Complexity and Social Networks Blog

The following is an interesting case (MAP Project) of how a network is used as an alternative to the public service network to solve an issues of troubled teenagers in the Netherlands I stumbled upon during a conference on Innovations in Government.

Young people are frequently left behind in the bureaucratic public service systems. Among the disadvantaged, they are often the most difficult to help because they do not have the resources or experience to deal with the social service system. For example, a young woman (age 19), who has not completed a basic level of education due to family problems. Her family as a unit has a bad reputation among agencies. She has also a track record of being rejected by several welfare programs based on her behavior.

As a recipient of welfare, the benefits office wants her to work as a volunteer because her attitude makes her incompatible with the workplace. If she does not comply, her benefits will be stopped. Yet that money is a potential avenue for the young woman to get out of the family situation. Consequently, there is a disconnect between the two sides' needs. The benefits office will not allow this woman to work because of her attitude, but her attitude towards the public sector is so poor because she is not being allowed to pursue her own goals.

The program aims to allow people like the woman described access to the contacts and social networks they need to achieve their life-goals without shifting through bureaucracy. The Network Program for Adolescents Dealing with Multiple Problems attempts to bridge the gaps between young social service recipients and adult service providers. Its a highly personalized case oriented approach. Moreover, the program mobilizes social capital by putting the program participants (the teenagers in crisis) and adults (from different sectors in society) in meetings to expand the networks available to

Two moderators initiate the meetings and arrange training programs for the participants. For example the participants are asked to present themselves to the audience, find and how they would like to utilize their new contacts. The adults present, respond to the participants by asking questions, making suggestions, and offering information. Therefore, the established members in society offer their expertise for a short period, allowing disenfranchised participants to engage with adult networks and information in an informal ways. Both sides take each other serious. However, the program does not seek to establish a formal mentoring relationship. The primary goal of the program is to A. utilize social capital and B. build the latter for the participants by bypassing bureaucratic training programs to introduce them directly to the men and woman who can help them navigate the job market.

By training participants to identify their own solutions to their problems, th program facilitates a bottom-up approach to public service. Therefore, the program tries to activate self-expertise which also represents one of core values identified by the program. The program works outside regular government institutions to mobile the industrial and commercial job markets to assist young people in need, giving program beneficiaries access to private sector opportunities they might otherwise never find.

In general, the meetings cater three to five participants. The majority of participants attend only one meeting. To date, this project has served 71 young people in 15 meetings since April 2005. 60% of whom have subsequently returned to school or joined the labor market. 43 adults, the majority working in industry or commerce, and the others from the fields of public administration, education, health and politics have offered their advice. The program is funded through subsidies of various government subsidies of around EUR 140,000

The founders of the project (e.g. Clara Pels; Henny Werter) are enthusiastic as the MAP Project has been able to demonstrate the effectiveness of collaboration between organizations from different domains. Yet they also note that the programs informal nature is also its greatest weakness. Its very hard to truly measure the effects of the program.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I have come up with a new format for our blog. In the next couple of months I will post interviews with leading Internet entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who can share their insider knowledge on the current state and future of social software/Web 2.0. Hopefully this is inspiring to those with entrepreneurial ambitions in the area as well as interesting to researchers who want to work on the "next big thing".

Dear Thorsten, you have been involved in various internet ventures either as part of the management team (21Publish, kinkaa, Newtron, Creative Weblogging) or as investor. We are very happy that you are taking the time to answer our questions.

Please tell us about your latest activities.

Hehe - that is a broad question - I did run my first marathon, saw my first two kids born and I do continue to bootstrap two startups - Kinkaa (a meta travel search engine for Europe) and Creative Weblogging (a blog media network).

Will the social software industry be affected by the economic downturn? Have you recognized or experienced a change in entrepreneurial or investor activity within the last couple of months?

People are certainly more cautious as everyone is trying to figure out what the impacts could be (less marketing spend, less advertising). However its just psychology so far - I haven't seen any early stage deals fall apart (as it happened with many private equity deals). Overall it seems that early stage deals show a healthy consolidation but its hard to forecast this further for me.

Let's say someone would like to start a social networking venture today. What would be your recommendations? Do you believe that the ideas are still of interest to Angel investors or VC's?

They are - just look at a Hamburg (Germany) based social network for classic car ('oldtimer') lovers. It just raised funds in the end of last year. Social networks must have a convincing organic growth and should target a certain specific demographic. If there is a good business model or good idea to make money besides running ads that can indeed be an enticing mix for investors.

Google executives recently said that it is harder than expected to generate revenue from online social networks. What is your opinion on the potential revenue models for social networks?

CPMs (price per 1000 impressions) will continue to be below average compared to other internet services. Nevertheless social networks market themselves mostly and can claim enormous amounts of users with very little marketing needed. So most will break even eventually.

Many social networking platforms have made it easier for companies to mine their user data for marketing purposes. Do you think this is the right move or will the internet community strike back?

I feel it's not a good idea to move into that direction. It was felt like going 'under your skin' as a user. Most initiatives have backtracked already from their former stance.

A follow-up question. Aren't you tired of keeping your profile up to date in all those social networks. Wouldn't it be the best way to create a single XML type online identity?

Absolutely - but remember each social network has a (slightly) different purpose - my identity in LinkedIn and MySpace may never be the same.

