Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness

The News Story in Value Network Maps

2008-05-09T14:46:00.000-07:00

From John Maloney on the Value-Networks group this week, a link to a wonderful blog post, Value Network Maps at NewsTools2008, from an unconference-style mashup of journalists, technologists, and entrepreneurs. The event included the unveiling of value network maps that showed "the Old News Story" and the "emerging News Ecology."

This is the first time that I've seen value network maps (which I use in my own consulting work) drawn in the style of graphic facilitation. What a treat!

Shown in small here, you must go to the site to download the handout.

Networks and Governance

2008-05-06T04:08:00.000-07:00

Governance is a word with many fine distinctions. Most definitions use terms like power, authority, decision-rights, policy, management, control. Governance is applied to political entities, corporate institutions, increasingly, IT.

While writing Net Work, I chose to define governance from the perspective of the word's root, which means "steering:" "Governance is the fine art and delicate practice of guiding and steering an organization in a steady operational state." Many of us in the network biz will avow that you cannot manage networks, you can only steward them, but I also believe that governance, as a practice, provides insights into how to define an initial structure and to let it evolve within certain boundaries. It may all be about managing boundaries.

What got me to thinking about governance was a note from colleague Laurie Lock Lee that he has started a new blog, Governance in a Networked World. His initial posts indicate that he will be focusing on issues of governance in our increasingly networked world of business, such as a recent post describing the issues related to scaling supply chain management when dealing with ever-increasing numbers of suppliers.

Not to overlook the political aspect of governance, I've been a fan of David Lazer for some time. David is the Director of the Program on Networked Governance at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. David hosts seminars on complexity and social networks at the KSG, which have been a great resource for us lucky Boston area locals.

IT governance is another beast all together, but I can bet you that Web 2.0 is making the control freaks crazy.

Anyway, welcome (back) to the blogosphere, Laurie. I look forward to your conversations.

Community 2.0 Webinar on Thursday, April 24

2008-04-21T10:27:00.000-07:00

Community 2.0 is right around the corner. I'm going to preview my keynote talk there this Thursday afternoon at 3:00pm. You can register for this Free Webinar and afterwards, send me feedback!

A networking week that was

2008-04-09T06:00:00.001-07:00

Since last week, I've met up with Jack Vinson (who has taken a job in the Boston area and is in the process of moving his family here) from my "greater KM network;" got first time face-to-face connections with John Smith, Bronwyn Stuckey, and Beth Kanter from my CPsquare network; reconnected with colleagues from the UVA Network Roundtable I've co-authored articles with (Zeke Wolfberg at the DIA and Vic Gulas of MWH Global); got to spend an hour with the elusive Bruce Hoppe; and had a wonderful morning introducing a small local OD network introduced to me by Nancy Settle-Murphy about Web 2.0. I missed, however, a great meeting of the Boston KM forum (one of my principal local networks) on Web2.0 because I was working under a deadline for an article for a print magazine (how 20th century) on organizational network analysis. Today (also 20th century) I got a copy of the new book, Knowledge Management in Practice, that includes a chapter co-authored by my partner Joe Hutchinson and myself, but that also includes chapters by Boston KM Forum colleagues Larry Chait and Lynda Moulton and by two folks I saw last fall at a Conference Board of Canada KM event, Dave Pollard and Albert Simard.

These activities all brought home to me very powerfully how much Web 2.0 tools have crept into my life and work. I know when Jack is in town because we are fellow travelers on Dopplr. John and I have conversed many times over the course of the 5-year history of CPsquare, and I've interacted (only slightly) in the virtual collaboration spaces with Beth and Bronwyn. CPsquare and its practitioner community are on the cutting edge of technologies to support communities. Beth introduced us to her latest method for communicating, her N95, which she used to telecast (live) brief interviews with all of us at dinner. She also posted a photo of my with my book on Flickr, to help generate sales. Communicating in real time.

