It's all about people and networks

Efios in Spain

Thu, 08 Mar 2007 15:04:08 GMT

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.

Collaborative Working Environments for Business and Industry

Sat, 07 Oct 2006 14:58:55 GMT

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!"

Communities of Practice, social software offers support for teacher research and professional learning

Thu, 20 Jul 2006 23:36:54 GMT

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.

White Label Social Networking Software

Thu, 13 Jul 2006 07:51:57 GMT

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 "

Community web and social networks (Yutaka Matsuo)

Mon, 10 Jul 2006 23:01:30 GMT

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.

Evolutionary dynamics and social networks

Sun, 09 Jul 2006 23:42:13 GMT

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.

Visualization of engineering community of practice

Sun, 09 Jul 2006 23:23:54 GMT

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.