Merging data from social software with the real world has been discussed in the past under the name of "location based services". Though we have yet to see applications and devices that are available and used by a majority of users. When and how could this change?

It must become ubiquitous - all (or most) phones need GPS. Data plans must be included into a normal mobile phone subscription. Mobile phone displays and UI must improve so that even your grandma can login to Facebook from her mobile phone. Seems a coupe of years off - judging from my grandma who has yet to buy a mobile phone...

As a pan-european investor you are seeing and hearing about trends before they emerge. Is there an area of social software that we should be aware of in the near future? Will we be seeing more crowd based business concepts such as the trend to allow users to share almost anything?

I like the idea of Amazon Mechnical Turk a lot - it's basically an API for the human mind. It's still a lot of theory and only so much practice, but social networks with all the user data could eventually build their business on a similar platform. Social networks as an API to knowledge and human services?
...
I kept it short - hope it still helps. Please let me know if you have any more questions.
Best, TJ

Torsten Jacobi or 'TJ' is a serial entrepreneur and investor with experience in the software and media industry in the U.S. and Europe. He lives close to Silicon Valley with his family.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I recently attended a conference of innovations in government co-sponsored by the Ash Institute in The Hague where the following U.S. case was presented. The case was not discussed from a social networks perspective but should be interesting to those with an interest in the matter as well as the law enforcement community.

Overt drug-markets are an issue for many communities. The police usually responds by conducting crackdowns and drug sweeps. Many times drug trafficking in those neighborhoods continued. In addition, the police struggled maintaining a positive relationship with the lawful residents living in those areas. The following paragraphs will describe the actions taken in the city of High Point, NC.
 
Determined to make a difference, the executive staff of the High Point PD met with Prof. Kennedy (formerly Harvard U), to discuss alternative strategies. Kennedy proposed the concept of law enforcement and partnership, which would comprehensively dissuade street level drug dealers from open-air markets. Community networks are a core success factor. Though the strategy acts on multiple levels as a deterrent for those impacting the community, leaving offenders with little choice but to modify their behavior.

The Overt Drug Market Strategy has eleven key elements:

1) mapping, to determine where the most serious offenses are concentrated (which follows the idea of CompStat)
2) mobilizing commitment of community through public meetings to identify and inform community stakeholders (thereby lowering the transaction costs of acquiring information)
3) surveying by police and probation officers to identify those involved in street drug dealing; 
4) formal identification of offenders and their areas of activity; 
5) incident review; 
6) undercover investigation of each location and offender; 
7) contact with the offender’s family to invite them to join law enforcement in asking offenders to quit; 
8) the call‐in, face to face call between offenders, law enforcement and the community 9) a deadline is issued for three days after the call in for offenders to quit dealing; 
10) enforcement; and 
11) follow‐up visits about a month after the call‐in to ensure that former offenders are being given the help to get out of their situation.
  
The strategy identifies or selects neighborhoods for implementation based on an intense analysis of crime data, followed by interviewing patrol officers, street narcotics officers and community members for their list of "persons of interest". This take at least three months. To date, 40 offenders have been called-in or notified for the Overt Drug Market Strategy in three neighborhoods.

The biggest obstacle for the strategy is the lack of employment opportunities for notified offenders. Jobs are scarce across the board, and most street level drug offenders have only minimal qualifications. Working in collaboration with local service providers, agencies are trying to offer personalized support for the former offenders. Furthermore, this strategy only targets the supply side, not the consumption side.
 
The single most important achievment of the strategy has been the collapse of the drug markets in the neighborhoods. Rush hour traffic jams caused by people buying drugs on their way home have disappeared.

The 1998 institution of the violent offender notification process, on which the Overt Drug Market Strategy is based, resulted in consistent reductions in High Point's violent crime rate as it decreased 47% from 1302 in 1997 to 681 in 2005. In the two years following the call-in in the West End neighborhood, the pilot project, crime of all kinds remained more than 25% lower than before the strategy implementation. Citywide, violent crime decreased 20% in that same two years.

This case certainly supports Kasadra's and Janowitz's (1974) notion that ones attachment to a community produces a willingness to its maintenance through individual or collective action. Though, in this case, a public body like law enforcement agencies seem to play an important part in activating (or may be reactivating) the sense of moral responsibility and connectedness of people in those neighborhoods.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While attending and presenting some of my work at the "gobernabilidad and participation" week of UNESCO's Monterrey Forum in Mexico a couple of weeks ago I had a lot of interesting discussions on the relationship between government, society and the trend towards networks to answer the today's an future issues of the world.

One of the presenters is working on a project called the United Transnational Republics (UTNR). Today's entry summarizes the project based on conversations with Georg Zoche, the founder, as well as some of their communication material.

The UTNR were found in April 2001 and think of themselves as a “3GO”: a Global Governmental Grassroots Organisation. Moreover, it is also an art project. The focus of the UTNR is to establish democracy on a global level. Democracy as we know it since the last two centuries only takes place within nation-states. At the same time globalization happens globally, outside of national boundaries, legislation or agreements. In Georg's words: the world has global problems, but only local/national governments.

Continue reading "A different kind of network: United Transnational Republics" »

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 2:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Together with Timothy Huerta, Texas Tech University, and Jennifer van Stelle, Stanford University, I have written a paper on "How do networkers network?". We conducted a study of participants at the annual conference of INSNA (International Network of Social Network Analysts) to understand how young researchers are introduced into the community of senior researchers. The paper is work in progress at the moment and we would like to hear your comments, especially on our methodology.