One of the attractions at the Boston KM forum that I missed was hearing Ray Sims and Jessica Lipnack talk about their Web 2.0 journeys into the "flow." Especially as I still have much to learn, even though my session with Nancy's LDR group of OD consultants was quite a success. For people who haven't yet gone beyond LinkedIn or perhaps put up Facebook pages or possibly thought about blogging, the world running underneath, the social bookmarks, twittering, and I'm not sure what all else, is really an astonishment.

Thus it was that I found it difficult to wrap up my article for Inside Knowledge magazine on "Social Network Analysis Five Years On." My first published article about SNA/ONA was in that same magazine in May of 2003. To bring the field up to date, I used all my social tools to reconnect with people, and to make new connections. Work in the field has progressed, but is moving quickly as the tools that we use to determine relationships between people and create maps of them are rapidly being embedded into the social tools that we use. The careful methodology of ONA will remain valuable, as it looks at the explicitly declared relationships among people at the level of "who do you turn to when you have a new idea that you want to share?" But the amazing amount of implicit knowledge that we will be able to mine to look at the relationships will alter the way companies think about networks forever. (I invite you to look at my blog post on TheAppGap on this topic.)

Yours truly (swirling in the flow).

Social networks and social networking

2008-04-05T05:55:00.000-07:00

I've been doing social network analysis since 2001. With the upswing over the past few years of the social networking sites the language has got a bit blurry. When I do my NetWork workshops, I now need to help people distinguish the basics of "social networks" as distinct from the phenomenon of linking.

Mike Gotta, in his Collaborative Thinking blog (which I started reading just a short time ago), provides a great service by summarizing notes on the history of social network analysis. (The notes are taken from a book by Linton Freeman.) Notes include snippets of the contributions to the field, beginning with Auguste Comte in 1853 along with a summary of the key learnings from the research over the years.

He summarizes Comte's contribution: "Comte applied structural terms to argue that people within a social system are interconnected, a concept core to much of the research that emerged in the 1930�s concerning social networks." This notion of the structure underneath networks is one of the core principles I use in my book to help people learn to use the network lens.

My friend Jessica also blogged about Mike's post, and I love her insertion of a quote from Alexis deTocqueville about Americans and our way of forming associations. I read that this morning just after an email from my own small Town's emerging group of activists concerned about the future of our schools. I've been thinking about doing some maps.

Resonance

2008-04-04T13:55:00.000-07:00

The power of blogs to connect has resonated with me today as I looked at my Bloglines feed and found a number of touching remembrances of Dr. Martin Luther King, on this anniversary of his death:

The Night James Brown Saved Boston (Karl Hakkarainen)
Le Roi est mort (Jessica Lipnack)
Why (The King of Love is Dead) by Nina Simone (Stowe Boyd)

Thanks, friends, for reminding me.

Explaining Collective Intelligence - Haiku may be the only way to go

2008-03-22T08:00:00.000-07:00

I've been pondering a recent McAfee post, "Explaining my Fondness for Explicit Content" and have blogged on this in TheAppGap, but I was so tickled by his references to definitions by Kim Rachmeler on the topic of "collective intelligence:

The network knows what the nodes do not
The nodes know nothing. The nodes know all. Both are true.

These resonated with me partly because my view of the three eras of knowledge management (I will not use the vogue-ish 1.0, 2.0 terminology), I say that:

in the first era, knowledge was considered to be in documents (artifacts)
in the second era, it was acknowledged that knowledge is in people
in this third era, knowledge is in the network

Kim' statements above are a much more elegant and thought-provoking way of stating the third.

Meanwhile, Nancy White has posted on Haiku as Conference Capture one of the Haikus blogged by praxis101 at the recent SXSW:

Your social footprint.
Or your ghost on the network.
You have to choose one

If you go and read the McAfee article referenced above, you'll see that he makes the distinction between the explicit content (what we know we've written, tagged or linked) and the implicit content on the web, which he describes as "fingerprints." There must be a haiku there somewhere.

