Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness

Monday, February 15, 2010

Socializing

I recently tweeted an observation of David Weinberger's on how our language has shifted:

Over the past decade, we’ve gone from talking about social circles to social networks. A circle draws a line around us. Networks draw lines among us.

I liked the way he phrased it, and I also note that it is the word social that connects the concepts because we are, at our core, social beings. The observation also begs the question about how those lines get drawn, and this leads me back to an inquiry I've been having for some time. The word social is now attached to so many concepts that it is hard to keep up with the proliferation of terms that are coopting it and putting it in different contexts. (Just as when I was young I had trouble parsing "ice cream social" because I didn't see "social" as a noun.)

Because I am called upon to give talks about, uh, social media and the like, I thought it best to take the time to do a very quick run-down of the terms and my sources for the definitions that I use. This is necessarily an incomplete list (see the word "proliferating" above). Here's my current take, divided into three pieces: technology, practice, analysis. First, social media.

Social media appears to be the term that is showing the most legs in terms of collective use with respect to the web-based digital technologies that shift focus from content to conversation, from publishing to interacting. Penny Hagen, who nicely ties together some of the definitional threads to provide A working definition of social media and why we couldn’t answer the question, captures thinking from Danah Boyd and Clay Shirky that suggests that social media is both about technology and the social habits that are being entrained by our use of it. So the media is not just the message (as per McLuhan) but it is the message and the messengers.

Technology

Social software becomes, therefore, the technology side of the definition of social media, and we use it when we refer specifically to software that enables and supports personal interaction. The personal interaction becomes social to the extent that there are named and identifiable people on each end (or in all the threads) of the transaction. These may be either tools, platforms, or social networking sites/services.

Social tools are the individual programs and products that use, either in concert or individually, for example, blogs and wikis.

Social software platforms consist of suites of social tools that are packaged as solutions aimed at one or more business segments. Jive, for example, is a collaboration platform designed with a social perspective. Ning is perhaps the largest open (free) platform available to groups of any size or inclination who want to form a community or to collaborate. Andrew McAfee

first used the phrase emergent social software platforms in his May 2006 definition of Enterprise 2.0. Its acronym, ESSP, is often taken as Enterprise Social Software Platform.

Note that existing software platforms that predate Web 2.0 can be socialized by the addition of social tools, but the design centers for these platforms remains unchanged (SharePoint, even SP10, remains designed around content management.)

Social computing. Dion Hinchcliffe, who is so talented at graphic representations of the relationships among concepts tackled social computing as the overarching and encompassing term for the mishmash of themes and terms. I don't want to contradict him, but merely point out that each of us has to resolve the distinctions for ourselves and that his model is a good starting point for anyone who wants to try to make sense of this (as I am now doing for myself and sharing it with the expectation that it may help others start to make their own sense of things).

Social networking sites are a special case of social platforms. To use Danah Boyd's definition, they are

"web?based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi?public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.

Andrew McAfee has similarly used the term social networking service to refer to these sites, which include Facebook, MySpace, and so on.

Social bookmarking lets people share the URLs of websites that they want to revisit and organize them in a way that is browsable by others.

Social tagging offers the ability to provide descriptors for information artifacts that can be used by others, including bookmarks.

Practice

These technologies are changing the way we work, the ways in which we grow relationships with other human beings, and the ways that we process, filter, and give context to information. These are the practices that are emerging that make us comfortable with, dependent on, and successful using social media. It is in this area that some of the more interesting new terms are sprouting. I say "interesting" because the terms themselves challenge us to think anew about who and how we -- and our enterprises -- are in the world.

Social Business is a term proposed to lead us to rethink how business is done:

An organization designed consciously around sociality and social tools, as a response to a changed world and the emergence of the social web. (Stowe Boyd)

(Stowe also acknowledges the need to disambiguate this use of the term with the use related to nonprofit businesses that address social objectives.)

Social architecture is the intentional use of social media in the design of how people work. For me, the term architecture implies design, as is evident in these definitions from two of my favorite people:

Social architecture is the conscious design of an environment that encourages certain social behavior leading towards some goal or set of goals. (Andrew Gent.)

Social architecture is a user experience oriented approach to the design and analysis of social tools. (Stowe Boyd)

Note there is no single architecture, but a sense that we can harness the extraordinary capabilities offered by social computing to change the ways we work and learn.