You can find the paper in our working paper series (Working Paper # PNG07-005) and an abstract here:

This study was conceived during the 2005 INSNA conference by attendees who were interested in the evolving patterns of relationships among social network academics and consultants, and in how junior researchers were being integrated into the existing community. The study was also intended as a session- and space-planning aid for the 2006 conference organizers. Specifically, this paper describes a study of networking among social network professionals who attended the 2005 INSNA (International Network for Social Network Analysis) “Sunbelt” Conference. The attendees were asked to respond to two rounds of surveys regarding their experiences. We obtained data on existing and new ties in the first round of the survey, and tracked the maintenance or decay of those ties in the second round (approximately nine months later). We employ homophily arguments as well as theories of status and career/life cycle to determine what factors led to the establishment of ties from interactions at the conference. We consider the content of the new ties in addition to the above-mentioned theories to understand why such ties decayed or were maintained in the post-conference period. As well as applying the results of this study to the understanding of social network dynamics, we hope our findings will further the integration of new members into the existing community and enhance the session-scheduling and space-utilization aspects of conference planning.

Posted by Ines Mergel at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

As I reported a couple of days ago, I decided to launch a real-world experiment by setting up an online social network which I labeled Team.Triody.Com. I reported that the first weeks were quite successful in terms of member and activity growth. Here is the current update.

(1) The network has grown to 39 members. Each member has at least contributed once to the community. I would consider 10 members as relatively active on the site. Additional stats will follow later.
(2) So far, the network has received 10,788 page views and 7 groups have been created on the site by 5 different members.
(3) We have established a weekly "offline" event where in average 5 people participate. We also conducted one additional social event which took place "offline".

To date, most of the members that have joined the network are "offline" acquaintances that live and work around the area I am located at. We are currently trying to expand our members beyond the city of Lausanne. Right now, we have on person from Zurich, Switzerland and 2 people from the US.

Major findings so far:
(1) It is absolutely crucial that there are about 2 or 3 core members that keep the information sharing process alive which, in turn, makes the community attractive for new members.
(2) Off line events help to strengthen personal ties which then facilitates online interaction as well as the promotion of the site across other social circles.

Posted by Thomas Langenberg at 2:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Yesterday, I made use of the ning.com social networking platform and created my first online social network: Team TriOdy (link:http://triody.ning.com). I am part of a group of active endurance sports enthusiasts that is regularly sharing information about races, trainings, and other related tips&tricks. I therefore thought it might be cool to turn this offline community into an online one. According to my own research results regarding information sharing in online communities, I follow two main strategies:

1. Get a critical mass of people involved in this project that are not necessarily "sitting in the same office or area" (so that there is a reason for them to visit the site). I plan to invite all my sports friends as well as the friends of these friends.
2. Also, I want to be as dedicated as possible and create as much interesting content as possible (in so doing I hope to make sure that people come and visit my site). From my latest research I know that community members with high "emotional commitment" and "high participation in information" exchange are most crucial to the success/sustainability of a user community.

I'll keep you updated on my progress!

Posted by Thomas Langenberg at 8:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

The New York Hall of Science is the host of the 2007 NetSci conference and has also an ongoing exhibition on social networks. It shows kids hands on how social networks are established or fall apart.

It’s a very cool exhibition: the creator Stephen Uzzo has just walked us through it without explaining the different parts. Everyone had to experience for themselves how connections on the Internet are created for example, how a hub connects to the closest spokes around him (we were all standing on a light show type of board, where each of us was a node and when you move around the connections are changing, depending on the shortest path). There were also real spiders creating a spider web.

I will add more on this during the conference and hopefully some pictures...

Posted by Ines Mergel at 6:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The exclusion of Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso, two of the top favorites for the Tour de France 2006 victory, from the race one day prior to its start shook the professional bicycle racing scene. Both riders have been and still are suspected to have been part of the doping network of the Spanish physician Eufemiano Fuentes. Almost one year later, observers, lawyers, and journalists are still trying to shed light into the activities within the latter network. However, very few results have been achieved until today. From a network research standpoint, one could ask the question why is it so difficult to get access to information in this case?

From a structural social network perspective, two answers appear worthwhile giving some more thoughts
(1) Cohesion-Argument: In professional bicycle racing, everybody knows that everybody else is using to gain or maintain performance during bicycle races. According to Coleman's social capital argument this would mean that everybody in the community of professional racers expects from everybody else not to say a word of what is going on. Such collective action of keeping everything secret thus hinders observers to shed more light into this situation.

(2) Brokerage-Argument: Nobody in the scene knows what other riders are doing do gain or maintain race performance. Only a few key people - brokers such as the physician Eufemiano Fuentes - are aware of what is going on. In this case, only these key people or gatekeepers might provide a potential pathway to more information on what is going on in the scene. In this scenario, riders will not offer any insights into potential doping network as long as they consider their careers as threatened.

It will be interesting to see how this story evolves and which of the two scenarios might hold at the end.

Posted by Thomas Langenberg at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Governments worldwide are facing three issues of importance. Many experienced administrators will retire which also results in a drain of knowledge. Furthermore, governments have to do more with less and be innovative by i.e. exploiting the benefits of ICT while at the same time cutting budgets. I recently read an article about new government recuriting methods which nicely illustrates Granovetter's theory of weak ties for job finding and possible utilization of SNS in government.