Networking - Swiftly - to Community 2.0

2008-03-13T15:10:00.000-07:00

Kathleen Gilroy recommended me for the Community 2.0 conference and I'm really pleased to be giving a keynote there, "From Networking to Net Work." I may even have books to sign! I had coffee with Kathleen recently and she filled me in on her new product venture, Swift. It's all about accelerating the personal networking process that occurs naturally ( or to shy people, with difficulty) at conferences. The vision is quite simple: provide a central place for people who will be attending the conference to start networking in advance. The platform leverages my existing social spaces -- things that I tag in del.icio.us and Flickr. When I tag something related to my conference talk (as I have this entry) it shows up as a link on my conference page. It uses Facebook to let me know which of my Facebook friends is also signed up for the conference. I am just beginning to explore, and I hope that those of you attending the conference will also take a look.

I think this is close to what Charlene Li was talking about when she said that the future of social networks: Social networks will be like air. We expect them to be, and we expect the technologies to be integrated into our activities.

Conference Information
The conference is May 12-15 at the Red Rock Resort in Las Vegas, NV. The website is www.iirusa.com/community. Because you read my blog, you can get a 20% discount off the standard price on my behalf. Your personal discount code to share is: SPKRM2005NW. Please pass this along to anyone you know who plans on registering. They can register by calling 888.670.8200, emailing register@iirusa.com or visiting the website www.iirusa.com/community

Social Software Survey

2008-03-13T11:44:00.000-07:00

I have been talking on and off with Christian Gray after almost meeting him in person at KMWorld and SLA conferences. He and his colleague Mike Reid have started an Enterprise 2.0 Social Software Research initiative and are fans of my book, Net Work.

You can access a survey that they are launching just now from their invitation page. Enterprise decision makers are the primary audience for this -- they are looking to understand what particular technologies and products are being adopted, but many of the questions are applicable to organizations and networks of all types. Please forward this note, or a link to the invitation page, to your colleagues!

(You'll see the cover of Net Work displayed there, as they are offering free copies of the book to six lucky participants!)

Christian and Mike are partnering with InfoToday (who manages KMWorld) and with SLA (Special Libraries Association), which may attract a slightly different audience from the AIIM survey I previously asked people to take. The AIIM results, btw, are in; some pretty interesting stuff that Carol Frappalo will present on March 27th in a Webinar.

Please take the survey and encourage others to do so. You might get a copy of my book!

Carbon

2008-03-13T05:40:00.000-07:00

My friend Jessica Lipnack got started on carbon-neutral collaboration a while back. The idea is to decrease our carbon footprints by traveling to collaborate only when really necessary, for example, when social/cultural cohesion demands it, or when there may be sensitive negotiations. It makes a lot of sense, even if it goes a bit contrary to what we've learned from a number of organizational network analysis projects: when geography limits the ability of people to truly get to know each other so as to know when to collaborate and how to collaborate, nothing beats getting people onto planes. The case study I wrote with Vic Gulas at MWH is a good example.

But once we have made those connections, we can get smart about using technology. It's just that startup phase that is expense (in $$ and in carbon).

One of my favorite social tools (I wish more of my friends used it!) is DOPPLR. It shows me where my friends are traveling, compares where they go to where I go, and lets me know if we can manage serendipity. The fact is that I do not travel very much, but I like the situational awareness aspect of who is going where. And I like it that it shows me, Dave Snowden, and David Gurteen in Nancy White's city at the same time. David has arranged a boat ride!

Now, DOPPLR is adding a carbon calculation feature in partnership with AMEE . Still in Beta, it will calculate for you the carbon cost of your travel. It still needs some tweaks, but it can be a sobering reminder that you might not need to take all those trips...

