Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness

Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness
Inquiry and learning into social networks, organizational network analysis, and the relationships among people and systems in complex organizations and networks.

Thursday, November 27, 2003

Visiting Philadelphia

I'll be giving a talk on social networks to the Philadelphia Knowledge Management Group on Wednesday, December 10. (Click on "Calendar," then on "December.")
Any and all people interested in coming to this talk are invited. I see this as an opportunity to share some of the ideas that we have developing at Gennova. I am very grateful to John Barrett, ITI Associates, for giving me this opportunity.

DATE: December 10, 2003
TOPIC: Social Networks: Discovery and Analysis
PRESENTER: Patti Anklam, Consultant, Hutchinson Associates
HOST LOCATION: The Downtown Club, Philadelphia; Hosted by Rohm & Haas
TIME: Refreshments, 7:45am-8:15am. Session, 8:15am-9:45am

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Living Networks -- Conference in NYC December 4

I won't be able to attend this upcoming conference, which promises to be very interesting, centered on the theme of "Living Networks," and Ross Dawson's work. Fortunately, Ross is coming up to Boston the next day and will spend some time with my Gennova network. It turned out that we were connected in a couple of ways. I met Ross at the KnowledgeNets conference in New York last Spring, and Ross had also been corresponding with one of my Gennova colleagues.

Coincidentally, my review of Ross's book, Living Networks, has just appeared in Knowledge Management Magazine. Unfortunately, the review is available to subscribers only. I gave the book a good review (honestly!) as I did like it a lot. It's a well-written book, with some challenging thinking in it.

Turns out I am also connected to Ross through Verna Allee, who attended a Gennova gathering last week. This network is getting richer and richer.

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Spoke-ing Up

Spoke, one of the social network software startup companies, just received a grant from the National Science Foundation to work on problems of data quality in customer relationship management (CRM) systems. I know this because a reader of this blog, Auren Hoffman, prodded me to take a new look at Spoke. (When I first went to the site some months ago, there wasn't much happening. Now, they have opened a public interface, so that you can sign up and find and invite contacts, as LinkedIn does.

Spoke surprised me in a couple of ways. First, it not only read in all of my contacts, but it also mined all of my Outlook email folders to find all the people who had ever sent me mail, or cc'd me on mail. So my resulting personal network consisted of over 6,000 people, many of whom I only dimly remembered from past corporate jobs or didn't know at all. It will take some time to prune all these names out. But Spoke also "recognizes" that these people are really weak ties, and it shows me that with a little bar next to each name how strong the tie is (based on frequency of emails from a person that it found and whether I was a "To" or a "cc").

It also provides a delightful visual view of the contacts and the proximity of one to another. However, since only 7 of the contacts in my network are actually registered in Spoke, there's nothing very interesting in terms of a network map.

Having already invested some of my social capital six months ago by inviting many colleagues into LinkedIn, I have to find something really valuable and different in Spoke to build the network connections there. So it's a conundrum. Most of my colleagues haven't seen much value in participating in LinkedIn, so I have to pass for now on re-building the network in Spoke. (Especially since the system tray isn't working.)

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Tuesday, November 18, 2003

nTags

New Scientist has an article on nTags -- those "wearable" PDAs that can alert you to the nearness of someone with common background or interests. (Yet another good bit from David Gurteen's Knowledge-Letter).

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Launching a KM Network

David Gurteen's latest Knowledge-Letter has some lovely tidbits, not the least of which is the invitation to the launch of the London Knowledge Network. The notes for a festive evening with Dave Snowden include a link to his latest presentation on the Cynefin dynamics, which include a number of the dynamics of shifting context from one domain (complex, chaotic, ordered) to another.

The letter also reminded me to go see what Sam Marshall is up to, and it seems they are traveling in the same circles around Singapore, Amsterdam, and London. I love Boston, and we have a good KM community and lots of great things going on, but my yearning for travel and multi-cultural experiences goes up when I read about all these great distant events!

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Saturday, November 15, 2003

Knowledge-at-work

Denham Grey sent me a note that he had moved his blog (blog roll has been updated). It was a good reminder to go see what's on his mind. Good inquiries (as usual) on questions, COPs, and knowledge fundamentals in Knowledge-at-work.

As with so much serendipitous email, these are all pertinent to some work I am doing with a client this week. Thanks, Denham.