"All over the country, municipalities are widely reporting that it’s hard to recruit city managers, technology directors, engineers and people with expertise in the fields of accounting and finance. States seem to be having a little easier time of it right now, especially if they are in the heady throes of gubernatorial transition. In Massachusetts and New York, private-sector experts in areas ranging from public health to homeland security have been enticed to lend a hand to ambitious new governors, even though it has meant putting another career on hold and taking a huge hit in salary [...] When Antonio Villaraigosa became mayor of Los Angeles in 2005, his headhunters required all potential high-level aspirants to apply online, says his transition chief and now chief of staff, Robin Kramer. In the end, Villaraigosa ended up filling most of his top jobs the tried-and-true way: He approached people who were known to him or his top staff or who were referred by some other trusted source. "

In order to find the right people governments are increasingly tapping into headhunters, web based job platforms and certainly social networking sites like LinkedIn to widen their choice of possible candidates.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 12:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I recently stumpled on the following website which offers a neat collection of various network images/ visulizations and links to the respective projects in the field of social, art, biology, business, computer systems, food, internet, transportation, knowledge, music or pattern recognition. I am sure you can find something for your next powerpoint...

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I just finished revising my current working paper on firm celebrity. The idea of this paper is to examine how information processing within social networks of industry participants (in my case a user community of ski enthusiasts in the U.S. freestyle skiing industry) influences the way these participants relate to firms. Here is the abstract of the paper:

"In this paper, I study the firm celebrity creation process – that is the question of when, how, and why firms gain market popularity. I draw on previous research in this field and examine the sources of firm celebrity. More precisely, I examine how exposure to industry information affects an individual’s perception of a selected firm’s credibility to cope with industry level changes. My empirical data stems from qualitative interviews and a survey of ski enthusiasts in the U.S. freestyle skiing industry. The results show that besides exposure to industry information, exposure to interpersonal information exchange in user communities influences an individual’s emotional response toward a selected firm. This paper contributes to the discussion about the sources of firm celebrity. Avenues for further research in this field are discussed.".

The working paper What is the source of Firm Celebrity Status? can be downloaded on Thomas Langenberg.com.

Posted by Thomas Langenberg at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The University of Toronto’s NetLab has been doing some exciting research on how to measure social networks and communication behavior. Their recent conference paper, “Collecting Social Network Data to Study Social Activity-Travel Behavior: An Egocentric Approach,” discusses new methods of collecting data about social network, travel behavior, and the use of communication technologies. This is exciting research because it shows how to effectively measure two important elements of social life – the cognitive dimension of perceiving the existence of social ties, and the behavioral dimension of interaction that actually occurs with social ties. Moreover, this research incorporates multiple types of communication, including communication that occurs in-person, telephone, and email. The advantage of this approach is that rather collecting data about only certain kinds of ties or ways of interacting – such as the General Social Survey’s question about “those with whom you discuss important matters” – measuring both the cognitive and behavioral elements of social ties gives a more comprehensive understanding of the extent to which social life exists in America and how it actually occurs.

Posted by Jeff Boase at 12:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I recently conducted a small world experiment in my networks class, selecting an individual in Fargo, North Dakota as the target recipient. I selected Fargo for much the same reason that Milgram selected a small town in Nebraska: psychologically and sociologically it is about as far away as from Cambridge, Mass, as is conceivable and still be in the US. My students were instructed to send an e-mail (with explanation) to someone they knew, who was supposed to send the e-mail to someone they knew, and so on, until it reached the target.

The results: for 25 students (and about 40 attempts) 4 chains were completed, plus a fifth chain completed from a split from one of the completed chains (i.e., one of the students hit the target twice with a single e-mail because one of the recipients down chain sent the e-mail to multiple others). The number of hops varied from 3 (a student in the class who happens to be from North Dakota), to 8), with an average of 5.25.

A number of interesting observations (some consistent with existing lit on small worlds—e.g., see Stanley Milgram, and Duncan Watts on small worlds, and John Kleinberg on navigation in small worlds):

1) These results confirm the basic intuition that we live in a small world (i.e., where a small number of degrees of separation is typical). Even for the majority of students who did not have completed chains, presumably there are a maximum of only 4 hops away from this individual in Fargo, since they have one classmate who is just three jumps away.

2) The navigation of the completed e-mails through the network was strikingly efficient, reflecting the crude but effective cognitive representations of participants of the macro- societal network. People used a variety of heuristics for choosing who to send the e-mail to: do I know someone from North Dakota? Do I know someone who is well connected and likely to know someone from the Midwest? Etc. The resulting paths were likely not the optimum paths, but couldn't have been far off. Even assuming that the world is “small” it is a remarkable (if understandable) thing that these e-mails could find a reasonably short path through the network. If only Boston roads were this navigable….

3) Information about the target improves the navigation through the network. To illustrate this, I varied the information that students were given—some were just told name and city of the target, and others were told name, city, and profession. Three of the four completed chains were for the second condition. Further, in the fourth case, someone along the way looked the guy up and incorporated information about where he worked into the e-mail. Nothing statistically significant, but notable.