From The Edge: Social Networks are Like the Eye

2008-02-28T06:54:00.000-08:00

Via my friend Art Hutchinson this morning, I followed a link to an article in The Edge, a conversation with Nicholas Christakis. Dr. Christakis, with his colleague James Fowler, were the authors of the research paper published last year on the spread of obesity in networks in the New England Journal of Medicine. The research made the front page of the New York Times.

This work is truly boundary-crossing. Beginning with a physician's interest in how disease, health, and happiness spread through social networks, Christakis' intellectual inquiry has brought him to the fundamental questions of how networks form and how things flow through them. He describes how models of health spread via behaviors (copying what those near us do), norms (observations about others that modify our expectations), and ideology (knowing what is right). His research indicates that it's the norms that are most influential because, as he says, "they can fly through the ether" whereas for behaviors to propagate we need to be physically together.

He echoes many of the themes I've developed in my book (Net Work): one of the the things that I have been saying for years is that the key distinction of this 3rd generation of knowledge management is that knowledge is in the network. (In generation 1, we assumed knowledge was in artifacts; in generation 2 it was in people.) Christakis comes to the same conclusion with respect to the shift in the study of neurons and the work of Barabasi: "Can we understand learning and behavior not by studying the neurons, but by studying the interconnection between neurons?"

The obesity data came from 24 years worth of data (paper) collected by the Framingham Heart study. He is now shifting the focus of his work to what he calls the "massive passive" technologies -- the Web 2.0 tools and social network sites where we leave our "digital traces." A current study is a longitudinal look at the spread of norms, tastes (in music, movies, or books), and shifting social structures.

The article is the text version of a video of Christakis's comments (the video is also available on the site). Worth a read or a watch.

Connections Rule

2008-02-23T10:21:00.000-08:00

I have blogged before (but not for quite some time) about the Digital Equipment/Stone Center project (the Stone Center for is now a part of Wellesley College's Centers for Women)
which includes the Jean Baker-Miller Training Institute. It was from the experience of working (in 1991) with a remarkable set of women that I first understood the power of relationship. Certainly that work readied me for embracing the ideas of working in networks. Every Valentine's day, an email reminds me of my connection to that work. This year, the email provided a set of relationship tips. While this list comes from a different sociological discipline (years of research in women's psychology) it's wonderful to see how apt they are to many of the "rules" and suggestions those of us who are network weavers (like Valdis Krebs, June Holley, and Jack Ri cchuito) articulate.

Think relationship - Move from the �me� and the �you� to the �we.�
Honor the desire for good connection - Research shows that people need relationships like they need air, food, or water.
Radiate respect - Respect is a gateway to healthy, hopeful connection.
Emphasize empathy - Empathy is the �wireless connection� that creates an empathic bridge between others and ourselves.
Listen with love - When we listen with love, we communicate how much the relationship matters to us.
Be present - Being present and real in our relationship allows others to be more present and real in the relationship. Your presence can be the best present.
Make it mutual - Healthy relationships are always moving toward mutuality�each person affecting the other and being affected by the other�which leads to actions that benefit both people.
Build resilience - Resilience is not an individual attribute; resilience grows through engagement in mutually-encouraging relationships.
Respond, repair, reconnect - When a �disconnect� occurs, see if re-connection is possible.
Remember: relational pain means something needs to change in the relationship, the relationship needs to move in a new way.
Laugh liberally - �We� who laugh, last.
Grow together - Good relationships contribute to the growth of both (or all) people in them. They allow us to grow together even as we grow in different ways.
Say yes to zest! - Relationships deserve our very best energy, and good relationships actually replenish our energy. Zest! Energy! Creativity!�all arise in a healthy relationship. These relationships provide the energy of our lives.

I have to give a nod to Rob Cross on the last item in this list: mapping the sources of energy in organizations is one of the sweet spots of his research.