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Great quote from Valdis

Valdis Krebs has joined the AOK community. He gave a great summary of the value of social network analysis there this week:

IMHO, SNA[KM]is a tool for the corporate consultant[antropologist] to view normally hidden aspects of organizations and together with the client to make-sense of what is happening -- and therefore adapt to the real[not imagined] dynamcis.

No silver bullet, no crystal ball. Yet, you will soon see adds claiming such outcomes.

Valdis

I just presented the analysis results for Gennova (the emerging professional network I participate in). It is a "flat" organization, with some special-interest value networks, and still relatively small. Nonetheless, there were patterns to see, and to learn from.

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Thursday, November 13, 2003

More on social software

Cynthia Typaldos pointed this morning to a terrific note, Social Networking tools: a bubble in the making?, which describes my thoughts about this trend, only much more coherently than I could.

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Advanced Thinking

Before I had time to savor all the new ideas from Multiples of 1, I was off to the Advanced Thinker's Forum, an emergent intentional network that Andy Snider, a Gennova colleague, is creating. Two days at the IBM Palisades conference center (a good design really does make a difference) with 30 "advanced thinkers " focused, Renaissance Weekend-style on the organization of the future.

Had the pleasure of participating in a session defining the attributes of this future (economiuc context, organizational imperatives, individual context) with Stan Davis, Nancy McKinney, and a handful of creative consultants. An amazing session during which we agreed that we are on the next wave (the S-curve beyond the information age), that we can see the characteristics of the future NOW, though dimly, and only in patches, and that it will be about relatedness. (And I wasn't the one to suggest it. It emerged.)

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Saturday, November 08, 2003

Multiples of 1

The Multiples of 1 conference just concluded. It was a mentally enriching (and tiring) day and a half of speakers, dialogue, and networking.

Bill Snyder (co-author of Cultivating Communities of Practice) cast the provocative question about the emergence of community from those attending, and what its domain of practice going forward would be.

Robin Chase, CEO of Zipcar, talked of the unexpected but vital community that emerged among Zipcar customers. The success of the company is all about relationships.

Francis Duffy -- a real pioneer in thinking and designing spaces for people to collaborate and work -- challenged the speakers to think about history and theory, not just the immediate in the design of devices (nodes?) that shape our lives. The "horrible" 20th century was brought to us, he said, by people who fundamentally believed that people could not be trusted, and that is why it was all about control, and why it was so horrible. We are building the wrong spaces in cities the wrong shapes.

He and Robin both helped me distinguish a new kind of community, a community of the "commons," that is, one that arises around a shared artifact or space. (Long ago, when I smoked, I did notice the special community and norms -- guilty smiles and all -- of the people who frequented the "smoking room.")

David Reed (author of Reed's Law, which demonstrates that networks that support the formation of communicating groups create value that scales exponentially with network size, opened a conversation that Richard Li of Red hat had begun Friday afternoon and took it to another level. The question in the room became, what is possible when the means of production of network capacity shifts to the nodes in a network? (I confess I did not understand much of the technology in his remarks, nor the economics in the talk by Yochai Benkler of Yale Law School that followed, but I have a lot to think about.)

Kudos to Kate Ehrlich, Hani Asfour, and David Tam�s for designing an awakening experience.

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Update on Business 2.0 Centerfold

The Business 2.0 article from my 31-Oct post can be downloaded from Spoke's website. http://www.spoke.com/news/b20_73956.pdf.

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Thursday, November 06, 2003

Popular Mechanics -- the Dynamics of Mingling

A SOCNET-er (Steve Sherman) just posted a link to this NY Times article: Popular Mechanics. A sociometric study of the interactions and dynamics of movement at a party... the context is the world of the New York fashion industry, but the dilemmas facing anyone at a party are really exposed: how to talk with and connect with the "right" people, how to approach people you don't know well. The party was observed and photographed for the research.

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patti anklam. How to make networks work.

Find me person-to-person !

KMWorld 2008 September 23-25, San Jose, CA. I'll be doing a session on Net Work and moderating a day with KM thought leaders.

links: network analysis

My ONA Page

Rob Cross
Bruce Hoppe
Valdis Krebs
INSNA
ONA-prac. The online community for learners and practitioners in the emerging field of Organizational Network Analysis.

links: blogroll

21st Century Organization
Anecdote
Bill Ives
Dave Snowden
David Gurteen
Denham Grey
Jack Vinson
Patrick Lambe
Ross Dawson