Complexity and Social Networks Blog

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28 December 2006

Social Networking Comes to Healthcare

Dan Novak from IBM posted about an article from yesterday's Wall Street Journal on the SOCNET list. Since this is something I'm personally very interested in, I thought I'd share the posting with this community, with more to come from yours truly about SN in healthcare...

Quoting Dan Novak:
"Social networking to help patients and improve healthcare in today's Wall Street Journal (12/27/06).

My company has been supporting Patient Centric Networks (PCN), primarily from an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) point of view.

"Patient Social Networks" have the potential to educate, provide support, contribute to research, improve healthcare, and save lives.

Full article requires subscription, here is the free preview"

FREE PREVIEW
Social Networking Comes to Health Care
By Laura Landro

At DailyStrength.org, patients and caregivers dealing with hundreds of issues, including asthma, celiac disease and depression, can join a support community, start a wellness journal, share advice and recommend doctors, link to news stories and Web sites with disease information, and even send other members a virtual hug.

The social-networking revolution is coming to health care, at the same time that new Internet technologies and software programs are making it easier than ever for consumers to find timely, personalized health information online. Patients who once connected mainly through email discussion groups and chat rooms are building more sophisticated virtual communities ...

Article preview on wsj.com

Posted by Maria Binz-Scharf at 12:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

26 December 2006

Sunbelt 2007 (XXVII)

For those interested, the pre-eminent social network conference is taking place on the island of Corfu in Greece, May 1-5, 2007. Sunbelt is a wonderfully informal but intellectually rigorous conference-- I highly recommend it if you are interested in the topic of social network analysis. Should you wish to submit a proposal for a presentation, the deadline is January 30, 2007.

A description from the website:

The International Sunbelt Social Network Conference is the official conference of the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA). Located in the scenic Dassia Bay of Corfu island in Greece, Sunbelt XXVII will provide an interdisciplinary venue for social scientists, mathematicians, computer scientists, ethnologists, and others to present current work in the area of social networks. Workshops and conference sessions will allow individuals interested in theory, methods, or applications of social network analysis to share ideas and explore common interests.

Posted by David Lazer at 11:25 PM | Comments (0)

24 December 2006

Happy holidays!

During these holidays, I suggest you reflect on how our relational routines are culturally embedded, and how these routines affect our networks. Who do we see each holiday? Who are we supposed to see? Who do we talk about? Who do we send holiday cards to?

Consider the role of Christmas. In many families Christmas is a time when the grown (and dispersed) nuclear family reconstitutes itself, bringing together adult siblings (and additions to the family) together with their parents. The result is thus an "all-channel" family, where every member of the family sees each other on a regular basis (for better and for worse).

I think that for many families that do not have this tradition, there is no singular event that brings the entire family together on a regular basis. Thus, while children may visit their parents as often, they may not visit at the same time. The structural result may be that of the "hub-spoke" family, where all grown children talk to and see their parents frequently, but not each other.

This is, of course, an empirical question (and perhaps one that research has been done on-- if so, please comment), but would have important long term implications. How does the structure of communication among grown siblings affect the care of aging parents? Do rituals like thse play a crucial role in sustaining life-long social capital within nuclear families? etc.

Just something to ponder over the eggnog this holiday.

Posted by David Lazer at 9:46 AM | Comments (0)

21 December 2006

Follow up: Social Networks Researcher Google-Maps Mash-up

Thanks to the first people who joined and added their markers/stickies to the Social Networks Researchers map. As many of you have probably noticed the Website and UI is still in its Beta stadium and buggy. I have already sent a couple of bug reports to Sociallight and they have been very receptive. So, if you experience bugs, have ideas on how to improve the UI or what is missing you should also let them know at: support [-at-] socialight.com which should be helpful if they see/feel the power of our community!

Besides that: Please feel free to add markers of other researchers you know to the map!

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 3:56 AM | Comments (0)

19 December 2006

Call for Participation: Creating the first Global Social Networks Researcher Google-Maps Mash-up

Please join us in the effort to build/create the first Google-Maps mash-up of the global research community on social networks. Please go to the following website called Sociallight and add your or other peoples information (location, name, research interest, URL) to our channel/map called "Social Networks". Registration is necessary to add a marker but is free and can be done in less than 5 minutes. As you can see we have already added 4 people to the map as an example. If you like it connect to our harvard_png profile after you have added a "sticky note".

Besides some other neat features with regard to mobile phone environmental tagging and location based services, the site offers the opportunity to build ones own social network with other users. After reviewing different google maps mash-up tools we decided this one is the best solution for our purpose the moment.