4) The credibility of the message was essential in pushing it through the network. I suspect that if I had done this experiment 5 years ago, chain completions would have been higher. The vast majority of e-mails that people get now are junk. Further, everyone has received hoax e-mails forwarded on by acquaintances. One guesses that there was a concern not just that it was a hoax, but that it would be embarrassing to forward a hoax e-mail to someone else.

5) People relied on strong ties in sending the message. Interestingly, given the literature on the role of weak ties in disseminating information, when I polled students on whether they sent e-mails to close friends as compared to acquaintances, 90% of the students indicated that they sent the e-mail to close friends. This follows directly from point 4: their concern was to send it to someone who, in turn would forward it on.

6) Friends are helpful, but friends of friends far less so. Participants in chains were instructed to cc the originator, thus we have data on incomplete chains. Interestingly, almost everyone reported that the first person they sent the e-mail to forwarded it on (following from point 4); but there was a big (~50%) drop off at the next jump. My intuition is that this reflects more broadly on the epidemiology of information.

7) The act of “using” the network affects the structure of the network. In reading the chains of e-mails, it was striking to me how people used this e-mail to reconnect with someone—e.g., “I wouldn’t normally send this on, but it seemed like a good excuse to see how you were doing.”

Posted by David Lazer at 8:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

This is an abstract of todays PNG/CCCSN seminar with Daniel Diermeier (Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University). We encourage you to discuss his presentation via comments on the blog.

"We use agent-based modeling to study collective problem solving in complex social networks where information aggregation and consensus building is modeled as the density classification task. We show that simple individual aggregation rules in conjunction with complex interaction patterns are highly efficient in solving the density classification task. We then investigate the effect of conservatism and partisanship on classification efficiency in large populations. We find that conservative agents enhance the populations’ ability to efficiently solve the density classification task despite large levels of noise in the system. In contrast, we find that the presence of even a small fraction of partisans holding the minority position will result in deadlock or a consensus on an incorrect answer. Our results provide a possible explanation for the emergence of conservatism and suggest that even low levels of partisanship can lead to significant social costs."

Here are the related publications:
Global Coordination in Modular Networks
Efficient system-wide coordination in noisy environments

Posted by Bernie Cahill at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A critical mass of users who actively engage in information exchange and knowledge sharing activities is crucial to keep an online community (of users) up and running over time. But how can critical mass in online communities be established and sustained over time? What are promising strateg(ies) for community operators to turn online communities into places that are worthwhile lingering?

One potential strategy can be observed in aSmallWorld.net which is a prominent online community. Critical mass was established by bringing together two types of people:

(1) celebrity-type people, and
(2) internet "aficionados" who love spending their time on the web and in interactive chat rooms.

While the celebrity-type people make sure that the site receives significant media and the general public's attention, internet "aficionados" generate the traffic which is important to make community look active.

Any other ideas how the creation of critical mass can be established?

Posted by Thomas Langenberg at 5:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I recently came across another interesting news article about the adoption of mobile phones in developing countries. This particular article focuses on mobile phone adoption from the perspective of companies who are selling mobile phones in India. These companies are scrambling to make low-cost phones that will endure dust, heat, and long periods of time without recharging. What strikes me most about this article are the lengths that people living under impoverished conditions will go to connect, and stay connected, with their social networks. Having little else, they are still willing to spend a large amount of their income on a single piece of social technology. Yet, from the social support perspective, this makes perfect sense. If people in India are anything like those studied in America, they exchange different kinds of support with different kinds of ties, and mobile phones enable them to stay connected to a variety of ties like never before. On the other hand, while Americans often use their networks to get ahead, people in India may need them just to get by.

Posted by Jeff Boase at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Newschoolers.com, skibuilders.com, or the Skiers Union are online communities of freestyle ski enthusiasts. In my research, I attempt to address the question why and how such online communities or online social networks work.

More precisely, I examine an important aspect of user communities – that is its members’ involvement in information sharing activities. I draw on previous research in the field of information sharing in social networks and I take a closer look at the following research question: "Why are some community members more actively sharing information than others?".

I build hypotheses and test them with data from a survey instrument, which I administered in the newschoolers.com community. I find that members with higher social status are more actively sharing community-relevant information than others. I also find that status is the result of a member’s embeddedness in and his experience with the user community.

In summary, my results contribute to the literature on user communities by illuminating the individual level determinants of voluntary information exchange. I also discuss the implications for further research in this field.

A working paper version of this paper is available upon request from the author of this blog entry.

Posted by Thomas Langenberg at 3:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Of course this is not the only thing those on the ground and in HQ should consider. Know the people, the topography, economy, history, religion and culture. Know every village, road, field, population group, tribal leader, and ancient grievance says David Kilcullen, an Australian Army officer. For decades, the Pentagon and social sciences have had little to do with each other. This was different in World War II and is changing given the difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan. More on that in an article by Packer (2005) in the New Yorker (12/18). In fact, network analysis was also used in the pursuit for Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi President. A paper by Aylwin-Foster (2005) and the US Army field manual (FMI 3-07.22) give further insights into strategies and practices of counter-insurgency operations.

Other aspects of dark networks were presented in an earlier post this blog. With regard to Afghanistan, military planners might find work done by the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit of interest. Here is a link to one of their case studies about Afghani social networks in Peshawar, the Pakistani border region with its key trade route (Khyber Pass) to Afghanistan. You can also listen to a program (Taliban Sympathizers Take Refuge in Pakistan) on NPR by Kelly (2006/12/1). Finally, additional insights can surely be derived from Monsutti's (2005) book, War and Migration:Social Networks and Economic Strategies of the Hazaras of Afghanistan .

