Building Sustainable Communities through Network Building: This article by by Valdis Krebs and June Holley elaborates understandable and enlightening (word of the day 
the use of social network analysis derived from it’s maps. It anwsers questions like: who are the most influential nodes in a given network. Knowing that gives you an idea how to diffuse innovation, rumors, alerts or whatsoever. Those nodes are often not formally recognized in organizational charts or political environments. It also saves you from trying to spread you message all over the place. Or to quote the authors:
If you know the network you can focus your influence.
Now how does such a network look like? We know from popular books like Linked from László-Barabási, that the routers of the Intenet, our nervous system, people in organizations, biological system, pages on the Web (WWW) work essentially the same: as networks.
- Birds of a feather flock together: nodes link together because of common attributes, goals or governance.
- At the same time diversity is important. Though clusters form around common attributes and goals, vibrant networks maintain connections to diverse nodes and clusters. A diversity of connections is required to maximize innovation in the network.
- Robust networks have several paths between any two nodes. If several nodes or links are damaged or removed, other pathways exist for uninterrupted information flow between the remaining nodes.
- The average path length1 in the network tends to be short without forcing direct connections between every node. The power of the indirect tie is used.
- 5. Some nodes are more prominent than others [^] they are either hubs, brokers, or boundary spanners. They are critical to network health and growth.
The authors refer to a study on that IBM conducted with major customers; by applying networkrd thinking they figured out that thos organizations with the shortest network paths (where communication flew fast from node to node) and with emergent leadership adapted best to change processes. Though the elements and rules are known they are not deployed to nurture networks.
Managing the network is the issue. This article helps understanding what’s needed to help sustain networks.
(pointer via Email from Wolfgang Neurath)
Now I wonder what informal networks of - let’s say weblogs and the like (social software) - can achieve on a regional or even global scale. Do birds of a feather flock together without diversity - one of the challenges of un-managed networks?
Related posts
No tag for this post.
Comments are closed | Permalink • 
• 