Ketchum Partners is catching the SNA wave with Rob Cross

2008-02-08T05:17:00.000-08:00

An interesting press release: "Ketchum Partners With Leading Social Network Expert Rob Cross to Enhance Social Network Analysis and Activation for Clients." The headline mostly says it all. Ketchum is a PR firm, Rob Cross the master of bringing social/organizational network analysis initially to a host of KM practitioners (moi aussi) and since, via the Network Roundtable at the University of Virginia, to a consortium of businesses.

Through the Network Roundtable, Rob has been able to invest in the development of specialized survey software and methods. To date, the use of the software has been restricted to consortium member companies for their internal use and research. This commercial collaboration is interesting in that it will enable, presumably, Ketchum to use the software with their clients, for example to: "map networks of influencers within their organizations and identify the roles and relative influence of opinion makers within and across such networks."

Of the many applications for SNA, the one that marketing and PR firms have always been the most interested in is the ability to identify influencers. The attraction to this idea is obvious: find the influencers and you can use them to "spread the word." Recent research by Duncan Watts has examined this hypothesis and he states:

Under most conditions that we consider, we find that large
cascades of influence are driven not by influentials, but by a critical mass of easily
influenced individuals. Although our results do not exclude the possibility that
influentials can be important, they suggest that the influentials hypothesis requires
more careful specification and testing than it has received.

I do hope that Rob and his work with Ketchum will help us understand the dynamics of influence even more as the theory is put into practice.

News with Context: Silobreaker Search

2008-02-02T06:28:00.000-08:00

I'm afraid I won't get much work done today. In a post in the mailing list for KMG Philadelphia, a member posted a quick reference to Silobreaker, a news aggregator and search engine that generates context. Right on the home page you can see what's possible when a news from many sources is digested, analyzed semantically, and then put into visuals. The semantic analysis, entity extraction, reads text of news items and identifies the names of people, place names, companies, organizations, and themes. Relationships are identified based on co-occurence in themes, and ideas are clustered so you can see "hot spots."

A "360 degree" search provides links to relevant articles, lists of related people, places, and keywords, and links. Default pages provide at-a-glance views of global issues, science & technology, business, and world events.

My favorite search is of course, the Network Search, which goes straight to building a network map of the entities identified in the search and their relationships. I did a search in the Network view of "Microsoft Yahoo" to see what I could glean about yesterday's announcement the Microsoft was making a bid for Yahoo!. (You can click on the image above to see the blown-up result). You can see the strength of the relationship (numbers of articles) by the width of the lines. You can click on any of the entities to see a summary of the article(s) that reference it and links to those articles. You can adjust the filters so that you see only the names of people, only the companies involved, only the keyphrases (how about that "dominance"!) and so on.

Oh bliss, a tool that I have been long waiting for. Thanks, Silobreaker.

Heisenberg and Social Networks

2008-01-19T06:12:00.000-08:00

Thanks to my friend Jessica's posting about Copenhagen, I was inspired to go see the play at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge last night. My cold was getting worse and I was overtired but nonetheless drawn into the complex, multi-level time- and perspective-changing experience. In the play Heisenberg introduces himself by acknowledging that "there are only two things the world remembers about me. One is the uncertainty principle and the other is my mysterious visit to Niels Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941."

Three actors on the set, sometimes speaking directly to one another, sometimes narrating what is occurring in the interactions, always circling back to what was said in 1941, and replaying it, finally seeing that it could have had a different result had the particles (Bohr and Heisenberg) interacted in a slightly different way.

The most common description of the uncertainty principle is that the act of observing a particle (we're talking quantum physics now) changes its behavior. Heisenberg describes the night the uncertainty principle unfolded in his mind. What you might see, if looking at the path of a particle in a cloud chamber, is "Not a continuous track, but a series of glimpses -- a series of collisions between the passing electron and various molecules of cloud vapor... what we see in the cloud chamber are not even the collisions themselves, but the water-droplets that condense around them."

This morning, I read David Lazer's post on the use of sociometric badges at an MIT Media Lab event. Participants wore badges that detected interaction in real time, and over the course of the day a large monitor displayed the changing social network graph.