Please spread the word and add your information to the map! Thank you!

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 3:29 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

X-mas and Social Networking

It is end of the year and X-mas, which means people are spreading out to spend the holidays with their families. We thought it would be nice to stay in touch during this period and therefore created a new platform to connect with each other.

On the relatively new site socialight.com, we created a channel where we are trying to map all the researchers that are interested in social networks. We already mapped some of our PNG members and would invite everybody who is working on or with social network analysis to join.

Let's start to connect!

Posted by Thomas Langenberg at 8:09 AM | Comments (0)

14 December 2006

Identifying Criminals - Beyond kinship analyisis

One of our May posts about an article by David Lazer, Frederick Bieber and Charles Brenner in Science discussed using the DNA of relatives to catch guilty kin. These days I stumbled on an article in The Times about a pilot project in London to identify the highest-risk future offenders based on various data sources which reminded my of this entry. Statistically speaking, a long domestic violence record increases the risk of becoming a murderer. Richard Berk, Professor of Criminology and Statistics at UPenn is currently working on a project, funded by the National Science Foundation, on the development and application of statistical learning procedures for data sets in the behavioral, social and economic sciences. Among the key applications are anticipating failures on probation or parole and forecasting crime “hot spots” a week in advance.

See an interview with him in the Phiadelphia Inuirer. If someone can build relations based on my DNA or crime records, may be so can my social relations. David's past quote is very applicable here:

[...] the more general issue around data mining of relational data, individual choice, and privacy [...], so much information is inherently relational. The fact that I have certain characteristics may say something about people that I have various types of connections to. This does create certain conundrums for constructions of privacy that rely on individual choice, since with relational information, what I choose to reveal about myself reveals something about others-- i.e., there are informational externalities. In this day and age, this issue is endemic, and suggests that certain types of decisions about privacy must be necessarily communal and not individual in nature.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 12:01 AM | Comments (0)

11 December 2006

CFP: INSNA 2007, Corfu

The next annual conference of INSNA (International Network of Social Network Analysis) will be held in Corfu, Greece, in May 2007.

Submission deadline is January 30, 2007. You can find the website here.

Posted by Ines Mergel at 10:44 PM | Comments (0)

watching them watch us...

If you go to the bottom left of the blog, you can see the locations of the 10 latest visitors. If you click this box, you can view statistics about who has visited this blog-- e.g., based on geography (there's a map that shows where the latest hits are coming from). One of the little puzzles to me has been the over representation of google as a search engine source for the netgov blog (see these stats). For example, for this month 92% of search engine results that have pointed people to the blog have been from google-- in contrast, google controls 50-60% of the market. Why the over-representation of google? One possibility is that the types of people who search for social network stuff are more likely to use google. Another possibility is that google ranks us higher than yahoo, msn, ask, etc. There may be something to this latter hypothesis-- e.g., if you google 'social network blog' this blog is in the top 10. In contrast, if you go to yahoo or ask, the blog is way way down (so far down I didn't have the patience to find it). Interestingly, if you look at 'complexity blog' we rank in the top 10 for all of the search engines. In any case, there does seem to be some interesting variance in how the different search engines treat the term social network (the basic pattern is replicated if you just look for 'network blog') in the context of the netgov blog.

Posted by David Lazer at 8:42 AM | Comments (0)

10 December 2006

Call for Papers: dg.o 2007 - 8th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research

Submission Deadline: December 18th 2006

dg.o 2007 - Bridging Disciplines and Domains
May 20-23, 2007
Sheraton Society Hill, Philadelphia, PA, USA

The International Conference on Digital Government Research is a forum for the presentation and discussion of interdisciplinary research on digital government and its applications in diverse domains. Interested participants are invited to submit research papers as well as proposals for panels, system demonstrations, posters, and pre-conference tutorials and workshops. Each year the conference focuses on:

- Social Science Research and Citizen Interactions
- Computer Science and Information Technology Research to Support Government
- IT-Enabled Government Operations and Government Application Domains

Research on digital government as an interdisciplinary domain that “encompasses inquiry at the intersections of computing research, social, political, and behavioral science research, and the problems and missions of government agencies.” (US National Science Foundation, 2005) Unique partnerships of university research and government professionals. The Conference Committee particularly encourages interdisciplinary and cross-cutting submissions. Best paper awards will be given to those papers selected as most fully representing the interdisciplinary and cross-cutting nature of exemplary digital government research. Please visit the digital government conference website for more information and paper submission details.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 2:00 AM | Comments (0)

8 December 2006

What makes online ties sustainable?

