Complexity and Social Networks Blog

« Information Sharing and Institutional Impact | Main | "Network elasticity" and "individual plasticity" »

13 August 2006

Quantifying Social Networks in Africa - EPROM

Wanted to spread the word that we are now launching EPROM (Entrepreneurial Programming and Research On Mobiles) jointly at MIT and the University of Nairobi. The premise behind the project comes from the fact that today’s mobile phones are designed to meet Western needs. Subscribers in developing countries, however, now represent the majority of mobile phone users worldwide (1.4 billion mobile phone subscribers live in the developing world!). We have put particular emphasis on Africa because it is currently the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world, and I’ve moved to Kenya for the year to get the project off the ground.

What Kenyans are starting to do with their phones is amazing. Today, in my small town of Kilifi, I can buy milk, pay for a taxi ride, even check the local vegetable prices on my mobile... I describe this phenomenon in more detail here.

To further our understanding of the underlying factors driving entrepreneurship using mobile phones, we are involving several students as research assistants to pursue research on behavioral and mobile phone usage patterns. We will be distributing Nokia ‘smartphones’ to fifty individuals in different demographics and log their behavior over the course of six months. The phones will have a custom application that continuously logs location, nearby peers, communication and phone usage statistics, similar to the data collected for 100 people during the Reality Mining project at MIT. In this previous research, we generated models of our subjects’ lives with such precision that they could be used to accurately predict subsequent behavior. Based solely on data logged by our custom phone application, we have successfully shown that after two months logging it is possible not only to predict behavior, but also to infer friendships, differentiate demographics, validate survey responses, and even quantify the dynamics of an organization. It is our hope that this data will provide an analogous quantitative description of Kenyan social networks and mobile phone usage behaviors.

Cheers from Kenya...

Posted by Nathan Eagle at August 13, 2006 7:53 AM

.
• Business (2)
.
• Citizen Relationship Management (13)
.
• Commentary (5)
.
• Complexity (2)
.
• Current Trends (40)
.
• eGovernment (15)
.
• Events/Announcements (51)
.
• Innovation (12)
.
• Internet (14)
.
• Knowledge Sharing (16)
.
• Methodology (28)
.
• Networked Governance (14)
.
• Networks in political science (1)
.
• PNG Working Paper Series (6)
.
• Powerlaws (4)
.
• Reviews (2)
.
• Simulations (1)
.
• Small group networks (3)
.
• Small Worlds (2)
.
• SN in the news (56)
.
• Social Capital (2)
.
• Social Computing (9)
.
• Social Finance (1)
.
• Social Networking Platforms (8)
.
• Social Psychology (2)
.
• Social Software (22)
.
• Societal Networks (33)
.
• Technology (27)

Comments

Notification

Post a comment