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?

Continuing adventures of Patti in Enterprise 2.0

2008-01-17T08:03:00.000-08:00

Following on to my work on the AIIM research project, I have been invited to blog on a new group blog, The AppGap.

The AppGap is a new blog from the people who manage the FASTforward Blog. This blog is positioned to explore the future of work and how new tools both contribute to change and support changes. Conversations will include interactions on collaboration, innovation, organization with an undercurrent on the "gaps" in applications and the ways that Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are filling (and also creating) the gaps.

I expect to learn a lot from fellow contributors Matthew Hodgson, Shiv Singh, Jenny Ambrozek, Russell Shaw, and James P. Ware, and hope that I'll be able to keep up with them.

My challenge, of course, is to understand how to select whether to blog here or there on any given topic, as (as you have noticed) topics about tools that support networks, complexity, and relatedness keep emerging.

If the network could net work

2008-01-15T15:11:00.000-08:00

I've written several times about the great collaborative enterprise that was Digital Equipment Corporation. It was the one of the first truly networked (technologically) enterprises, having invented DECnet and other communications network technologies. But as in so many cases, a company's products echo the company's values, and this was also true of Digital. I once wrote an article, "The Camelot of Collaboration," on this very topic.

I continue to work with former colleagues when I have the chance and most of my closest personal friendships were forged in that environment. I received, today, the following email from a Digital "colleague" whom I had never met, who had just been browsing my web site:

Patti, at Digital in 1988 I gave talks in which I asked, "How much work could the network work if the network could net work?" I didn't think anyone was paying attention...
all the best, Harris Sussman

Harris had read my recent article with Nancy Settle-Murphy and decided to check me out. I had never met him at Digital, but I do think that there was something in the water...

(Also, oddly enough, I was looking at my web page traffic statistics at the very moment that I received email from Harris and was curious about who it was in Somerville, MA who was looking at my web site....)

Charlene Li on 60 Minutes

2008-01-11T04:10:00.000-08:00

I've long admired Charlene Li's thoughtful research on collaboration, social networks, and web 2.0. She writes this morning that she will be on 60 Minutes ("THE 60 Minutes!" she says) this coming Sunday, January 14th to talk about Facebook with Leslie Stahl. Program your TIVO.

Given the demographics of 60 minutes, Charlene notes, her invitation to be interviewed is a strong indication of CBS News' desire to reach a younger audience. I also think that it bodes well for the wider adoption of Web 2.0 into the enterprise. I've been having great conversations with Nancy Settle-Murphy about how these technologies can be put to use to support virtual teams. The first of our articles, Why Social Networking Can Mean Serious Business for Teams, has just been published in Nancy's monthly eZine.

Election year reminder of the importance of diversity in networks

2008-01-09T08:34:00.001-08:00

One of the enduring lessons of net work is the importance of diversity. This applies to the composition of networks, which need to have sufficient variety to support the cross-fertilization of ideas and values, as well as to our personal networks. Rob Cross, in his work at the Network Roundtable at the University of Virginia has has homed in on this latter aspect by developing software that helps individuals understand the composition of their personal networks.

I was reminded of this in a recent column by Washington Post columnist David Broder, "What Presidents Must Know," in which Broder recounted a conversation that he had had with Bill Bradley during Bradley's run for the presidency in 2000. Apparently, Bradley had turned down an offer to be Michael Dukakis' running mate in the 1998 election, stating, "You shouldn't run for vice president unless you thought you were ready to be president."

He first said the "presidents must know" other countries from the inside out, so you could be able to understand the pressures on their leaders when you need to negotiate with them.

Second, he said:

...a president should know the leadership elites in this country -- not just in politics but in business, the professions, academia, labor -- well enough that he would know where to go to staff his administration. And, he said, you needed to know the policy community well enough to be able to navigate for useful advice.

He did his net work, and felt ready in 2000. Broder sums up the outcome: "Bradley turned out to have his shortcomings as a campaigner, but his prescription for a president still seems right."