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 10:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A follow up on my earlier posting regarding demographics, social networks, and electoral politics. The census bureau just released numbers on population changes since 2000. Quoting from “The Fix” (http://blog.washingtonpost.com/thefix/), there is clearly a shift toward Republican-leaning states:

“The ten states with the highest percentage population growth between July 1, 2005 and July 1, 2006 -- Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, Georgia, Texas, Utah, North Carolina, Colorado, Florida and South Carolina -- were carried by President George W. Bush in 2004.

Regionally, too, the highest population growth is in areas that are Republican-red. The states comprising the South gained 1.5 million people over the past year, and the region now accounts for 36 percent of the national population. The West picked up more than 1 million people in the same period and now makes up 23 percent of the population; the Midwest gained 281,000 people and represents 22 percent of the nation's population total. The Northeast, which produced Democratic gains in the House and Senate in 2006, added just 62,000 people and is now the smallest region of the country with 18 percent of the population.”

Whether this benefits Republicans is an open question. Assuming most of these changes are due to migration (within the US, and from other countries to the US), as discussed in my earlier posting, it depends on how the migrants act politically—do they adapt to their new environs, or do their new environs adapt to them? In the short run it helps the Democrats if Democrats move to Republican leaning states and continue acting like Democrats. Four or five of those states are potentially competitive in 2008, and a 100,000 votes here or there could easily tilt a state into the Democratic column. This also means that Democratic states in 2008 have slightly (2-3) more electoral votes than they would deserve based on their population, and similarly, that Republicans areas are currently slightly under-represented in the House (lest you worry, the electoral system currently has a number of other biases in favor of Republicans that easily counterbalance these demographic shifts). The recalibration of the House and electoral college after the 2010 census will certain benefit the Republicans, but it is an illusory shift, largely reflecting a shuffling of people toward Republican states, not a shifting of voters toward the Republican party.

Posted by David Lazer at 10:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A follow up to my last posting: As I watched a stomach bug pass from my sister in law’s family to mine this holiday (and, perhaps, unknowingly, from us to others) I pondered (among other things) the systemic consequences of these relational rituals. Extended families are increasingly spatially dispersed, or, put another way, family boundaries are increasingly likely to cross-cut geographic boundaries. A possible consequence of this is that those times when families get together (e.g., over the holidays) are actually a manifestation of those “long-distance” ties that (a la Watts and Strogatz) play a critical role in speeding diffusion in systems. I would note, though, that the process is not a purely network-structural one, because it is not just the network structure but the scheduling of communication within that structure that is important.

An interesting question (perhaps answered?) is whether holidays, in turn, accelerate the spread of pathogens through the population. For example, is there an accelerated inter-regional spread of contagious diseases in January in the US? More generally, what are the systemic consequences of system-wide “scheduling” of communication in this fashion (as compared to, for example, a less synchronized but equally frequent level of communication)?

Posted by David Lazer at 3:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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 | Permalink | Comments (0)

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 7:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The following figure by Lazer, D./Mergel, I./Friedman, A. (2006) plots the citation patterns of social network papers published in 2005 in the American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review.

The squares correspond to the cited papers, where only papers cited at least twice are shown. The black squares are from the social sciences, and pink squares from mathematics and physics. Notably, 22% of the citations listed are from mathematics and physics. Further, eight out of eleven of these papers cite work from mathematics and physics, where Watts and Strogatz 1998 and Watts 1999 are the most cited (six) works.

Posted by Ines Mergel at 4:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I would like to draw your attention to an entry by Andrew Bond posted a few weeks ago in his blog "Analytical Visions".

Andy recently published a follow up on US senate voting patterns. One of the Program on Networked Governance research projects called "Connecting to Congress" is collecting a lot of data on how the Internet might transform Congress ways of connecting citizens to elected officials so we are always interested in that type of research. We will also use SNA with some parts of the data during the course of the project. Related to Andy's post is a paper by Wang/Mohanty/McCallum that draws on voting records from the US Senate and UN. Their SNA simultaneously discovers groups of entities and also clusters attributes of their relations, such that clustering in each dimension informs the other. In short, legislators many times cluster around a topic regardless of their party membership.

Finally, if you have ever wondered who supported who's bill in congress you should check out the embedded link.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've spent this last week working on a paper with Kakuko Miyata and Barry Wellman. The paper uses longitudinal survey data collected in Japan to understand the causal relationship between the use of keitai (internet enabled mobile phones) and the reception of social support. This is one of the first opportunities that I've had to write a paper based on longitudinal data, and I'm thoroughly enjoying the experience. In addition to providing me with an understanding of the causal relationship between the technology and social behavior, the data is also allowing me to chart the adoption of a new technology, as it has become integrated into lives a general public. This experience has made me wonder about the extent to which the adoption of keitai is the result of a social network structure that is more prevalent in Japan than in countries. My hope is that more longitudinal studies of this nature will be conducted in different countries, so that I might someday better understand the extent to which adoption patterns are the result of differences in network structure, vs. other factors, such as culture, marketing, or investment in technological infrastructure.