Recently we heard more and more that online social networking platforms don’t really work - Alexa teaches us, that people tend to sign up for MySpace, Facebook or openBC, but platform providers have the hardest time to keep the network alive: people tend to sign up, but don’t or only infrequently come back to their profile.
This made my co-author Thomas Langenberg, EPFL Lausanne in Switzerland, and me start to think about the question: What makes online ties sustainable? We came up with a research design that looks at four different phases of a life cycle of online ties.

Here is the abstract of our paper:

Recently, the Pew Internet & American Life Project published a study about the number of social relations people maintain online and the omnipresent question was raised again: are actual face-toface contacts declining over time and are they replaced by online social interactions. Our virtual life is scattered in online profiles across sites such as openBC.com, Friendster.com, Match.com or MySpace.com. There are currently more than 400 different online social networking sites – with new sites popping up every day. Building on existing factors of persistence and sustainability of network ties in general, we address the key research questions: Which factors lead to the creation, maintenance, decay and reconnection of online network ties? Our research draws on prominent issues in the social network literature, which address the gap between research on offline and online social networks. We examine individual, dyadic, structural and content-related characteristics to understand how and why actors in different phases of their life cycle turn to online ties. Within the presented research framework, we derive propositions and develop a research design to collect and analyze qualitative and quantitative network data. The overall goal is to develop recommendations on how online social networks can become sustainable over time, and we develop questions and avenues for further research.

We came up with the following taxonomy of online vs. offline networks in our paper:

You can download the full paper on our Working Paper website of the Program on Networked Governance.

Full citation:

Mergel, I./Langenberg, T. (2006): What makes online ties sustainable? A Research Design Proposal to Analyze Online Social Networks, PNG Working paper No. PNG06-002, Cambridge.

Posted by Ines Mergel at 4:00 AM | Comments (0)

7 December 2006

Call for papers: The Journal of Information Technology & Politics

I am on the senior editorial board of The Journal of Information Technology & Politics. I think it is off to a excellent start, and I would like to encourage people to submit high quality manuscripts. Below is the call for papers.

The Journal of Information Technology & Politics (JITP) seeks high-quality manuscripts on the challenges and opportunities presented by information technology in politics and government. The primary objectives of the journal are to promote a better understanding of how evolving information technologies interact with political and governmental processes and outcomes at many levels, to encourage the development of governmental and political processes that employ IT in novel and interesting ways, and to foster the development of new information technology tools and theories that can capture, analyze, and report on these developments.

Formerly the Journal of E-Government, JITP will publish its inaugural issue in the fall of 2007. Since 2005, our publisher, The Haworth Press, has been affiliated with the organized section on Information Technology & Politics (ITP) of the American Political Science Association (APSA). At the September 2006 ITP business meeting, the
section voted to adopt JITP on a trial basis starting with the first issue. At the 2008 business meeting, the members of ITP will vote on whether to make it the official journal of APSA's ITP section.

Submission Types

JITP accepts a variety of manuscripts. Please review the descriptions below and identify the submission type best suited to your intended submission.

Research Paper (20-40 pages)
Research papers are theoretically driven, focusing on an intersection of politics and IT and reporting substantial findings.

Policy Viewpoints (10-20 pages)
Policy Viewpoints explore competing perspectives in an ITP policy debate that are informed by academic research.

Teaching Innovation (8-15 pages)
Teaching Innovation articles explore creative uses of information technology tools to improve student learning in political science and other related fields. Tutorials and papers that evaluate the effectiveness of technology tools improving learning both are welcome.

Workbench Note (8-12 pages)
Workbench Notes present a brief introduction and evaluation of one or more novel ITP tools developed to gain analytical leverage over political processes, or to advance political science instruction.

Review Essay (10-20 pages)
An original theoretically guided essay linking three or more related recent books to an important ITP subject area.

Book Reviews (3-6 pages)
A review of a book, or other book-length document, such as a government or foundation report.

For more information on these submission categories, please visit:

http://www.jitp.net/m_submiss.php

Posted by David Lazer at 6:00 AM | Comments (0)

6 December 2006

Government Social Software - SNS in Japan Part I: Yatsushiro City

As I wrote in an earlier entry I am currently in Japan doing research in 2 areas. First, I look at local SNS (social software) and how this could be useful for disaster management. Second, I will do another case study for my research on Citizen Relationship Management.

