers and potential customers, thus driving them to their site. Don't know what Twitter is?

My favorite of Bill's reports comes from a small Springfield, Mass., company, the same valiant city that pioneered "open-book management," where Jack Stack, the founder of Springfield Remanufacturing, threw open the company's ledger to its employees and thus transformed how corporations shared financial information. Here's Bill's report on Scuderi's, another Springfield company's, use of social media:

Scuderi Group is small Springfield MA company working on improving internal combustion engine. Decided on a social media campaign to gain more awareness in their market. Looked at a combination of methods, both social media and traditional media. Felt email is dead as an out reach media. Reporters get too many emails to read them. Wanted to create a feedback between social and traditional media. Launched a blog as a distribution method to distribute news, less personal than some blogs. Also created a YouTube channel and did some high end videos for this free channel. Blog promoted videos, as well as traditional out reach. One video has 120,000 views after a Wired story on it with the video embedded. Covered in many mainstream outlets, NPR, NYT.

Cracking the code on virtual DNA

This one deserves its own category. And perhaps the techies reading here saw the original story when it broke in InfoWeek in Oct '07. IBM and Linden Labs, universe-makers at Second Life, have teamed up to create avatars that can travel from virtual world to virtual world.

For those to whom that last sentence is gobbledy-gook:

Two companies, one old and from the beginning of computing time, the other from the 21st century, have formed a partnership. Their goal is to produce a transportable digital version of you. So instead of visiting different web sites with only your name to show for it, now *you* will appear, the 3D-digital version of you, that is. How much will this set you back? The street price for a digital version of yourself right now is in the title of this previous post--You: Price Tag, $300.

Jeff Stamps on Teams of Practice

Jeff Stamps has taken the time to reply at length and in depth to Mike Gotta's response to my post on Teams of Practice. Here's Jeff's thinking:

Mike, this is a terrific post on "Teams of Practice". I'll take a crack at it in the knowledge management context in which we coined the term.

At a high level, we see KM in three phases of collaboration. 

Phase 1 is the capturing, storing, and making accessible knowledge objects generated elsewhere in the organization, the Knowledge Base, for shared use.

Phase 2 added Communities of Practice to source knowledge directly from people. CoP systems of conversation follow Etienne Wenger's observation that people pass practices, their "how-tos," along informal pathways of tacit knowledge exchange, propelled along by questions and answers and held together by social relationships of community. Here, the conversation itself is the knowledge base.

Phase 3 adds Teams of Practice to source knowledge directly from teams. We mean to capture both what "a team of practice" is, and how they inevitably connect as "teams of practice," a network of ToPs.

Teams are the working units of the organization, both strategic (executive) and tactical (line) teams at all levels. The team context allows people to collaboratively pursue concrete goals, test ideas, make decisions, develop and execute tasks, and produce output. As teams go online, they create and capture knowledge objects, generate focused conversations, and produce a wealth of contextual "how-tos" in agendas, task lists, time lines, etc. Hence, knowledge captured in the context of an online team room is the actual tacit practice of the organization.

Organizations are inherently networks of teams, starting with the hierarchy, which is a network of interlocked management teams of direct reporting relationships. Today, many more types of teams are added to that basic set of groups to get the work of the organization done. All these teams are producing output used by other teams in the organization in a sequence of upstream-to-downstream and supplier-customer relationships feeding teams delivering to the organization's ultimate customer(s). The horizontal connections among working teams are the ones that produce large-scale organizational results. This network of teams exists whether recognized or not, and is not a stage on the way to a CoP of individuals.

What's historically new to us as a species long familiar with the complexities of small groups, as with the first two phase of KM, is the online part, the externalization of memory and learning in the global cloud of virtual spacetime. As more of a team's daily life occurs in or passes through online places, more concrete practice is captured in its natural, role-based, context. This is increasingly happening whether the team is collocated or not.

However, teams are jumping online in all manner of KM containers, most groups happily isolated from one another. The challenge is to network them in the meaningful pattern of their work, not just randomly (i.e., search across team spaces). Teams of practice would not only share across teams, but enable learning and problem-solving at the teamnet (network of teams) level of producing organizational results.