Posted by Jeff Boase at 8:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Many social science articles focusing on networks also discuss social capital. Sometimes the two terms are used nearly synonymously. Some scholars bristle at the conflation, others are indifferent.

Does a network map necessarily provide insight into social capital?
Does understanding social capital require a network map?

As food for thought, consider these two potentially problematizing examples (continued below in the extended entry)...

Continue reading "Social Networks and Social Capital: Semantic or Substantive Differences?" »

Posted by Brian Rubineau at 7:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A more expansive scenario would be that the NSA collects all phone log data from US sources as well as non-US calls that pass through US switches, plus locational information from cell phones where available (+ e-mail traffic, etc).

The expansive scenario offers a significant security and logistical advantages to the NSA. The security advantage is that under the more limited scenario, the NSA would have to share critical security information with telecomms, by asking them for information about only certain individuals. That delimited information is terribly sensitive intelligence—by telling telecomms who they want to monitor, etc, it is essentially telling them who the government has received intelligence about.

Continue reading "NSA data mining—what patterns to look for: expansive scenario (II)" »

Posted by David Lazer at 8:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So, what data mining could one do with the data the NSA has collected from telecomm companies? Obviously, it is still unclear as to what is being collected, so this is quite speculative, which is a little different from my normal role of cautious academic. My hope is that this speculation, in the end, will yield some productive discourse about this important subject. I also want to make clear that I am not endorsing (or condemning) such data mining for now. Later I will discuss some of the privacy and policy issues. For now, I just want to do a thought experiment of how one might analyze these data in a fashion that might detect terrorist activity.

My assumption here is that the objective is to identify candidate nodes (individuals) for surveillance.

I am going to start with what I consider a less expansive scenario. In this particular scenario, one is starting out with some phone numbers and e-mails that are designated as “high risk�?—e.g., from other intelligence. A simple analysis would simply snowball outwards from these high risk nodes to their contacts, and to their contacts’ contacts, etc. As one snowballs outwards, one will likely find overlaps, where some nodes are members of multiple circles. In the simplest analysis, the more circles that a node is a member of (and the closer to the center of those circles), the higher risk they should be considered.

Obviously, the analysis should get substantially hairier than that, because of the nature of the sampling from the network. For example, I am guessing that the identifications of high risk nodes are not independent events. Imagine that an Al Qaeda cell is identified and its members apprehended in Jordan, and their computers, address books (or equivalents) acquired. One would then snowball outwards from these contacts. However, to find overlap among the contacts of these cell members presumably conveys different information than if one found overlap among the contacts of different cells from different countries (presumably the latter would be more significant).

One could devise a weighting system that depends on the number of paths that go through a particular node, other information about nodes, etc, to develop a ranking of who should be watched. These weights could be validated by fitting them to part of the network data, and then examining whether the technique was effective at identifying those nodes that you knew were already “high risk.�?

Ideally, one would use communication data going back in time as far as possible—thus, while telecomm companies are sharing data, you would want them to go back as far as possible. This would also be useful in case you wanted to do sequence and timing analysis—e.g., it’s not just who you call, but it’s when you call (say after some event), or that you called Anne after Joe called you.

Obviously, there are lots of difficult issues re sampling. Further, one would hypothesize that any terrorist worth their salt would be careful about recording contact information, and, more generally, their use of electronic communication. And I would guess that most of the people that terrorists communicate with are non-terrorists, and their contacts, in turn, are even less likely to be terrorists, so the vast majority of people caught in this net are going to be non-terrorists. So, to mix metaphors, one may have removed from the haystack proportionally more hay than needles, but you are still left with a very large haystack with just a few needles.

Once one has identified some risky nodes, the next step would be to monitor actual communications. Presumably, the NSA has finite capacity to have humans listen to conversations, and thus the key management question is how to allocate this scarce resource. The first level of monitoring would therefore simply be recording of conversations. Presumably, this is fairly cheap to do, so, putting civil liberties concerns aside, one would adopt a pretty low risk threshold for recording. This would allow going back in time for human monitoring if an individual were subsequently identified as high risk. A second level, if it is technically possible (at some level it surely is), would be to apply voice recognition to those recordings, where the content of conversations would adjust the evaluated risk level of those nodes. Further, such voice recognition could pick out candidate snippets of conversations for human monitoring. Such “snippet-based�? monitoring, I think, would explain why the FISA court process was circumvented, since it might result in the brief, human-based monitoring of a very large number of people (conceivably exceeding the number of warrants approved by the FISA court in its history very quickly), and in the computerized monitoring of a still larger numbers of people. That is, the oversight process specified by FISA would be unable to cope with the sheer volume of requests. Further, the basis of monitoring these snippets is probably weaker than what has traditionally been brought before the FISA court. It would also explain why some defenders of the policy (who presumably know more than has been publicly released) have stated that having a computer monitor your conversation was not a privacy intrusion (thus suggesting that a major component of the program did involve computerized monitoring).

This is the less expansive scenario that I have come up with (although how expansive it is depends on a number of parameters—how many steps out one goes from the initial sample, what is the threshold for monitoring, etc, so the actual numbers of people who are in some fashion caught in the net might number anywhere from thousands to millions). This is a pretty rudimentary analysis, as compared to how one would actually do it, but I think has the essential ingredients. My next entry will consider a more expansive scenario.