Speaking of learning, Social learning

[is] the development of knowledge, skills, and attitudes while connected to others (peers, mentors, experts) in an electronic surround of digital media, both real-time and asynchronous. (Harold Jarche).

Even as I include that definition, I feel that we must also acknowledge, via Jay Cross, that informal learning occurs by many means (especially face-to-face) that can't be controlled or programmed, but by its nature when the learning comes through exchange with other human beings, it is social learning. I have also blogged social learning at theappgap.

Social team (from Boris Pluskowski): a collection of individuals who have a common understanding of the "game they are playing" (i.e. the team's purpose); know in which goal they are trying to score (i.e. have a shared understanding of what a "win" looks like); and are collaborating together to achieve that aim. Boris is extending the concept of team using the concepts from Here Comes Everybody to illustrate the potential to tap the expertise, passion, and abilities of a large number of people to support a shared purpose.

Social Object:

...(in a nutshell) is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else.” (Hugh McLeod)

This notion brings us back down to earth in the sense that when we talk about what makes it possible for people to collaborate, we must understand that there is something shared between them, an artifact that prompts discourse or a shared emotion.

Note I tend to equate these social objects with a more scholarly term, boundary objects, most clearly explained by Lilia Efimova in writing about blogs as boundary objects.

Social capital. the stocks of social trust, norms and networks that people can draw upon to solve common problems. This is what we build, or can build, daily, by acknowledging others, through respectful collaboration in shared endeavors and in social media through retweets, comments, and references.

Analysis

One of the things I have come to understand in my work in social network analysis is that being able to make sense of the connections -- the lines among us -- gives us access to questions and insights we might not otherwise have.

Social network. a collection of people who can be identified by a something that they have in common, a kinship, an interest, an organizational tie, a membership. What we see in social media are the networks of common interest implied by membership in a single social networking site (so Facebook represents a "network") but more rationally are any set of people who have a somewhat narrower set of criteria. I participate in many social networks on Facebook, don't you?

Social graph. The representation of the social network. As I like to say, if it's a network, you can draw it (or imagine it drawn), showing individual people and their connections.

Social network analysis comprises a set of methods and tools for collecting information about the graph of a social network and displaying that information visually and quantitatively.

Social analytics. The aggregation and correlation of the data collected from social software that reveals social structures and relations to assess interaction and conversation patterns. (See Mike Gotta for the basics and also for his thinking about how this is an emerging topic for 2010 .)

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Tuesday, January 12, 2010

The Year of Personal Net Work

Chris Brogan writes about his strategy for deepening his personal networks. He starts off his list of tips with this one:

"Devote two hours a week to this effort. If, out of the 60 hours an average person works, you can’t find two for this, reconsider how you’re running your day.

This is not the only new year's resolution I've seen along this line. As we become more and more connected through social media, the more we are aware of what those connections mean.

My new year's resolution? I'm resolving to share more of my thinking, especially about personal networks. Here's a slide show from this past October I hope you will enjoy.

Personal Network Management Km Forum Oct 2009

View more presentations from Patti Anklam.

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Thursday, December 31, 2009

The Three KMs, Redux

A few months ago, I posted a series of blogs on theAppGap on what I called the "three KMs:"

(I also followed these with one of my latest themes, Personal Net Work.)

These 3KM blogs were picked up on by the folks over at InMagic, who were kind enough to asked me to do a podcast with them. You can listen to it now: "Today's collaboration imperative."

If you do have the time to listen, I would be happy to hear your comments. Perhaps we can get that conversation restarted here.

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Monday, December 28, 2009

Women actually say things

Catching up -- and trying to get ahead of 2010. Some interest bits from latest reading.

Saba, a company that specializes in enterprise-wide human capital management, has created 8 predictions for how social computing will improve the enterprise value chain. A key thread in the predictions themselves is the importance of supporting the ability of people to learn from and work in informal networks:

"Learning connections will matter more than learning transactions."
"Connecting people to expertise will begin to matter more for organizations than traditional learning management programs."