You: Price tag, $300

My fellow bloggers will appreciate this problem: much to blog about, little time to blog. So it is that a compelling presentation by Stew Sutton of The Aerospace Corporation at the Knowledge Leadership Forum week before last has not gotten its due. As I've said before, one of the unnoticed benefits of being a speaker is hearing other speakers (viz. Robin Gerber), as I did at the Brookings Leadership Lab in September. Rarely does one (meaning this one) have the time but because the Knowledge Leadership Forum took place within quick driving distance, it was possible to hang out.

Stew was the person who really introduced me to Second Life, the online virtual world where people create digital versions of themselves (or of the beings they wish they were). I wrote a bit about IBM's guidelines for Second Life a few months back. In truth, I first learned about Second Life only 18 months ago from that serial tracker of new things digital, John Seely Brown, who calls himself Chief of Confusion. Like a couple of million other people, I logged in after talking to Stew. If you're there, you're unlikely to find me teleporting around but should you be curious, search for Pesha Linden. I chose the name Pesha for reasons known to my family and a few close friends; the name Linden was available on a list and I went right for it: my last name, original spelling Lipniak, means "linden tree" (or white wood, depending on whom you ask) in Ukrainian.

Of course, now that I have time to write this post, I can't find my notes from Stew's great presentation. He showed us all the cool things that his company, possibly the very first company to use Second Life, to support collaboration. Freed from the physics of our little planet, things fly and float and pulse and disappear in the Aerospace collaboratorium (they don't call it that but it deserves such a grand term). Astrophysicists can stand in the spray of rockets; they can invent new ways for rockets to spray. Very, very cool and apologies to Stew for the poor reportage (my early editors would be upset with me).

Here's the one fact I remember: you can have an avatar, meaning a digital version of yourself, made these days for $300. I mean something that looks like you. $300. Three bills for the virtual you.

Facing the facts about Facebook

If you're reading this post, Facebook is not for you. Of course, if you're reading this post, it may be because you were referred from my Facebook page.

Yes, my friends, I am on Facebook and so are a lot of my other friends. And I use the f-word without quotes.

But an op-ed in the October 6, 2007, New York Times, The Fakebook Generation, by Alice Mathias says, in short, that us old people run the risk of missing the point. What's new there? I first became aware of how much of the point I was missing some years ago when I added an article to Phish and my daughters nearly expired from laughter. The and Phish do not a match make.

Ms. Mathias, a 2007 grad of Dartmouth College (and a very good writer), explains that Facebook is for fun and those of us who've joined since the floodgates opened to the AARP gen and their younger sibs this past spring may be delusional. Again, no dispute. The question remains: Can social networking sites a la Facebook and MySpace and who-knows-how-many-others actually offer anything of value to us working hacks?

Possibly. Frankly, though, I was shocked when the head of a software company, a contemporary, mind you, wrote me a note in early July saying that he hadn't found me on Facebook, that I apparently "wasn't into that." This was about the same time that I went to the meeting where I learned that Email is for old people (the young 'uns post for all the world to see, a point that Ms. Mathias makes). Advance the calendar another month and the head of a medical center invites me to be his "friend" on Facebook. Well, I like his blog so why not follow his lead to Facebook?

So off I go, feeling rather lonely as he was my only friend...for about two or three hours, whereupon I began to bump into all kinds of people I know, seriously, people I've known for years (or, in some cases, months), business colleagues, friends from the Internet wayback machine (hello, Howard, hello, Izumi), the nephew of a mentor whom I met some years ago (rattttther well known in publishing), and, of course, my 16-year-old godson, my 18-year-old nephew, and, yes, my daughter. And then people started "friending" me, people who saw my name on someone else's list of friends, people who'd read one of our books or had been to a talk I (or we) had given or some other flattering association.

All nice but useful? Well, in just a few weeks, I've been asked to write an article for a CIO publication, a foreword to a book, AND gotten help for another piece I've just finished for FreePint (thank you, David Coleman, Michael Sampson, and Loretta Donovan).

And I find myself feeling a bit silly from time to time as I ponder how many "friends" I have and consider adding frivolous widgets to my Facebook facility. How about you, my friends?

NB: Even The New Yorker has been reporting on Facebook. See Sept 17, 2007, Icebreaker Dept: Social Studies, which, needless to say, I blogged.