Posted by David Lazer at 12:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The story about the NSA eavesdropping program has received a lot of attention over the last week. The follow up story has received somewhat less attention, but may be more important, see story from December 24 NYT: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report (by ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN):

“What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.�?

"All that data is mined with the cooperation of the government and shared with them, and since 9/11, there's been much more active involvement in that area," said the former manager…

This is a remarkable story, and raises some interesting questions: (1) exactly what data are telecomm companies sharing with the government; (2) what could usefully be gleaned from these data; and (3) what are the privacy implications?

There is a lot more we don’t know about this story than we do know, but it is worth beginning a discussion on the value and the costs of these data under different scenarios of exactly what information is being shared. My next few entries will aim to begin a discussion on these issues, grounded primarily in a social network perspective.

Briefly, what data do telecomm companies have? Focusing on the telephone data, for now, they have (1) phone log data; (2) varying amounts of locational information for cell phones; and (3) varying amounts of information linking individuals to particular phone numbers (e.g., not so much for some pay as you go phones, more for other types of phones). My understanding is that little remains of the bits that flow over the network (i.e., the content).

These are thus a type of social network data, along the lines of my preceding entry on the “behavioral flows�? of relationships. That is, for any given dyad one can observe the timing and duration of calls.

Whose phone data is being tracked? It is not clear from the article. Clearly, the focus is on international communication (domestic to international, and international to international calls routed through switches that are on US soil). Is purely domestic communication also being tracked? The article suggests not:

“This so-called "pattern analysis" on calls within the United States would, in many circumstances, require a court warrant if the government wanted to trace who calls whom.�?

This sentence is ambiguous, however—e.g., given that the sharing of data by the telecomm companies is voluntary, what are the statutory limits on their sharing data with the government? Is there a prohibition on a telecomm company voluntarily handing over information to the government regarding one of their customers’ phone logs? I do not know of such a prohibition, but if a reader does, please do comment.

For the next entry: Given that these are essentially social network data, from what we know from the research on social networks, what insights might they yield?

Posted by David Lazer at 11:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

As a way of introducing myself to this blog, I'm posting an interview that I recently did for a radio show on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). This interview is part of a series about fellows at Massey College, University of Toronto. The interview focuses on my research – how people maintain their relationships by way of the internet. I hope you enjoy. To Listen, Click Here.

Posted by Jeff Boase at 10:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thomas Schelling, in Micromotives and Macrobehavior, notes the social inefficiencies of Christmas cards (31-33). He claims that cards are based on a system of obligations, and that once a card has been sent one year, failing to send one each subsequent years sends and active—and negative—signal. Tim Hartford, the Undercover Economist, reiterates this theme, and notes that the yearly lag for feedback (I send a card this year, and receive one in return next year) may create this trap. Instead of thinking of the card tradition as a forced system of obligations, however, suppose we look at it from a networks perspective.

Continue reading "Christmas cards and network pings" »

Posted by Allan Friedman at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Markus Mobius will be speaking today on "Measuring Trust in Social Networks Through a Microfinance Field Experiment"

Monday, November 28, 2005
Bell Hall, Kennedy School of Government
12:00 - 1:30 p.m.

We propose a methodology to measure trust within a social network and apply it in a field experiment in shantytowns of Lima, Peru. We model trust as a transaction cost which an agent pays to gain permission to use someone else's asset. Social closeness reduces the transaction costs through two channels: (1) it reduces asymmetric information and makes it more likely that the asset's owner can identify the user as a 'good' responsible) type; (2) it gives the owner the ability to control the agent's use of the asset and hence reduce moral hazard.

We have designed a microfinance program where we invite a subsample of the Shantytown community to become 'sponsors'. Sponsors receive a line of credit and can use a fixed share of it to obtain loans for their own household. The rest of their credit line (the 'asset') is allocated for 'sponsoring'. Any household in the community can get a low-interest rate loan from our microfinance partner by finding a sponsor who agrees to cosign the loan application. We randomize interest rates across all client-sponsor pairs: this allows us to measure the tradeoff between accessing a socially close sponsor with a high interest rate and a socially distant sponsor with a low interest rate. A second randomization varies the extent to which a sponsor is responsible for a borrower's default which allows us to separate our two trust channels. In this paper we report early results from two communities. We find that social distance up to length three reduces transaction costs by about 1 to 4 percent in terms of monthly interest rates. Moreover, geographic distance is also highly significant.

Mp3 Podcast - Presentation PDF

Posted by David Lazer at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

When it comes to social software, a myriad of platforms and websites sprang out of the ground during the last couple of years: The Social Networking Services Meta list shows 380 different social networking platforms, covering interest areas such as business networking, dating, friend networking, pet networking, photo sharing or face-to-face facilitating sites.

It seems as if all these content areas are targeting different user groups, therefore different social circles in which the users are active.

Even though, it might be that some of the circles have overlapping neighborhoods of actors, it is more likely, that people would chose different social networking platforms for different purposes: for example, A might probably want to connect to B for dating purposes on a different platform than the one he uses with C for business contacts.

This leads to my question: Are people changing their personality (or at least are they (inter)acting differently, displaying different kinds of information = showing a different face) on different platforms? If so, where are the differences and why are they occurring?

One way of analyzing these differences would be a) to conduct a self-study or b) to collect data on people that you know of who signed up for different platforms. What would be a robust way to analyze these differences?

Looking forward to your comments :)

Posted by Ines Mergel at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)