From Understanding Users of Social Networks (HBS Working Knowledge), research by Mikolaj Jan Piskorski looks at patterns of behavior on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. An interesting read as it differentiates how women and men use the sites. Most interesting (to me) in early results of research is in the use of Twitter: "Women actually say things, guys give references to other things." It must have something to do with relatedness, and women's needs to establish context and relationships, mustn't it?
Andrew McAfee (whose work I've been following for some time, though most of my blogs on social media and Enterprise 2.0 have been done on theAppGap) provides a nice summation of the current state of Enterprise 2.0 in a Financial Times article, Enterprise 2.0 is vital for business. In addition to citing some early results from McKinsey on the benefits of E2.0, he makes the case that what E2.0 does is to bring technological support for the informal organization, as they can support the emergence of structures and new patterns of coordination. This is grist for the ongoing complexity conversation.

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Friday, December 04, 2009

Fernando Flores, Speech Acts, and Networks

One of the most powerful learning experiences in my time at Digital Equipment included immersion in a set of practices for effective communication. What I and my colleagues called "Contextual Management" was derived from philosophies articulated and propagated by Fernando Flores. At the heart of these philosophies are speech acts, a linguistic concept identified by John Searle and refined by Flores into a communication structure for effective management. These same speech acts are at the foundation of Landmark Education.

To me, the concept of speech acts is about being mindful that our language -- what we say and how we say it -- is creating the world we live in, as we live it. If we can identify -- just think -- about how we are being heard and the potential results, we can work more effectively. Speech acts include:

Declarations: statements about the world as it might be, that create a powerful future, and for which there is no evidence. "The US will put a man on the moon and bring him back before the end of the decade," famous words from President John Kennedy, are an example. At the time he spoke this, NASA did not have the technology to accomplish this, but by saying it, Kennedy created the future in which this happened.
Requests, or offers: a request can also create the future, in that it is possible to ask someone to do something that they do not know how to do. But in daily work life, we make requests all the time. We do not often enough, however, make well-formed requests, which are in the form, "will you please do x-action BY time-y?" The specificity of x-action and time-y make it clear that the requestor is asking for something that is important.
Promises: promises are commitments to do perform specific actions by specific times. Obviously, a goal of a request is to acceptance (a promise) to respond to the request, in its specificity, by the designated time. (One may also respond to a request by negotiating the deliverable, the time that is is requested for, and so on; or may decline it, respectfully.)

From these, and other speech act building blocks, a number of communication patterns unfold. I'd like to take some of these up in future posts, but my inspiration for starting this thread is a terrific article about Fernando Flores that has just come out in strategy+business, "Fernando Flores Wants to Make You an Offer."

In the article, Lawrence Fisher provides a biography of Flores, whose life represents a journey from a Chilean prison to work at Stanford with Terry Winograd, developing a successful consulting business, and ultimately a return to Chile as a statesman. The book he co-authored with Winograd, Understanding Computers and Cognition, describes how software programs could be used to enable more productive relationships in the workplace -- using the speech acts as a basis for communication.

It's a rich article (you will learn more about speech acts) that comes at a time that Flores is shifting into a new phase of his life and work, returning to business consulting to bring his perspective into how we work in networks. His concern is that:

“How do you educate people for the future world, in which an important part of activity is going to be networks?” he asks. “In my opinion, we human beings are not prepared at all for the explosion of new practices the Internet will produce. Education is going to be in networks and it will not be about knowledge. It will be about being successful in relationships, about how to make offers, how to build trust, how to cultivate prudence and emotional resilience.”

I'm excited about the possibilities in net work thinking opened up by the questions Flores is raising. The social web is opening up entirely new ways of communicating -- both means and modes -- and my head is already spinning at the thought of integrating these past and new ideas into my work.

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Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Engage with Grace

Last Thanksgiving weekend, many of us bloggers participated in the first documented “blog rally” to promote Engage With Grace – a movement aimed at having all of us understand and communicate our end-of-life wishes.

It was a great success, with over 100 bloggers in the healthcare space and beyond participating and spreading the word. Plus, it was timed to coincide with a weekend when most of us are with the very people with whom we should be having these tough conversations – our closest friends and family.

I don't need to have this conversation with my Mom. She has had a rough bout with cancer that is, at present, at bay. Last year, she hand wrote a note to each of her five children expressing her wishes about her end of life. It was hard to read, but it's good to have it explicit. We will of course honor all of her wishes but one: we will hold a memorial service to remember her.

The Engage with Grace "one-slide" format for questions is below. Cherish your family.

(To learn more please go to http://www.engagewithgrace.org.)

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patti anklam. How to make networks work.

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Boston KM Forum, Waltham, MA October 21, 2009.

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