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08 March 2007 |
Efios is expanding their business to Spain - since February 2007 we are working also from Madrid, Spain. See our updated contact details for our address in Madrid.
This happened at 4:04:08 PM or
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07 October 2006 |
Did you miss the first edition of Collaborative Working Environments for Business and Industry, also dubbed CWE, earlier this year? Although the contribution of virtual communities and communities of practice was only a part of the larger conversation about the collaborative working environment, it's still interesting to check out the next edition which will take place in Sweden, on June 14th, 2007. The call for papers is still open (check their website). The conference has a very strong ICT focus (as an enabler, has to be said) because it derives from the FP programme of the EU.
Breakthrough innovation in business models with communities of practice (/interest) was discussed by Laso Ballosteros. It's both an opportunity and a threat, he claims, in his presentation. The role of these communities is going to be quite different in 15 years time than it is now. Also, some reference to Alistair Rogers in his keynote: "Communities learn together. They build skills, knowledge and ‘lore’. The big issue is how to teach individuals the value of teams and how to be effective on and with teams. Even harder is how to build those communities over distance. We have the ‘myth’ that we can build tools that can fix this. It’s not going to be easy!"
This happened at 3:58:55 PM or
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21 July 2006 |
Christopher D. Sessums writes in his blog about An exploration of how social software offers support for teacher research and professional learning. He bridges three topics in his paper: professional learning, communities of practice and social software in general. About communities of practice he says:
Given that a community of practice organizational design must be negotiated between immediate members of a learning community, Mejias (2006) suggests that social software provides an ability for educators to engage “in learning to learn by having them assume some of the responsibility for integrating and maintaining the social software systems that allow learning to happen” (Mejias, 2006). In order for this to occur, it would seem that school administrators, i.e., those responsible for assigning teaching loads and organizing teacher time and development, would need to adhere to a philosophy embodied within the philosophie of a community of practice and professional learning communities (PLC). As such according to Hord (2004, p.7), PLCs advocate the following five themes:
• Supportive and shared leadership
• Shared values and vision
• Collective learning and application of learning
• Supportive conditions
• Shared practice
Clearly there is overlap between Wenger’s communities of practice framework, the PLC model, and the notion of teacher inquiry. However, what is worth noting is the notion of supportive conditions and leadership that must exist in order to foster and facilitate a learning ecology. It is critical for school administrators to understand and support inquiry communities and practice. This idea cannot be overstated. Without such support and advocacy, teacher learning and research is nearly impossible to imagine, much less actualize.
This happened at 12:36:54 AM or
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13 July 2006 |
Thomas Power (yes, the Ecademy one) posted in one of his forums a newsbite about what he calls "a great idea for new brands starting out using social networking". Kickapps is a small company that has created white label social networking software that can be used for startups to create their own orkut, openBC etc. I would argue there is only still a market for the highly specialized ones - maybe even as part of a community building effort - and market for open souce (and freely implemented) ones. Tech Grunch makes another point in their blog that substantiates this, and that is that maybe people want to belong to few social networking sites only. This would leave little space for large scale open platforms still using the white label software, but rather specialized ones could do.
The creators of this white label SN software (which I believe is not a novelty, since there are a couple of open source projects around which have similar intent) said yesterday in the interview on Tech Grunch: "The basic idea behind this service is relatively simple but the end result is a highly customizable social networking site for admins and a relatively compelling experience for users "
This happened at 8:51:57 AM or
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11 July 2006 |
Found on University of Maryland: a speaking engagement on the 13th of July (Friday)
Yutaka Matsuo and Hideaki Takeda will discuss their work on supporting communitys on the Web.
The Web is not used just for information publishing but also communication. We model web as an infrastructure to support human activities on information and communication, i.e., community web. In order to explore this concept, we are investigating various possibilities of web from extension of weblog to web mining.
We introduce social network extraction from the Web and its application for a conference support system, called Polyphonet. Several social networks are extracted and analyzed. Also we developed two extensions of weblogs to enhance communication among users. One is Semblog that extends weblog to include interaction among users with FOAF. The other is ActionLog that extends weblog to include the real world context.
