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.

Saturday, October 30, 2004

Declaration of success

The Boston KM Cluster was a great success. My partner-in-design, Nat Welch, and I had nothing but positive feedback and responses from attendees. Getting something like together is always an exercise in generation and closure. Generation because you have an idea about how things go together. In this case, once all the topics emerged, we found the theme: Net Work to Net Worth. To be valuable, networks must be worked on -- leadership work, design work, collaborative work. That's the "net work." Then, you can look at the value that is derived, the "net worth." We might have stretched that theme out a bit, but it overall worked.

The closure part comes from the clearing out of the ideas that weren't captured in the agenda, the paths that could have been discussed, the people we might have asked to speak. I always hate that part, thinking that there is a relationship that needs to be identified, that needs to be brought in, and yet the date, time, place constraints left something out.

Fortunately, John Maloney's KM Cluster infrastructure provides the way for ideas to keep roiling in the soup of current thought. My colleagues Bill Ives and Kate Ehrlich are designing the next Boston Event.

I did a network map of the attendees on October 15th. Nothing out of the ordinary, a dense center of well connected hubs (Gennova folks), with spokes to individuals we had each reached out to in our networks. One unexpected small world connection from a different context: Donna Denio (Center for Balance by Design)realized that Jan Twombly had been her accountant many years ago when she ran her own small business. I saw Donna yesterday morning, and that's how I found out why that connection existed!

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Thursday, October 14, 2004

Perspective with Alacrity

My friend Karl Hakkarainen (who blogs at )pointed me to a wonderful article on Life with Alacrity about the history of social software. It roots the idea of using computers as tools to support individual memory, people-to-people, content-to-content, and people-to-content connection and coordination. From idea to experiment to practice, the language has changed and evolved as real applications have been envisioned and then made real.

When I first skimmed the article, I felt as if my professional life was passing by. I was working with text editing software in 1982 when I attended an ACM SIGOA conference in Portland, where I heard Charles Goldfarb talk about generalized markup. I went back to Digital and designed and created a document markup language and software system that produced technical manuals -- and a hypertext help system. A little later, also at Digital, I met John Whiteside, one of the founders of the ACM special interest group on computer-human interaction, which inspired the SIG on computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW). From there to knowledge management, a renewal in the development of collaboration systems, and on to social software. The language has evolved with times.

Hence, over in Corante, there is a dialogue about the term "social software," its connotations, and alternatives.

I have a large section in my Ark Report (KM and the Social Network, or some such title not yet confirmed) on "social software" -- broadly defined -- and how different tools enable network-building. I have "finished" my draft and am now in that angst-producing time between the writing and publication, during which I come across, or people like my friend Karl send me, new articles and thoughts and ideas that, had I had them a month ago, would have found their way in the fabric of my written thoughts. Grrr.

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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

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

links: blogroll

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