Yatsushiro is the second largest city of the Kumamoto prefecture and is centrally located about 40 km from the Kyushu west coast, the southernmost of the four Japanese islands. As part of the eGovernment efforts in 2002/03 the city started “Gorotto Yatchiro”. It offered a bulletin board, calendar, link posting and email form functionality. However, it never got quite of the ground with a final community size of 600, 40 truly active users and 10.000 page views per month. Usage decreased over time and since membership offered anonymity some members did not stick to accepted conventions of online behaviour. As for Japanese culture, this keeps a lot of people critical of such initiatives paired with general mistrust in government and public administration in Japan. More than 900 local governments around Japan had set up citizens’ virtual conference rooms by 2004 as part of their eParticipation efforts. Though, most of these projects met the same fate as the one in Yatsushiro city.

Meet Mr. Takao Kobayashi who had/ still has the biggest influence on local government social networking services in Japan with his ideas and "Open Gorotto" platform which is available free as openSource software (click the above link to download the latest version).

In response to the decline of the bulletin board and inspired by bigger and popular social networking platforms such as Mixi, Mr. Takao Kobayashi, a young member of the Yatsushiro IT department, decided to design and program a new version of Gorotto in 2004. Interestingly, he was neither ordered to do so nor did he ask for permission. Within three months the first version of the “Open-Gorotto” SNS using openSource software as Free BSD, PostgreSQL, and PHP was developed. Except being inspired by existing social networking platforms no additional surveys on user needs were conducted. As the platform is hosted on government servers and development was done in work and free-time costs can be considered insignificant. Up to this day there is no additional budget set aside or significant recognition of political or administrative leadership except that that there is no interference.

Mr. Kobayashi mentions four points that motivated him to create the SNS platform: First, citizens are much better at sharing government information, so each citizen’s network serves as a multiplier. Second, the platform helps the community to grow stronger, meaning that people who share mutual interests can get together in a pleasant atmosphere. Third, the platform presents general and government information in a different way. Finally, administrators can interact and learn from citizens. Disaster is missing here but was picked up by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) as a goal. MIC conducted empirical testing of SNS communities in the City of Nagaoka which will be described in LINK and in Tokyo’s Chiyoda Ward in early 2006.

The SNS platform exists parallel toYatsushiro city's website which links to the former. “Gorotto Yatchiro” functionality includes a blog, networking, personal profile, picture/media library, calendar and newsgroups (see picture below). Its uniqueness compared to sites like Mixi, Gree, MySpace or Xing lies in additional features as GIS/Google maps mash-up, a fire alert or open architecture with allows for integration of other features. Besides that the platform is mobile friendly. Although everybody can use the platform registered users can invite contacts. In order to prevent a development similar to the bulletin board “Open Gorotto” includes the “Alien” or “Grey Person” feature. This automatically scans for swearwords and the like and also sends a quick note to the administrator (Mr. Kobayashi) and another person supporting him with this task.

Since the new version was made available online by end of 2004, member expansion was left to invitations of users only. Mr. Kobayashi thinks that this allows for a healthier online community and avoids the objections citizens might have towards government although it is much slower. Advertising was only done through links on the city website, flyers and ads in the city magazine. Additional public attention came through press articles first in the regional and later in national press which is visible in higher website traffic after key interviews. By now the platform has around 2800 members with 70% being from Yatsushiro. Average age of members is 39 with males tending to be more active than females (ratio: 7:3). 400 users can be counted as truly active in terms of their blog, commenting or in forum behavior. The most used features are the diary followed by the internal email system and forums. 400 users have also subscribed the RSS feature. Smaller forums are managed by citizens; bigger ones are managed by the admins. 100 members of the community belong to the local administration or politics. When asked, Government officials see the local SNS mostly as another communication channel. They are still thinking about further use, especially with regard to disaster though.

Mr. Kobayashi is currently promoting the idea of having local interconnected SNS in all of Japan's municipalities that also mirror each other in case of a failure/disruption like a disaster. Modifications of "Open Gorotto" are already used by other local SNS throughout Japan. However, many times Mixi is able to attract more people from the same area as the local SNS. This relates very much to questions raised by Ines Mergel regarding individual social networking platform online behavior.

In any case, the actions of Mr. Kobayashi are unique. It is proof of an individual's impact on a smaller and ultimately broader scale. I could not find similar projects of government SNS in the world with regard to eDemocracy or disaster management. Hence, "Open Gorotto" is an innovation for local government worthwhile spending more time thinking about.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 12:30 AM | Comments (0)

5 December 2006

Open-Source Spying

Interesting piece in Sunday's NYT Magazine on the potential for collaborative web-type tools to help the US intelligence community to "connect the dots". The essential conundrum, as highlighted in earlier postings, is how to facilitate the critical information sharing within the community, and not to allow it to seap out in damaging ways. Not clear that there is a way to achieve both.