This happened at 12:01:30 AM or
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10 July 2006 |
Carlos Garcia Timon has raised a thread in the OpenBC forum on collective intelligence, while trying to pick ideas on different domains. He says that Nature magazine has published an interesting idea from Hisashi Ohtsuki: A cooperative behaviour is succesful from an evolving perspective if the benefits of that cooperative behaviour divided by the cost, exceeds the average number of the network neighbours. Carlos ponders over the idea and says
Anyone can bring some light about this? its a simple but a powerful idea...
I immediate recognized the article on that Carlos mentioned, but am not sure what the powerful idea is that he is thinking about. Hoping that this thread could jumpstart an interesting discovery with other participants, I replied
Carlos,
"The fewer friends I have the more strongly my fate is bound to theirs" is the lemma that Ohtsuki describes in the article. I like it, but you have to read quite some background materials if you are not familiar with these theories of evolutionary dynamics and social networks. Check Hamilton's "The genetical evolution of social behaviour" for more pioneering work on this.
How do you apply these theories in your work of organizational (or social) network analysis is my question?
Erik
The conversation on evolutionary dynamics and network analysis is on. I am also looking for an application int he organization and social network application with respect to communities. At this point however, I need some deeper thinking. Contributions to the conversation can be mad edirectly on the forum on OpenBC (or can be sent to me by email). A sidenote is from my side is that the article that Carlos is referring to is for sale on the Nature website, but for as long as it lasts you can also download it here for free.
This happened at 12:42:13 AM or
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I just finished a round of reporting for a global engineering community. Attached is part of the report, which is the visualization of engineering community of practice (Netdraw, >300 nodes). In subsequent posts I will try to post the evolution of this community by introducing the 'time' factor in the network data, years 2001 - 2006. The labels have been removed. 
This happened at 12:23:54 AM or
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09 July 2006 |
Right after the posting about Friendster and the patent for online social networking, I received an email about a patent pending for "Methods and systems for delivering community knowledge" which has been filed under number 20060112051. See the full application here.
Methods and systems for delivering knowledge in a community of practice environment are disclosed. In one embodiment, the system may include a community of practice including members and a knowledge management architecture that manages knowledge used by the community of practice. The knowledge management architecture may also maintain a delivery profile for each member having parameters reflecting a preferred format for receiving updates regarding new knowledge. Further, the knowledge management architecture may be configured to detect new knowledge associated with the community of practice and determine, for a first member, that the new knowledge includes information related to a first profile parameter associated with the first member. Also, the knowledge management architecture may generate a notification for the first member including data associated with a portion of the new knowledge and deliver the notification to the first member. Moreover, the knowledge management architecture may deliver a supplemental version of the new knowledge to the first member in response to a request from the first member to receive the supplemental version of the new knowledge.
Again, I am note sure where this is going with such a generic patent application.
This happened at 4:32:02 PM or
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Since Red Herring published the article "Friendster Wins Patent" last Friday, 7th of July, it only took 48 hours for more than 26,000 blogs on social networks to pick the news up. Most of the sites report the same news item: "as the generic patent offers opportunities to the once-beleaguered site to pursue licenses from similar social networks and competitors that offer the same services based on the idea of connecting people within a certain number of degrees of separation, Friendster president Kent Lindstrom tells Red Herring that “it is still too early to say” although Friendster “will do what we can to protect our intellectual property”. Check the patent out here. The problem debated around is of course that the foundation of this patent is the "small world theory" by Stanley Milgram.
It is argued that with the patent, Friendster can put itself up for sale, significantly increasing its value. This story - without a doubt - will be continued.
This happened at 4:13:14 PM or
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The 2nd Social network Forum, which was organized by the Leeds University Business School and which was held from the 30th of June until the 1st of July, 2006, has finalized. Summaries of the presentations can be found online in the forum wiki, but the slides and proceedings have not been posted (yet) online.
This happened at 3:21:03 PM or
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©
Copyright 2007 Erik van Bekkum.
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