Enterprise 2.0 Survey -- Take it, Please!

2008-01-09T05:26:00.000-08:00

Two different client projects have required survey development over the past several months. It's a painful process, as you need to match the questions you want to ask with the goals you are trying to achieve. What questions do you need to ask about the current state of knowledge management in your company in order to determine what to do next?

The survey theme these past several months was highlighted by my participation in review of AIIM's Enterprise 2.0 Survey. One of my duties as a member of the Advisory Board for AIIM 's Market Intelligence Project on Enterprise 2.o (which I have previously blogged about, but cannot find the post in Blogger. I discovered that a post had been lost yesterday as well, so I am starting to get very annoyed.) You can read about the project on Carl Frappalo's blog.

If you are in an enterprise of any size, I request that you PLEASE TAKE THE SURVEY. AND SPREAD THE WORD. We all know how hard it is to get the volume of responses needed for a good sample and good results. We are all in this Enterprise 2.0 game now, and it will be helpful to get some understanding of the baseline.

Davenport McAfee, Round 2

2008-01-08T15:03:00.001-08:00

Somewhere, recently, I posted a note about the great debate on Enterprise 2.0 between Tom Davenport and Andrew McAfee that occurred at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston last June. It was only days ago, and there was a nice, live link to the recording of the debate by Veodia .

I said at the time that I thought it must have "classic" status, and sure enough -- a rematch is scheduled for Friday at 11:00 US EST. I have a client conflict, so will have to miss the live event. Someone, please send me a link to the recording!

From new media into old

2008-01-06T06:48:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Stowe Boyd for passing on this link to paintings of screenshots by Tyler Wilde.

It's the networks, stupid!

2008-01-05T11:37:00.000-08:00

Hoping that Valdis will pardon the paraphrase...

My husband is a political junkie. After many hours of analysis of the results of the Republican Caucuses in Iowa by pundits on the airwaves, I find the most cogent explanation from my colleague, Valdis Krebs, in his post Social Networks: 1 Political Machine: 0. Valdis, who has written on this topic before (see It's the conversations, stupid), points out that Huckabee tapped into the power of existing networks -- community, political, religious -- to get his word spread. Contrasting the traditional "get the word out" mechanisms as being primarily stranger to stranger (phone banks, mass mailings, etc.) that the networked approach lets the word spread among friends, through conversation, in a way that personalizes the candidate and helps people internalize the message.

We are all in networks, all the time. Networks are more powerful than individuals.

p.s. David Lazar, who studies networks at the Kennedy School of Government, has also noted this phenomenon in his blog. David is planning a conference in June on Networks in Political Science.

What about blogging?

2008-01-03T15:48:00.000-08:00

I had coffee with Jessica Lipnack yesterday, to catch up on where we've been for the past 15 years. She's doing a short survey of bloggers to develop ideas for a talk to an MFA class. The questions and responses on her blog, Endless Knots (she's a knitter, in addition to being a pioneer in understanding networked organizations) are just in time for me, as I've agreed to join a group blog that will launch in about 10 days. Even though I've officially been blogging for many years, I do have my up months and down months. So, it's good to get motivated to rethink my own mental processes and blogging practices. Everything old can be made new again (even if it's only what? four years old?)

Jessica's questions:

1. Has blogging improved your writing?
2. How long, on average, does a good post take?
3. One unusual thing that's come from your blogging
4. Your advice to new bloggers

You'll have to go to Endless Knots to see my answers. Please consider posting your own.

In New York, February 1

2007-12-26T12:25:00.000-08:00

I'm the odd duck on the agenda for the Open Enterprise 2.o Mashup Summit in NYC on February 1. It will take me some time to prepare something to say that will resonate with an audience seeking to understand mashups, but I am personally very excited about the opportunity to learn more, and specifically to hear a number of perspectives and points of view.

Plus, I heart NY.