Open-Source Spying

By CLIVE THOMPSON
Published: December 3, 2006
(New York Times Magazine)

When Matthew Burton arrived at the Defense Intelligence Agency in January 2003, he was excited about getting to his computer. Burton, who was then 22, had long been interested in international relations: he had studied Russian politics and interned at the U.S. consulate in Ukraine, helping to speed refugee applications of politically persecuted Ukrainians. But he was also a big high-tech geek fluent in Web-page engineering, and he spent hours every day chatting online with friends and updating his own blog. When he was hired by the D.I.A., he told me recently, his mind boggled at the futuristic, secret spy technology he would get to play with: search engines that can read minds, he figured. Desktop video conferencing with colleagues around the world. If the everyday Internet was so awesome, just imagine how much better the spy tools would be.

But when he got to his cubicle, his high-tech dreams collapsed. “The reality,” he later wrote ruefully, “was a colossal letdown.” ...

Posted by David Lazer at 8:56 AM | Comments (0)

4 December 2006

Geography, demography, the emerging Republican majority (?), and social networks

A post script on the election: Over the last couple of decades there has been a lot written on the emerging “Republican majority.” The 2006 election, providing majorities to Democrats in both houses in Congress, seemingly belies this assertion. However, it is only one election, with results in part a referendum on an unpopular President, and in part a referendum on a poorly run Republican Congress. Neither changes the basic tectonics of American politics, so it is worth revisiting the Republican majority thesis.

In part, these assertions rest on geography (red states are generally growing in population faster than blue states), and in part on demography (red voters growing faster as share of electorate than blue voters).

The argument about geography rests on the fast growth rates of the (red) South and West, and the slow growth rates of (blue) Northeast. These divergent growth rates have to be driven by some combination of migration and divergent fertility/mortality. (These growth rates over the short run have to be primarily the former, although for interesting piece on the fertility component, which argues that conservatives have more children and thus will inherit the body politic. I think the argument in the final paragraph, however, trumps this fertility analysis). To the extent that the growth rates are driven by intra-US migration, the question is what happens when blue staters move into a red state. There are two possibilities: (1) the blue staters are socialized into the ways of their adopted state; or (2) the politics of their adopted state shifts incrementally toward a shade of purple.

I have not seen a definitive study of this issue (please post a comment if you have); however, the election of Webb (and Kaine in 2005) in Virginia offers an intriguing hint. Northern Virginia, in the orbit of Washington DC, is home to many transplanted blue staters, and is a nice laboratory to examine the social persuasion effects of a red state on these blue staters. The electoral results in 2005 and 2006, where Northern Virginia provided Webb and Kaine their margins of victory, suggests that the migrants to red states, rather than taking on reddish hues, may be coloring their adopted states blue.

Of course, Northern Virginia has some particular characteristics—e.g., many of its residents work in Washington DC, and thus may be predisposed to be more pro-government. Further, migrants to Virginia have clustered in Northern Virginia, rather than scattering randomly through Virginia, perhaps allowing them to escape the social pressures to conform. However, such clustering is typical; further, it is interesting to see that the Rocky Mountain West, long the bedrock of the Republican party, has become more competitive. This might well be in part because of migrants (some combination of Mexican immigrants, ex Californians, and East Coasters) have pulled these states left. It is also probably because libertarian, Goldwater, types are somewhat disenchanted with current big government Republicanism. (Note, New Hampshire, the state with the single biggest Republican to Democratic shift in 2006, also falls into this category, with substantial numbers of migrants from Massachusetts, but also with those libertarian tendencies.)

Stepping away from social networks for a moment, it does seem like the Bush years will prove a lasting liability for the Republican party. Party affiliation “sets” in early adulthood. The perceived success or failure of the sitting President thus gets recorded in the party affiliation of those individuals, with electoral effects for the next 50 years. Much as the Reagan-Bush I years produced a generation of Republican-tilting voters (or at least, neutrally balanced voters), the Clinton-Bush years may be producing a generation of Democratic-tilting voters. (my single favorite political graphic of this election season). I suspect that this graphic, if anything, understates the generational tilt toward Democrats, inasmuch as many of the earlier generation of Democrats are Southern white Democrats who tend vote nationally like Republicans. This demographic tilt toward the Democrats is also pushed further by the apparent drop in the Republican share of the Hispanic vote from 2004 to 2006. We will see if this is just temporary; however, conventional wisdom (correctly, I think) is that share of the Hispanic vote is critical in future elections because of its increasing size.

The bottom line, however, is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to assert that the axis of American politics is shifting toward Republicans. The election of 2006 is just another bit of evidence, among many.

Posted by David Lazer at 9:00 AM | Comments (0)